What Plato didn’t mention is that this chained existence in a dark cave is one of their own making. It’s pretty easy to unchain yourself, but most people don’t want to.

They have one view of the world, and stubbornly keep to it. The brain is great at discarding facts that don’t fit into this narrow window. Ignorance is bliss. And ego is ever powerful.

Plato’s teacher, Socrates, saw right through this. Rather, his prescription to a good life was to acknowledge your own ignorance.

“I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” — Socrates

Charles Darwin, the unassuming hero

When you think of the scientific geniuses of history, which names come to mind? Galileo Galilei? Isaac Newton? Albert Einstein? I am pretty sure if you were forced to make a list, one name would surely appear on it. Charles Darwin.

Yet, what most historians agree on is how average Charles Darwin really was. He wasn’t particularly good at school. Nor did he stand out among his peers. Even Darwin himself acknowledged this in his writings.

“I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men.” — Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin, while smart, was no genius. His strengths lay elsewhere.

A hint of this can be found in Janet Browne’s description of him in her biography of the man:

“Darwin was the most unspectacular person of all time, a man known to his contemporaries as a quiet, methodical worker, devoted to his family, hard to prise out of his house in the country, averse to ostentation, utterly conventional in his behavior, modest and unassuming about his results.” — Janet Browne

Methodical worker. Modest. Unassuming. These words show us where Darwin’s strengths lay. It was not his powerful brain. Rather, it was the traits of his character that were behind his success.

Why your brain is preventing you from changing your mind

Science advances one funeral at a time. This short paraphrase of German scientist Max Planck’s observation on the nature of scientific progress hints at a larger human condition.

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.“ — Max Planck

People are stubborn. Scientists are people. Hence logic dictates they are often stubborn.

It’s the human brain’s wiring that is at fault here. It’s ego-driven and falls for cognitive biases. The most prominent of these is confirmation bias.

You have a particular view of the world. And you search to confirm those views. That means acknowledging the facts that are in line with your beliefs. And discarding everything else.

So if you come across something that challenges these cherished beliefs, you tend to discard it. Sometimes even rage against it. This can result in the so-called backfire effect, where not only do you not change your opinion when a fact negates it, you actually start believing in your BS even more.

Imagine that! A fact comes in that disproves your assumptions. And despite this proof being solid, you go on pretending it doesn’t exist. Your mind does a magic trick. It erases these inconvenient facts from existence.

This type of mental mechanism not only prevents you from changing your mind, it also hampers you in finding a better solution to problems.

Humans are often one trick ponies. You find one decent way of solving problems, and stick to it. You repeat it, and repeat it. This prevents you from seeing other ways of solving the same problem. Often, better ways of solving that problem.

In psychology, this is called the Einstellung effect. If all you have ever been using are hammers and nails, then you will treat everything as if it were a hammer and nail problem.

That’s just how the brain works. It’s hard to change your mind. For scientists, just like for normal people.

Charles Darwin was one of those rare characters who was able to tame these negative propensities of the brain. He had a nice little trick to battle confirmation bias.

Darwin’s Golden Rule

Charles Darwin revolutionized our thinking about the world. By uncovering some of the deep inner workings of the natural world, he opened up new avenues of research. And not just that.

The theory of evolution has been one of the most groundbreaking scientific achievements. It changed science. But also society. He turned the way humans view themselves upside down.

It went totally against the grain of the ideas prevalent among people for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Charles Darwin was able to go against the grain, exactly because of his mental humbleness. His open-mindedness.

It was his Golden Rule that was behind his success. It was a simple rule. Whenever he came across something that opposed his preconceived notions, he wouldn’t discard it.

Rather, he took care to note it down.

“I had also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely that whenever published fact, a new observation of thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones.” — Charles Darwin

He didn’t run away from contradictory evidence. He welcomed it. He knew these facts contradicting your worldview escape memory much faster than those that support it. That’s why he noted them down.

In this way, he was the total opposite of many of the scientists of his day. Even the professors that taught him in his university days.

In her first volume of Darwin’s biography, historian of science Janet Browne noted how Scottish naturalist and University of Edinburgh professor Robert Jameson went out of his way to hide evidence that contradicted his own theories:

“Jameson had his foibles, including, most notoriously, his efforts to prevent students seeing any geological specimens that might contradict his own well-developed views.” — Janet Browne

While this type of behavior is natural, it doesn’t really bode well for science. In fact, it is often strange out of place results that push science the farthest.

A quote often attributed to the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov points to the essence of how discovery in science works. Every great scientific breakthrough starts off when someone notices things that are strange or shouldn’t be there.

“The Most Exciting Phrase in Science Is Not ‘Eureka!’ But ‘That’s odd …’”

Darwin took this mindset to heart.

How to apply Darwin’s Golden Rule

Intellectual humility is at the basis of discovery. It can also help ensure that your theories stand the test of time. As writer Adam Gopnik stated in his book Angels and Ages, this was the strength of Darwin’s thought.

He was the first person to outline the chief objections to his own theory.

“All of what remain today as the chief objections to his theory are introduced by Darwin himself, fairly and accurately, and in a spirit of almost panicked anxiety — and then rejected not by bullying insistence but by specific example, drawn from the reservoir of his minute experience of life.” — Adam Gopnik

So how do you apply this type of mindset in your own daily life? It all starts with adopting a certain way of thinking. Acknowledge your limitations. Accept that you will be wrong on occasions. To err is human.

When you come across facts that contradict your own views, don’t discard them right away. Examine them. Note them down.

Keep a notebook for this sort of activity. Charles Darwin kept lots of notebooks. They are quite useful. Browsing them later on can remind you of things you might have forgotten.

This is a great habit to have.

Darwin’s ideas changed the scientific world. Perhaps his Golden Rule can change your thinking. Unchain yourself from the cave.

An earlier version of this article was originally published on “Medium” here.
Credit: 1;

In Plato’s view, this was a despicable job. According to him, all they taught was tricks and deception. Yet despite his objections, people still sought after sophists.

After all, it doesn’t matter if you know what the truth is, if you can’t convince others of it.

It doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong, as long as you win
Arguments are not won by logic. At least when it comes to the audience. Rather, persuasiveness has to do with something else. Emotion.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer noticed this in his never-finished treatise The Art of Being Right (originally titled The Art of Controversy). It often doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong. What matters is winning.

“Controversial dialectic is the art of disputing, and of disputing in such a way as to hold one’s own, whether one is in the right or the wrong.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

It is often not what you say in your argument, but how you say it that matters. In ancient times, orators such as Demosthenes or Cicero would spend countless hours practicing their discourses, working on their mannerisms, and applying techniques known to sway the crowds.

Even if you are correct, and your argument is sane and logical, that doesn’t matter. An adversary may appear to be better, even if what they say is bullshit.

“A man may be objectively in the right, and nevertheless in the eyes of bystanders, and sometimes in his own, he may come off worst. For example, I may advance a proof of some assertion, and my adversary may refute the proof, and thus appear to have refuted the assertion, for which there may, nevertheless, be other proofs. In this case, of course, my adversary and I change places: he comes off best, although, as a matter of fact, he is in the wrong.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

Why does this happen? Schopenhauer has a simple answer. Humans are stupid. Or rather, humans are base.

“If the reader asks how this is, I reply that it is simply the natural baseness of human nature. If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honorable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

The problem is no one cares about the truth. Everyone just cares about winning. According to Schopenhauer, it is vanity that is the strongest factor here. And vanity is often accompanied by outright internal dishonesty.

That’s what you are dealing with when arguing. On your side, but also on the side of the opponent.

How to win an argument in an environment full of bullshit?

We know bullshit is strong. Bullshit overpowers. So how do you win an argument in such an environment?

Schopenhauer says there are two basic ways of refuting an opponent’s original thesis.

“We may show either that the proposition is not in accordance with the nature of things, i.e., with absolute, objective truth; or that it is inconsistent with other statements or admissions of our opponent, i.e., with truth as it appears to him. The latter mode of arguing a question produces only a relative conviction, and makes no difference whatever to the objective truth of the matter.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

That is, either try to prove their assertion is inconsistent with objective truth. Or, demonstrate it is inconsistent with other assertions they had made previously.

It’s especially the second that’s powerful. Trying to prove an absolute truth based on facts or logic won’t work very often, since even if you provide facts, most people will reject them if these don’t fit with their preconceived notions. The backfire effect is a powerful cognitive bias.

Rather, Schopenhauer proposes a sneaky strategy to get the best of your opponent:

“We accept our opponent’s proposition as true, and then show what follows from it when we bring it into connection with some other proposition acknowledged to be true. We use the two propositions as the premises of a syllogism giving a conclusion which is manifestly false, as contradicting either the nature of things, or other statements of our opponent himself; that is to say, the conclusion is false.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

Trick your opponent into saying something which contradicts what they said before. Quite simple, and ingenious.

What winning an audience is all about

You have to play to the audience. Know what they are thinking, how they are feeling, and delivering on that. If you can hit their preconceived biases, then you have won.

You can often see this playing out on YouTube, which is full of “burn” and “destroy” videos. X destroys Y. R burns G. However, when you actually listen to these supposed destruction videos, no such thing happens.

The logic isn’t better. It’s just the poster of the video playing to their own biases. It’s a dynamic that plays out again and again, in the real world, and the virtual. You can find it not only on YouTube, but also here on Medium among partisans of whatever stripe or color.

This treatise by Schopenhauer not only gives you the tools to strengthen your own argumentation, it also exposes the tricks others use. The aim here is not to come to the right answer, but rather to win.

Some other tricks of the trade

If you look at the most successful populists and demagogues, you might notice they have mastered a few techniques. These appear again and again in their discourses.

Schopenhauer outlined a few of them in his little treatise. While he does not tell it explicitly, you can see that some of these tricks have to do with the fact humans are storytelling animals. They are suckers for a good story.

That’s why you always have to choose the right metaphor.

“If the conversation turns upon some general conception which has no particular name, but requires some figurative or metaphorical designation, you must begin by choosing a metaphor that is favorable to your proposition.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

Which words you use matters. As Schopenhauer goes on to say:

“The name Protestants is chosen by themselves, and also the name Evangelicals; but the Catholics call them heretics. Similarly, in regard to the names of things which admit of a more exact and definite meaning: for example, if your opponent proposes an alteration, you can call it an innovation, as this is an invidious word. If you yourself make the proposal, it will be the converse. In the first case, you can call the antagonistic principle “the existing order,” in the second, “antiquated prejudice”.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

Another trick, one which former U.S. President Donald J. Trump is a master of, is using seemingly absurd propositions. It’s saying something so ridiculous that in normal circumstances everyone’s eyes would roll, but doing it in a rude and matter-of-fact manner.

“For this an extreme degree of impudence is required; but experience shows cases of it, and there are people who practice it by instinct.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

There is a simple way to derail your opponents argumentation. Make everything personal.

“For example, should he defend suicide, you may at once exclaim, “Why don’t you hang yourself?” Should he maintain that Berlin is an unpleasant place to live in, you may say, “Why don’t you leave by the first train?” Some such claptrap is always possible.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

You can even step it up a notch, and insult.

