This came up with Aysajan about two months ago. An exercise which I recommended for him: first, pick a technical academic paper. Read through the abstract and first few paragraphs. At the end of each sentence (or after each comma, if the authors use very long sentences), pause and write/sketch a prototypical example of what you currently think they’re talking about. The goal here is to get into the habit of keeping a “mental picture” (i.e. prototypical example) of what the authors are talking about as you read.
Early reports from Aysajan are that integration of this exercise into standard reading habits has resulted in a significant step-change improvement in understanding what’s going on in nontrivial technical papers/posts, and also seems to spur a lot more independent thoughts/understanding in response to reading. Don’t know yet how robust/reproducible this is, so if you practice the exercise a bit, please let me know how it goes.
(Fun side note: you can think of this technique as an application of very basic model theory to human rationality.)
This came up with Aysajan about two months ago. An exercise which I recommended for him: first, pick a technical academic paper. Read through the abstract and first few paragraphs. At the end of each sentence (or after each comma, if the authors use very long sentences), pause and write/sketch a prototypical example of what you currently think they’re talking about. The goal here is to get into the habit of keeping a “mental picture” (i.e. prototypical example) of what the authors are talking about as you read.
Other good sources on which to try this exercise:
Wikipedia’s list of theorems
Alignment Forum posts
Your own old writing
Early reports from Aysajan are that integration of this exercise into standard reading habits has resulted in a significant step-change improvement in understanding what’s going on in nontrivial technical papers/posts, and also seems to spur a lot more independent thoughts/understanding in response to reading. Don’t know yet how robust/reproducible this is, so if you practice the exercise a bit, please let me know how it goes.
(Fun side note: you can think of this technique as an application of very basic model theory to human rationality.)