Skill: Maintaining “contextual pointers” with your knowledge, both for the sake of evidential sourcing and contextual usage.
The idea here is twofold.
First, many intellectual conversations between people who lack this skill are are random walks through topic space. Each tangential leap is potentially useful for mining relevant evidence from each person’s mind… but in conversations exploring an important central thesis it is good to treat the tangents as objects pushed onto a stack in the course of linear conversation. When you go to far afield with a tangent you need the presence of mind to notice that D was inspired by C which was inspired by B, which was profoundly relevant to the pragmatically important question of A. Stepping back to C or B or even A is frequently called for in important conversations but requires contextual mindfulness.
The second use of context is evidential. Being mindful of where evidence comes from (if it can be managed) helps keep track of the value and meaning of evidence. Confabulation induced or permitted by source amnesia, isn’t necessarily a bad thing in terms of “usage optimized concepts” but in terms of epistemic hygiene its a killer. It is especially pernicious in modern media environments full of advertising, fiction, and bullshit.
I bring these two sorts of context up because they both involve “context pointers” and together the two kinds of context pointers enable clear “tree formatted thinking” where reasons radiate from a root node, and leaf nodes carry citations to allow validation.
Will this really train this skill? I think this exercise would help train skills related to the “compartmentalizing” you mentioned above, but it would only generate reliance on the whiteboard (or something) for this skill. Also, I don’t think it would train long-term maintenance of “context pointers”, i.e. “where did I learn this fact/how much weight should I give it?”
Exercise: verbalise linking concepts with emphasis/stress on key words.
This verbalisation can be either psychic (that is, using the internal dialogue) or vocal if involved in a discussion with a group. When moving from one concept to the next we find a way to express this as a sentence, and by emphasising key words in this sentence we highlight the concepts linked to by the sentence.
I use this sometimes when I want to remember a particular thought and I use the emphasised words as ‘semantic tags’ in my memory.
First, many intellectual conversations between people who lack this skill are are random walks through topic space. … Stepping back to C or B or even A is frequently called for in important conversations but requires contextual mindfulness.
My impression is that most people are too good at this. People don’t have enough random-walk conversations, feeling socially pressured to stay on-topic even when the initial topic was a random choice.
Skill: Maintaining “contextual pointers” with your knowledge, both for the sake of evidential sourcing and contextual usage.
The idea here is twofold.
First, many intellectual conversations between people who lack this skill are are random walks through topic space. Each tangential leap is potentially useful for mining relevant evidence from each person’s mind… but in conversations exploring an important central thesis it is good to treat the tangents as objects pushed onto a stack in the course of linear conversation. When you go to far afield with a tangent you need the presence of mind to notice that D was inspired by C which was inspired by B, which was profoundly relevant to the pragmatically important question of A. Stepping back to C or B or even A is frequently called for in important conversations but requires contextual mindfulness.
The second use of context is evidential. Being mindful of where evidence comes from (if it can be managed) helps keep track of the value and meaning of evidence. Confabulation induced or permitted by source amnesia, isn’t necessarily a bad thing in terms of “usage optimized concepts” but in terms of epistemic hygiene its a killer. It is especially pernicious in modern media environments full of advertising, fiction, and bullshit.
I bring these two sorts of context up because they both involve “context pointers” and together the two kinds of context pointers enable clear “tree formatted thinking” where reasons radiate from a root node, and leaf nodes carry citations to allow validation.
Exercise: keep a physical stack trace on a whiteboard or something when talking
As topics become reframed for clarity, you can resolve child topics if they become irrelevant.
Will this really train this skill? I think this exercise would help train skills related to the “compartmentalizing” you mentioned above, but it would only generate reliance on the whiteboard (or something) for this skill. Also, I don’t think it would train long-term maintenance of “context pointers”, i.e. “where did I learn this fact/how much weight should I give it?”
Exercise: verbalise linking concepts with emphasis/stress on key words.
This verbalisation can be either psychic (that is, using the internal dialogue) or vocal if involved in a discussion with a group. When moving from one concept to the next we find a way to express this as a sentence, and by emphasising key words in this sentence we highlight the concepts linked to by the sentence.
I use this sometimes when I want to remember a particular thought and I use the emphasised words as ‘semantic tags’ in my memory.
My impression is that most people are too good at this. People don’t have enough random-walk conversations, feeling socially pressured to stay on-topic even when the initial topic was a random choice.