To paraphrase Charles Darwin — not the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change tend to survive. Not just as a species, adaption is our key to even survive at everyday work, home, or for that matter in any social environment. Exact adaptive mechanism depends on the situation. But in general, explanation to a problem always helps. Essentially why did something happen? Explanations to that `Why` can through therapy, through study, or may be just through the bottle! To quote a character from Nolan’s Batman Begins – “you always fear what you don’t understand” – an explanation is simply a good start to figure out how to adapt.

Understanding that cause requires theory, and adequate explanations mandate good theories applied to correct contexts. Reading provides us with theories. But, hardest part is internalizing those theories and applying them to our context. Marvin Minsky famously said – “You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way”. It took me a while to grasp significance of this quote. Any relatively complex theory has several implicit assumptions. One way to discover those implicit assumptions is to apply those theories in multiple contexts. For instance, here is a theory — ‘”Apocalypse Now” is a great war movie’. But is it great because it’s a war movie? Not all war movies are great, so is it because it’s three hours long and well edited? But, then there are other movies which share same qualities and are not of the same grade. We can easily discover implicit assumptions in our thought by applying our theory to multiple contexts. No matter how big or small that thought, this is a great way to refine our own understanding. This is a lot similar to how basic scientific process works in a lab.

Beyond the question of movie reviews, we can apply this refining process to more abstract theories as well. Here’s such a theory – democracy is an effective process to make decisions. But, if we generalize that idea to all decision making processes, we’d soon be subjected to whims and fancies of majority rule. No individual or organization can function well by making all decisions via voting. We immediately discovered unknown implicit assumptions to our theory.  But, this process also depends on our ability to apply same idea to different contexts. That ‘transfer of learning’ seems uncommon. Probably because it requires higher levels of abstraction. We need to essentially infer voting as that abstract process and apply that to decisions in multiple contexts. In that sense, learning is a process of refining our theories, and accurately identifying all its applications, while progressively removing incorrect assumptions.

Eventually our ideas are a lot like arsenal, they need to be sharpened and our skills determine their best application. This learning is cognitively taxing, and developing those higher levels of cognition sort of takes time. But, Marvin Minsky is correct in stating – “You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way”.

Reading is definitely a great way to gain exposure to new ideas, but as we can see, internalizing them requires reflection. This is especially true for the challenges we face in our daily life. Because we are all battling different problems and have slightly different assumptions and beliefs about how the world works. So, no matter how good the book, new ideas need to always take root and evolve within our own mental context. They need to be refined and chiseled to fit our mental context and to our unique problems. For this some prefer meditation, or sleeping, but for restless minds it can be some activity — like rock climbing or hiking — or just motorcycling. Someone said — you are never on a motorcycle, you are always a part of it. In that sense, when you are a totally different entity, new ways of interpreting old ideas simply emerge. So, when I’m on a long ride, along with enjoying nature, the goal is to live up to Minsky’s sage advice.