> It’s a pervasive attitude of curiosity about thinking and ideas in general, which leads to just endless practice of the varied body of skills and abilities that one can think of as “smartness”.
Yeah, maybe "smartness" is really just the accumulation of many skills - they start to interact in interesting and unexpected ways in your brain, which then compound on each other because you start to see the positive results of your efforts. Therefore, the act of "getting smarter" gets easier, and the virtuous cycle continues. I suspect that this is extremely similar to physical health, where the habits get easier with time (and some folks get over the initial hump easily while others never do).
It seems like getting folks (permanently) over the hump who are unable to do it themselves is very difficult, and I worry that it might be more of a "nature" than "nurture" thing.
> It seems like getting folks (permanently) over the hump who are unable to do it themselves is very difficult, and I worry that it might be more of a "nature" than "nurture" thing.
I worry a little bit about the nature vs nurture thing a bit, but I suspect it's less about getting individual people over the hump and more about empowering them to create groups and environments that sustain the parts of the feedback loop they can't easily sustain themselves.
My main concern on this front is that it may be that there are things you need to do to sustain this sort of constant improvement have a sort of problem where it's really hard for the cost-benefit analysis to work out if you lack a certain level of "intrinsic knack" for some of the parts, but I imagine that even if you can't get it to self sustain most people have the ability to improve significantly on where they are.
It sounds as though the thing you're driving at in the last paragraph is mental flexibility - that curiosity is possible because the person does not assume that they fully understand something already in all its implications, potential or connections.
I'm very intrigued by Roam - it also seems to be about flexibility. Something I think about a lot is how people have pointed out that our brain is not like a computer, but every successive century people have reconceptualised their thinking about the brain in relation to available external technologies. That suggests that our tools are to some extent like rails our thoughts run on. But it's often optimal to be able to move the train onto a siding or even derail it altogether.
And when I read that Roam gets beyond the limitations of a folder tree, I thought about how often I get stuck when organising info on my computer, whether it's for a book project or my bookmarks (you don't want to know how elaborate and extensive my bookmark system is). Folder trees at least allow for aliases, but a bookmarks system doesn't, so I'm forced to impose limited definitions on things, and on my future thinking about where to find them. So that's a constraint forced by a totally arbitrary thing, and yet it must play into my thinking about how I organise information in general, for both my own reference and for creative projects.
So where I end up is: I might get smarter and more practiced at making creative associations if I get out of habits of idea generation that derive from my own tools...
Definitely agreed that mental flexibility is a big part of it! A related skill I've been thinking about recently is that of asking good questions, and a lot of that is assuming there's always more to learn.
RE tooling: I'm a big fan of lightweight and flexible tools, and building lots of new ways of using them on top of them. To be honest despite my suggestions of various software that's mostly because it's a good memory assist to be able to search it. For most things that aren't about writing large volumes of text, I'm actually a big fan of manual tools - for idea *generation* I think I get more value out of a physical book, a bunch of post it notes, or a tarot deck than out of most digital tools, because there's so much flexibility in using them.
> It’s a pervasive attitude of curiosity about thinking and ideas in general, which leads to just endless practice of the varied body of skills and abilities that one can think of as “smartness”.
Yeah, maybe "smartness" is really just the accumulation of many skills - they start to interact in interesting and unexpected ways in your brain, which then compound on each other because you start to see the positive results of your efforts. Therefore, the act of "getting smarter" gets easier, and the virtuous cycle continues. I suspect that this is extremely similar to physical health, where the habits get easier with time (and some folks get over the initial hump easily while others never do).
It seems like getting folks (permanently) over the hump who are unable to do it themselves is very difficult, and I worry that it might be more of a "nature" than "nurture" thing.
Anyway, thank you for the insightful post!
> It seems like getting folks (permanently) over the hump who are unable to do it themselves is very difficult, and I worry that it might be more of a "nature" than "nurture" thing.
I worry a little bit about the nature vs nurture thing a bit, but I suspect it's less about getting individual people over the hump and more about empowering them to create groups and environments that sustain the parts of the feedback loop they can't easily sustain themselves.
My main concern on this front is that it may be that there are things you need to do to sustain this sort of constant improvement have a sort of problem where it's really hard for the cost-benefit analysis to work out if you lack a certain level of "intrinsic knack" for some of the parts, but I imagine that even if you can't get it to self sustain most people have the ability to improve significantly on where they are.
It sounds as though the thing you're driving at in the last paragraph is mental flexibility - that curiosity is possible because the person does not assume that they fully understand something already in all its implications, potential or connections.
I'm very intrigued by Roam - it also seems to be about flexibility. Something I think about a lot is how people have pointed out that our brain is not like a computer, but every successive century people have reconceptualised their thinking about the brain in relation to available external technologies. That suggests that our tools are to some extent like rails our thoughts run on. But it's often optimal to be able to move the train onto a siding or even derail it altogether.
And when I read that Roam gets beyond the limitations of a folder tree, I thought about how often I get stuck when organising info on my computer, whether it's for a book project or my bookmarks (you don't want to know how elaborate and extensive my bookmark system is). Folder trees at least allow for aliases, but a bookmarks system doesn't, so I'm forced to impose limited definitions on things, and on my future thinking about where to find them. So that's a constraint forced by a totally arbitrary thing, and yet it must play into my thinking about how I organise information in general, for both my own reference and for creative projects.
So where I end up is: I might get smarter and more practiced at making creative associations if I get out of habits of idea generation that derive from my own tools...
Definitely agreed that mental flexibility is a big part of it! A related skill I've been thinking about recently is that of asking good questions, and a lot of that is assuming there's always more to learn.
RE tooling: I'm a big fan of lightweight and flexible tools, and building lots of new ways of using them on top of them. To be honest despite my suggestions of various software that's mostly because it's a good memory assist to be able to search it. For most things that aren't about writing large volumes of text, I'm actually a big fan of manual tools - for idea *generation* I think I get more value out of a physical book, a bunch of post it notes, or a tarot deck than out of most digital tools, because there's so much flexibility in using them.