Learning by Writing (by Holden Karnofsky)

blog post

You can have detailed opinions on many topics if as you study it, you try to formulate your opinion in writing and think about its weak points and possible objections as the directions of further research.

The process

1. Pick a topic,
2. Read and/or discuss with others,
3. Explain your current hypothesis in writing (or conversation),
4. Find and list weaknesses in your case,
5. Do more reading/discussion to fix some weakness,
6. Revise the hypothesis,
7. Repeat steps 3-6 until happy.

Further advice

• In reading focus on books and articles (and their parts) that are most likely to change your mind. Same goes for discussing claims.
• Try switching your hypothesis around and arguing for the other side to find the best arguments there.
• Reformulating your hypothesis so that it’s easier to defend while still important is a good productivity hack.

My thoughts

• This method will also train your research skills, which is a nice bonus.
• With this approach the reading changes from push mode (author pushes ides to you) to pull mode (you look for ideas, arguments and data). This is somewhat complementary to Dave Lee reading method.
• Perhaps the overhead of writing things down is balanced out by greater information filtering effciency that this method nudges you into. Whereas normally you would just read/watch/discuss all kinds of things about an interesting topic, when you're in "research mode", you will seek out important stuff.