“A last trick is to become personal, insulting, rude, as soon as you perceive that your opponent has the upper hand, and that you are going to come off worst. It consists in passing from the subject of dispute, as from a lost game, to the disputant himself, and in some way attacking his person.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

It’s a great way to make them angry. You always want to make your opponent angry.

“Should your opponent surprise you by becoming particularly angry at an argument, you must urge it with all the more zeal; not only because it is a good thing to make him angry, but because it may be presumed that you have here put your finger on the weak side of his case, and that just here he is more open to attack than even for the moment you perceive.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

And of course always, interrupt, dispute, and divert. That’s the way to go.

“If you observe that your opponent has taken up a line of argument which will end in your defeat, you must not allow him to carry it to its conclusion, but interrupt the course of the dispute in time, or break it off altogether, or lead him away from the subject, and bring him to others.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

At the end, always declare victory, no matter what happened

Everyone likes a winner right? And who else to declare a winner than you? Just like Napoleon crowned himself emperor with his own hands, you should never leave someone else to do that for you.

And even if you lose, so what? Claim victory despite defeat.

“When your opponent has answered several of your questions without the answers turning out favorable to the conclusion at which you are aiming, advance the desired conclusion, — although it does not in the least follow, — as though it had been proved, and proclaim it in a tone of triumph. If your opponent is shy or stupid, and you yourself possess a great deal of impudence and a good voice, the trick may easily succeed.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

Being a winner is a mindset after all.

An earlier version of this article was originally published on “Medium” here.
Credit: 1;

I have realized life is complicated. When I was little, I thought I would have things figured out by now. Unfortunately, I am still quite clueless. Sometimes I think I am close to discovering how things work, but then one little event makes this ivory tower of impressions come crashing down.

At times, I have felt powerless. Humans want to feel in control. When this sense of power over things slips away, much distress can occur in the mind. My life has been severely marked by a depression which stems from this. Some people might label it as just “sadness” because of the fact I don’t need meds to dampen it. Nevertheless, it has had quite an impact on my life.

What helped is when I started to try make sense of things. As psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl noticed, people need meaning in order to overcome all the challenges life throws at them. Reading, exploring, and later writing have helped me cope. Turning to philosophy, psychology, and science have aided me in my quest to find answers, and guide me on my path.

In a way, I started to view my life as a hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell, who spent his life studying ancient mythologies, discovered that the stories contained within followed a certain structure. An ordinary person is living in an ordinary world, when suddenly something awakens them from their slumber.

Often, these stories contain a mentor. He guides the hero on their path, instructing them, and giving them wisdom. Unfortunately, just like most people, I have never chanced upon this mentor. What I have done is construct one of my own.

Reading about different philosophies, history, and all kinds of other subjects, I noticed that there are a lot of lessons you can take. I started to pay closer attention, trying to find things which I can apply to my own circumstances.

There are two types of people in this world. Ones who like to follow scripts, and ones who like to pick and choose, cooks and chefs if you will. The cooks of this world prefer to take a cookbook, and follow the recipe step by step. These are the ones who select a particular philosophy and follow it to the letter.

On the other hand, the chefs like to sample different ingredients and then mix and match them to create their own dish. I am not a Stoic, nor an Epicurean. I am not a Buddhist, nor a Taoist. Instead, what I have done is try to choose things that suit me from each of these philosophies, and apply them to my life. I am a chef. In following this approach, I have put together 11 simple rules that I guide my own life by.

11 Rules I guide my life by

Here are the 11 simple rules that have helped me navigate through life. While I am a chef and like to pick and choose, even those cooks that like to follow recipes to the letter can benefit from them. These are some of the most poignant lessons I took from reading philosophy, psychology, and other subjects. Most of them are common to different philosophies from across times and places.

—

Rule 1: Realize what is up to you, and what isn’t

—

Rule 2: Life has its strange twists and turns, and sometimes you just need to go with the flow

—

Rule 3: Your ego can lead you astray

—

Rule 4: You win or you learn

—

Rule 5: Know yourself

—

Rule 6: Learn about the world

—

Rule 7: Keep an open mind

—

Rule 8: Always be striving to improve yourself

—

Rule 9: You won’t discover how things work by sitting on your ass, go out and explore

—

Rule 10: Compassion

—

Rule 11: Don’t waste time talking about being a good person, just be one

—

How to apply

It all starts with the realization that there are some things in this world you can control, and a lot of stuff you have no power over. This is the crux of Stoic philosophy as defined by the ancient sage Epictetus. While these words might sound simple and common sense, very few people actually apply them in their lives.

Separating things that you can control from those you can’t, is the key to getting back the agency you feel you have lost. Often people despair over things they can’t control. It gives them much grief. Yet, it’s pointless. You can’t control what happens, you can only control how you respond.

Let’s take the example of the current Covid-19 pandemic. It’s here. It’s dangerous. You can’t do anything about it. Instead of freaking out, try to figure out what you can do in this situation. Protecting yourself and your loved ones is common sense, but there are also other things.

This is where going with the flow comes in. Usually it’s much easier to go with the current than against it, as the old Taoist metaphor likes to say. Stuck at home? Go with the flow. Try to find things you can do in this situation. Read, exercise, find a side hustle. If your family circumstances prevent you from doing that, use it as a way to bond with your loved ones.

The third rule on your ego is the key to many of the other rules. Your ego is often the source of many of your problems. The different strains of Buddhism try to get rid of this overfocus on yourself. When I was younger, my need to always be right prevented me from learning. It was when I read the book “The Art of Learning” by Joshua Waitzkin that I discovered what I had been doing wrong. Being introduced to the concept of a “beginner’s mind” changed my mindset completely.

Tied to this is the concept of accepting failure and learning from it. You win or you learn. I have failed countless times in my life. That’s not important. What is important are the lessons I have taken away from what happened. In time, these lessons have helped me overcome challenges that came after.

Failures are also a great way to learn about yourself. The ancient adage “know thyself” was pasted atop the Oracle at Delphi. Socrates used it to guide his own life. For me, it has proven crucial. If I want to achieve something, I need to learn about myself first. There are some strengths that I have, and some weaknesses. Analyzing this has given me a view on what I am good at, and what I still need to improve.

Self-improvement, this often maligned word is at the crux of my inner self. While recently most people have started focusing on accepting themselves or “loving” themselves, I have kept the spotlight on changing myself. For me, I never understood this acceptance trend. Since for a lot of people this means staying in place, often an unhealthy one. While for a time these affirmations can help, after a while cognitive dissonance will set in and things will come crashing down.

Instead, I strive to change things about myself I don’t like. My goal is to create a new me. Here my guide is David Goggins. David was a man who was close to being down and out, yet one day he invented who he wanted to be. I was quite inspired by that mindset. While I do realize that I might never become that person 100%, it’s more about the journey than the destination. Working hard to try to achieve something great is what life is all about. This is what gives me the greatest meaning.

Yet, of course you also need to take a step back from time to time. Remember principle 3. While working on improving yourself, don’t let ego get in your way. Your ego can not only stop you from following the best route, but it can also make you self-absorbed. This is where compassion comes in.

Marcus Aurelius spent hours reminding himself that he is just an insignificant cog in a huge machine of the universe. This is the first step in what Hierocles the Stoic called enlarging your circle of concern. Most people care about themselves first and foremost, then come wider circles, which include their families, friends, countries. For Hierocles, what is important is enlarging this one circle you have around yourself, and having it encompass all the other circles.

Feeling compassionate towards others is the key to building a better world. You can’t pick in-groups and out-groups. It’s about enlarging your circle to encompass all groups. For the Dalai Lama, compassion is also a fundamental prerequisite for feeling well. You help others, but also yourself by doing that.

This is probably the most important rule to take away. Be a good person, one who doesn’t just care about “you”, but one who gives a f**k about others too. However, it’s not the words that count. Actions are where it’s at. Inspired by the words of ancient Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, I try to spend very little time talking about being a good person. Instead, I strive to be one by doing good things.

An earlier version of this article was originally published on “Medium” here.
Credit: 1;

Laszlo Polgar is an unassuming man. In his old age, his white beard and round face make him look like a green-eyed Fidel Castro, but otherwise if you crossed him on the street, you would probably not take a second look.

What distinguishes Laszlo from other people is his methodological drive. As a young man, he had read the biographies of 400 extra-ordinary people in order to find out what made them special.

His conclusion was that the secret ingredient was starting very young and studying hard.

“When I looked at the life stories of geniuses, I found the same thing. They all started at a very young age and studied intensively.”
— Laszlo Polgar

He had identified a common theme among all these stories of supposedly “gifted” people, an early specialization and intensive training in one particular subject.

He became a big proponent of nurture over nature as the way to create a genius.

“A genius is not born, but is educated and trained. When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius.”
— Laszlo Polgar

Being the methodological man that he is, Polgar decided to put his theory to the test.

After he married his wife Klara, and his first daughter was born, Laszlo started his experiment.

His daughter Susan was going to become a chess champion. Her parents made up a plan and dedicated their life towards this goal.

Susan’s life, and later also the lives of her two sisters, Sofia and Judit, were spent studying, practicing, and playing chess. Their entire day was organized around this one activity.

It turns out, Laszlo was right. All three of his daughters became chess champions, with Judit and Susan being the top two ranked female chess players in the world for many years running.

It is all about the 10 thousand hour rule

 
In the book “Outliers”, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the work of psychologist Anders Ericsson on the nature of expertise.

In his research, Ericsson found that there was a pattern among the various world-class people in different disciplines.

They had all engaged in long hours of deliberate practice, meaning very focused practice beyond one’s comfort zone.

On average, the amount of deliberate practice needed to get to the top of a discipline was 10 thousand hours, hence the 10 thousand hour rule.

This required hard work, and a very structured program intended to make progress.

“So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.”
— Anders Ericsson

In order for this to get results, the quality of the practice counts as much if not more as the quantity of the practice. This means a good plan, and dedication are required if you want to be world-class in your discipline.

What if you are too late to apply the 10 thousand hour rule?

 
The problem is that the results of the social experiment of Laszlo Polgar, or the findings of Anders Ericsson, are a bit too late for most people reading this article.

Unless you have been specializing in your discipline for a long time now, you have probably already missed your window for deliberate practice as the road to the top.

What should you do now?

Here, we can apply some of the insights that the great primatologist Jane Goodall found a few years into her study of chimpanzees in Africa.

When Goodall arrived in Gombe to study the local chimpanzee community, the alpha, or leader of the troop was Goliath.

He was a huge ape, who had probably spent his entire life working on his strength, and ruled his community because of this specialization.

At the edge of the community lived another chimp who was named Mike by the researchers. He was lowly in status, smaller than most of the other males, and looked quite scared at times.

However, at one point he found several empty canisters left over by humans. By playing with them, he discovered that they made noise and could be used to frighten other chimps.

He used this to his advantage, and within 4 months, he had displaced Goliath at the top of the hierarchy.

What made Mike have the ability to overcome his initial bad position?

The reason, according to Martin Jones in his book “Feast”, was a combination of skills and traits that he had.

“He seems to have risen through the ranks from a quite lowly position by a combination of guts, intelligence, and threatening use of the empty kerosene cans he found.”

