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Re wanting to learn how to think, 2026-03-04

Mar 04, 202618 min read

Brief context

  • After a recent brief “crisis” where I thought I should meditate as much as possible in order to get out of emptiness/be happy/something, I was nudged back to “it’s the obsessive seeking that’s the problem, didn’t you experience deep okayness in the past?” by a mentor (lucky me!!!!)
  • And, with the “spiritual search” therefore declawed as a Thing To Prioritise, that has left me in an interesting vacuum, where the question therefore became “ok, if I don’t need to heal, then what should I do?”, and for whatever reason the genuine fact of my poor education has become very apparent to me as a Truth that has held me back in life
    • This is probably downstream of spending time with the executive director here and seeing just how much better he is at thinking that me, the complexity he can easily hold, etc

My “education”

What do I mean by wanting to learn how to think?

It’s simple, really - I think I’m barely educated, and would like to be educated.

Secondary school

I went to an average “state school” in England, from 2007 to 2014, 11 to 18 years old.

This was considered a good school according to the standards agency (OFSTED?). But I believe that this was comparing it against other state schools.

(Claude here: “…the two sectors are often inspected by different organizations using different frameworks.“)

It has been my belief, for years, that a private school would have been significantly better, more rigourous, more of a real “education”, or at least, setting you up for a real university, where you would get a real education.

I believe that the education I received was very poor, compared to what I would have achieved at a private school. And not to mention, compared to e.g. John Stuart Mill, who I appreciate is the absolute archetype of the complete opposite life (a father dedicated to making his son a genius). But still, just to gesture at would kind of education could have been possible, to demonstrate the possible maximum value here, to prevent the “no, it was a good school!” that a small-minded person who isn’t aware of higher standards.

I did math, of state-school quality, up until the age of 15. No algebra, pre-calc, anything like that. Really basic stuff. I never learned what a matrix was, for example. I never learned about imaginary numbers. I remembering hearing about both of these from my friends who did take math at A Level (which is 17-18 years old, the final 2 years, after GCSEs)

I got all A*s and As at GCSEs (easy, no studying needed). At A Level, I got an A* in English, and A in Psychology, an A in Biology, and a C in chemistry (the math was hard for me).

Undergrad

I then had to choose an undergraduate degree. Unlike in America, where it seems that you can explore for the first year and then choose a “major”, in the UK you choose before you apply and get accepted.

I was tempted to do English Literature or Psychology , but was aware that there’d be no jobs (or least, that’s the thing I told myself). So I went for Biomedical Science, with the vague vision of becoming a doctor (really, the only high-status job I was aware of).

Totally delusional to think I’d be able to do Medicine, as it’s highly competitive, and an ideal applicant would already have done “work experience” placements multiple times (e,g,, my girlfriend’s cousin, whose parents were both GPs, had already done work experience placements at his parent’s practice multiple times).

(I had never spoken to my parents about careers. My mum was a part-time nurse, my Dad owned a small shipping and freighting company.)

So I chose biomedical sciences, as I found biology easy and vaguely interesting (although, I know realise, far less interesting than English Literature, or Psychology. I was bizarrely good at writing in English Literature ( literally, never received any notes/feedback other than “keep it up”, I was the undisputed star of the class) (and I found psychology genuinely interesting, and had a budding insight that “my parents were messed up” ( remember my chemistry teaching that people only did psychology if their parents were messed up, which plausibly unlocked that thought for me).

So I did biomedical sciences, and you arrive and it’s like, 2 hour lectures where they tell you a bunch of stuff and expect you to remember it.

And it was an insane increase in volume, and I had no idea how to study, so I took notes and highlighted and forgot everything I was told within a few weeks.

Realising that I wasn’t learning

So by my third year of this, I had the insight that my study habits were clearly ridiculous (e.g. cramming before an exam by trying to squeeze as much text from a lecture as possible onto a single piece of handwritten A4 and then like, staring at it hard. Literally mad to think that I did this, given how into learning I’ve become since this time. A person with an entirely different inner experience, able to study very badly and not feel self-punitive about it. Just a naive and clueless but non-neurotic (in this way) guy.)

