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Comment by adverbly | Hacker News Reader

To me, it seems like a lot of these "systems" do actually work, and can lead to "good thinking". But, they all seem to suffer from the same flaw, which is that they seem to work better for the creator of the system than they do for adopters. "Good thinking" for many is still likely worse than what no system would yield.

Why is this the case? I think a good guess at the reason might be

1) The very act of creating a system is itself a meaningful practice which improves thinking

2) People document systems which they found natural to themselves, and therefore are a better fit for themselves than others.

Until I see someone "invent" a system which has broad success that goes beyond the inventor's own success, I'm not going near any of these systems with any degree of seriousness.

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3) people who adopt someone else's thought-system are effectively admitting they are bad at thinking. They will likely continue to be bad, no matter how refined the system is.

You can get Leo Messi to teach me football but my first touch will still be sub-par.

4) It's not possible to express a thinking system sufficiently clearly in writing - after all we've been thinking for far longer than we've been writing.

5) (related) The assumption that all aspects of thinking are conscious. The eureka moment, sleeping on a problem or just taking a distracting shower suggest otherwise.

> 3) people who adopt someone else's thought-system are effectively admitting they are bad at thinking. > You can get Leo Messi to teach me football but my first touch will still be sub-par.

Isn't that conflating practice with thinking? You would also never invent football on your own if you'd never heard of it. If you want to be good at football, letting Leo teach you is likely to be a lot faster and produce better results than not learning from anyone.

Everyone adopts thought systems from others, you do and I do. Failing to admit that is to be actually bad at thinking and fail to admit you're human. It's not possible to have only original thoughts, and even if it was, it wouldn't be practical.

Try to be honest with yourself and think about how many things you know for certain, that you weren't taught by someone else. How many facts do you know that you've verified yourself first hand? How do you know the sun is 93 million miles away, or that there are electrons in your CPU? I trust scientists who've studied it and thought about it, I haven't verified those things myself. How do we even understand words and speak languages? As children, we learned everything about the world from others, including how to think.

Isn't this is a feature, not a bug? We learn from each other over time, and we'd be nowhere without people having adopted and then built upon the thought systems of others.

> Isn't that conflating practice with thinking?

"Thinking" is the practice of thought.

To be honest, I thought (eh) we were talking about "thinking" as "reasoning" (and mostly in an original sense).

Obviously if you redefine the concept as "having any thought whatsoever", then anything goes. I personally don't consider "reading a fact in a book" or "associating sounds to concepts" as "thinking" in the terms of the upthread conversation, but you clearly do.

I don't think (eh) we can agree on much in this conversation given the premises.

> "Thinking" is the practice of thought.

Oh, is that what you meant when you said "my first touch will still be sub-par."?

> I personally don't consider "reading a fact in a book" or "associating sounds to concepts" as "thinking" in the terms of the upthread conversation, but you clearly do.

I don't think you can learn philosophy without learning a language. I don't think you can learn the scientific method without first learning some scientific facts.

Please elaborate, where would you draw the line between facts+language, and "reasoning"?

What is your point here?

If you are saying that you need to practice and find methods that work for you after being taught by Messi, you could apply the same concept to thinking. Sports, like most other things, consist of both a theoretical and practical aspect. Getting Messi to teach you the theoretical side of the sport should not be seen as a replacement for practicing the sport itself, and the same can be said for thinking.

> people who adopt someone else's thought-system are effectively admitting they are bad at thinking.

How else does one develop more complex thinking than studying patterns of thought?

I'm pretty sure every single person who is good at thinking has had a good think about what other people think and how they do it. They've taken on some ideas, rejected others, applied some in this area and decided this is the wrong area for another good idea. They've recalled what they've thought previously and analysed that working out what they missed and how they could have approached it differently.

I doubt anyone is silly enough to let someone else tell them "how to think." Without thinking a lot further about that.

Whether it's FOX, MSNBC, CNN or the Russians there seems to be a rather common belief that everyone is quite happy being told what to think and can think no further about it. Maybe it's true. (Except the russians, that's such obvius garbage it's embarrassing). n

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