While Goliath was actually decent at making tools, and despite the name no dumb brute, Mike’s ability to bring together several things won out the day.

Mike’s competence at combining different skills was able to overcome his rival’s initial advantage in size and strength.

While other chimps from time to time played with the cans, it was Mike who figured out how to use them just a bit more effectively.

This got him to the top.

However, even after the researchers took away his canisters, Mike was able to maintain his leadership position.

Subsequent research across different chimpanzee communities found that while large males specializing in strength rose to the top position much more easily, the individuals who could combine different skills stayed at the alpha position for a longer time.

What separated Mike from the rest was his ability to stack his different skills.

He didn’t have to apply the 10 000 hour rule, but instead used a different strategy. Because of a combination of skills, he was able to overcome his initial disadvantage.

Apply skills stacking

 
While humans in modern times live in a much more complex society, where the hierarchy is not always so clear cut, and where we are members of several different groups at the same time, similar dynamics apply as in the jungle.

Just like chimps who have the ability to combine different skills in order to overcome their initial disadvantage in size can become leaders, humans too can rise up in status through their ability to mix and match expertise from different domains.

The advantage of this type of approach is that you don’t have to be a world-class expert in any of the domains, but just being better than average in several of them can be a huge asset.

Scott Adams, the man behind the “Dilbert” cartoon explained how he applied this to get to where he is now:

“Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort.”
— Scott Adams

He stated how he could draw better than most people, but would hardly qualify as an artist. He would never make it as a stand-up comedian, but he is funnier than most people.

For him, it was the combination of these different skills that made him so rare.

“The magic is that few people can draw well, and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.“
— Scott Adams

Just by being in the top 25% in these various disciplines, Adams was able to create a unique niche for himself, and become a world champion in that niche.

The great thing about this is that with this type of approach you can rise to the top quite easily, because you are the one creating your niche, which automatically makes you the champion of that niche!

Skills stacking has allowed me to quadruple my salary

 
Skills stacking has been my strategy to the top. I am not the best in the world in anything, but I am in the top few percentiles in a lot of things.

This has often served to my advantage.

Straight out of university, I was stuck at a lowly job, but I decided to work on developing skills in some areas that I was weak at.

While I had studied humanities and economics at university, I started programming and developed a deeper knowledge of IT.

While, I am not the world’s greatest economist, or the most efficient project manager, and my programming skills are quite mediocre, the ability to combine these skills, as well as some others (semantics and data models anyone?), has allowed me to form my own niche.

In that niche, I am world-class.

This has helped me to basically create my own position and at one point to get a job which instantaneously quadrupled my salary.

The expert generalist is your path to the top

 
While yes being a world-class specialist can get you a lot of recognition, it also requires a lot of hard work and lots of time.

For most people, this route is already out of bounds.

However, by stacking your skills and becoming a Renaissance Man, you can have an advantage over your peers.

The way to get there is to determine what skills you already have that are above average, and figure out which skills you still need to complete the package.

Once you have picked the skills that you want to work on, you should come up with a plan of self-improvement. The great thing is that it doesn’t take that much effort to become above average in any one discipline.

Sure, you will never become world-class in any specialization, but by stacking the different skills that you have, you can create your own discipline.

There, you will be world-class… automatically!
 

 
Read More:
Return of the Renaissance Man: The future belongs to expert generalists.

This story was originally published on “Medium” here.

Credit: 1

One device defines the current decade more than anything else. It is rectangular, shiny and fits smugly into your pocket. It not only allows you to communicate with other people, but also to access information about anything that you can think of. You might have guessed it: I am talking about the smartphone. This little gadget has become an integral part of your life, an indispensable tool which people never leave the house without. Yet, the iPhone is just barely over 10 years old. In that short spate of time, the smartphone has not only changed society, but even managed to change fundamental human behavior itself.

Astonishingly, little more than a decade ago, people lived just fine without it. If you watch old TV shows like “Friends” or “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”, you get the eerie feeling of gazing at something from another world. The people are similar, the cities are similar, yet the interactions are weirdly different, missing the ever-present sight of someone starring at their tiny screen, not paying attention to what is happening around them. Today, it seems as if you are not complete if you don’t have your smartphone on you.

The introduction of the smartphone has transformed society in a huge way, not only by changing the way you keep in touch with other people, but also by giving you access to vast libraries of knowledge available at anytime, anywhere. This is just the latest step in the Internet Revolution that started in the 1980’s, and which has served as a catalyst for profound changes in almost every aspect of people’s lives. In the past thirty years, our society has undergone a huge shift in the way people work in the world. The result of this is that more information has been produced in the last two years than in all of history before that, and all that information is available right under your fingertips.

Yet, not all of this change is positive. While tremendous amounts of information have been created, much of it is junk, polluting the ether, and contributing to the noise around you. People are always connected, but in many ways actually disconnected to real interactions with people around them. You now have the possibility of discovering knowledge from the smartest scientists from around the world, and learning about any subject you can think of, yet most people spend the time posting selfies and random statuses.

And the pace of the transformation is just accelerating with newer and newer trends always appearing over the horizon. The problem is that nobody knows what the future will actually look like. We can make predictions, but most of those will probably turn out wrong. Just look at the ways that people in the past envisaged what the present day would be like. The movie “Back to the Future II” imagined that in 2015 we would have flying cars, but that faxes would also still be around! It is 2019, still no flying cars, and faxes have gone the way of the dodo bird.

Throughout the past 150 years, when the technological revolution was taking off and transforming society, people were constantly imagining what the future would bring. Some of these predictions ranged from the bizarre, for example whale-driven submarines, to way too optimistic like human missions to Jupiter. Many were colored by the culture of the times. This look into the past illustrates how hard it is to predict what will happen in the future. While we can discuss the general trends, we need to keep in mind that whatever predictions we make are greatly affected by the state of technology and the topics of today.

There are some emerging trends and patterns however. Artificial intelligence has the potential to cause another revolution in the way that people work. Most jobs, especially the more manual, routine work, will disappear, to be replaced by a totally new environment on the job market. With the advent of artificial intelligence, many of the more routine jobs that are done by people will be automated. This doesn’t only apply to such things as factory work or crunching numbers in Excel, but also some of the work done by lawyers and other similar professions which normally you think would normally require humans to perform them.

This means that for most of the population, a large number of the tasks that they are doing right now will be done by artificial intelligence and robots in the future. Many governments are fearing massive unemployment due to technological shifts, however the more likely scenario is that the types of jobs that are being done will just be different. There were similar changes in how work is done in society during the Industrial Revolution. Back then, it was also feared that machines were going to replace people, but what happened instead is that the nature of the work that most people were doing changed.

The ability to adapt (adaptability) is crucial

Current trends indicate that there will likely be a shift towards more expert-generalist types of skills. Specialists will still be valuable, and will command high salaries, but the number of specialist types will shrink and the surviving ones will still need to master more generalist skills. This is because the ability to be adaptable in the face of rapidly changing conditions will be required of people, if they want to earn money and be competitive on the job market. Adaptability will be the number one meta-skill that will be key to success. It will require people to master a range of skills and mindsets to help them navigate the complexities of the future.

Most of these have to do with soft skills and the ability to learn. These are meta-skills that are not domain specific, but can be applied across domains in different situations. The ability to learn requires you to have a methodology that would allow you to grasp the fundamentals of any subject quite quickly and then continue to add on to that knowledge if need be.

This is because the rapidly changing world means that you don’t know what skills you will need in the future. What is clear is that a person should have knowledge from different domains, and a wide perspective on things, since you cannot predict what problems you will encounter along your journey.

Getting the gist of any subject quickly will also allow you to think critically about a wide variety of issues that will affect the world. The way you arrive at a conclusion is just like if you were piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, first starting off with a few pieces, the overall picture nowhere in sight, but as you fit more and more pieces onto the puzzle, the picture starts revealing itself. Once the little pieces of the puzzle start coming together, with each jigsaw added you gain more understanding of how things work.

While these things can be done through applying a few methodologies, nothing can overcome the power of intrinsic motivation. That is why mindset will divide those who will be able to adapt and those who will be left behind. And the driving force of mindset in an ever-changing world is curiosity. Curiosity will naturally motivate a person to learn more things, to try to find out about how things work and then transform those findings into workable solutions.

Curiosity can induce states of flow, where learning is no longer seen as a challenge to force yourself into, but instead a reward in itself. When the act of reading a book induces the same type of dopamine effects for you as smoking a cigarette or taking selfies does for others, then you know you will be the one getting ahead.

Curiosity will also allow you to keep an open mind, which is a prerequisite for not falling for cognitive biases. These can hijack your thinking processes and make you blind even if you have your eyes open. In order to lessen the effects of the emotional part of your brain on your decision-making process, you need to engage in meta-cognition. You will never be able to complete rid of mistakes in your thinking, but by taking a step back and being aware of the way your brain thinks, you can keep more of a detached and skeptical perspective on things.

Setting up the right question to ask and the right problem to solve

One crucial, but quite underrated skill is the ability to ask questions. Not any type of questions, but the right ones. For the answer you get usually depends on the question that you ask. Asking questions has been at the core of the creative process since the dawn of time. Thinkers as varied as Socrates in ancient times, and scientists in modern times, focused on asking questions about how the world works. Other guys, visionaries like Elon Musk or the engineers at Google, then took the answers that the previous group found, and applied them by asking further questions. What defines the most creative geniuses of our age and all the ages that preceded it, is that they all spent a lot of time thinking about the types of questions that they wanted to answer.

While knowledge has become more accessible than ever before, it has also become much more clouded. There are many signals, but there is also a lot more useless chatter out there as well. This means that another important skill is the ability to select the right pieces of knowledge from all the noise around you. Fake news, selfies, attention whoring, are out there in full force. All these things can either distract you or lead you on the wrong path. Strong willpower will be required in order to stay focused, and self-knowledge and skepticism will be needed to weed out the fake from the real, and the necessary from the useless. Self-knowledge and skepticism are the building blocks of critical thinking, which is the main pillar of a rational society. Rationality is crucial if we want to prevent the world from going mad.

Monsters are coming for you

Everything that I have described will be done in a world which is starting to be overgrown with different types of threats, some quite new in the history of human existence, while others as old as time itself. One characteristic of the modern age is that there is no more privacy. Whatever you put on the internet stays there, and can be used against you in the future. Just like the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal shows, the data that you have out there can be taken and used for all kinds of nefarious purposes. Hackers can come in and steal your identity, dark individuals can try to manipulate you either to buy something that you don’t need or to vote for a demagogic candidate. All these dangers are real and ever-present.

Other types of dangers are there on a global scale and threaten the very survival of our planet. The Amazon rain-forest is burning, and so are many forests around the world. The oceans are full of plastic, which not only washes up on the beaches of deserted islands, but also ends up in the stomachs of fish and other marine animals and enters our very own food chain.

While these problems are known, most people ignore them, unfortunately to their own peril. What is however even more frightening is that there are also many unknowns, which at the moment are either hidden or don’t exist yet. These so-called “black swans” can come in at any moment and significantly shake up the world. What defines them is that they are hard, sometimes even impossible to predict. They often creep up when no one expects, and cause huge amounts of damage and destruction.

