Is there any systematic technique for improving your understanding?

[Bobby_2021]

Let's take something definite like chess or cycling or trees. How do you approach that thing to understand it more and more. Is they are formula for increasing your understanding?

How do you systematically increase your understanding of something extremely complicated like chess?

One way is to jump into the it and experience it to the maximum and make sense of it as you go. But what should be the balance on contemplating and action/experience? 

[Phil King]

How are you going to measure understanding? Does Magnus Carlsen have a greater understanding of chess then Bobby Fischer because of his ELO rating? How would you measure youre understanding of trees? 

I feel like you must first start with a system or metrics of measuring progress towards a complete understanding of a topic.

[LastThursday]

Full immersion is generally the way to go to quickly and deeply understand a thing. But that takes a certain level of commitment. For example you're clearly going to learn chess more quickly and thoroughly if you consistently play it, than if you just play occasionally. Full immersion is almost a prerequisite for language fluency as another example.

One obvious thing to do is to take a course, whether online or IRL. That will at least ground you in the basics of a subject and it will systematically take you through the main points of a subject.

I think from the beginning stages you should be fully in action mode, you need to get a real feel for what you're learning. As you progress you should ramp up the contemplation and theory. For example if you're practising a new sport, it wouldn't make much sense to go straight into theory, you just need to do the actions to learn - it's much the same with most things. It's only when you become more proficient do you start theorising and learning techniques.

Another way, is to have a teacher or have someone mentor you. If they're good, they can systematically take you through the parts of a new subject.

Lastly, a lot of subjects have their own language and jargon. It's good to pick up at least the most important terms and have a good understanding of them. For example in IT, the ideas of information and storage and processing are important - learn what the jargon means. That will give you a foothold into a new subject.

Edited October 31, 2023 by LastThursday

[Princess Arabia]

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Maybe there's a system for the study of understanding.

[Bobby_2021]

15 hours ago, Phil King said:

How are you going to measure understanding? Does Magnus Carlsen have a greater understanding of chess then Bobby Fischer because of his ELO rating? How would you measure youre understanding of trees? 

I feel like you must first start with a system or metrics of measuring progress towards a complete understanding of a topic.

I do not want to quantify or measure the understanding for the sake of comparison. But if you believe that understanding can be improved, then there are people with lower level of understanding of life in general or some niche aspect of life. And there are people who understand reality better than others.

Magnus definitely had a better understanding of chess than Fischer for various reasons. 

The question is why do Magnus has a better understanding of chess?

If you are saying ability, then there are certainly many people with the same level of ability compared to Magnus in this world. There has to be some meta level technique that magnus had used, on top of his exceptional genetics which had led to his higher understanding of chess.

It could be that:

He had less fear that others.

He had more experience in chess than others. Others could not immerse in chess as much as Magnus.

Messi with respect to football is another example. How come the understanding of Messi is so higher than others?
What technique did he use?

-----------------------------------------------------

Again, it cannot be entirely genetics. There are many people with exceptional genetics in this world. But some men are able to dominate others so ruthlessly. How come some people possess God level understanding of something. They were closer to the Truth in some way.

What is that?

[Bobby_2021]

10 hours ago, LastThursday said:

For example if you're practising a new sport, it wouldn't make much sense to go straight into theory, you just need to do the actions to learn

Deep point. It is a grave mistake to jump into theory first when you are learning something new.

10 hours ago, LastThursday said:

Lastly, a lot of subjects have their own language and jargon. It's good to pick up at least the most important terms and have a good understanding of them. For example, in IT, the ideas of information and storage and processing are important - learn what the jargon means. That will give you a foothold into a new subject.

Agreed. Labelling things immensely affects the speed at which you are able to retrieve information.

Full immersion in something is such as amazing concept. Due to suppressed fear, I have observed that I am unable to fully immerse my self in something. That could add up to something.

 

10 hours ago, Princess Arabia said:

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Maybe there's a system for the study of understanding.

There has to be.

[Bobby_2021]

To improve understanding fast:

• Full immersion in the thing that you are trying to gain experience in. Position yourself so that you can get more experience of that thing. 
• Fear is falsehood and antithetical to Truth, experience and understanding. Fear is an immersion inhibitor.
• Label and compress things that you already know. Having a label means fast retrieval. You need to have a good memory.
• Sensitivity and compassion help you to immerse in something faster. 
• Zoom into the thing and make finer distinctions of what you are learning more of.
• Also, it is better to be in touch with improving something for an extended period of time, if you want to improve at it.
• Have the right Expectations. This is cruical.

Edited November 1, 2023 by Bobby_2021

[Razard86]

18 hours ago, Bobby_2021 said:

Let's take something definite like chess or cycling or trees. How do you approach that thing to understand it more and more. Is they are formula for increasing your understanding?