So but anyway, I googled “how to learn” at some point and came across, and then did, the “Learning How To Learn” “MOOC” (massively online (something) course”. And this opened up this part of my internal experience, unfolded my like, map of thinkable thoughts, to include a section that said “hey, you know you can learn efficiently and well”, rather than before, when that section was entirely blank. I suppose I went from being subject to my learning skills, and subject to the cultural vibe that learning is a thing that just happens (e.g. “transmissionism” as an unchecked assumption).

This must have recommended spaced repetition flashcards, which I then got into, and they were insanely powerful. I learned English kings and queens in order, having never known anything at all about history, and was deeply thrilled about this, to see things actually genuinely durably stick into my mind, to be able to ramble off the top of my head to my Jane to demonstrate the fact that this worked.

And I realised that, given that I’d forgotten the first 2 years of my undergrad, that it was really too late for me to use Anki spaced repetition flashcards for my undergrad. So I dabbled with other stuff in my spare time

This as a source of shame

NOTE TO SELF - publish this as a new shame post !!!! ???

Realising that this actually HAS been both a huge preoccupation, and something that I’ve felt very embarrassed about. E.g., the dumb one at the biotech startup, lower tier. {Founder} and {engineer} vs me at the mental health startup. Going to Imperial College London for my master’s where everyone was rich and international and well educated, my girlfriend’s dad’s side of the family, the two GPs, the young doctors.

But I still have a lot to be proud of!

Education as folding out more parts of your brain. And seeing how much I’ve done this already. How different I am, intellectually, from the young man I was at 17 at A Level, or 19 in second year of uni, of during Master’s when I was reading one (pop) non-fiction or history book per week, and before that at my first job after uni when I was listening to Andrew Marr’s history of England, and then re-read and made flashcards after realising I’d retained none of it, and developing a genuine working knowledge of the basics of English politics since the 1940s, a shallow view of the key events and each leader at the very least, enough of a framework to allow further thinking (which I didn’t do, but ce la vie, it was more a thrilling proof of concept).

And to end up, at 26, hired at a biotech startup, under unusual circumstances, but remaining there, and getting effusive feedback from the co-CEO who was my direct manager for 5 months, re: the rate of my learning, my productivity, and my meta-cognition, and ability to crystallise concepts and create visual diagrams to aid thinking.

So here I am

So here I am, 29.5 years old.

My high school education was poor. My undergraduate education was not an education, it was 2 years of facts falling out of my head, an eventual 2:1 (the most average grade), arguably no knowledge retained, no job in the field gotten, etc. I never really truly cared about biology, and after university, I didn’t think about it at all.

And I taught myself enough Python to become a data analyst, and I became obsessed enough with learning (anki + obsidian, although I now believe that the way I used obsidian was mostly entirely foolish). And this obsession did lead to tangible skill in learning (mostly via flashcards, and later visual notes to clarify, simplify and help grok, making flashcards of progressive depth and making visual note sof progressive simplicity both genuine forms of active learning, maybe even somewhat “constructive ”, in the ICAP framework. I also had a bit of awareness of Bloom’s taxonomy and Solo’s model for learning, although I never e.g. wrote essays to test my knowledge - flashcards were as far as I got).

Biotech job, diligent idiot

And so anyway. That led to the biotech job, and sure, I ended up not doing knowledge management stuff for it, partly because it seemed like we didn’t really need it, but I think actually because it turned out that I had essentially no skill there, literally the first “knowledge management” tool that I set up was a net negative that no one liked using. A manager very diplomatically put it that I “seemed to have somewhat less knowledge in some of the stuff that I owned than I might” - really, I was a guy who was decent at making his own flashcards, with a messy Obsidian vault, which the co-CEO mistakenly thought was a very sophisticated system, and hired me for 4x my UK income in a rush of a few days, with no sense checks done at all, as money was flowing and it was the COVID pandemic so there was a feeling of urgency.

