
How to Understand Things - ingve
https://nabeelqu.co/understanding
======
refrigerator
Great post. Personal anecdote:

I don't think I really understood anything in school, but I was decent at
going through the motions of carrying out certain methods and recalling
certain facts when I needed to.

I went on to study Maths at university, and for most of my first year, I had
the same surface level "methods + facts" knowledge that got me through school.
After some studying, I could recite definitions and theorems, I'd memorised
some proofs, and I could occasionally manipulate a problem to get an answer. I
think about half of the cohort was in a similar position. But it was clear
that there were others in a completely different league.

When we were studying for our first year exams, I was struggling to remember
the proof of a specific theorem (it felt quite long). A friend was trying to
help me learn it, and he asked me what "picture" I had in my head for the
theorem. I didn't have any pictures in my head for anything.

It turned out that a simple drawing could capture the entire statement of the
theorem, and from that drawing, the proof was trivial to derive. It was long-
ish to write out in words, sure, but the underlying concept was really simple.
This blew my mind — I realised I didn't have a clue what we'd been studying
the whole year.

The worrying thing is that I actually thought I understood that stuff. Before
that incident, I didn't know what it feels like to actually understand
something, and I didn't have an appreciation for the layers of depth even
within that. I suspect lots of people go through the entire education system
like this.

~~~
alicemaz
>I suspect lots of people go through the entire education system like this.

+1. it took me a couple years after getting kicked out of college to get my
head sorted out to the point where I felt like I could "think" again

I think one of the most harmful things about schooling is the way it imposes a
tracked structure on learning. it demarcates knowledge into discrete subjects
and sets up a linear progression through them and says you need to master each
step on the track before moving onto the next one. this is poisonous and
borderline evil, and I've encountered many people who are crippled for life by
it. a lot of people never pursue things they're really interested in and could
become extremely passionate about because school has convinced them they need
to stack up prerequisite knowledge before they're even allowed to touch it

~~~
knzhou
> says you need to master each step on the track before moving onto the next
> one. this is poisonous and borderline evil

What’s wrong with it? You do need to understand calculus before classical
mechanics, classical mechanics before quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics
before quantum field theory, and quantum field theory before the Standard
Model. I’ve seen tons of people disregard this and the result is always
confused word salad. People waste years of their lives this way, going in
circles without ever carefully building their understanding from the ground
up. The order in school was chosen for a reason.

~~~
drorco
Some people like to work their way in reverse. I'd often pick a really
complicated subject I'm after like "stellar fusion" and then work my way
downwards and learn whatever I need to learn in order to understand it. If I
had to start from differential mathematics, without knowing why I need it, I'd
probably give up.

~~~
codersteve
This is the big problem I had with engineering in school, so much was based on
faith that you needed it. And just now as I'm writing this, I realized that's
completely counter to my personality.

side note: I remember Einstein needed to learn particular math skills to help
prove his ideas and sought out to learn it.

------
afarrell
> This quality of “not stopping at an unsatisfactory answer” deserves some
> examination.

> This requires a lot of intrinsic motivation, because it’s so hard; so most
> people simply don’t do it.

It also requires self-confidence, persuasiveness, and social power.

Without these traits, your attempts to really understand something will be
dismissed as "overthinking things" or "trying to understand the universe".
Those around you will urge you to "stop thinking just do the task" or "do the
obvious thing" as they lose patience with you. If you don't resist them you'll
end up moving forward despite feeling confused, sometimes completely. You'll
then end up pissing people off when you execute too slowly or fail (in their
eyes, intentionally).

> This is a habit. It’s easy to pick up.

