Over the last few episodes, we saw that our intuitions about how we perceive and remember
the world are often mistaken. In fact, we have no real privileged access into the basis
of our decisions, how it is that we do what we do. In the last episode, we introduced
a more realistic account of how the mind works. We spoke about system one and system two and
chatted to Danny Kahneman about some the heuristics and biases that we rely on, that we have to
rely on, in order to deal with the complexity and ambiguity of the world.
One of the things I think is important that people take away from the last episode is
that it's not really a matter of just slowing down. That's not really a solution. As Danny
Kahneman said during our interview, when we asked him how to improve everyday thinking,
he suggested that we pick only a couple of areas and try to improve those, or recruit
the help of a friend, someone who's looking at the circumstance from the outside.
The reason he made this suggestion, I think, is that—you know, he's been doing this a
long time—50 years, I think, he's been in this area—and he's won a Nobel Prize. If
anyone is going to improve their everyday thinking by generally improving their problem-solving
skills, it's going to be Danny Kahneman, and he mentioned that his everyday thinking
hasn't improved over the last 50 years or so.
So where does that leave us? Well, just being more careful or being more deliberate really
isn't going to help necessarily. That's only half the story. Of course, learning the names
of these heuristics and biases are important so people can recognize them when they're
actually happening, but that's only half the story.
The other half of the story is what we're going to talk about today, which is learning
to learn. We talked to Geoff Norman, who essentially teaches this stuff to doctors about this very
topic, and here's what he had to say.
How do they improve as an expert? You mentioned that we—going slow doesn't necessarily help,
being deliberative, and there's this compounded issue of self-assessment that we often don't
know how good we're actually doing at any given case. I mean, what does that mean for
improving practice? How do we get better? How do—the goal of this course that we're
taking is called The Science of Everyday Thinking. So given your experience in the field of expertise
and in medicine, how do we improve everyday thinking?
You improve by knowing more.
So just the accumulation of experiences.
Yes. It seems so tantalizing. It would really nice if I could be very prescriptive and say,
"Well, if you do this, that, and the other thing, then you'll be much better." At some
level, I guess there's got to be a bit of a germ of truth in that. This course wouldn't
exist if we didn't think that there are some—that being explicit about everyday thinking and
the traps in everyday thinking wouldn't help people think better. At some level that's
true, but that's generally locked in to what's been called general problem-solving strategies,
which are not very powerful. Sure, that's going to help a bit. I suppose reflection
is going to help a little bit, but it seems that all of these strategies, to sort of generalize
horrendously, are good for about a 10-percent improvement. It's not zero, but it's not
night-and-day or black-and-white either.
Very clearly, the single best predictor of how good you are is how much you know about
the domain, not what problem-solving skills you bring to bear on it. We began there. That
was wrong. Question is: are there strategies we can do to optimize the acquisition of knowledge?
Again, we're talking about two kinds of knowledge: formal knowledge and experiential
knowledge. We're now beginning to discover— and I can't take any personal credit for this
one; this isn't my domain—but people like Mayer, Bjork, Roediger had been working hard
on taking models of the nature of the mind—short-term working memory, long-term memory, associative—and
turning that into very prescriptive and powerful strategies to enhance the efficiency of learning.
Things like—an obvious thing like mixing up examples from across multiple chapters
so that you have to try and figure out which is which—it turns out to be an extremely
powerful strategy for learning.
The idea of transfer, which is being able to take knowledge that you've learned in one
context and apply it to another: one, it doesn't happen at all as easily as we think it does;
but, two, psychologists would devise strategies to make that happen better.
I think this is moving much more into the instructional educational psychology end of
things. There are things we can do to very much enhance the efficiency with which you
acquire the knowledge you need to get the job done as a diagnostician or as a human.
My name is Geoff. I think about reasoning.
I think it's really clear now that just telling people to slow down, to be more careful,
is not going to help people improve their everyday thinking. Yes, it's really important
that we have the vocabulary for this stuff. You need to be able to know what the heuristics
and biases are and point to them and see where they're operating.
But as Geoff said, the key to improving thinking, to thinking better, is to know more. So if
you want to be a better singer, you have to spend time singing. If you want to become
a better cricket player, you have to practice.
That's part of the story, I think, but the other half is, as Geoff said, yes, practice
is important. You need to spend the time and the effort actually doing the thing that it
is that you want to improve on, but the other is actually taking the advice or learning
from experts, so reading, right? You need to spend time looking at the things that experts
say are important within that field in order to improve a lot more.
So when it comes to sports, knowing where to put your fingers or your feet is critical.
In academics, learning from experts or academics tell you what area or what things to read
within that area so you're not going down blind alleys all the time. They can tell you
exactly where you need to focus your attention. That's really important. That's what reading does.
But this idea of general knowledge or general problem-solving, as Geoff Norman called it,
is a little bit tricky, isn't it? I mean, he said that, yes, that's not going to help.
Having this sort of generic problem-solving capability hasn't done very well in the past.
Danny Kahneman mentioned that in his interview as well. So just having this sort of blunt-force
thing that you can apply to each of these different areas isn't going to terribly successful,
and the reason it's not is that it's so far removed. You have this general purpose
tool that you're applying to all of these different very specific things, and by that
very nature, it's going to be unsuccessful because it's so far removed from each of these
different areas. What is going to be successful is exactly as you mentioned: in order to improve
everyday thinking, you need to know more. You need to expand your experiences with that particular domain.
That's what we're going to talk about today specifically: learning how to learn. If your
goal is to try to improve, is to try to know as much as you can about a particular domain,
we can help. We know a lot. We can help you get there more efficiently. We can help with
learning the information faster and hanging on to it for a longer period of time.
So we talked to John Dunlosky who's done an enormous amount of work in this area. He's
done a massive analysis of all of the techniques that seem to be effective and those that don't,
and here's what he had to say.