I see you learned many subjects of interest at school, & that was impressive. Was It hard to incorporate interdisciplinary learning in life, like learning is great in itself but It takes a lot to piece together so many different pieces of theories in life. Do you mind sharing how you can make peace with all those information? thank you.
If I'm a good interdisciplinary learner today, there is lots of credit to go around. The school I went to encouraged interdisciplinary study and I was lucky to have met several interdisciplinary professors who had a deep influence on me. Also, when you majored in a so-called "impractical" subject, you were generally encouraged to pair it with something more practical. For instance, psychology students were often encouraged to double major with education or business, which fostered an interdisciplinary mindset. Unfortunately, I doubled down on the impractical by pairing with philosophy lol.
Many people don't know the history of the university. The first universities in early Western civilization only had one subject: philosophy. This meant philosophy had to cover everything, so it is interdisciplinary at heart. It wasn't until much later during the scientific revolution that natural sciences separated out from philosophy. And it wasn't until about a century ago that the social sciences separated out from the natural sciences.
Most philosophy courses in university are labeled "philosophy of _____". The blank includes a wide range of possible subjects, such as: aesthetics; bioethics; business ethics; culture; death; economics; education; environmental ethics; existentialism; gender; history; knowledge; language; law; literature; logic; love; mathematics; medicine; meta-ethics; metaphysics; mind; money; morality; politics; psychology; religion; rhetoric; science; sex; technology; values; etc.
A person who is drawn to major in philosophy is likely to already have an interdisciplinary attitude. As you can see, a well-educated philosophy major is basically able to understand the theoretical underpinnings of any subject, which gives them a big leg up in studying anything. People like to joke about philosophy majors having few practical skills (it is true in my case), but they consistently get the highest scores on tests of intellectual ability compared to every other major.
Fortunately, I am blessed with natural talent for learning theory as well as a personal passion for it, so I don't find it particularly difficult. As for how to "make peace" with all the information, it's hard to explain. Suffice it to say that the ability to learn progresses in predictable stages, from lower order to higher order thinking skills. A philosophy textbook that I can now absorb in a week might've taken me a month to process in the first year of university. You have to take a lot of time to build up a solid foundation of knowledge through lower order learning before you can reach the higher order stage of being able to synthesize information, see: Bloom's Taxonomy.
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with regards to learning it may be important to know about IEOD(illusion of explanation depth) which may sometimes lead us to believe we understand more about the world than we think this can be especially true for those with an intuitive preference i write this because I've fallen for it too I hope this helps
I have discussed such learning problems in previous posts. After spending many years teaching, tutoring, and coaching students from a variety of backgrounds, in a variety of subjects, it never ceases to amaze me just how little people understand about learning. I believe that basic knowledge of learning theory is necessary for optimizing the learning process, if one hopes to be a good student of anything.
With so much information at the fingertips, it's more important than ever that people are mindful about how they learn. Being in the role of "student" is hard because you're a newbie and you're ignorant and you don't know the best way to tackle a big subject. Without a good teacher or an expert to guide you, you might come to rely on dubious sources of information, misinterpret what you read, misapply the ideas, or hit a seemingly insurmountable block/plateau.
Unfortunately, there are not enough good teachers to go around. Unfortunately, many teachers in public education are tasked with "babysitting" rather than teaching, to the detriment of learning. As a result, too many students get to high school, i.e., into adulthood, without a solid foundation of study skills.
Just recently, I was helping a twelfth grade student with essay writing. Being a good student, they couldn't understand why they kept getting low marks in writing despite putting a lot of effort into the assignments. Turns out, they kept submitting summaries of the literature when the teacher was explicitly asking for analysis of the literature. When I brought this problem to their attention, they were even more confused, because they thought they had been doing analysis all along. They had no clue that there was a difference between summary and analysis, so they were incapable of getting to the level of depth that the teacher was demanding.
One of the first things I often have to do with students is explain the difference between lower order vs higher order learning. Lower order learning is usually enough to pass the class throughout K-12 or achieve basic competency. Higher order learning moves people into expert territory. Without a clear vision of what they should be aspiring to, students tend to get stuck in lower order learning.