Not if the people around you are exhausted by you.

~~~
BeetleB
There are both extremes, and best not to be at either one of them.

Example: I forget the name of the principle, but in mathematics the statement
"P implies Q" is considered true if P can never be true. As an example, let P
be "George Washington was a woman" and Q be "Queen Elizabeth is a man". Then
the statement "If GW was a woman, then QE is a man" is considered to be a true
statement.

I have a friend who refuses to accept that such a statement should be
considered "true". And he has put off studying real analysis until he can
learn enough logic theory to convince himself on the validity of accepting
such statements as true. I do not think he'll ever get to study real analysis,
because he is full of "No! I need to understand this really really well before
proceeding!" statements.

It's a fine approach if you have an infinite amount of time.

The other issue, as another commenter pointed out: It's very difficult to
measure progress in thought. The mind is great at fooling itself, and not
until you try to solve real problems (or discuss them with others) will you
expose most of the gaps in your mind. The same person in the above anecdote
does suffer from this. He definitely puts in effort to learn a lot (and has
succeeded), but there are always more things to learn, and he moves on to the
next topic before really applying what he has learned. As someone who talks to
him often, it's really hard to tell if he understands. He is the classic case
of "I'm sure I can solve problems when I need to, with a bit of review".

At the other extreme, of course, are people who are not really that motivated
to understand. They are satisfied if they get the answer at the back of the
book. You won't get far with just that.

> If you don't resist them you'll end up moving forward despite feeling
> confused, sometimes completely. You'll then end up pissing people off when
> you execute too slowly or fail (in their eyes, intentionally).

This sounds more like an issue at work, and your experience is fairly
universal - most jobs I've worked at have it. In my experience, understanding
things well is sadly not valued on the job. They want you to "execute", and
want you to minimize the time you spend learning. And of course, they would
rather hire someone else instead of ensuring your proper learning/training.

~~~
tashi
A real logician can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think those statements are
considered "vacuously true" for the same reason we say the empty set is a
member of every set and x^0 is 1: it makes the rules of calculation simpler if
we define it that way than other ways. But you can't use these convenient
definitions to learn anything new.

You can keep multiplying your equation by x^0 and union-ing your set with the
empty set and or-ing your proposition with "If eggs are diamonds then fish can
talk" all the livelong day, but you never gain any more information.

~~~
BeetleB
I pretty much told him the same: That we declared such statements to be true
merely for convenience - it makes the proofs shorter. And that none of the
theorems he would normally deal with would have a different "outcome" if we
don't accept such statements - they'd still be valid theorems.

But he won't be convinced until he formally studies logic. No idea when that
will happen.

~~~
smabie
Well I have "formally" studied formal logic and he's in for a disappointment.
Formal logic is a game, especially boolean logic, which has no grounding in
truth, the world, or anything. Sometimes it's a useful game, but there's no
inherent meaning behind it.

Tell your friend that implication works that way because that's what we've
assumed, nothing more, nothing less.

~~~
BeetleB
> Formal logic is a game, especially boolean logic, which has no grounding in
> truth, the world, or anything.

Thing is: He knows this. He's not a "beginner" who wants to learn a bit more.
He just hasn't spent enough time pondering vacuously true statements, and is
assuming there is more to it than there is, and hopes studying logic will shed
some light. So he refuses to study analysis until he has time to study logic.

No doubt, if he ever gets to logic, he'll end up with more questions and
branching off further and further. He'll never get around to analysis. But
like the top level comment - he doesn't like it when people tell him not to
bother.

~~~
smabie
Though not implication, there is some reasoning to some other vacuously true
statements. Take for example:

All purple cows are smart.

This statement is true, because the set of purple cows is empty. It might
seem, odd, but it's because we can rephrase it as:

There does not exist a purple cow that is not smart.

When you phrase it like that, I think most people would intuitively agree that
it should evaluate to true. In other words, to preserve symmetry between the
universal and existential qualifiers, you need the first statement to also be
true. Without the ability to transform "exists" into "foralls" would make
first order predicate logic pretty much useless. In addition, if the emptiness
of a set actually changed how the quantifiers worked, it would be a big
problem: breaking referential transparency, if you will.

I don't recall there being a similar justification for implication in boolean
logic, but I think the reasoning is similar. Hope that helps!

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I don't recall there being a similar justification for implication in
> boolean logic, but I think the reasoning is similar.

You can apply a similar equivalence, the contrapositive. Using the same
example I gave sidethread:

0\. (Premise - I wish to snottily imply that "that guy" did not graduate from
high school.)

1\. "If that guy graduated from high school, I'm the King of England."

(1) is exactly equivalent to (2):

2\. "If I'm not the King of England, that guy didn't graduate from high
school."

A positive proposition in (1) is negative in (2), and vice versa. But they are
the same thing; if one is defined, the other is also defined.

