This reminded me very much of a Fallible Ideas Podcast episode I listened to just yesterday entitled How To Learn Philosophy. I decided to write about it to help me remember the lesson (I’m not sure if I should’ve posted this here tho).
Here’s a relevant quote from 8:30 of the podcast btw (quote copied from the YouTube transcript. I added a bit that the auto transcriber missed in square brackets):
if you read a book um your expectation should be that you understood say 10 [percent] of it if you felt like you understood it if you felt really confused and stuff then maybe you understood one percent but if it went pretty well um ten percent you missed most of it you didn’t get most of it there’s just reading it through is not enough
In my own mind I filed that as The 10% Rule to help me remember it.
Here’s some other quotes from that same podcast episode (also copied from the YouTube transcript):
From 43:29:
if you’ve read the book you don’t understand it very well
Or, like he said in the previous quote: “your expectation should be that you understood say 10 [percent] of it”
From 44:07:
you have to be very careful of books um and of being really careful about how much you’re actually understanding and how much you think you’re understanding and trying not to get a false impression that because that false impression is one of the things that discourages people from asking for help for asking questions for okay here’s what i think it said and this is my understanding is there anything wrong with this at all
Some extra thoughts:
While listening to the podcast I initially found this bit surprising (copied from the YouTube transcript):
basically to learn it all by yourself and correct all your own mistakes you would have to be pretty much as good of a thinker as the author that you’re reading […] if you want to understand karl popper’s philosophy and you have no help from other people you’re just reading the books by yourself you have to be pretty much as good as karl popper […] yes the books give you some help you know they’re they’re an advantage a leg up but they’re not that much of an advantage
Like I would’ve thought reading Popper’s books gives you quite a bit more than “not that much of an advantage”.
But then I thought of it in terms of Rand (who I’m more familiar with): virtually no one who has read Rand is as good as Rand herself.
Or, another way to think of it could even be in terms of like an interview. Virtually no one who has read Rand would be able to give answers in an interview that are anywhere near as good as what Rand would have given (e.g., in her Mike Wallace interview or Columbia University radio station interviews). Why? Cuz despite reading Rand and listening to her etc they’re still nowhere near as good as her and still don’t understand the material anywhere near as well as her.
And ofc they don’t live lives or do work that’s as great as hers.
Or using Elliot’s content as the example. Even though I’ve read a fair bit of his stuff I obviously wouldn’t be able to come anywhere near close to writing stuff (or recording podcasts like this one) that are even a tiny bit as good as his.
So yeah, now I think of it, I’m def more convinced that Elliot was right about “just reading the books by yourself” being “not that much of an advantage”.
Some of my takeaways from the podcast episode:
-
just reading books is nowhere near enough
-
people massively underestimate how many mistakes they’re making
-
learning something really well requires huge amounts of discussion & feedback
-
having huge amounts of discussion works better if you can write informally, quickly, easily (just like you’d discuss at an IRL study group—which reminds me of Elliot’s Write How You Speak advice)
-
do this discussion in public and as you go along (rather than after you’ve already finished reading the whole book)
Also, maybe it’s a bit of a tenuous connection, but in another Fallible Ideas Podcast episode that I listened to yesterday entitled Motivation and Laziness he talked about how (quoting the YouTube transcript again) “if you can’t do something when you’re tired that means you’re not very good at it your skill level is a bit too low” (from 4:04). Also:
From 6:29:
but even if they could just barely do it that’s not good enough you need to get to the point where you can more than do it so that there’s a spare capacity to deal with errors and random variants and setbacks and so on
From 7:20:
so people uh they think they can do things like before they actually are able to
I feel like that’s a kind of a similar point to The 10% Rule in that in both cases I feel like the point is that learning something really well takes way way way more work than most people realize.
Like when most people think they’re done learning a book or a skill, they’re probably only 10% done learning.
Or, to go back to what ActiveMind originally said:
. Like if I feel tempted to do some brainrot doomscroll type stuff I’ll ask myself if there’s some super duper easy philosophy stuff I can do instead.)