While luck plays a role, the personal damage that they cause can be minimized if you are an adaptable person, and have the ability to learn new skills. In this way, you become anti-fragile for the future. While most people will be drowning in the latest storm, if you apply yourself, you can weather these challenges and even thrive. The future is unknown, but that doesn’t prevent you from preparing for it.

What is positive is that the same types of skills that can make you anti-fragile when it comes to disasters, can also be used in order to solve or even prevent them. Adaptability not only means being able to go wherever the wind blows or duck when the mast is coming for your head, but also the ability to apply knowledge from one domain to the next in order to solve problems and even to come up with new, innovative ways of doing things.

While the world seems to be on the path to self-destruction, a little optimism can go a long way. Humanity has created tools which can destroy the planet many times over, but it also has the ability to overcome these challenges and come out ahead. We don’t know what the world will look like in the future, but we need to adapt. Global threats like climate change, pollution, or terrorism will continue to occupy the smartest minds for the foreseeable future. Other factors like AI are neutral in themselves, but can be used for both good and evil. What will be crucial if we want to tackle these challenges is humility, holistic thinking, and a regard for the common good.
 

Read More: The future belongs to expert-generalists.

I originally published this story here.

Credit: 1

In history, it is usually not the individual actors who are important, but instead the processes themselves. This is because similar processes can lead to similar outcomes. In these types of situations, analogies can be quite illuminating. They can help us to recognize the problems and pick potential solutions.

Mapping Step

When coming up with analogies, the first thing you always do is to map the source system to the target system. This means you take concepts from the initial phenomenon that you know well, and then fit them to the things you are trying to analyze. While doing this, you always need to be careful about what you are comparing. When people make historical comparisons, they usually head down the road of comparing individuals that appear similar in these different eras. While mapping the different individuals from the ancient era to the modern era (is Trump the modern Clodius or Crassus?) might be fun, it does not really tell us much about the current world. Instead, it is mapping the underlying processes at play in the two eras that is interesting. This can enlighten us on what is happening in our society today.

When taking lessons from the past, there are certain key things that you should look for. When examining the modern era and Roman times, there are some apparent similarities. Certain actions and conditions lead to certain paths. These are processes that are linked to the conditions in society, and include the widening gap between the segments of society, certain segments of society getting relatively poorer, the process of anger creation, and similar things.

• I described them in more detail in the article on lessons from the ancient commentators that I wrote previously.

The fall of the Republic happened when Rome became the hegemon in its part of the world. The Roman society became richer than ever, with the level of material goods skyrocketing. However, a gap between the richest and the poorest members of society widened, with many of the people on the lower rungs feelings as if their situation was worsening. The state of affairs today is similar, we are living in an era of overall prosperity, however wide sections of the population are feeling as if they are losing out.

When working with historical analogies, what you can map are different behaviors. While culture and technology influence how these behaviors are displayed, the mental processes behind these behaviors are very similar. In one of his iconic statements on the basic nature of the world, Cicero stated that while the Egyptians might worship cats and dogs, the fundamental processes of superstition are the same in all nations. The particulars don’t matter, it is the underlying process that does.

To illustrate this statement with another example, we can look at vanity, a behavior that many humans engage in. In his work, Late Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus described how people were infatuated with creating statues of themselves in ancient Rome. This behavior we can map to the modern trend of people posting selfies of themselves. While, the way the process is implemented is different (statues vs. selfies), the mental behaviors that lead to this stem from the same place.

Moving on, let’s take the process of anger creation as an example for continuing the mapping. What I am mapping here is not particular circumstances of how anger was created, but instead the general patterns. In ancient Rome, the initial process that led to anger, then outrage, and then political violence is the one between the Optimates and the Populares, as the positions between these two factions drifted apart. The similar process today is the battle between the alt-right (and other far right elements), and the alt-left (sometimes joined by other far left elements).

While the ancient process was based more on economic conditions, and the modern one is more about ideas, there are many parallels. What drove both these processes in the background was a perceived fall in status, perceived relative gains and loses, as well as similar structural elements.

Both these processes led to increased polarization in society, with the likelihood of compromise drifting further and further away. These situations also have parallels in how certain individuals are using them to gain power for themselves. Populism was on the rise then, and it is on the rise now.

The reason why these processes can wreak havoc on the political institutions of the countries of the northern hemisphere (like the US, but also the EU), is that the institutions of the Roman Republic have striking similarities to our modern institutions. Whether this was by design (as in the US) or by heritage and evolution (mostly in other countries), the way the state is set up today is close to the way it was set up in the Roman Republic.

Basically, here we are mapping the old Roman institutions to the modern political institutions. The people, the Senate, the executive, the division of powers, all these have parallels in both systems. This means that the processes are quite likely to have similar effects in both cases.

Application Step

With the last statement, we are already moving to the Application Step. With this step, we are applying the mappings to learn something about the system we want to study. And the system we want to study in this case is the current political situation.

However, to be able to apply the mappings correctly, we also need to keep in mind the main differences between the two situations we are studying. These differences will determine which things from the analogy are relevant and which aren’t.

The first factor to keep in mind is the difference in the level of technology in the two societies. This had a huge impact not only on how people lived, on transportation between places, but also on the spread of information. There were also many cultural differences, with one huge difference being that in ancient Rome people had a fundamentally different view of the set up of society. There was the institution of slavery, and women had much less rights than they do now.

One significant element was that the Roman Republic was a libertarian paradise. Everything was provided by private contractors and many things we take for granted now (like a police force or a fire squad) were not there. For example, Crassus used this hole in the market by making his own private fire squad and sometimes using it for nefarious purposes. Some of these things were corrected under the Empire. When he consolidated his rule, Augustus set up a sort of police squad, as well as a fire squad, which were under the control of the state.

There were also differences in the work structure. The population outside of the city of Rome consisted mostly of agrarian farmers, and the presence of slaves was also significant in all aspects of society. Today, the places of work are either in the industry, but more importantly in offices, where people sit all day in front of the computer screen.

While these differences are significant, in my opinion, they do not negate the main point of the argument that the Roman Republic could be used as an analogy for current times. The key to this is that different processes can produce the same mental effects. This means the same outcomes.

People might argue that the institutions of Roman Republic and today are not the same. This might be true, but only on a physical level. On a more conceptual level, the institutions are incredibly similar.

Here we can use concepts from computer science to illustrate. Data modeling in computer science divides data models into conceptual, logical and physical levels. The conceptual level is all about the concepts and ideas, while the lower levels are about how these are implemented in practice. The logical and physical levels are where the actual set-up of the institutions shows up.

For the political system, the conceptual level has things like the people, legislative power (even though in theory the people made the laws, in reality it was the Senate), or the executive power (consuls). The system in the Roman Republic was set up as a way to check the powers of the different institutions and make sure that no one person becomes too powerful. This resulted in a division of powers, which inspired the way modern governments (such as in the US) are set up. While, in ancient Rome, there were consuls, and the US has a president, this does not really matter. On the conceptual level, these institutions are quite similar, as they are the executive powers in the state.

Another interesting parallel is powerful individuals hiding their business dealings behind front men (and making policy to benefit their business dealings). How this process worked was described in some of Cicero’s letters. Reading these writings, it is almost eerie to realize how similar corruption of yesteryear was to that of today. Powerful business interests are often tied to politicians and have quite a big influence on policy.

One important lesson that has parallels in both eras is norm breaking. Since the institutions are similar, the breaking of norms by politicians can destroy the institutions in similar ways. There is an interesting parallel in the strategy used in ancient Rome and the UK a few years: going to the people to decide. Gracchus and other Populares started going around the Senate and implemented people’s plebiscites on many issues. This is quite similar with what happened with the Brexit Referendum in the UK. These processes were easily manipulated.

There is one further point which I would like to map, and which in many ways is a quite abstract analogy. However, it could give clues to why a system that weathers numerous storms for hundreds of years, suddenly falters. There was one fundamental difference between the Rome of 100 BC when things were beginning to unravel, and the Rome of 300 BC or even 200 BC, when things seemed to be functioning.

In 100 BC, Rome was no longer a city-state, but ruled a vast empire, becoming the hegemon of the Mediterranean world. While even in earlier times, it had ruled territories outside the city, even outside of Italy, the scale and circumstances became fundamentally new and different.

These circumstances changed the rules of the game. Rome becoming an imperial power was something so fundamentally new, that the institutions that worked well in the old times were not able to adapt fast enough. A paradigm shift was occurring in the ways the world worked and the Republic collapsed under the strains. The Romans were not able to handle all the different things that were suddenly thrown at them. Chaos was the result.

A similar type of paradigm shift in how the institutions work is happening in today’s world. This is due the changes of technology, with the rise of the internet. Even more radical changes like artificial intelligence are just a stone’s throw away. Systems that are designed to work well in predictable circumstances, can get strained and cease to function properly when a curve ball is thrown at them. For the Roman Republic, this curve ball was empire, for us this curve ball is technology.

Learning Step

In the Learning Step, we come up with a generalization of what this all means for the evolution of human societies. What can we learn from history? There is a common saying that you never step in the same river twice. This is true. The water and everything floating in in is not the same. However, the underlying processes of how the rivers flows, how it deposits sediments, as well as other things are pretty much the same.

So yes, the way the sediments look after they are deposited will not be the same, but you need to look at processes. You examine one spot of the river at one time and then come back a year later. It will look a bit different. While you might not know the specificities, you can describe what general processes made it look different. You won’t be able to predict the precise way that spot will look one year from now, but you can guess what processes will affect it (sediment deposits, wind, water erosion…etc.). Of course, we also need to keep in mind the possibility of big unpredictable events, which can mess all this up. Maybe a major storm might hit and destroy everything. As history often reminds us, “black swan” events can often out of nowhere and totally change the course of history.

There is also the question of the inevitability of outcomes. What we need to distinguish here are the role of trends versus human agency. Here you can use counterfactuals to judge what if scenarios. What would have happened if Sulla had not taken his army to Rome? It is likely that at some point some other general would have done it. This is because there were strong trends in place, which made this quite inevitable. With armies in the field after the Social War and these armies becoming more loyal to their commanders than the state after the reforms of Marius, it was just a matter of time before one or the other ambitious general used them for his own interests.

What role can you attribute to humans in the course of events? Some events are likely to happen no matter which person actually triggers it, but some are highly dependent on the person. For example World War I. was triggered after the assassination of archduke Ferdinand, but even if that had not happened, something else would have triggered it. The conditions were ripe. Once the tipping point is reached, almost anything can set off the spark to start the conflict.

However the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander were highly dependent on Alexander, since he was the one who came up with the idea (or rather his father Philip). If Alexander had not been in charge of Macedonia, it is quite unlikely that another person would have attempted to conquer the Persian Empire.

Another important thing to keep in mind is the question of causes versus symptoms. What is the cause of an event and what is its symptom? This can be quite hard to distinguish, but causes are usually large processes, fed by feedback loops, while symptoms are specific manifestations of these processes. For example, Trump is a symptom of the current malaise. This means that even if he didn’t show up, someone else like him would likely have come along and taken advantage of the situation. There are different brands of populists across the world today, but they are all using similar underlying processes that carry them to power.

