> 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 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...
> 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 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...