------
kevsim
As an engineering manager, I love having a mix of people who just always need
to go deep on whatever they’re working on and others who are just obsessed
with shipping and getting stuff out. Particularly great when you pair them off
and they push/pull each other a bit.

~~~
jonwalch
Totally agree with this. I used to be solely in the latter camp and my
teammates pulled me in the deep direction.

------
avindroth
I have always thought that, as mentioned in the article, time is the greatest
enemy. Human minds are incredible at understanding and theorizing, if given
enough time. But when we are young and lacking information, pressure and trust
of authority create a time-restriction that disallows us from forming truly
"soft" or flexible models. Thus we are sort of taught to "forget" about a
problem once it is solved. The problem itself becomes a task to be finished
(for brownie points) rather than an actual problem with its own unique set of
rewards. Not every problem rewards equally and even some problems may be
detrimental to solve, but the self-education that our education system
requires of our minds to succeed in the system makes it such that we regard
problems as something we need to solve as proof to authority that we may get
some free time.

Great post.

------
RedShift1
Heh I get this a lot in my daily sysadmin/developer duties. When you need to
turn on a knob somewhere you don't just wanna know that you have to turn it
on, you want to know why you need to turn it on and follow the chain up until
you get to facts you already know. But it's not always possible to get that
far, there's too many layers of abstraction, the source code is not available
or you just don't have the time.

~~~
capdeck
I can draw a parallel to this in software development. Some product features
that require development "from scratch", where you can get down to the
original code and logic - this is where "taking time to think" really pays
off.

But when you are basically composing a final product from components,
libraries and features - this is where figuring something out may take really
long time and a lot of effort. It today's world many libraries are open
source, so you actually can get to the bottom of many issues. But the time and
effort cost of that is almost never acceptable.

My conclusion is - if you are a "slow" thinker, prefer getting to the bottom
and figuring stuff out - try and choose the "fundamental" type of work. Where
you are "done is better than perfect" kinda person - you'll thrive in the
upper layers of development stack where shipping stuff out is of utmost
importance. Focus on your strengths.

~~~
karpierz
Where do you find this "fundamental" kind of work? How do you select for it?

~~~
capdeck
One example would be analytics libraries that require precise calculations and
background in math as opposed to the UI that displays the bar chart with
results. The former is what I consider to be "fundamental" where the latter is
much higher level and close to the end user (UI).

Other examples: audio / video codecs vs. media player app; game engine vs.
intro screen and menu stuff, etc...

------
RichardChu
I worry that the way modern society is structured disincentivizes deep
understanding.

1\. Industry cares more about concrete results, quick execution, and bias for
action.

2\. Academia cares more about positive results, quantity of published papers,
and small achievable experiments over big experiments that might fail.

Where are the institutions that care about deep understanding?

~~~
catwind7
i agree. I think this is why I find companies like tesla and spacex exciting.
They seem to have set up incentive structures that encourage _both_ quick
execution and innovation (which requires deep understanding). One thing he's
said that really struck me is that it's _really_ difficult to produce
innovation if you tie punishment to failure. People tend to be conservative if
they are punished / think they will be punished harshly for trying and
failing. But if you want to innovate, failure has to be an acceptable outcome

hopefully we see more companies go in this direction

~~~
jmchuster
well that's where the whole mantra of "move fast and break things" comes from.

Putting it out there and failing also accelerates you faster to the right
answers. If you release it today, it'll take 6 more months of iteration to
really get it right. Or maybe you spend an extra 2 years of development to get
it "right", but then once you release, you'll still have to spend 3 more
months of iteration anyways to get it right.

~~~
catwind7
yeah, this hits home for me because my team just spent a couple of years
trying to get a product right and now it's on the verge of being replaced.

I think I've typically associated that mantra with pure software companies, so
it's surprising when a company does this with rockets

------
lightfooted
The points about education really resonate with me. In my engineering
undergrad, it was frustrating to see in our applied math courses that the
mechanical plugging and chugging of equations was the approach that most of my
peers took in their studies. They got better grades than me. I wanted to
understand concepts more deeply, but there was no time, and the tests rewarded
those who could simply go through the motions of applying formulae to
problems.

~~~
agucova
I'm a first-year engineering undergrad, last Friday I finished the last
Calculus 3 exam on the semester.

I spent 2 days studying with friends just to see they would blindly memorize
formulas with no regard whatsoever for what they were actually doing. "I'm not
the understanding type", they said unironically.

Do you think this happens more often in engineering than other disciplines?
Some people believe that applied science or mathematics means that just
learning formulas is enough

------
inetsee
One of the things I remember quite vividly from my Psychology classes in
college was the idea of a "satisficing" problem solver. Given a (reasonably
solvable) problem to solve most people can come up with a satisfactory
solution. The difficulty comes when you ask them to come up with a new
solution. Many people struggle because their brains say "I already came up
with a solution, and it was a pretty darn good solution too."

