Virtuous Circle of Intelligence
From Zanecorpwiki
Russ Roberts has a nice talk with Daniel Willingham on memory, education, and learning and it got me thinking about why--to be modest--I'm so smart. One component is memory. To reason successfully about things, we need to have a command of the facts. But how do we remember the facts?
Willingham's point is that we remember what we think about. So, if you want to remember 1776 is the year the US declared independence from Britain you should think about that in a meaningful way. Rote repetition of the fact or simple desire to remember won't help at all. Instead, connect the fact to something you know, remember seeing the date in a poster for a movie, or place it in the time line between the early British settlements beginning in 1607 and the War of 1812 (an easy one to place).
Reasoning itself is also a skill, but one that must be supported by facts. In other words, facts support reasoning, but reasoning supports facts. This is a pretty clear virtuous circle and something I find very true in my own life. It also jives with psychology studies that support the idea that people that people tend to be really good at lots of things or nothing. In other words, if you find a kid who's good at math, odds are they're also good in literature, science, and history and vice-versa.
The trick, therefore, is to think about things all the time. I'm constantly comparing, critiquing, contextualizing, deconstructing, and synthesizing. At lectures, listening to podcasts, talking to people, reading books, etc. I'm a fairly slow reader and I think this is part of the reason, because I'm very actively thinking about everything. I just can't help it.
Overall, this is a good thing. It's become easy for me to not only learn and even master subjects in a relatively short amount of time. At some level, the sheer amount of stuff I'm interested in becomes a drag on my ability to assimilate yet another subject, but overall, one's ability to engage in multiple domains increases because the more you know, the more you can compact and analogize new knowledge. For instance, if learning subject A takes 1 unit of "mental resource", then subject B might take .8 mental resource units because wherever there's common ground between A and B, you can share knowledge. At some point, the marginal cost of new knowledge drops significantly.
There are downsides. The biggest problem is over generalizing and over-confidence in one's ability to reason. I can, for instance, often convince people that I'm knowledgeable about subjects that I know next to nothing about because I'm able to synthesize the knowledge on the fly by analogizing to things I do know about and by employing other reasoning techniques. What's worse is that usually I'm right. I know this because I can talk with people who are legitimately experts in the subjects and get quite far by extracting a lot of understanding from a limited number of facts.
It is very easy to go too far, however. Given enough time, I'll almost always trip up and sometimes in quite painful ways. When talking with an expert, this generally results in a reprimand which may hurt my pride, but is all to the good. The real problem is when I'm "faking" it with non-experts and unknowingly end up reducing their understanding of the subject by injecting false information.
It's also hard for me to turn it off. Even while watching fictional shows I'm constantly turning over literary analogues, critiquing presentation, assessing dialogue, etc. I read fiction like an editor. Meditating and specifically trying to "quite the mind", even without external stimulus, can be very difficult.
In the positive form, the idea is what Zen means by "the mind of the student". It's the mind that engages and is active in acquisition and the idea is applied to change in the mind that takes one from journeyman to master. The student must be active because they know nothing, the journeyman can fall prey to passivity because they've learned the form of things. The master re-engages with the knowledge and combines their experience with the mind of the student to push things beyond what is currently known.
In the negative form, it can be a ceaseless chatter. This is not only stressful, but it can easily become distracting and diminish the value of new experience. To be most effective, the voracious reasoning must be balanced with periods of quite contemplation.