So really, I didn’t get to stick around at the biotech startup because of my knowledge management skills, at all. I pivoted to internal operations “process improvement”, as a low-stakes place for me to help people at the startup. I didn’t create anything profound or complicated. But I was competent in a low-skilled way, a diligent idiot, really. And the other people at the biotech startup were very smart, genuinely educated and skilled.

So I did well there, considering the low stakes of my role. I probably should have been paid 4x less.

It should also be noted that I was genuinely skilled (naturally) at being a very good “bastion of the culture”. The co-CEO said that I’d be the person he’d point to as the bastion of the culture. Very warm (digitally, at least, I was mildly traumatised and scared in person, e.g. on work retreats, and I felt very inferior, very “Different” (rightly!)), funny (I had a memes channel where I posted custom-made memes about the startup), friendly, helpful, very positive vibes (I mean, I was thrilled to be there, wildly overpaid, and not working on anything stressful).

And the funder exploded so funding dried up and they let go of 9 people, including me (and a few months later, the startup no longer existed).

And I lived off my ridiculous bonus that I got at some point for no reason, and some severance, and all the money I had saved up from suddenly getting paid a ridiculous sum per month. Even after breaking up with my girlfriend and giving her half of my net worth (Sep 2022), I had enough to live off of for like, 3 years (being fairly stingy, and going to Asia).

Mental health startup, diligent idiot

And after a year of travelling and discovering the post-rat world and emotions and etc1, I got a job at a mental health startup (really, a solopreneur thing), working for free for a while, doing basic “customer success” stuff. And I was useful for a year, in a low stakes way, no huge wins. The company never really grew, I was barely paid anything (but didn’t mind because I still had my savings, and didn’t mind spending them because it felt like freedom, and it felt like I hardly earned the money anyway, like I’d never expected to have so much). And I liked being a part of the internal family systems world, and having calls with nice post-rat people who wanted to test the app, growing my post-rat network a bit.

(I can see so much bad thinking, lack of thinking, bad philosophy, looking at my past self now. And of course, my past self leads right into my current self, so stepwise improvement in my thinking here, really.)

Rationality sprint

And somehow at some point I realised how much I should learn rationality, so I started a rationality sprint (start of 2025), although it only lasted like a month. I didn’t even know what epistemology was, really basic stuff, basic logic (which I still don’t really know, stuff as simple as a valid vs sound argument, etc).

So I did a coursera course (well, parts 1 and 2) on basic logic, and I think deductive reasoning. And I studied this in the highly inefficient way of making flashcards. That is, I didn’t try writing arguments, or essays. I just memorised the bits and pieces. Until I burnt out on it. Or maybe, I realised that mapping my values, my telos, would be a good idea? I forget. I’m sure one led to the other

Personal values sprint

Then I pivoted to mapping out my personal values2, which reminded me of how much I’d loved working at the biotech startup, so therefore I should get a similar high-skill job. So I emailed a few people about being their chief of staff (ha!). I emailed {person 1} and {person 2} from the biotech startup days. I applied to be a chief of staff at Open Philanthropy and really thought I had a chance.

Longview Philanthropy ExA

Then I applied for an ExA role at Longview Philanthropy, which I thought was low status and beneath me, but when I realised that their CoS was an ExA for 2 years before becoming a CoS, I got excited. And I ended up nearly getting the role, being one of two final applicants, after two work trials. (I think this is a sign that people as smart as me are normally doing proper knowledge worker jobs, so for me to apply for an ExA role means I’m always going to be like, 80% percentile of applicants.

