Sometimes the way you’re thinking makes assumptions you’re not noticing about how to draw lines in the first place. And they see that, and they see that your assumptions are blocking you from understanding. But they don’t know how to explain it in your paradigm. Which means it’s easier to ask you to suspend your way of trying to understand and just try something different.
A silly example is with bike riding. Someone who never rode a bike before can study physics all they want to, and dive into neurology and see how learning works in principle and how that interacts with trying… but most of that basically doesn’t matter. You just have to get on the bike.
But I see this show up in aikido too. People want to understand how to do a certain movement, but some people insist that they understand through words and principles, and those people are the hardest to teach. I have to slow them down, ask them to stop trying so hard to think of it that way, and draw their attention to their bodies instead. Then their bodies can teach them new nuances of experience.
I really respect the power of analysis. I find it annoying when people who think vague thoughts defend their status and worldview by trying to make me dumber.
But from the inside, sometimes that’s what it’ll look like when a person who is in fact seeing a dimension you’re not even operating in is trying to point that fact out to you.
This. It took me years to understand this, but it’s true, and vital to proficiency in most areas of endeavor.
The trouble with “overthinking” is that it’s all to easy to try to oversimplify, or to frame a problem in terms that make it unnecessarily difficult. Martial arts are a good example. My experience with aikido is minimal, but at least in jiu-jitsu, knowing what a move feels like provides the data you need to actually use it, and in a form that can be applied in real time. Knowing verbal principles behind the move, on the other hand, almost invariably leaves out important pieces, and even when your verbal understanding is more or less complete, it’s too slow to actually use against all but the most cooperative opponents.
Of course, that’s with a physical discipline. Going back to the OP’s question, how can overthinking be harmful when trying to understand a purely abstract concept, or how can a concept be understood with less thought rather than more? Well, as Bound_up says, it’s impossible to understand a concept without thinking. But the kind of thinking is essential.
For example, I struggled with learning calculus for a while. The teachers would explain various tools that could be used to take a derivative or integral, but it wasn’t clear which tools to use when. I responded to this by trying to create a rigorous framework that would reliably let me know when to use which formulas. However, there simply weren’t enough consistent, reliable patterns relating a certain type of function to a given formula for differentiating it. Everyone said to “stop overthinking” calculus, but I figured there had to be rigorous algorithms governing the use of u substitution vs. integration by parts, and that the people telling me to just relax were sloppy thinkers who didn’t generally understand concepts beyond rote learning.
What ended up actually working, however, was accepting a more ad hoc approach. Creating an algorithm that could tell me what tools to use, first time, every time, was beyond my capabilities. But noticing that a function could be manipulated in a certain way, or expressed in a more tractable form, without expecting that the exact same process would work the next time, wasn’t actually very difficult at all. It was a bit frustrating to accept that calculus would consistently require creativity, but that’s what actually worked, when my overthinking turned out to be oversimplification.
I think there’s another option to look for.
Sometimes the way you’re thinking makes assumptions you’re not noticing about how to draw lines in the first place. And they see that, and they see that your assumptions are blocking you from understanding. But they don’t know how to explain it in your paradigm. Which means it’s easier to ask you to suspend your way of trying to understand and just try something different.
A silly example is with bike riding. Someone who never rode a bike before can study physics all they want to, and dive into neurology and see how learning works in principle and how that interacts with trying… but most of that basically doesn’t matter. You just have to get on the bike.
But I see this show up in aikido too. People want to understand how to do a certain movement, but some people insist that they understand through words and principles, and those people are the hardest to teach. I have to slow them down, ask them to stop trying so hard to think of it that way, and draw their attention to their bodies instead. Then their bodies can teach them new nuances of experience.
I really respect the power of analysis. I find it annoying when people who think vague thoughts defend their status and worldview by trying to make me dumber.
But from the inside, sometimes that’s what it’ll look like when a person who is in fact seeing a dimension you’re not even operating in is trying to point that fact out to you.
You both make fine points, and I didn’t think of them. Thank you
This. It took me years to understand this, but it’s true, and vital to proficiency in most areas of endeavor.
The trouble with “overthinking” is that it’s all to easy to try to oversimplify, or to frame a problem in terms that make it unnecessarily difficult. Martial arts are a good example. My experience with aikido is minimal, but at least in jiu-jitsu, knowing what a move feels like provides the data you need to actually use it, and in a form that can be applied in real time. Knowing verbal principles behind the move, on the other hand, almost invariably leaves out important pieces, and even when your verbal understanding is more or less complete, it’s too slow to actually use against all but the most cooperative opponents.
Of course, that’s with a physical discipline. Going back to the OP’s question, how can overthinking be harmful when trying to understand a purely abstract concept, or how can a concept be understood with less thought rather than more? Well, as Bound_up says, it’s impossible to understand a concept without thinking. But the kind of thinking is essential.
For example, I struggled with learning calculus for a while. The teachers would explain various tools that could be used to take a derivative or integral, but it wasn’t clear which tools to use when. I responded to this by trying to create a rigorous framework that would reliably let me know when to use which formulas. However, there simply weren’t enough consistent, reliable patterns relating a certain type of function to a given formula for differentiating it. Everyone said to “stop overthinking” calculus, but I figured there had to be rigorous algorithms governing the use of u substitution vs. integration by parts, and that the people telling me to just relax were sloppy thinkers who didn’t generally understand concepts beyond rote learning.
What ended up actually working, however, was accepting a more ad hoc approach. Creating an algorithm that could tell me what tools to use, first time, every time, was beyond my capabilities. But noticing that a function could be manipulated in a certain way, or expressed in a more tractable form, without expecting that the exact same process would work the next time, wasn’t actually very difficult at all. It was a bit frustrating to accept that calculus would consistently require creativity, but that’s what actually worked, when my overthinking turned out to be oversimplification.