How do you systematically increase your understanding of something extremely complicated like chess?

One way is to jump into the it and experience it to the maximum and make sense of it as you go. But what should be the balance on contemplating and action/experience? 

Play chess against different opponents, you could even play against yourself. Then watch a lot of chess on Youtube. Then contemplate the many moves and strategies you can do. Do this for 10 years or more repeatedly and you just might become a master.....Grandmaster...you would need talent for that one.

[LastThursday]

@Bobby_2021 something that also comes to mind is that play and experimentation is also crucial to speedy learning. For example if in Badminton you learn that a different grip is needed for backhand shots, then you would experiment with different grips on the same type of shot and feel the difference. Maybe you try and use the new grip for everything and see what happens. Children do this all the time, they learn something new and start using it all the time in different ways and combinations. In chess you might experiment with different openings or gambits. 

The trick with play is to do it innocently and be happy to make mistakes and laugh at yourself if you get things wrong, make it light. Sometimes doing things wrong is more instructive than always doing things right. If you've ever driven a car on snow and ice, you'll know what I mean. You need to "feel" what it's like when things are not right, so you can recognise it more quickly in future. You need both positive and negative feedback to learn more quickly.

Curiosity and reading around a subject is also very helpful. So often something that doesn't seem that related to what you're studying increases your understanding later down the line. Maybe you're studying to be a cook, but start looking into the chemical reactions around bread-making. Then you realise later down the line when you want to make bread, you have a deeper understanding than you would have done. Organic learning is very useful for accelerating learning.

Edited November 1, 2023 by LastThursday

[zurew]

I think the term "understanding" is way too vague and broad here and that will be a problem. 

There are different types of understanding and those require different set of practices. For example what do you care about here? Do you care about embodied understanding (in other words your ability to do or practice something) or  do you care about intellectual understanding or both?

If the answer "I care about both" in that case I wouldn't seek one formula, but multiple formulas that will be good in their specific domain. There is almost always a cost to generalities, and the cost is that  often you won't improve as much or maybe at all at certain specific domains and you will only improve at a slow rate at most domains.

....

 

That all being said here is a list of things that could be helpful in the vast majority of cases:

- You need to know how to properly measure your progress: This is extremely crucial and you need to be very clear with yourself. You need to find the most relevant variables and you need to know how to properly contextualize the weight and the sum of each of those variables. So for example when it comes to chess, if you want to use elo as a variable to rate your progress, that case, do you actually know what that is measuring in the context of practices? For example can you tease out from elo rating  alone how much and what kind of practice someone has done?

- Frequent feedback: You want as much feedback as possible and as frequently as possible. Basically the more data you have/gather about yourself the better. This could also mean very subtle self reflection where you map out exactly where your limitations are. It can be done by asking experts to give you high quality feedback or it can be done by you experimenting on your own self.

- Always challenge yourself: You want people who will constantly challenge your weakspots. You need to seek for people who are much knowledgeable and or better than you at that specific task.

- Drop all the assumptions you have about the specific domain and look up all the facts about how you can become better at it:  You need to be brutally honest with yourself here - what is that you actually know vs what is that you just assuming/guessing. Do you actually know what practices will yield the best results?  Just because you look up the best people in a specific domain that does not mean you actually know what practices had the most significant weight on their improvement. Also, different people might need different practices compared to others to get to the same level.  For example maybe someone has  the assumption that when it comes to boxing the most improvement will come from hitting the bag and therefore this guy will spend 80% of his time hitting bags. But it might be the case that sparring has much more weight when it comes to boxing improvement.

- Always be aware of marginal utility:  For the purpose of this discussion we can define utility as "a variable that will help you improve your understanding at a specific task". Basically, when you want to be good at something there will be a set of practices that will be good for you, but not all practices will have the same utility over time.

For example lets take programming. You can divide programming into many smaller tasks that all programmers do either periodically or all the time. For example all programmers need the ability of writing on the keyboard, so lets say you are exceptionally bad at it and you can only write 20 words per minute so you start to practice. Lets  say after 2 years of hardcore keyboard typing practice - now,  you can write 220 words per minute. Now remember that in this example what you want is being a better programmer. Further improving your typing speed from 220 word per minute to 290 word per minute will have close to zero impact on your overall ability of programming, but initially when you could only wrote 20 words per minute , at that time typing practice had much more impact on your overall programming ability. So basically typing practice lost its utility over time and now to improve your programming ability further you need to allocate your time more intelligently and you need to replace your typing practice with a different one.

