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BrandonReinhart comments on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently - Less Wrong
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Here is another question, regarding the basic methdology of study. When you are reading a scholastic work and you encounter an unfamiliar concept, do you stop to identify the concept or continue but add the concept to a list to be pursued later? In other words, do you queue the concept for later inspection or do you 'step into' the concept for immediate inspection?
I expect the answer to be conditional, but knowing what conditions is useful. I find myself sometimes falling down the rabbit hole of chasing chained concepts. Wikipedia makes this mistake easy.
Adding to the tangent, in my opinion, the concepts of scholastic philosophy are actually incredibly useful for rationality in general. They usually end up being logic terms, and they are employed well outside of their concept even in modern works. A lot of times, for example, when you read an argument and understand there is something wrong with the argument, but have a hard time putting your finger on what is wrong with the argument, there's typically some scholastic term that will nail it for you. The scholastics were incredibly subtle, and are typically the ones ridiculed when the expression "splitting hairs" comes to fore. But usually that ridicule is made by people who aren't subtle, and don't realize that the distinctions are incredibly important.
It depends on whether the concept appears to be necessary to my understanding of what I care about or not. Sorry I can't give an example right now.