# Learning and the Subconscious | How to Become a Great Intellectual **URL:** https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/learning-and-the-subconscious-how-to-become-a-great-intellectual/1744 **Category:** Elliot Temple **Tags:** bot, cf-video **Created:** [March 20, 2023, 11:31am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/learning-and-the-subconscious-how-to-become-a-great-intellectual/1744 "2023-03-20T11:31:45Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 3
### Author: ![MetaCreation](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/user_avatar/discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/metacreation/32/2670_2.png) [@MetaCreation](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/MetaCreation) #### Post date: [March 28, 2023, 10:05am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/learning-and-the-subconscious-how-to-become-a-great-intellectual/1744/3 "2023-03-28T10:05:45Z")
Current main skills related to CF that I’m consciously working on: - [Grammar](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/mc-studies-grammar/1742/22) - [Studying Karl Popper](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/thoughts-about-conjectures-refutations/1713/15) (or more generally, studying articles, and this would overlap with e.g. studying CF articles) - [Creating answers to some big life goal questions](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/project-part-0-considering-major-life-choices/1722/25) (more generally, writing articles) The grammar is something that I’m sure would be advantageous to automate. I’ve tried doing it while practising the other skills and I think it just makes me worse at both. In other words (referencing 18:40 in the video) I’m overloading my conscious thought bottleneck. The other two I don’t think can be meaningfully automated. I guess e.g. if I knew Popper well enough to read his books and analyse them that would be a kind of automation. But I don’t think it’s a priority to know all of Popper’s writing in lots of detail, I’m interested in beneficial ideas that I can use without knowing all of the details too. I think I can do _well enough for now_ at studying and writing articles for the amount I’m doing it. I want to improve at it but don’t think it’s the right skill to develop consciously at the moment. I probably make quite a few mistakes in both. I think once I have a good automatised understanding of grammar I’ll find it easier to work on studying and writing skills (such as paragraph trees, reading comprehension, research skills). I think studying and writing articles at the moment can also help me identify specific areas I need to improve on, so it’s useful to do even knowing that I’m probably making mistakes. Learning grammar is about _changing automatisation_ for me (referencing 21.40 in video.) I already used a lot of grammar subsconsciously. I don’t have a good sense of how accurate my subconscious grammar is. I think I get enough right most of the time for people to mostly understand me, but I don’t have a way of measuring that. Even if I was super good subconsciously (which I don’t think I am), I still think it’s useful to understand the grammar language so I can talk about it. The biggest change I think in learning grammar for me now is that I can go back and read over my sentences and more often than not describe which word is serving which purpose - though in more complex cases this is still a conscious effort for me. It has also made me more mindful of trying to write complete sentences; that’s something I’m currently consciously doing as I write and I’m rewriting sentences a lot. It would be better if I didn’t need to rewrite so much. Maybe a sub-skill to develop for improving my use of grammar is having more complete thoughts before I start typing. I sometimes start typing and fairly often change my mind or add the rest of a thought mid sentence and that leads to lots of rewriting and possibly introduces more errors. I guess that would be an example of making more automatisations conscious. Noting I’ve stopped watching at 25.03 for now (Mental Skills) so I can come back to this another time. --- _[View the full topic](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/learning-and-the-subconscious-how-to-become-a-great-intellectual/1744)._