However, the arrival of someone like Trump further destabilizes the situation, which then creates greater chaos. This is because the different feedback loops working in the background are reflexive, meaning that they reinforce each other. Both the causes and effects affect each other, with no one being able to tell which is the cause and which is the effect after a while.

What is the answer to all these problems? For the ancients it was using reason (using system 2 in the words of modern psychology researchers). However the questions remains, can we beat out the pitfalls of human nature by using the brain?

There are specific conditions in our modern societies today, that are giving rise to specific behaviors. This is quite similar to what was happening in the ancient Roman Republic. People argue whether nature or nurture is more influential in human behavior. The bell curve model that I explained is agnostic to whether character comes from nature, individual willpower, or nurture.

I believe that all these have an effect on how a human behaves. Nature gives each individual human certain predispositions for behavior and certain traits, however individual willpower and nurture can push these to the background and sometimes even change them.

I am a big believer that as an individual you are not just a slave to your genetic predispositions, but through your own willpower can rise above them to a certain extent. Virtuous character and acting right for the right reasons can be maintained under any circumstances. Yes, it can be shaken, and you will sometimes have to make some moral concessions, but overall there is never a need to descent to the pits of evil.

What is key is to build a resilient system, one that can withstand the swings of human nature. History has cycles, but with certain measures it should be possible to stop these cycles or at least diminish them. According to Polybius, the mixed form of government of Rome was able to diminish the functioning of these cycles, and prevented wanna-be kings from arising.

Turns out that this wasn’t enough. Even the most resilient systems can succumb to powerful forces. The separation of powers in the US has been able to keep the country stable for a long time, however as can be seen from things like the Civil War, certain processes can overwhelm even the best of systems.

Things don’t have to only go from bad to worse. There is precedence for societies changing for the better. One example is the lessening of corruption in Sweden. Sweden went from one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, one where everything was for sale, to one of the least corrupt ones.

On the other hand, the Roman Republic entered a vicious cycle, where it went from one of the least corrupt societies in the Mediterranean, one based on honor, to a corrupt, hedonistic cesspool. Decadence took over, which had a negative effect on how people behaved in society.

This brings us to the concept of a behavioral sink. The environment around you has a huge influence on how people act, which can be seen from some pretty unusual experiments that were undertaken in the 1950s and 60s. Researchers built a series of rat and mouse paradises, habitats which were meant to provide all the food and housing needs of its inhabitants and keep them free from predators. Then they introduced a small number of rats (in some experiments it was mice) into these habitats and watched what happened.

After a time of exploration, the rats settled in and started reproducing. Since all their needs were provided for, their populations exploded rapidly. However, after a time, weird things started happening. Dominant males built their harems, which consisted of a lot of females and a small number of select males who completely withdrew from doing anything productive and just ended up spending the entire day grooming themselves. The rest of the rejected males started congregating in some sections of the habitats. Some of them withdrew from society entirely, while others became violent and attacked anything that moved.

Decadence set in and rat society started disintegrating. The differences between the males were huge. Some had access to harems of females, while the majority did not have access to even one. With many of the rats congregating around a select number of feeding stations, social interactions became stressful.

After a while, all out war erupted, and even the alpha males had trouble defending their harems and territories. In these chaotic times, the females stopped building nests and even threw out their babies. At one point, no more babies survived into adulthood. Society disintegrated and collapsed.

Yet, there was no problem with food, predators, or shelter. These habitats provided for all of them, creating a prosperous society. Instead of calming everyone down, stress pervaded everywhere. The same rats that acted normally before, started behaving in abnormal ways.

The Roman Republic also underwent its behavioral sink. After the Punic Wars, it became a prosperous society overall, and its outside threats were eliminated. The population increased exponentially. Yet the social divisions grew worse too. The rich hoarded all the money and resources, while the poor got poorer. The select number of alpha rats monopolized most of the females and the best locations, while most of the other male rats ended up with nothing. The elites in Rome monopolized the farmlands and other resources, while many sections of the populations were kicked off their lands and couldn’t even find work.

The fact that the population skyrocketed and the space was limited, meant that the population had to battle over limited space and resources. The historians who came up with the theory of cliodynamics proposed that elite competition was an important factor in the downfall of the Republic. The population of the nobles grew, yet the number of places at the top was as limited as ever. There were still only a limited number of senators, and a small number of magistrate positions, including two consuls every year. While in the past, many of these nobles would be able to satisfy their ambitions in rising up the hierarchy, in a situation where there are a lot of them, this was no longer guaranteed. Battles for positions started.

We might be experiencing a behavioral sink now. While, there are significant differences between humans and rats, what happened in the rat utopias can serve as a warning sign. Certain conditions changed the behavior of the inhabitants, which led to a collapse of the society. Even though the utopias had all the resources needed for their inhabitants and protected them from outside predators, decadence set in and social interactions helped start a vicious circle, which spiraled down until society was destroyed.

We live in societies which are the most prosperous in history, yet the conditions seem to be stuck in a vicious cycle which is spiraling down. Social interactions are stressful, causing many people to withdraw from society, while others become more aggressive. The differences between the haves and have-nots are getting wider and wider, not just in terms of money, but also in social dynamics for many guys (a small percentage has harems of women, while others struggle to even get a date). City life is further adding to the every day stresses of large parts of the population, and the rise of social media is taking over social interactions.

This all leads to more and more frustration, which can lead to anger, and the rise of dark forces like populism, which further polarize society, leading it down to potentially bad places.

Read More:
This is Part 2 of a series on using historical analogies to describe current events. Read Part 1 here:
Why the fall of the Roman Republic is a good analogy for today’s chaotic time – Part 1.

Further articles to read:

Article 1:
The dangerous trends that are shaking up the world today.

Article 2:
11 lessons from the fall of the Roman Republic. It is disturbing how relevant they are for today.

Article 3:
At what point of the fall of the Roman Republic are we?

Article on forming analogies:
The method to create good analogies.

Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

1) Mapping Step
2) Application Step (Inference Step)
3) Learning Step

How does this work? You have a problem and you figured out that using an analogy would be a good way to solve it. What you start off with is a source system that you know well and that you want to apply to solve the problem (target).

First, in the Mapping Step, you take the source of the analogy and map it to the system (target) that you are trying to find out more about. Second, in the Application Step, you apply this new mapping in order to solve the problem that you are facing. The Application Step can also be called the Inference Step, since you infer or form an opinion on the matter based on the information that you have, which then helps you to come up with a solution. Third, in the Learning Step, you can come up with a generalization of the principles, which you then potentially reuse to solve different types of similar problems.

Let’s illustrate this on a familiar example. How did the process for the mass production of cars in Ford’s factories come about? When William Klann (a worker in Ford’s car factory) was visiting a Chicago meat-packing factory, he was inspired by what he saw. There were conveyor belts that were pulling animal carcasses along, and at certain points these carcasses would arrive at the station of a person who would then strip it of a certain part of meat. So this person would specialize in just that little task.

In his mind, Klann did the Mapping Step. The carcasses are akin to the cars in his own factory. The workers in the meat-packing factory are akin to the workers in the car plant. Once he did these initial mappings, he moved onto the Application or Inference Step.

If the products and workers in both types of factories are equivalent, then you can probably use the same process you use in the meat-packing factory to mass manufacture cars. You can move the cars along the conveyor belt and have people specialize in only one task, putting in one small part of the car again and again. This would then solve the problem of the mass production of cars.

Once you successfully apply the mappings and start to mass manufacture cars using this process, then you can move onto the Learning Step. This is when a generalization comes in. The conveyor belts and specialization can be used in many different industries in order to do a similar process for many different products.

The key to forming a successful analogy, like in the case of animal carcasses and cars, is what some researchers call the systematicity principle. This is to see beyond the surface and try to find connections which might not be apparent at first look. What you have to realize is that independent facts themselves don’t matter that much. What is important is the connected knowledge.

How to make a good analogy

The thing is that good analogies can often be quite abstract. What you need to pay attention to are the similarities in the relations of the different actors and elements in a system. One example that can be used to illustrate this is comparing the flow of electrons in an electrical circuit to the flow of people in a crowded subway tunnel. Here the electrons themselves do not resemble people at all on the surface, however if you take a closer look, then the higher-order relations between these things will become apparent.

Once you grasp these relations between relations, you can apply the analogy to create some interesting solutions to problems. How can you use the analogy of people going through a subway passage to inform you on electron flows?

Imagine a crowded subway tunnel with huge crowds of people going through it on their way to catch their subway train. If you add a very narrow gate in a subway tunnel, then this will act as an obstacle for the people to pass through. They will have to line up and start passing one by one, which means that the rate at which the people pass through there decreases. You can apply this as an analogy to electrons. If you add a resistor to a circuit, this will cause the rate of flow of electrons to decrease.

By thinking in terms of these higher-order relations, you can see the linkages on a deeper level. One of these deeper level analogies that ended up revolutionizing how we work in the world was comparing what is on a computer screen to a physical desktop. If you start to think of your screen as akin to a desktop, then it can give you ideas on how to organize things. This is a deeper connection that Alan Kay came up with at the Xerox PARC Laboratories, and one that Steve Jobs saw great potential in.

Another example are the connections between water and economics. In 1949, Bill Phillips, an economist from New Zealand, tried to simulate the flow of the economy by using the flow of water as an analogy. In order to do this, he constructed an analog computer called the MONIAC, which regulated this flow of water.

This was possible because he used the analogy of money as a liquid that was flowing through the economic system, and the economic system itself as a form of plumbing. This type of analogy came to be called hydraulic macroeconomics.

A similar concept had been used previously in the Soviet Union. In 1936, Vladimir Lukyanov built the Water Integrator, an early analog computer. This idea came to him after he became familiar with several different theoretical frameworks on analogies. One of these was the work of Nikolai Pavlovsky who surmised the possibility of replacing one physical process with another. This can be done if these two things are described by the same mathematical equation and has been called the principle of analogy in modeling.

Lukyanov was stuck trying to find a solution to one incredibly important problem. He had been working as an engineer on the construction of a railroad, but was facing the issue of the concrete cracking quite frequently, which slowed down the construction work quite significantly and caused many issues with its quality.

What Lukyanov did was to use the flow of water as an analogy for the thermal processes that were behind the cracking of the concrete. In order to put this analogy into practice, he built the Water Integrator, which was a complex machine using the flow of water to calculate differential equations. Once this proved successful in this specific case, this type of machine was then applied to other problems in a variety of fields, in the Soviet Union and abroad.

Here, you can quite clearly see the 3 steps in practice. Lukyanov combined different types of knowledge on analogical thinking (such as the work done by Pavlovsky), which then gave him the idea to use the analogy of water flows to model thermal processes. This was the Mapping Step and the Application Step. Later, this analogy was generalized, and applied in many other domains. This was the Learning Step.

Analogies can be abstract

The examples I described show how more and more abstract analogies can arrive at pretty good solutions to many types of problems. These can then sometimes be generalized in order to be applied to solve a variety of challenges in different fields. The key to forming good analogies between things that at first glance seem unrelated is to strip away the factors that are irrelevant and see it all on a more abstract, conceptual level.