The difference between lower and higher order learning is neatly summarized by Bloom's Taxonomy, a conceptual framework for evaluating cognitive/intellectual ability. It breaks down the learning process into six categories/levels: 1) remember, 2) understand, 3) apply, 4) analyze, 5) evaluate, 6) create. Since it's hard to quantify exactly what's happening in a student's mind during learning, this framework helps by asking concrete questions about what the student can or cannot do.
My student got stuck at level 2 when the average requirement for the class was 4. They gave me a sample essay that their teacher considered to be "excellent" and it was easily at 5. While they could "feel" that there was a difference between their own essay and the excellent essay, they weren't able to articulate the difference at all.
One learning problem that people, Ns especially, often suffer is that they tend to get ahead of themselves, which is related to illusion of explanation depth. It's basically trying to run before walking. For example:
they believe "gist" is enough and dismiss details
they conflate knowing (theory) and doing (real world)
they judge/conclude without proper analysis
they try to create without mastering the basics
The above problems arise when a person doesn't realize how much they don't know (and in the case of an unhealthy personality, they refuse to acknowledge it). My student (N) is a good example. They believed that being able to do level 2 stuff (paraphrase, summarize, interpret, give examples) qualified as level 4 "analysis" and that this meant they had "mastered" the material. They simply didn't know any better or that more was possible. It wasn't until I explained to them the differences between lower and higher order learning that they began to realize how low-level their writing actually was.
I've talked before about the differences between a good student vs a good learner. A simple way to think about it: A good student is preoccupied with proving how much they know, so they are mainly motivated by extrinsic rewards or egotistical gain. By contrast, a good learner is preoccupied with how much they don't know, so they are mainly motivated by intrinsic rewards or intellectual humility that naturally breeds intellectual curiosity.
Hello! First of all, thanks so much for this awesome blog. I wanted to ask if you have suggestions on how I can deepen my understanding of psychology—I am INFJ and I'm personally interested in using study the way you do to derive insights and interpretations because I have always been interested in the field. However, when I try to read textbooks or formal sources of information I find myself unable to apply the information or really see the 'point' of it; what should I approach as a beginner?
I’m not sure that I can give you an encouraging response because, in reality, the path of independent learning is a difficult one to travel, and sometimes it is only your own passion that sustains you, i.e., you must be intrinsically motivated.Â
First off, I’m able to learn well today because I took the time and spent money to acquire good learning skills through many years of formal education. While there are some genuine autodidacts in this world, they are few and far between. I believe that formal education is necessary for becoming an expert in any field that is offered at the university level. You need experienced instructors, a well-designed curriculum, access to the most current learning materials, and the constant feedback of a classroom setting to ensure that you build a solid foundation of knowledge. Imagine that you tried to do advanced yoga on your own for the first time, without having had anyone correct your mistakes before, there’s a good chance you’d hurt yourself. Imagine that you opened up a calculus textbook when you hadn’t even learned basic arithmetic yet, how would you begin? I know that some readers here are young or haven’t been through university, so I’ll lay out the process in general terms.
A lot of people joke that psychology is the study of the obvious, but it’s actually a difficult subject if you aim to move beyond the introductory level. To get beyond introductory requires learning a lot of theory (psychology has a long history of scholars coming up with theories), so people struggle when they’re not very good at grasping/remembering theories.
Additionally, psychology is a very, very broad field, so its graduates end up in many different places, from business to marketing to education to research to communications to politics to fiction writing. Even when you graduate with a bachelor’s degree, chances are, you still haven’t really experienced the full range of the entire field because you’re forced to specialize in one area due to time constraints. There’s simply no time (and perhaps not enough money) to take every class and explore every subfield, especially if you attend a very small college that isn’t able to offer a fully representative selection of courses.
Thus, If someone says that they have a psychology degree, it actually doesn’t tell you very much about what they learned. You’ll find that it’s quite difficult to compare two psychology major students because they might be learning very, very different things. Furthermore, not every person is a good student, some people get by with a C average and don’t know much, while others take on extra work and know quite a lot.