The really creative people are the ones who insist that their brains come up
with another solution, and another one until they can be confident that
they've found the best solution within a reasonable time investment.

~~~
cmehdy
To me this seemed to get easier as I encountered more "languages of the mind",
i.e. more ways to think about things. This, is very much tied to the "nurture"
part of our lives, as foundational experiences are more by the very definition
of "experience" subjective and unique.

Solving a problem within mathematics in a new way can be made much easier if
you have grasped multiple fields (for example, algebra vs. geometry). I've
seen people understanding chemistry well because they enjoyed cooking, and
could sort of use either to get to a given explanation to solve a problem.
I've definitely started to grasp chemistry only when I reached a decent level
in theoretical physics.

Here's my assumption: everything has a likelihood of depending to some degree
on other things (examples: can you do mathematics without a language or
writing? can you do physics without mathematics?). Therefore, "thinking
laterally" could very well be thought of more as "thinking with an interesting
combination of previous vectors of thought". Perhaps the "genius" is to create
nonlinear combinations of previous vectors.

So in short, this ability to come up with another solution, and another, and
another.. I wonder how much it is tied to the richness of experiences you've
had since your birth, and particularly the foundational ones (at the very
least I would assume to be more testable than later on, if my hypothesis about
dependency of "thought vectors" is true).

------
dorkwood
> But it’s not just energy. You have to be able to motivate yourself to spend
> large quantities of energy on a problem, which means on some level that not
> understanding something — or having a bug in your thinking — bothers you a
> lot. You have the drive, the will to know.

This resonates with me. Someone once asked me how I decide when I'm finished
with a particular thing I'm working on. The answer is as simple as "when I
stop thinking about it". When it stops bubbling up in my thoughts. Until then,
I'll keep returning, and I'll keep chipping away.

~~~
smabie
That's a really great and profound answer. Thanks!

------
getpost
Not stopping after the first right answer is one metacognitive strategy[1]
among many. Metacognition is an area of active research.

I first heard of metacognition as a distinct discipline in connection with the
treatment of insecure attachment.[2]

Metarationality[3] is an aspect or extension of metacognition.

[1] [https://helpfulprofessor.com/metacognitive-
strategies/](https://helpfulprofessor.com/metacognitive-strategies/)

[2] [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-resilient-
brain/...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-resilient-
brain/201609/attachment-disturbances-major-breakthrough-in-treatment)

[3]
[https://meaningness.com/eggplant/introduction](https://meaningness.com/eggplant/introduction)

------
branko_d
From the article:

> Visualizing something, in three dimensions, can help you with a concrete
> “hook” that your brain can grasp onto and use as a model; understanding then
> has a physical context that it can “take place in”.

I'm still sore at the educational system in my country (Serbia) for ignoring
and occasionally discouraging this kind of visual thinking. Remembering words
and reproducing them at the time of examination was rewarded far more than
constructing a mental model of how things work at the abstract level, and then
deriving conclusions from that. Some teachers were exception, of course, and I
remember them vividly and fondly to this day, but the rest are like some
amorphous gray mass that barely existed somewhere in may past.

I still remember being told to memorize the Schrödinger's equation in high
school, before we even covered, let alone understood the underlying maths. And
I still don't. The funny thing is that this teacher was one of the "good ones"
and she actually apologized to us for forcing us do this. But her hands were
tied by the teaching "plan and program" that was obviously created by a
committee whose members didn't talk to each other.

At the university (maths + CS), we would write-down (to our notebooks) the
computer programs scribbled onto the blackboard by the professor, then
memorize them for the exam, which was taken on paper. Nobody ever asked any
questions. I still remember a colleague who didn't understand the concept of a
pointer. That was in the third year and she had good grades.

I honestly hope things have improved in the meantime (the above was in the
'90s).

