I have very detailed opinions on lots of topics. I sometimes get asked how I do this, which might just be people making fun of me, but I choose to interpret it as a real question, and I’m going to sketch an answer here.

You can think of this as a sort of sequel to Minimal-Trust Investigations. That piece talked about how investigating things in depth can be valuable; this piece will try to give a sense of how to get an in-depth investigation off the ground, going from “I’ve never heard of this topic before” to “Let me tell you all my thoughts on that.”

The rough basic idea is that I organize my learning around writing rather than reading. This doesn’t mean I don’t read - just that the reading is always in service of the writing.

Here’s an outline:

Step 1	Pick a topic
Step 2	Read and/or discuss with others (a bit)
Step 3	Explain and defend my current, incredibly premature hypothesis, in writing (or conversation)
Step 4	Find and list weaknesses in my case
Step 5	Pick a subquestion and do more reading/discussing
Step 6	Revise my claim / switch sides
Step 7	Repeat steps 3-6 a bunch
Step 8	Get feedback on a draft from others, and use this to keep repeating steps 3-6

The “traditionally” hard parts of this process are steps 4 and 6: spotting weaknesses in arguments, trying to resist the temptation to “stick to my guns” when my original hypothesis isn’t looking so good, etc.

But step 3 is a different kind of challenge: trying to “always have a hypothesis” and re-articulating it whenever it changes. By doing this, I try to continually focus my reading on the goal of forming a bottom-line view, rather than just “gathering information.” I think this makes my investigations more focused and directed, and the results easier to retain. I consider this approach to be probably the single biggest difference-maker between "reading a ton about lots of things, but retaining little" and "efficiently developing a set of views on key topics and retaining the reasoning behind them."

Below I'll give more detail on each step, then some brief notes (to be expanded on later) on why this process is challenging.

My process for learning by writing

Step 1: pick a topic. First, I decide what I ...

Ishan Mukherjee

Ishan Mukherjee

Ishan Mukherjee

Ishan Mukherjee