For example, think of the analogy of the flow of electric current in a wire, and how in many ways it is physically similar to the flow of fluid in a pipe. This is because heat and fluid follow similar physical laws. These similarities then have been applied in the study of many types of things that have been termed transport phenomena.

Transport phenomena concern the exchange of such things as mass, charge or momentum in different systems. The basic insight for their study is that you can determine the properties of one of the systems studied by modeling it through a different type of system (electricity and water for example).

You can sometimes get even more abstract, such as with the analogy between the flow of people in a subway tunnel and the flow of electrons on a circuit. However, the more abstract the model gets (the more abstract the analogies are), the less it will most likely be able to explain and the less applicability there will be to create new solutions. The ones that have more observable shared features are usually the things, which have the closest parallels (but not always, and also the parallels which are more high-level can also be significant).

When trying to apply analogies you need to keep some things in mind. You have to be realistic about the model you are using and decide what it can and cannot explain. Which things are really good analogies for this problem and which aren’t? There is a spectrum of analogies, ranging from perfect ones, to ones that are wholly misleading.

What is a good analogy? There are always two things at play here: how well you know the source system and how representative it is. There is a trade-off between these two things. Some things you know well might not be that representative of the problem you are trying to solve and vice versa.

One thing is clear: in order for the source analogy to be a good one, you need to know a lot about it. If you are applying an analogy, which you don’t know much about, you risk missing some essential elements of it, which could really skew the results.

Is this a good analogy or a bad one?

So when you are going through the process of deciding whether to apply this or that analogy, you have to go through two steps. These are done in parallel to the three steps of forming an analogy (Mapping, Applying, Learning):

1) Decide
2) Adapt

How to decide whether the analogy fits? Let’s say that we want to use the people in a crowded subway tunnel analogy in order to improve the way we manage the flow of electrons in an electrical circuit. How do we decrease the flow of people in a subway tunnel? By adding a gate. Can this be applied to the flow of electrons? Yes, you can. What can you use as a gate for this? A resistor.

The important thing here is not whether a resistor is structurally the same as a gate, or a person is somehow the same as an electron, but instead the similarity of the relationship between a subway tunnel, people, and a gate, to that of electric circuits, electrons, and resistors. If those relationships are indeed similar, then the analogy has the potential to be applied successfully. Here, both the Decide and Adapt steps are good to go.

Now let’s try to see whether we can do something interesting with another analogy, one between the postal system and the internet analogy. With this analogy, people compare the internet to the postal system, where letters are akin to the packets of data that are used to send information on the internet.

In the process of examining this analogy, you determine that at the moment you don’t find any applicability. Maybe this particular analogy can be used only for its descriptive power, but has no practical purposes. Remember the two main functions of analogies: understanding and problem solving. Maybe the postal system/internet analogy is only good for understanding, while the subway/electric circuit analogy also had applications for problem solving.

This means that the first analogy helped you to solve a particular problem, while the second one could only be used to help you understand how the target system works. You decided to use the first one, but discarded the other one for problem solving. However, even the analogy you did take on board, you needed to adapt in order to make it fit for your purpose.

Always keep in mind that you should be careful with what types of analogies you use and when you use them. This will be looked at in a future post.

Read More:
Go back and read the first installment in the series on thinking in analogies like Steve Jobs:
How to think in analogies.

How to use the first principle thinking method of Elon Musk:
A short introduction to first principles thinking.

Note: Some of these ideas are based on more theoretical work of researchers such as Philip Johnson-Laird, Keith Holyak or Dedre Gertner.

Images: 1, 2,

In one of his interviews he said this:

“I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list.

That didn’t look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. That’s what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.“

This is a brilliant comparison, one that clearly demonstrates the advantages that a computer brings to the average person. A normal person, even one with great speed and stamina, can cover only a very limited range on foot at any given time. However, when they get up on a bike, the speed and range that they can cover expands exponentially.

Similarly, with your normal brain, you can remember only a limited amount of things and do a limited amount of actions. On the other hand, just by using a computer, you have access to vast stores of information and software that allows you to do a huge number of things that you cannot do just on your own.

What Steve Jobs did here is to use an analogy to pass a message across. An analogy is the process of comparing one thing to another, noting the similarities between them.

When you are doing thinking in analogies, you have two models that you are comparing: the source system and the target system. What happens is that you are using the source system as an analogy to infer some characteristics of the target system.

The source system is something that you are quite familiar with, and the purpose of using this as an analogy is to better understand the functioning of the target system, the one you are less familiar with.

What you are doing is mapping the source system to the target system. You create maps in your brain between the two systems and apply concepts from the source system (which you know quite well), to the target system. This helps you then to better understand the target system.

The key to all this is how similar the two models really are in reality. If the two systems are very similar, then the conclusions you form are valid, however if the similarities are only superficial or weak, then the conclusions you form could be incredibly misleading.

What can you use analogies for?

There are two basic things that you can use analogies for: understanding (learning) and for problem-solving.

In school, in basic physics class, you might remember the lesson where they showed you how the atom looks like a tiny solar system, with electrons rotating around a nucleus composed of protons and neutrons. What this model (called the Bohr model) used was the analogy of the solar system to better demonstrate what happens inside an atom.

While modern research shows that what happens inside the atoms is much more complicated than that, this solar system analogy does give you a basic idea of the inner workings of the system. This model works with the basic premise that most people have a decent understanding of how the solar system works (source system). The sun is at the center, and the planets orbit around it. By applying this analogy, people who are starting to learn about physics can get a better understanding of how atoms function (target system).

This is one of the main uses of analogies: understanding how something works. You can use analogies to help you learn better about how things function. When you are learning about one subject, you might use analogies from another similar subject (one that is more familiar to you) in order to understand that new subject.

One analogy that is often used to show people how the brain works is comparing the human brain to a computer. Here the source system is the computer and the target system is the human brain.

Let’s take an example of how the brain is described as being akin to a computer from a blog post by Shamli Prakash:

“If we break it down, the human body functions very similarly to modern day computers — or rather, computers are very closely aligned to the most complex processing unit there has ever been, namely the human brain. Going back to basics for a moment — any information processing system consists of 5 main components — input, output, storage, processing and program. We can draw parallels between the brain and computers for each of these elements.“

Learning about how things work is not the only use of analogies. Analogies are also quite important in problem solving. This is when you apply tested processes from one area to another, or reuse already existing solutions.

One thing that you are doing here is improving a process. Let’s take the example of Henry Ford and how he revolutionized the world of car-making. He used first principles thinking by changing the process of making cars.

However, he did this by using an analogy from another domain. In 1913, Ford introduced the assembly line at his factory in order to mass produce his Model T. This reduced the time it took to assemble an individual car by almost ten hours!

The main part of the assembly line at the Ford factory was a moving conveyor belt that was inspired by what could be seen in those years in Chicago’s meat-packing plants. The credit here should go to one of Ford Company’s employees, William Klann.

Apparently, Klann went to a slaughterhouse in Chicago and noticed how the carcasses of animals were butchered and disassembled as they moved along a conveyor belt. Each person standing at the conveyor belt had their own piece of animal to remove, over and over again.

Klann was inspired by how smooth and efficient this process was and reported it to his superiors at the Ford plant. Using this analogy from the domain of meat-packing ended up changing the world of cars forever.

If you are like most people, then you probably used the Google search engine to search for something on the internet in the past week. Did you know that the early Google search algorithm was also based on an analogy, but a very unusual one?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were both researchers when they came up with Google search, and the fact that they came from the academic world inspired how it worked.

In a very good example of combining things to make something new, Larry Page used the analogy of citations to web pages. Basically, in academia, you get ahead by getting citations. The more citations of your works that you have, the more important and authoritative you are.

Page thought of links to web pages as citations, and applied this to search engines. The more links a web page has, the more authoritative it is and the higher in the search results it should rank. The initial Page Rank algorithm that Google used was based on this ingenious analogy.

You can use different analogies to come up with very interesting answers to problems. The analogy of a human brain as a computer can serve as a model to illustrate how the brain works, however some researchers are doing the reverse and using the analogy of how the brain works to make the functioning of computers better.

One team of scientists have modeled computer robot brains after the synapses in human brains:

“A team of scientists at MIT has completed a successful initial test of a computer modeled after brain synapses rather than binary 1’s and 0’s, which could well lead to robot brains that are structured like our own – thereby giving our adaptability to computers so that we become truly obsolete.“

The way the brain works also serves as analogies for several of the methodologies behind machine-learning and artificial intelligence.

For example research into how humans remember things has inspired the creation of deep learning models for artificial intelligence:

“When you remember autobiographical events such as events or places we are using a brain function known as episodic memory. This mechanism is most often associated with circuits in the medial temporal lobe, prominently including the hippocampus. Recently, AI researchers have tried to incorporate methods inspired by episodic memory into reinforcement learning(RL) algorithms for episodic control.“

There are many other analogies that are taken from the field of neuroscience and applied in the field of computers and artificial intelligence. What is happening here is that the way the human brain solves problems is inspiring solutions to problems in the quest to make fully functioning thinking robots.

From changing the paradigm from making cars painstakingly by hand to the mass manufacture of them on conveyor belts by Ford, from Google algorithms for searching on the internet inspired academic citation scores, to deep learning methods of artificial intelligence based on the ways the human brain works, analogies have been used to solve many problems.

When you need a tried and tested way of solving a problem, then using analogies is something that can help you to come up with many solutions quiet fast.

Analogies can give you big insights into the world

The thing about using an analogy is that it can be adapted in many ways. A novel way of using an analogy can sometimes give us big insights into the world.

Going back to the analogy that Steve Jobs made, how do computers map to bicycles? On a first look, they look quite different. However, the analogy here is not about how these two things look or work, but about the fact that they help extend human abilities. The bicycle helps extend the human capacity for covering distances, while the computer helps extend the human capacity for knowledge.

The way to come up with some of these deeper insights, is if you realize that the key to analogies are not the features of the individual objects in the models you are using (computers and bicycles are very different individually), but instead the high-level relations underlying the two models you are comparing.

Steve Jobs was very good at finding these underlying higher-level relations between different things, and then incorporating them into his work.

It is quite likely that you are reading this on some sort of a computer-based device (computer or pad, or smartphone), and your screen is organized a bit like a desktop.

There are different icons around the screen that you can click on and use. You have folders and documents and if you open them up, they serve the same functions as paper folders and paper documents in the physical world.

This is called the desktop metaphor and was based on the brilliant insight that what you see on the screen could be organized like the actual top of a desk. Before that, the user interfaces were clunky command lines, which were hard to get around. Using this metaphor, really changed things.

People were used to physical desks and working on them. Why not organize the screen on the computer in a similar fashion?

Steve Jobs was not the one who came up with this metaphor, but he was the one who saw the power of this for personal computers.

The idea originally dates from 1970 and came from Alan Kay, who was working at the motherland of all things personal computer, the Xerox PARC laboratories. There were some experimental computers that worked with this, but it was Steve Jobs who saw the potential of this analogy and incorporated it into his Apple Macintosh in 1984.

The concept was simple, yet elegant, and became the basis for how almost all personal computers (and other later devices) became organized.