”Competent generalist” excursus, and funnel

  • (Sorry, this is a rambly brain-dump innit)

(I think this is a really good point. I excel in roles where they don’t actually expect you to be properly educated, like “competent generalist” roles, like internal operations, customer success, data analyst)

You could imagine a model of like, a funnel, from genuinely dumb people who therfore couldn’t do white-collar work. Like, filters. First filter is like, can you do computer grunt work like editing podcasts etc. Then, are you also unusually good at something (e.g. in my case, making diagrams, metacognition ). If yes, then you may be more reliable than a low-skill grunt re: e.g. planning out a simple system that needs to be easy for the skilled people to use, causing no issues. If yes, cool, you’ve passed the “competent enough” filter and can be a “competent idiot” at the biotech startup (especially as you’re also a culture fit and the co-CEO has a good feeling about your character).

And then like, are you competent and smart enough to be a competent idiot, but also, you can think rigorously, and handle bigger problems (e.g., do you have a higher MHC level, due to doing physics or math at uni?). If yes, then you can be a data scientist, or a management consultant. (This is what my 3 friends who did physics undergrads went on to do)

Also, perhaps you’ve just spent multiple years learning medicine rigourously, in which case you are now ready to be a doctor (and truly, only those that know enough pass and become doctors, this is not a degree mill, it’s life or death).

Competent idiot

So anyway, competent idiot is where I’ve remained. I’m intelligent, but untrained. I don’t have a body of knowledge. In a real way, my technical education never began

I have pockets of knowledge, far more than your typical competent idiot. I taught myself Python, and how to learn, and then learned various things, mostly in a fickle way. But these things I’ve learned and completely disjointed, shallow. And they’ve never gotten me to the higher levels of reasoning and abstraction that e.g. a physics undergrad must get you to. There’s no bullshitting in a physics exam, you either can get the calculations correct or not. Sink or swim. Whereas in biology, you can get by on cramming, and then forgettnig (at least, at average, non-elite universities).

The good news

The good news is: I have demonstrated repeatedly that I can learn. I’ve unfolded in a bunch of directions!

More good news: I have a mentor who can think, does know what I’m missing (or at least, will have guesses and suspicions).

So, for literally the first time in my life, rather than guessing at what to learn next, and being led partly or mostly by fickle interests, I can learn things in an order that makes sense. And also, in a way that makes sense, e.g., not making flashcards from an online course about logic and argumentation, but actually practicing by writing arguments, and arguing with people IRL.

My study habits have been plagued by blind spots, like not thinking critically about what to learn, not realising that there were core things that if I learned could have given me a much better internal framework with which to think, not realising that flash cards are often not the correct way to learn. And now I have an external consciousness that can tell me exactly what I’m doing wrong, and how to correct it.

It’s like if you learned martial arts by yourself for 10 years, with no mentors, exploring many different techniques whenever they felt interesting to you, never going deep on anything, and whilst also working a full time job as a competent idiot, and having a girlfriend, and no one else around you is taking studying seriously. Vs having a mentor who recommends the core systems to learn, and points out what you’re doing wrong. Or vs going to a university and spending multiple years on this stuff full-time.

On this website

Note that in June of 2025 I did start writing up things on my website, which I found very helpful for my thinking. But I still did this in a way that is e.g. completely blind to logic, rationality, anything thorough about thinking things through. It’s always vibey braindumps where I eventually think I’d made a compelling argument for x thing. I’ve written enough to convince myself about x, based on vibes.

And occasionally, I’ve e.g. tried to learn about Socrates and how to think, the elenchus etc. But I never put these things to use, so they fall out of my brain. (E.g, in July of 2025, 03. Manifesto - “Why I Should Learn the Socratic Method”)

So that’s it, I’ve written another unsystematic brain dump. Hopefully one of my last?

Footnotes

  1. See e.g. So you want to learn about the post-rationalist “healing” space? (2025-11-10) ↩

  2. Kinda quixotic in retrospect, but useful. Using Daniel Schmactenberger’s “personal dharma” questions, writing answers to like 60% of them (it’s a ridiculously long list IMO (here)) ↩

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