If you ever studied anything complex — you know it is necessary to gradually develop one’s understanding
complex like physics, math, respectable chess ranking,
Even less complex subjects you don’t learn overnight, like driving a car
Why would your own ideas be any different?
Ideas and opinions and views
Why would they magically develop overnight?
And why would they be retained?
If it’s just a passing occurrence in your psyche?
Of course you forget all your great ideas and shit ideas too
They are not different to anything you read, hear, perceive
It really is ultimately just a fleeting event on the surface of your consciousness
Unless you make it enduring — it is gone
This is not merely to say that you should jot down your ideas, which is a banality
This is to say that you should approach them with the same discipline and respect you would approach any complex subject
If you think this thought you had has some deeper significance, could be a clue to some bigger problem you were looking to understand — then you must now meditate upon it
You must absolutely make sure you don’t forget it, that is obvious
Just like you can’t just forget Newton’s first law, and then try to figure out the force to move that rock
When you’re seriously learning something — you don’t just somehow forget all the pertinent details
Why should your ideas and worldviews be any different?
It should all be conducted like a big project
When you’re constructing a bike, you don’t just misplace a few parts, and then hope it will all somehow work out
And yet in this venture of spontaneously trying to understand the world — you think just having thoughts and ideas randomly pass over your empty fucking brain will somehow suffice
Well it will suffice for you to stay as stupid as your are now
But your understanding of anything will not grow
We really are atrocious at learning
Or doing anything, are we not?
We really only do something well if we know it could be done better, FAR FAR better,
If we’re somehow compelled to improve,
Then we improve fast. We become chess grandmasters at 13 yo, even though it’s such a pointless venture
We just need that reference point, and the way to get there,
When it’s not there, we almost immediately stagnate,
Like humanity in the fucking stone age,
If we don’t know we could improve — we just don’t improve
We’re like AI’s — we just can’t generalise
You get a physics PHD — and you’re still an absolute halfwit who can’t orient himself in the world AT ALL. Can’t build a coherent model of the world
At a chessboard you studied every opening endlessly, played myriad games in it, and memorised the first 666 moves,
At physics you were unable to move forward until all the previous formulas and theories perfectly intuitively clicked for a coherent model
But then you have to go vote — and you have “ideas” for an hour of 50000 hours — but you’re still as stupid
You forgot to build a coherent model
No one told you a more coherent model could be built, HAD TO be built
So thoughts and ideas became TOYS and tokens for your identity — not pieces in a coherent model of reality
This is a complex world
You must get really good at learning
Learning something that some moron learned should become BANAL to you
Learning guitar, learning tennis, learning to draw a cat, learning to break someone’s nose, learning basic science of the world, learning to drive, learning to speak a language, learning to crochet, WHATEVER
It should be LAUGHABLY banal,
Any HOBBY should be laughably banal,
This is the reference point,
And then — with ACTUALLY COMPLEX things — learning should resemble learning physics, or mathematics, or programming,
In that you ruthlessly break the problem down to its necessary subcomponents,
Build a top-down and bottom-up understanding,
And absolutely permeate your being with the nuances of the subject matter, so that it becomes intuitive, like riding a bike
THIS is the reference
This is the minimum quality necessary,
It’s absolutely doable
You just have to distinguish banal subjects from easy subjects from complex subjects,
Easy subjects require basic skills of learning better, or else getting a coach. That’s how morons become chess grandmasters,
Complex subjects require utmost seriousness, a literal engineering of one’s understanding, where no pertinent data slips between the cracks, and all ideas are built on, in dialogue with one another
In practice, it almost certainly means you will need to build those models OUTSIDE of your brain,
-on paper
-or physical models
-or algorithms
-tables
-graphs
-etc.
Because you’re simply too stupid to build a complex system in your head, without offloading some of that knowledge load outside
No actually complex problem was solved “in the head”
Why would you be different?
You can solve the problem of laundry and groceries in your head
Not any serious and complex question
There’s a reason mathematicians write equations, and there’s a reason there’s a blackboard in school, and there’s a reason prototypes are built before production,
Complex systems exist, and when someone told you it’s complex and requires complex engineering — you SOMETIMES snap into that mode (especially where the outcome is objective),
But when no one told you it’s complex — you just default to fucking VIBING about it like it’s a garage band with your drunken friends,
You’re just HAVING IDEAS
Even if you’re half-intelligent — and those ideas in isolation are quite interesting — it’s still just a dime in a dozen, an utterly unserious approach to anything but groceries and laundry and garage band
Indeed, this whole rant boils down but to understanding when you’re dealing with a COMPLEX system,
and then tackling it with all the necessarily elaborate tools,
and with full comprehension of one’s mental shortcomings to spontaneously grasp that matter
It will at a very least require you to make extensive notes,
When you listened to a lecture in school — you did take notes — so that you maybe sometimes passed the exam,
WHY would it be any different with any complex subject or problem you’re dealing with now?
Make notes to your own ideas, problems, systems, designs, so that they may actually be useful
We’re lazy and sloppy and unserious about everything, unless we don’t have a choice
Thus we fail to learn
Thus we choose to be stupid 99% of the time
We’re only not stupid when we know we can’t avoid it
One most commit to not be stupid
So that one maybe gets the minimum intellectual seriousness and discipline to start learning and figuring stuff out properly