Jobs used another analogy when he was deciding on the way Apple computers should look like. One day he went into the kitchen section of a Macy’s store and spent his time carefully examining food processors.

When he came back to talk to the designer of the Apple II computer, he said:

“Here’s what we need for the Apple II, a nice molded plastic case with smooth edges, muted colors, and a lightly textured surface.“

This is how a simple food processor became the inspiration for personal computers.

One of Steve Jobs most versatile and iconic tools was his ability to use metaphors and analogies in different situations. Not only did he do this to create revolutionary products, but also in other things like the management of his teams.

There is one interesting quote from a lost interview with Steve Jobs that demonstrates one of these metaphors for working with people:

““When I was a young kid there was a widowed man who lived up the street. He was in his eighties. He’s a little scary looking. And I got to know him a little bit. I think he may have paid me to mow his lawn.

One day he said to me, “come on into my garage I want to show you something.” And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a little band between them.

And he said, “come on with me.” We went out into the back and we got some rocks. Some regular old ugly rocks. And we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and little bit of grit powder, and we closed the can up and he turned this motor on and he said, “come back tomorrow.”

And this can was making a racket as the stones went around.
I came back the next day and we opened the can. And we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks.

The same common stones that had gone in through rubbing against each other like this (clapping his hands), creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks.

That’s always been in my mind my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about.
 
It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these beautiful stones.”“

Analogies are one of the tools that you should have in your tool belt, not only if you want to make a shrewd comment or argument, but also if you want learn about things, and solve many different kinds of problems.

However, how do you become a master of analogies? Let’s explore that in the future posts. Click here to read Part 2 of the thinking in analogies series and learn the techniques that you can use to create good analogies.

 
Read More:
How to use the first principle thinking method of Elon Musk:
A short introduction to first principles thinking.

This is quite worrying, as according to the numerous studies and surveys done on the future of work, knowing how to learn and the skills associated around this meta-skill, are always ranked at the top of the skills needed in the new types of jobs.

The expert-generalists are gaining in importance and the future will require you to be able to grasp many different subjects quite quickly. You won’t be able to do that if you don’t have the basic learning techniques down.

A recent study led by John Dunlosky of Kent State University looked at the effectiveness of 10 study techniques. The results showed that techniques like distributed practice are the most effective, while popular techniques like highlighting and underlining have only a limited effectiveness.

Here are the 10 methods:

1) Practice testing: taking practice tests on the material
2) Distributed practice: spreading out learning over time
3) Interleaved practice: mixing different problems and materials within a single study session
4) Elaborative interrogation: generating an explanation for why a fact or concept is true
5) Self-explanation: explaining how new information is related to known explanation or explaining steps taken during problem solving
6) Rereading: restudying text material again after an initial reading
7) Highlighting and underlining: marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading
8) Summarization: writing summaries of what you learned
9) Keyword mnemonic: using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials
10) Imagery for text: attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening

I will give a short summary of the findings on each of these methods from the study, as well as some tips on how to implement these strategies and techniques into your own study plans.

John Dunlosky, the chief researcher behind the meta-study, says that all of these techniques can be used successfully by a motivated student:

“All of the strategies that we reviewed can be used successfully by a motivated student who (at most) has access to a pen or pencil, some index cards, and perhaps to a calendar.”

However some strategies are better than others. let’s find out which.

Study method:
What is it?
How effective is it?
What does this mean for your studying?

1) Study method: Practice testing

What is it?

This method involves you taking practice tests in order to learn the material. The idea is for you to set up situations (tests), where you actively force yourself to use your memory to recall the information that you are trying to learn. This doesn’t mean the act of taking a graded test itself, but can instead include a wide variety of techniques that use active recall.

To quote the study:

“For example, practice testing could involve practicing recall of target information via the use of actual or virtual flashcards, completing practice problems or questions included at the end of textbook chapters, or completing practice tests included in the electronic supplemental materials that increasingly accompany textbooks.”

How effective is it?

According to many experiments, practice testing is a good way to enhance retention of things that you learned.

To quote the study:

“Testing improves learning. Since the seminal study by Abbott (1909), more than 100 years of research has yielded several hundred experiments showing that practice testing enhances learning and retention.”

Different studies show that students who engaged in practice tests were able to later recall information much more easily and scored much higher on the final test.

For example, in one study meant to test students learning of the Swahili language, practice testing yielded higher scores for a much larger percentage of the students, than just simple restudying.

To quote the study:

“Performance on a final test 1 week later was substantially greater after continued testing (80%) than after continued study (36%).”

Practice testing has different forms, but the form where you put yourself in situations where you simulate the testing environment, can also help with things like learning how to manage stress better.

A meta-analysis study of different scientific studies on practice testing came up with the conclusion that this method is more effective than the vast majority of other study methods:

“The testing effect is a well-known concept referring to gains in learning and retention that can occur when students take a practice test on studied material before taking a final test on the same material. Research demonstrates that students who take practice tests often outperform students in non-testing learning conditions such as restudying, practice, filler activities, or no presentation of the material.”

The good results of these studies are so systematic that the researchers have even coined the term “testing effect” in order to describe this phenomenon.

The testing effect can be described as the finding that long-term memory is often increased when you do retrieval practice as part of your study sessions.

What does this mean for your studying?

Throughout your studying sessions, you should set some time to doing practice tests. These can be anything ranging from hiding the definitions of words with your right hand and trying to recall them from memory, to doing the practice tests at the end of each chapter, all the way to simulating a testing session itself.

Another thing that you can do is to create your own practice tests. At the end of each study session you write down some questions that you think best reflect the material that you studied and a few days or weeks later, you sit down and try to answer these questions yourself.

Flash cards are an example of practice testing. You can create your own flash cards and then periodically test yourself with them.

Sometimes you can find practice tests for the subject that you are studying online. This can be a good way to test whether you are getting the material.

2) Study method: Distributed practice

What is it?

This means that instead of cramming your studying into one day, you spread it out over a certain period. Usually this involves regular study sessions.

How effective is it?

To quote:

“The term distributed practice effect refers to the finding that distributing learning over time (either within a single study session or across sessions) typically benefits long-term retention more than does massing learning opportunities back-to-back or in relatively close succession.”

Many studies were done in order to test distributive practice and all of them proved that distributed practice has better overall results than massed practice. In order to illustrate this, here are the results of one of the tests:

“Spaced practice (1 day or 30 days) was superior to massed practice (0 days), and the benefit was greater following a longer lag (30 days) than a shorter lag (1 day).”

The result was that this technique is of high utility for the learners.

What does this mean for your studying?

The idea is quite simple. Instead of cramming everything the night before the test, you set up regular slots for studying throughout the week.

You can set up regular study sessions per subject. For example, for subject A, you say that you will study it for one hour every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

This way you spread out your study sessions over some time.

You need to do this systematically. This method is highly effectively and will help you learn material much better than most other methods.

You can combine distributed (spaced) practice with other types of methods, but this should be the skeleton around which you wrap all the other methods, and not something that you do just from time to time.

3) Study method: Interleaved practice

What is it?

Interleaved practice involves spreading out your study sessions over a certain period (just like distributed practice), but in addition also using different materials and studying different (but related) topics over that period.

There are two types of techniques:

“An intuitive approach, and one we suspect is adopted by most students, involves blocking study or practice, such that all content from one subtopic is studied or all problems of one type are practiced before the student moves on to the next set of material. In contrast, recent research has begun to explore interleaved practice, in which students alternate their practice of different kinds of items or problems.”

How effective is it?

Studies show that if you want to understand and retain information over a longer period of time, interleaved practice is better than practice in blocks.

The results were:

“During practice, performance was better with blocked practice than interleaved practice, but this advantage dramatically reversed on the criterion test, such that interleaved practice boosted accuracy by 43%.”

An explanation for this is that this type of practice engages the brain much more:

“Interleaved practice helps students to discriminate between the different kinds of problems so that they will be more likely to use the correct solution method for each one.”

Judged as having moderate utility, great for some types of problems (like math), but not for others.

What does this mean for your studying?

Interleaved practice has as its basis distributive practice. Where it differs is that instead of studying one topic within one block, you study several related topics within that block (mix them up).

How can you use this method? For me, the best way would be to use it as part of your overall studying strategy, where over the course of your semester (or study sprint), you set up a study schedule.

Within the first several sessions, you use distributed practice and focus on only studying one topic within each block. Here the focus would be on mastering this topic.

Once you have a good grasp of the different topics, you should start with interleaved practice. Now within each study block, instead of focusing on one topic, you incorporate several topics and jump around through them.

For example, let’s say you are studying basic math. You set up that every week you will spend one hour every Monday, Wednesday and Friday on learning math.

The first few months, for that one hour block you will focus on mastering one topic. You could start with addition, once you have mastered that, move onto subtraction…etc.

However once you have a good grasp of these different topics, you would change up your study blocks. Now every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, instead of focusing on one topic every block, you would mix them up. So within the block you would look at addition problems, then go into subtraction, then come back to addition, then division, then multiplication, then subtraction again…etc.

4) Study method: Elaborative interrogation

What is it?

This method is about generating explanations for yourself of why certain facts are the way they are.

To quote:

“The key to elaborative interrogation involves prompting learners to generate an explanation for an explicitly stated fact.”

This method can be triggered simply by asking “why”.

How effective is it?

The technique is very effective in helping people remember facts, and also improves their capacity to see links between different things. One study done to test this, divided students into three groups. Each group was given the same series of statements, what differed is that the first group was asked to seek an explanation for that statement, the second group was given an explanation, and the third group just had the series of statements.

For example, all three groups were given the following statement: “The hungry man got into the car.”

The first group was asked to seek an explanation of why he did that: “Why did he do that?”

The second group got an explanation already pre-written for them: “He got into the car to go to the restaurant.”

The third group got nothing else besides the statement.

At the end, all three groups were given a test to recall what happened in the statements. For example: “Who got into the car?”

The result was that the first group, the one that was the elaborative-interrogation group, got this right 72% of the time, while the other groups were only 37% accurate. This is a pretty big difference.

One important thing to note with this method is that it gets more powerful as prior knowledge on the topic increases. This means the more you know about the subject you are studying, the more effective this method becomes.

To quote:

“Prior knowledge is an important moderator of elaborative-interrogation effects, such that effects generally increase as prior knowledge increases.”

For example, one study tested a group of Canadian students and a group of German students on their knowledge of Canadian provinces and German states.

The Canadian students of course started off with a higher knowledge of Canada than the German students, while the Germans had more knowledge about Germany.

The results of this study demonstrated that:

“Students showed larger effects of elaborative interrogation in their high-knowledge domain (a 24% increase) than in their low-knowledge domain (a 12% increase).”

The authors of the meta-study rate the elaborative interrogation method as of moderate utility.

What does this mean for your studying?

The key to this technique is asking questions, especially the question “why” throughout the course of your studying.

Another thing that you should do is be able to explain how you came up with the answer that you did. Often, it is more important to be able to explain the steps that you took to arrive at the answer and why you chose them, than the answer itself.

5) Study method: Self-explanation

What is it?

This is about explaining how the new information being studied is related to the old information that you already know.

How effective is it?