------
typon
Unironically writing about "honesty, integrity, and bravery" while working at
Palantir

------
pandesal
Jesus christ that background is distracting.

~~~
abnercoimbre
Wasn't sure whether your comment was relevant, then I remembered I closed the
article a third of the way through because of a deep annoyance with the
background.

I'm all for individual expression, but here I think it subtracts from the
reading experience.

------
drol3
Huge fan of this kind of thinking.

I try to recommend this technique with software all the time. Basically
instead of the workflow bring this

1) follow some tutorial online 2) integrate into real work

I do

1) follow some tutorial online 2) spend an hour to see how I can break it 3)
integrate into real work

That step two does all sorts of wonderful things like helping you understand
failure modes, better understand quality, make it easier to debug. You get the
same knowledge over time by doing "real work", but it is much much more
efficient this way :)

------
sega_sai
There is one point there that I thought was interesting, regarding asking
questions, and not being afraid to look stupid and about many
senior/distinguished people doing that. Being in science, I noticed that it
gets easier when you get more and more stature. I.e. if you are a professor, I
think it is very easy to ask a postdoc/student after the talk -- sorry I don't
understand it, or sorry if it is a stupid question. And the reason is 1) you
know much better the limits of your knowledge, so it is unlikely a stupid
question 2) You may be less dependent on the opinion of people surrounding
you. While if you are say a grad student, when you ask a question, there is a
higher chance of looking stupid, just because you may know significantly less
and also you may be more afraid of people around you because of their higher
career status.

Because of all this, I find it a bit disingenuous when senior people say to
younger people that you should always ask questions and not being afraid of
looking stupid. But being curious and asking questions is good overall. It is
just not always easy.

~~~
aarghh
> Because of all this, I find it a bit disingenuous when senior people say to
> younger people that you should always ask questions and not being afraid of
> looking stupid. But being curious and asking questions is good overall. It
> is just not always easy.

I agree with your general point, but a minor comment here: in many cases the
professor/leader asking those (stupid) questions may be to create
psychological safety for a more open conversation. It is less threatening to
the person being questioned; it also encourages other people to participate.

------
abdullahkhalids
How would you create a training program to teach all of lessons?

I thought of creating a workshop at my uni, titled "how to ask stupid
questions?" Essentially, do group activities where someone presents on some
topic, and the goal of the audience is to ask genuine "stupid questions" \-
questions about the fundamentals, which most people are embarrassed to ask,
but which play a big part in understanding.

------
kenny87
Sharing one of my favorite quotes on this topic that James Clerk Maxwell was
said [0] to tell his students:

"In this class I hope you will learn not merely results, or formulae
applicable to cases that may possibly occur in our practice afterwards, but
the principles on which those formulae depend, and without which the formulae
are mere mental rubbish. I know the tendency of the human mind is to do
anything rather than think. But mental labor is not thought, and those who
have with labor acquired the habit of application often find it much easier to
get up a formula than to master a principle.”

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v40OcJ7rfSE&t=788s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v40OcJ7rfSE&t=788s)

------
djohnston
Excellent read. So much of this resonates deeply with me based on uni
experiences. I studied math and was guilty on more than one occasion of
basically memorizing some theorems and methods of manipulation, missing the
forest for the trees so to speak.

------
cosmodisk
I catch myself doing this quite often: I read documentation, try a couple of
things,if it works,I move on. Now this is all good when dealing with simple
things but the more complex things are the less it works. It's like reading
learn python in 10 days and then going on GitHub with all that newly gained
knowledge and confidence and trying to understand how a large codebase works.
Within about 30 seconds you close the browser and binary tears start dripping
on your keyboard...

------
rustybolt
> Moreover, I have noticed that these ‘hardware’ traits vary greatly in the
> smartest people I know -- some are remarkably quick thinkers, calculators,
> readers, whereas others are ‘slow’.

This strikes a chord. I am much more of a nerd than my girlfriend, but I
notice at almost every opportunity that she's a much quicker thinker and a
much better learner than I am. I have studied math and computer science, but
she regularly out-thinks me in puzzles, even when they are math-related.

------
skybrian
This takes a habit that's sometimes good for some people and some subjects,
and turns it into a universal recommendation, and then claims that's what
intelligence is, which is really quite dubious.

To work on math, you need time, a peaceful place to think, and motivation.
Even then, you can't do this for everything, because there is too much.
Obsessing on something that's not urgent when there's more important stuff to
do may not be good time management, depending on your priorities and other
claims on your time. But you might do it anyway, depending on your interests.

Also, learning some other subject well may be less about thinking by yourself
and more about going out and talking to people, or playing a lot of games, or
challenging yourself in some other way. All that takes time too.

But there is a lesson here: knowing something in more than one way means you
know it better. I see this especially in music, where there are multiple ways
to memorize a piece and they reinforce each other. Auditory memory (being able
to hear it in your head), muscle memory, knowing the chords, knowing the
lyrics, even remembering where it is on the page can all help.

