How to write, think and learn more clearly

I stumbled upon a great presentation on Hacker News (2022-04). It was about write, thinking and learning more clearly.

Some of the ideas are worth excerpting here:

Writing

• People who write are powerful.
• You don’t know what you know until you try to express it.
• You don’t have to be able to name and classify the parts of your language in order to use them!
• Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader.
• Write down ideas in random order, then sort them.
• State the main point before you give the reasoning that leads to it.
• Put the main point of each paragraph in its first sentence.
• Always use the clearest, simplest language that will do the job. NEVER try to sound formal or sophisticated.
• Never use a word unless you know EXACTLY what it means.
• Whenever possible, shorten your sentences by removing needless words.
• Never draw the reader’s eye to anything that is not the main point.
• The reader will expect every change to mean something.

Thinking

• How do you know what a sentence means? Largely, by knowing how to find out if it’s true or false.
• Epistemology is the study of how to acquire knowledge by observing the world around you.
  • The goal is to end up believing things that are true and not believing things that are false.
• A belief isn’t warranted unless you could have known if it’s not true.
• Your guesses and opinions need to be testable. They have to say what will not happen.
• It is important to be able to understand and present sympathetically a position that you do not agree with.
• If people believe something, they probably have a reason worth knowing about even if they’re mistaken.

Learning

• Changing your goals is OK. Not having goals is not!
• Different kinds of material require different learning strategies.
• A student who is only good at one subject is often someone who only has one learning strategy.
• Students who are lost have always been lost longer than they want to admit.
• People accustomed to incomplete learning get terribly lost in rigorous, logical, mathematical material.