There was a study done that divided students into three groups. The first group was solving a problem, and while doing that they had explain their reasoning. The second group solved the problems and explained their reasoning only at the end of the process. The third group just solved the problems and did not need to provide any reasoning.

While all three groups performed about the same on the first test, on the second test (one that required a transfer of knowledge) the two first groups outperformed the third group by a wide margin.

The overall assessment of the researchers of this study is that it is of moderate utility. It does improve learning. However, training on how to generate self-explanations is needed in order for it to be effective:

“Although most research has shown effects of self-explanation with minimal training, some results have suggested that effects may be enhanced if students are taught how to effectively implement the self-explanation strategy.”

What does this mean for your studying?

There are different ways that you can implement this method into your studying. One way is to write down short essays where you discuss the material that you learned and relate it to other material that you know.

Another way is to create concept maps, where you draw relationships between different concepts. This can be mind-maps or similar types of diagrams.

A good way to use this method is to come up with analogies. How is this material similar to other subjects that I already know?

Here is a good explanation on how to use analogies in learning from a course on Coursera by a scientist from the University of Zurich. Analogies and learning through analogies is something that I will try to cover in more depth in one of my later articles.

6) Study method: Rereading

What is it?

This technique involves you rereading your notes and study materials again.

How effective is it?

In order to test the effectiveness of the rereading technique, researchers designed a practical experiment. They divided a group of students into four groups, with one group not reading the text at all, the second group reading it once, third group twice, and the fourth group four times.

The students were then asked to wait 10 minutes and were given the text again, but with certain words deleted. They then needed to fill in the missing words. The ones who got to read the test four times did the best, followed by the group that read it twice and so on.

Why does rereading work? There are two hypotheses:

“According to the quantitative hypothesis, rereading simply increases the total amount of information encoded, regardless of the kind or level of information within the text. In contrast, the qualitative hypothesis assumes that rereading differentially affects the processing of higher-level and lower-level information within a text, with particular emphasis placed on the conceptual organization and processing of main ideas during rereading.”

Spaced rereading is better than massed rereading:

“Although advantages of rereading over reading only once have been shown with massed rereading and with spaced rereading (in which some amount of time passes or intervening material is presented between initial study and restudy), spaced rereading usually outperforms massed rereading.”

The researchers ranked rereading with low utility:

“However, most effects have been shown with recall-based memory measures, whereas the benefit for comprehension is less clear. Finally, although rereading is relatively economical with respect to time demands and training requirements when compared with some other learning techniques, rereading is also typically much less effective.”

What does this mean for your studying?

Rereading is best incorporated with other strategies. For example, while rereading, you can highlight the key parts of the text, and then after your rereading session is over, you can create a summary of the text that you just read.

Rereading can also be done after you have already done several intensive sessions of studying and you just want to have a quick refresh on what you learned (and don’t have too much time).

I find that rereading is quite useful in that every time you read, you do get a better understanding of the material, maybe by noticing some parts that you didn’t see before or because of the fact that you have learned the material better, making new connections.

7) Study method: Highlighting and underlining

What is it?

This is when you actively highlight or underline parts of the text that you think is important.

How effective is it?

This technique is quite simple and doesn’t require much training to use.

To quote:

“The techniques typically appeal to students because they are simple to use, do not entail training, and do not require students to invest much time beyond what is already required for reading the material.”

There were few benefits.

To quote:

“First, within the active-highlighting group, performance was better on test items for which the relevant text had been highlighted. Second, this benefit to highlighted information was greater for the active highlighters (who selected what to highlight) than for passive highlighters (who saw the same information highlighted, but did not select it). Third, this benefit to highlighted information was accompanied by a small cost on test questions probing information that had not been highlighted.”

This is due to the isolation effect. In this effect, you remember much more easily an item that is unique among other items. So highlighting helps you remember the text you highlighted a bit better.

However, a lot depends on how you highlight. There can be great variations among people when it comes to highlighting text, ranging from people highlighting just a few things to other people highlighting almost everything.

Research found that people remember more if they limit their highlighting, for example just to one key sentence per paragraph.

To quote overall assessment:

“On the basis of the available evidence, we rate highlighting and underlining as having low utility. In most situations that have been examined and with most participants, highlighting does little to boost performance. It may help when students have the knowledge needed to highlight more effectively, or when texts are difficult, but it may actually hurt performance on higher level tasks that require inference making.”

What does this mean for your studying?

This should not be your primary study method, but can help you if you incorporate it as part of a wider study strategy.

For example, highlighting and underlining can help you with creating better summaries.

8) Study method: Summarizing

What is it?

This is about writing summaries of the material that you need to learn.

How effective is it?

A test was conducted which divided students into five groups. All of the students were asked to read the same text.

The first group wrote a 3-line summary of each of the pages of the text, while the second group was asked to write 3 lines of notes.

Students in the third group were asked to locate and copy the three most important lines from each text, and the students in the fourth group were asked just to write all the words that were capitalized in the text.

The fifth group was asked to read and do nothing else.
All the groups then took tests, right after the exercise and also one week later. The groups that did the best were the summarization and note-taking groups.

To quote:

“The results fit nicely with the claim that summarization boosts learning and retention because it involves attending to and extracting the higher-level meaning and gist of the material. The conditions in the experiment were specifically designed to manipulate how much students processed the texts for meaning.”

Also to quote:

“Students in the verbatim-copying group still had to locate the most important information in the text, but they did not synthesize it into a summary or rephrase it in their notes. Thus, writing about the important points in one’s own words produced a benefit over and above that of selecting important information; students benefited from the more active processing involved in summarization and notetaking.”

However, this strategy has to be practiced, as its effects are greater among more advanced learners:

“It can be an effective learning strategy for learners who are already skilled at summarizing; however, many learners (including children, high school students, and even some undergraduates) will require extensive training, which makes this strategy less feasible.”

What does this mean for your studying?

The most important part of this strategy is to learn how to do it correctly (efficiently and effectively). This means the first step is to practice summarizing.

While your first summaries might not be the best, after a while of practicing, they will become much better.

You can incorporate summarization in many different ways. At the end of every study session, you can spend some time writing a summary of what you learned.

Or you can spread your summarizations out throughout your study session, for example writing a summary of every block that you did.

9) Study method: Keyword mnemonic

What is it?

This technique is about creating keywords and mental images in order to associate verbal materials.

How effective is it?

It is effective, but the effectivity varies.

To quote:

“The overwhelming evidence that the keyword mnemonic can boost memory for many kinds of material and learners has made it a relatively popular technique. Despite the impressive outcomes, however, some aspects of these demonstrations imply limits to the utility of the keyword mnemonic.

First, consider the use of this technique for its originally intended domain—the learning of foreign-language vocabulary. In the example above, la dent easily supports the development of a concrete keyword (“dentist”) that can be easily imagined, whereas many vocabulary terms are much less amenable to the development and use of keywords.

In the case of revenir (to come back), a student could perhaps use the keyword “revenge” (e.g., one might need “to come back” to taste its sweetness), but imaging this abstract term would be difficult and might even limit retention.”

Overall assessment:

“On the basis of the literature reviewed above, we rate the keyword mnemonic as low utility. We cannot recommend that the keyword mnemonic be widely adopted. It does show promise for keyword-friendly materials, but it is not highly efficient (in terms of time needed for training and keyword generation), and it may not produce durable learning.”

What does this mean for your studying?

This is a niche method that you can use to remember certain words or things that are hard to remember.

It’s not something that you should use as your primary studying method, but it can help in many specific instances.

I would recommend reading the book “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything” by Joshua Foer, a journalist who used these techniques to become the US Memory Champion, to give you some ideas on how and when to use these techniques.

10) Study method: Imagery for text

What is it?

This technique involves you actively trying to create mental images of the material.

How effective is it?

In one experiment, the group was divided into two groups. Everyone had to read the same text, but while one group had to just read it, the other group was told to create mental images of each paragraph in their head.

At the end, everyone was given a multiple-choice test on the material in the text. The group that was told to create mental imagery in their head for the text performed much better on the multiple-choice test.

To quote:

“A variety of mechanisms may contribute to the benefits of imaging text material on later test performance. Developing images can enhance one’s mental organization or integration of information in the text, and idiosyncratic images of particular referents in the text could enhance learning as well.

Moreover, using one’s prior knowledge to generate a coherent representation of a narrative may enhance a student’s general understanding of the text; if so, the influence of imagery use may be robust across criterion tasks that tap memory and comprehension.”

Overall assessment:

“Imagery can improve students’ learning of text materials, and the promising work by some researchers speaks to the potential utility of imagery use for text learning. Imagery production is also more broadly applicable than the keyword mnemonic. Nevertheless, the benefits of imagery are largely constrained to imagery-friendly materials and to tests of memory.”

What does this mean for your studying?

This is another niche technique, which can help you to globally understand what you are learning. You can incorporate it in various stages of your learning process.

For example, when you are reading a text, always try to visualize what you are reading.

Visualization is something that Nikola Tesla (and others such as Albert Einstein) used in order to come up with his inventions.

How do I apply the techniques for my own studying?

During my university days, I applied some of these techniques without actually knowing that I am applying them. I remember that I seemed to be putting much less effort into studying than most of my peers. However, now that if I look back, the reason why I was able to go home and watch James Bond before a test, while everyone else was pulling all-nighters in the library was that I just was studying more effectively.

The basis of my strategy were distributed practice and interleaved practice. I would usually spread out my studying over several days, sometimes looking at the same materials and subjects and at other times mixing things up. In this way, I was able to stuff things into my brain with much less effort and the fact that I would return to study the subject a few days later would make it stick in my mind.

Another favorite technique of mine, one I which incorporated as part of my distributed practice schedule was rereading. While by this study this technique was later as moderately useful, for me this was very effective. The first time I would read the material without understanding it much, however the magic happens when you read it the second or third time. With all subsequent readings, the material just starts making more and more sense, and ends up sticking in your head.

Self-explanations have also been a staple of my studying. Whenever I am reading something, my mind automatically tries to find patterns and relate this new material to things that I already know. Sometimes I link it to other things that I know, while at other times I try to find analogies to help me to understand the new subjects better. I often use visualization as part of forming self-explanations.

The key to effective and efficient learning in my opinion is to combine distributed and interleaved practice with other techniques that you like. All people are different and different learning techniques work better for some people than others, so you will need to experiment a bit and find what works better for you. Once you have found the sweet spots, you will need to apply it as often as you can. The reason why these techniques work is not because they are some magic pill, but instead they promote a systematic way of doing things.

Read More:

Learning and knowing strategies on how to learn new subjects will be crucial if you want to be able to thrive in the new world of future work:
Get the skills for a robot-proof career in the workplace of the future.

Learning and learning strategies always come out at the top of all studies that predict the most important skills that will be needed in a future work environment.

More articles on learning:
The Art of Learning: one simple mindset change that will lead you on the path to mastery

How to set up your goals in an agile way and implement them

Here are some articles on learning specific subjects:

Language learning:
The Indiana Jones method for learning foreign languages

How to stop being an eternal beginner and learn a foreign language to fluency

How to stop being an eternal beginner and learn a foreign language to fluency

Learn any foreign language in a day

Here is the link to the study itself, as well as a link to a text explaining the study.