Discovering Defender of Basic’s post on how he learned to think at 30 feels like a hugeeee turning point.

Very recency bias, but based on the experiments I’ve already ran (see the new website I’ve made, lol) it seems like I’ve kind of been learning fairly wrong this whole time

Well, I’ve been learning well, as far as like, reading great stuff, making flashcards that make stuff stick, make you legit conversant in topics (e.g. nuclear risk etc, John Boyd)

BUT, I’ve had the model of “I’ll learn all this stuff, as it might be useful one day, and then maybe one day I’ll be able to combine all this in some way and like… have opinions, have takes”

Vs just “oh, you can make predictions, you can model people on twitter, you can spot what you’re missing, make predicitons about the answers, and then fill in the blanks”.

this creates wayyyy stickier learning because you have skin in the game - your ego is now involved - is my guess correct? Am I about to get a sting when I realise I missed something really obvious? Am I about to get a really exciting insight/new nugget which gives me a whole new thing to look into?

It may not sound like profound of a shift, but idk, I guess… I guess the analogy is like, I was being a librarian, gathering a bunch of knowledge, diligently filing it away in my head. But never doing anything with it! E.g., I did 50 hours of John Boyd study, 20 hours of nuclear safety study, and have had 0 conversations with other people about this stuff.

Vs, learning via world modelling and model-updating is like being a detective. Your ego is involved, etc. Already said this, but you know.

It’s like, when you’re a detective, 100% of what you learn is useful, by definition, because you’re posing questions, then learning what the real answers are. Vs when you’re a librarian, 99.9% is just stored away for later, and maybe you’ll end up using 100% of it one day, but also maybe not!!! Maybe like 95% of it will be kinda pointless, busy work.

This is the curse of the blessings of tools like Anki and Obsidian. They make collecting stuff so easy, that they imply that collecting stuff is correct.

I wonder if you could have tools that incentivise the detective mode, rather than the librarian mode. An app that roasts you about how little you know about US politics or something (as for me, going on twitter and being like “why would someone tweet this” has been an experience of like “ok, AOC is tweeting about how it’s terrible that the establishment is backing Andrew Cuomo, let me guess at who he is, what party, what he’s running for? Has he been governor before? Is he running again? Are there term limits? Do these vary by state? What was his scandal? Are the top scandals money + sex?” etc etc.

So like yeah, it’s juicy as hell to be a detective. It’s embarrassing too! It’s embarrassing to be a 2 day old detective, to realise all the things that you’ve never thought about. But it feels like this path will lead to many blanks being filled in FAST. It’s so exciting!!

Also, I have a friend who works in policy, and we had our weekly call today. I’ve never actually asked her what she does at work, and also what policy really is, and I think I’ve always felt kinda intimidated by her because it sounds so professional, so legit, and makes me feel dumb. So today I was just like - “this is ridiculous, but what is policy? Let me guess first actually - xyz?” - and she said a bunch of super useful stuff that added depth to my model (and my guess was actually pretty solid – I had just been scared to guess before (??? that’s another post - why was this scary to do, why did I not learn in this way, until getting permission from the Defender of Basic post?). And then I asked her what she did at work specifically, and guessed at that, and it was a super super useful conversation.

It’s like, the okayness with looking stupid. It’s such an efficient way to learn

  • just fuckin ask dude!!! I think I’ve mostly just been scared to admit to not knowing obvious stuff, but like hey, it’s fine, no one is gonna shame me, lol. Plus the “what is x? And first, ok I’m gonna guess - it’s y?” - at least you’re trying!