Everyone has to start with “psychology 101”, which amounts to reading a good introductory textbook that presents all the different subfields and summarizes all the current research in each area. From there, you take intermediate and then advanced courses in 1-2 subfields that you are most interested in. If you are in a good school and an honors student, you should have to do a big research project on your own to prove that you can apply the things you’ve learned, which forces you to narrow your focus to a tiny little point. You’d then have to present your findings and defend your work to the experts themselves. That’s basically all you can accomplish in four years, but it lays the foundation for deeper learning in the future, should you want to reach the doctorate level eventually, and many students enter psychology with the intent to get a PhD. You can’t get all of this valuable experience on your own.
Many people don’t understand the learning process and how difficult it actually is, mainly because what they know of learning is only from their limited personal experience of grades K-12, very basic stuff. Psychologists have created theoretical frameworks to teach people how to learn better. I’ll give you an example of one of these frameworks called Bloom’s Taxonomy (the image is easily found in google if you can’t read it well here):
This framework is useful because it allows you to see the stark difference between lower order learning vs higher order learning. You’re saying that you want to be at the highest levels where you’re able to take old knowledge and use it to create new knowledge. But it sounds like you’re still at the lowest level of accumulating foundational knowledge, which means that you have a long way to go. You simply aren’t capable of creating new knowledge when you don’t have a strong foundation of basic knowledge to play around with. The grunt “memorization” work of the lowest level is an essential step that many people fail to make it through because they convince themselves that memorizing is “useless” or “pointless” and then give up.
I’m not saying that it’s impossible for people to move up to higher order learning by themselves, but I will say that it will be a very slooowwww and difficult process without experts to guide you and actively pressure you up to higher levels. I’d say that the majority of high school grads never make it beyond the comprehension level. University grads are pushed to reach the analysis level, though many don’t (as observed from my teaching experience). And it is only the people who are most dedicated to their field of study that make it to the highest two levels.
You compare yourself to me, but it’s not a fair comparison. People don’t know the work I’ve done; they only see the results. I continued to study and fortify my foundational knowledge on my own, for the sake of lifelong learning, even though I had a full time job that always bled into my personal time. I read up on every subfield of psychology that I didn’t get to study in school so that my knowledge base was as extensive as possible. I tried to keep up with current research in the subfields that I had specialized in so as to deepen my knowledge. I continued to watch psychology lectures that were increasingly available online over the years. Part of my motivation in running this blog is that it forces me to research and keep learning. What can I say? I love learning and I especially love higher order learning. I structure my whole life around it. And this doesn’t even include the work that I’ve done for my other major in philosophy, which is actually my true passion in life.
Lifelong learning is not a lifestyle for everyone, but it’s the life I’ve chosen. I’m not a savant and I don’t believe I’m exceptionally intelligent. My strength lies here: No matter what I choose to learn, I’m always willing to start at the very bottom and put in the “boring” grunt work that is necessary to gradually push myself up the pyramid of learning, because I understand that every step is important for reaching the future goal.
I know that my response might sound discouraging as it presents your problem as an epic mountain to climb. I don’t want to sound discouraging but I have to answer honestly so that you know what you’re getting into - I can’t make everything sound easy only to create disappointment for you down the road. I hope that Bloom’s Taxonomy gives you a sense of what is required for higher order learning so that you have something more tangible to aim for. It sounds like you want to become more knowledgeable and insightful, which is a noble goal, but it’s also much too vague.
You need focus and direction (“psychology” is too broad). You have to set concrete learning goals and make good long term plans to guide you. You have to find ways to test your knowledge and apply it. Most importantly, you have to possess intrinsic motivation or personal passion that gets you over hurdles and challenges. If the only reason you’re aiming high is because you envy someone else, then you are extrinsically motivated, and it might not be enough. If the reason you’re aiming high is because you genuinely see more potential in yourself to fulfill, then you’re on a better track.
