#lesson#education#reflection#philosophy
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how to think fast
2025-01-05 · 5 min readan internal model of how I process information—along with practices I do in my free time!
For context, I competed in circuit policy debate in highschool at the national/state level. If you’re unfamiliar, its a competitive debate format with talking speeds around… 350wpm. This is crazy fast and trains people to think extremely fast.Because of policy, I can oftentimes think of arguments extremely fast & easily. This usually can be expanded to areas outside of debate, letting me think of pro/cons to frameworks pretty easily, how to create different projects, and thinking about general ideas. In the past I haven’t explored how my thoughts work, and this will (try?) to be my first formalization of how my brain thinks during debate + creating new concepts. This has worked for me, and might not work for you (here be dragons).mental structures are important!
In the next couple section’s I’ll describe a mental model I use to think faster—it’s pretty simple but has been extremely useful to me! No matter how simple the model your brain uses, uncovering exactly how it works + working to make it function better is important to make the model better.There are different systems that optimize recall/memory, but I would say that the modular system I’ll try to outline is good in a variety of scenarios that require coming up with new ideas on the fly. For example a memory palace, which is extremely good for recall, might not actually be as fast if you need to manipulate the data (think the difference between a fast encryption algorithm vs homomorphic encryption, for one you can manipulate the indexes themselves meaningfully).consuming data
The first step is to consume tons of new arguments. Whether its literally consuming by reading or maybe its thinking deeply about a topic, you come across new ideas. My main approach here is to break the argument down into its constituent subparts. For example, take Universal Basic Income (UBI). It has aspects of socialism, government involvement, post-industrialization, and more. Now when you read arguments for/against UBI, you can sort them into these specific building block/general classes.As you consume more information, your tree of building blocks should increase—along with the actual arguments that these building blocks relate to. For example, capitalism might be associated with overgrowth and competition problems. These building blocks often come with problems that show up extremely often.deconstructing data
To do this in real-time, you need to practice breaking down arguments. Now say you’re approached with a topic out of complete left field—”Monkeys in Narnia are instituting mandatory curfews”. Here the argument might seem absurd and pretty different at first glance from consuming data, but it can be broken down into smaller building blocks! Mandatory curfews sound a lot like government intervention, curfews might relate to the literal concept of curfews in highschool/parent psychology, etc. Then we can cross apply the pro/con arguments relating to these building blocks to the monkey situation.A good tip here is to iteratively expanding the topic until you get to areas that you're familiar with—finding a connection to your tree of ideas.NOTICE: Here the majority of thinking was not actually finding pro/con arguments to the topic. The actual time we took thinking was focused on deconstructing our new concept into small familiar blocks—each which we have answers for and against already prepped for us in our mental tree.Some ways I think getting good at deconstructing data is helpful:- In meetings/interviews where you need to answer questions fast but in an in depth fashion. If you just have a really good modular understanding of yourself, you don’t need to think hard during an interview.
- During conversation! Being a good conversationalist is hard and requires understanding concepts extremely fast… but what if you could fake it? By actually just focusing on listening to exactly what the person is saying + doing a retrieval based on those modular blocks, you’re left with a ton of interesting things to say (while being a better listener)!
- Solving problems on the fly! When people talk about different problems they’re tackling, having an expressive modular prior can help you find new paths. This is a large reason why interdisciplinary research has gained so much hype in the past decades.
so… how do i practice?
I commonly compartmentalize my tree or basically get rid of seemingly large unwieldily ideas. By modularizing your tree in your free time, this actually does a lot of precomputing for handling a new argument. By having more granular (again, not necessarily more data) building blocks, you can get a better hang of new concepts that are deep out of your comfort zone.Some practice tasks I recommend:- create an (impact) masterfile: I highly recommend actually consolidating impacts that you care about—climate change, chemical war, ai safety—and finding pro/cons to each of them. Since any argument usually has an impact, this can help you a lot. In a broader sense, outside of argumentation, this would probably look like drawing out a literal google document of things you care about and ideas associated with them—physically building out these building blocks.
In non-debate areas this could look like specifically writing down topics you're interested in, creating write-ups of all your different projects, or even making a blog ;) ! - create new arguments: A fun activity would be to look at your building blocks and… create! For example what do you get when you put together famine, economic crisis, and monkey wellfare—maybe an argument saying that monkeys should eat all the food to prevent the economy from falling. Even these small terrible arguments help you get familiar with your building blocks. By getting a deep understanding of how these pieces interact, it helps you decompose them later.
I love to do this with people in any topic area. A majority of my conversations actually tends to revolve around interesting new ideas & finding weird implications. If you use this method to introspect, this could even look like imagining conterfactual versions of yourself given different experiences. - read & analyze: The easiest way to get better at deconstructing arguments is basic practice. Reading books with a critical lens, finding the constituent building blocks in your tree, and finding problems is a good practice that can both 1) help you get better at thinking and 2) increase the amount of data in your tree!
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