Related to: Rationalization, Meditation on curiosity, Original Seeing.
Why aren’t you learning faster?
For me, one answer is: because I’m not asking questions. I blunder through conversations trying to “do my job”, or to look good, or elaborating my own theories, or allowing cached replies to come out of my mouth on autopilot. I blunder through readings, scanning my eyes over the words and letting thoughts strike me as they may. Rarely am I pulled by a specific desire to know.
And most of my learning happens at those rare times.
How about you? When you read, how often do you chase something? When you chat with your friends -- are you curious about how they’re doing, why their mouth twitched as they said that, or why exactly they disagree with you about X? When you sit down to write, or to do research -- are you asking yourself specific questions, and then answering them?
Are there certain situations in which you get most of your useful ideas -- situations you could put yourself in more often?
Lately, when I notice that I’m not curious about anything, I’ve been trying to interrupt whatever I’m doing. If I’m in a conversation, and neither I nor my interlocutor is trying to figure something out, I call a mini “halt, melt, and catch fire” (inside my head, at least), and ask myself what I want. Surely not stale conversations. If I’m writing, and I don’t like the sentence I just wrote -- instead of reshuffling the words in the hopes that the new version will just happen to be better, I ask myself what I don’t like about it.
Thus, for the past six months, several times a day, I've interrupted my thoughts and put them back on an “ask questions” track. (“Grrr, he said my argument was dishonest... Wait, is he right? What should it look like if he is?”; “I notice I feel hopeless about this paper writing. Maybe there’s something I should do differently?”) It's helping. I'm building the habit of interrupting myself when I'm "thinking" without trying to find something out, or taking actions that I expect won't accomplish anything. As a human, I’m probably stuck running on habits -- but I can at least change *which* habits I run on.
My experience has been similar, and I'll also add on a related note that probably one big reason why I'm not better at casual conversation is that if I'm not genuinely curious about the answer to a question I'm asking, I often won't have anything interesting to say as a followup to whatever answer I get (e.g. maybe I'll ask "So, where are you from?" or "What school do you go to?", and they'll answer, and then I'll say, "...Ah, um, okay" and not have anything else to say). It seems to me that a lot of advice on conversation (of the type prepared for people with Asperger's syndrome, or social anxiety, or general awkwardness) teaches mostly superficial aspects of conversation, and I suspect that there's a deeper art to it that can't be conveyed so easily. Probably the best way to develop such a sense is to be the sort of person who is naturally actually curious about other people, but for those of us to whom social curiosity doesn't come so naturally, learning to fake it well probably requires a much deeper understanding than can be attained by memorizing standard small-talk questions and such. I expect it's possible to learn to successfully simulate social curiosity, but not if one only understands it at that superficial level.
You've already identified the weakness of asking questions. It should come as no surprise to you that Pick Up ("that" subject) teaches one to never ask questions. It is advice for dating, but holds for generally any conversation. Compare and contrast a standard interaction.
Question: "What school did you go to?" This allows-> Answer: "" which segues into.... "...Ah, um, okay." It's a bad conversation track. You're asking for effort from them while forcing them to respond in a narrow field, which they proba... (read more)