------
leoc
Gerry Sussman talked at length about IV during his DanFest
[https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/dfried_celebration.html](https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/dfried_celebration.html)
talk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arMH5GjBwUQ&t=295](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arMH5GjBwUQ&t=295)
.

------
catwind7
> not understanding something — or having a bug in your thinking — bothers you
> a lot.

I find this to be true for nearly all of the best co-workers I've had. I think
this is the same reason people enjoy debugging software. It's the computer
telling you that there's a bug in your thinking

------
alexandercrohde
My own take trying to express this dichotomy of second-hand versus firsthand
knowledge
[https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/682](https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/682)

------
rainhacker
Great article. A nice followup can be an article that talks about how to
prioritize, or select which problems to take a deep dive in.

------
arendtio
> Another quality I have noticed in very intelligent people is being unafraid
> to look stupid.

At school, there was a guy who used to ask questions which made him look
stupid, at first. After discussing said questions for a few minutes, it often
became apparent that those questions were in fact at the heart of the topic.

------
musicale
Interesting; for the chain rule proof he cites, it would seem at first glance
that if you rewrite the leibniz notation as its equivalent limit notation,
then the y terms cancel. It has been a while since I learned differential
calculus, so perhaps that is why I don't immediately recall why this is wrong?

------
ibejoeb
Reminds me of "How to Solve It" by George Pólya. Short read about finding
approaches to problems, planning proofs, and understanding by restropect.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It)

------
sharkjacobs
> Understanding something really deeply is connected to our physical intuition

This rings true to me.

I think that I "understand" how to start a fire, which I do a couple dozen
times a year, in a deeper more complete way than I understand any of the
abstract software development that I spend 30 hours a week doing.

------
sidpatil
I can't scale the text on that page. I tried in both Firefox and Edge.

------
bredren
This reminds me of a discussion in the most recent episode of Django Chat with
Aymeric Augustin on the difference between tutorials and reference
documentation.

------
sunstone
Interesting that his understanding of calculus doesn't include non-standard
analysis. But then mathematics has a lot of abstractions.

------
aaron695
Is this consciousness?

IQ being the biggest life changer.

Consciousness is considered second and more importantly is considered
trainable.

~~~
aaron695
Since spellcheck killed that -

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness)

It's part of the ‘Big Five’ factor of personality.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits)

It's interesting when Jordan Peterson was asked what he has been wrong about,
he said he did not initially believe in the Big Five personality traits.

It fits with the hardware(IQ) and software(conscientiousness) analogy

------
Volker-E
Oh my lord, why is Jesus in that list?

~~~
Barrin92
because it's actually quite relevant. The quality that the author is talking
about is simply faith. Genuine intellectual activity is the recognition that
there is a gap between how you understand the world and that there is is a
more genuine degree of understanding to be found.

Because there's no guarantee of success the attitude one needs to adopt is the
same attitude a believer needs to have, which is to take a leap of faith.

And like genuine faith, genuine intellectual activity is not goal oriented. If
you only think to optimise your shopping list or make more money, you're
impoverishing your own thinking by making it subject to what basically amounts
some meaningless goal, that is to say you're instrumentalising thinking. Just
like being faithful so you end up on God's or the churches good side is an
impoverished version of belief.

~~~
randcraw
The OP goes into some detail on the essentialness of honesty and integrity
when it comes to inquiry. Without both, your pursuit of deep understanding
will short-circuit. The best way I know to overlook truth is to willfully
presume you know something, especially something unknowable. And that's faith.
To exercise faith, you must stop questioning, shut your eyes, and jump into
the abyss. You stop thinking. If some sort of understanding arises from faith,
it most certainly is not the fruit of intellectual pursuit.

------
pstuart
Interesting. tl;dr -- we learn by experiencing things, not by being told
things.

~~~
cloudier
I think this is the transmissionism versus constructivist view on teaching.[0]
This is something that is well-known in education and I wish more people knew
about it! Lay people commonly think of education as transmission of ideas from
teachers to learners, but educators believe that learners construct their own
understanding of ideas. So these educators try to create situations where the
learners can do that construction.

[0]: [http://nas-
sites.org/responsiblescience/files/2016/05/Dirks-...](http://nas-
sites.org/responsiblescience/files/2016/05/Dirks-and-Stith-ActiveLearning-
May-81.pdf)

