![]() ![]() You have to be able to motivate yourself to spend large quantities of energy on a problem, which means on some level that not understanding something - or having a bug in your thinking - bothers you a lot. “In these four words,” Shockley wrote later, “ distilled the essence of a very significant insight: A competent thinker will be reluctant to commit himself to the effort that tedious and precise thinking demands - he will lack ‘the will to think’ - unless he has the conviction that something worthwhile will be done with the results of his efforts.” The discipline of competent thinking is important throughout life. This was a phrase he learned from the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi and never forgot. the essential element for successful work in any field was “the will to think”. Motivation is at least as important as method for the serious thinker, Shockley believed. The Nobel Prize winner William Shockley was fond of talking about “the will to think”: ![]() This requires a lot of intrinsic motivation, because it’s so hard so most people simply don’t do it. So even figuring out whether you understand something or not requires you to attack the thing from multiple angles and test your own understanding. It’s also so easy to think that you understand something, when you actually don’t. One component of it is energy: thinking hard takes effort, and it’s much easier to just stop at an answer that seems to make sense, than to pursue everything that you don’t quite get down an endless, and rapidly proliferating, series of rabbit holes. This quality of “not stopping at an unsatisfactory answer” deserves some examination. What this means is that you can internalize good intellectual habits that, in effect, “increase your intelligence”. The software traits, though, they all have in common - and can, with effort, be learned. Moreover, I have noticed that these ‘hardware’ traits vary greatly in the smartest people I know - some are remarkably quick thinkers, calculators, readers, whereas others are ‘slow’. Importantly, this is a ‘software’ trait & is independent of more ‘hardware’ traits such as processing speed, working memory, and other such things. Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand - no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince them selves of it, they won’t accept it. I concluded that what we call 'intelligence' is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about 'raw intellect’. In this way, he got a much deeper understanding of things than I did. I had the opposite tendency: as soon as I’d reached the end of the proof, I’d stop since I’d “gotten the answer”.Īfterwards, he’d come out with three or four proofs of the same thing, plus some explanation of why each proof is connected somehow. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. '//var node = document.getElementsByTagName('script') Gads.src = (useSSL ? 'https:' : 'http:') + Var gads = document.createElement('script') 17 People Share the Popular Things That They Just Can’t Understand ![]()
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