Edited November 1, 2023 by zurew

[gettoefl]

in maths we say learn that one book and learn it well

this elevates you to master then you are ready to speak for the first time

chess by the way is finite imprudent trivial

[Bobby_2021]

6 hours ago, Razard86 said:

Play chess against different opponents, you could even play against yourself. Then watch a lot of chess on Youtube. Then contemplate the many moves and strategies you can do. Do this for 10 years or more repeatedly and you just might become a master.....Grandmaster...you would need talent for that one.

Let's go deeper. Many people do all this and never make any progress at all. Why?

Being stuck in a rating range is surprisingly common in chess. They play chess their whole lives and be stuck under 1700 or some under 2100. What could be the reason? They do above and beyond all that you have mentioned. 

2 hours ago, zurew said:

That all being said here is a list of things that could be helpful in the vast majority of cases:

- You need to know how to properly measure your progress: This is extremely crucial and you need to be very clear with yourself. You need to find the most relevant variables and you need to know how to properly contextualize the weight and the sum of each of those variables. So for example when it comes to chess, if you want to use elo as a variable to rate your progress, that case, do you actually know what that is measuring in the context of practices? For example can you tease out from elo rating  alone how much and what kind of practice someone has done?

- Frequent feedback: You want as much feedback as possible and as frequently as possible. Basically the more data you have/gather about yourself the better. This could also mean very subtle self reflection where you map out exactly where your limitations are. It can be done by asking experts to give you high quality feedback or it can be done by you experimenting on your own self.

- Always challenge yourself: You want people who will constantly challenge your weakspots. You need to seek for people who are much knowledgeable and or better than you at that specific task.

- Drop all the assumptions you have about the specific domain and look up all the facts about how you can become better at it:  You need to be brutally honest with yourself here - what is that you actually know vs what is that you just assuming/guessing. Do you actually know what practices will yield the best results?  Just because you look up the best people in a specific domain that does not mean you actually know what practices had the most significant weight on their improvement. Also, different people might need different practices compared to others to get to the same level.  For example maybe someone has  the assumption that when it comes to boxing the most improvement will come from hitting the bag and therefore this guy will spend 80% of his time hitting bags. But it might be the case that sparring has much more weight when it comes to boxing improvement.

- Always be aware of marginal utility:  For the purpose of this discussion we can define utility as "a variable that will help you improve your understanding at a specific task". Basically, when you want to be good at something there will be a set of practices that will be good for you, but not all practices will have the same utility over time.

 

All these are good points. 

1. Progress.

2. frequent feedback

3. doubling down on weak points

5 hours ago, LastThursday said:

something that also comes to mind is that play and experimentation is also crucial to speedy learning. For example if in Badminton you learn that a different grip is needed for backhand shots, then you would experiment with different grips on the same type of shot and feel the difference. Maybe you try and use the new grip for everything and see what happens. Children do this all the time, they learn something new and start using it all the time in different ways and combinations. In chess you might experiment with different openings or gambits. 

Making even more finer distinctions within a domain. At one point the distinction becomes so smooth that it becomes impossible to find proper words in the English language. Then you have to make up your own web of constructs and personal labels or assign feelings for such distinctions. You might simply feel that you are in the "right" grip by feeling it.

2 hours ago, zurew said:

I think the term "understanding" is way too vague and broad here and that will be a problem. 

The definition of understanding is a declarative or implicit one. The problem is to quantify and somehow understand understanding itself. 

But understanding itself is not vague. Some people understand reality or a finite aspect better than other people. It is a simple fact. I was wondering what exactly is what differentiates them. Genetic ability plays into this but there is more to that.

[toasty7718]

AI. 
 

I've been using various chat GPT prompts to deepen my learning and it's been amazing. Try asking it for that specifically and it will tailor it to you. There's a definite reason why Kahn Academy is embracing AI.

 

I'm pretty sure if you can get an open AI software app on your phone you can talk to it and it responds in a tts voice, which will be practice articulating your points.

 

Albert Einstein once said something along the lines of if you can't explain something simply, then you don't understand it deeply.

Edited November 2, 2023 by toasty7718

[Bobby_2021]

On 2/11/2023 at 6:17 AM, toasty7718 said:

AI. 
 

I've been using various chat GPT prompts to deepen my learning and it's been amazing. Try asking it for that specifically and it will tailor it to you. There's a definite reason why Kahn Academy is embracing AI.

 

I'm pretty sure if you can get an open AI software app on your phone you can talk to it and it responds in a tts voice, which will be practice articulating your points.

 

Albert Einstein once said something along the lines of if you can't explain something simply, then you don't understand it deeply.

AI can aid you in helping with understanding. But is there any state of mind you could be in where you can make use of AI, even better and faster.

Even if everyone has access to AI chatbots, not all of them are going to understand everything is it not?