Hanlon's Razor

While going through a crisis of any kind can be challenging for most of us, one category that for sure feels the change is represented by the teaching staff worldwide.

When asked to teach their subject via Zoom or applications alike, teachers have to change their way of presenting the topic, make them seem more interesting and, what is even more important, to make the class more interactive; this can eventually lead to sadness, anxiety and fear even for the most experienced teachers.

If there is one thing that teachers should be particularly good at, this has to be mentoring their students.

By doing so, not only do they guide an individual's self-development throughout his or her school years, but they also emphasize the idea of human interaction, which should actually be the basis for most of our successful actions.

A big part of treatment for children with anxiety is to teach parents stress tolerance.

A mental health professional can help you work through methods of stress management for your specific needs.

You might learn strategies in therapy that you can impart to your child when she is feeling anxious.

Try to maintain a calm, neutral demeanor in front of your child, even if you are still trying to manage your anxiety. Children are quick to read facial expressions.

The “conscious competence” learning model is a way to learn new skills in the future, having 4 stages:

1. Unconscious Incompetence
2. Conscious Incompetence
3. Conscious Competence
4. Unconscious Competence

Stage One of this learning model is Unconscious Incompetence, where you are clueless and overwhelmed and don't know why.

In this stage: You don't know what you don't know.

How to really learn: Instead of rereading, highlighting, or underlining important information, ask yourself:

• ‘What is the author trying to say?’ 
• 'How is this different than other things I’ve read?’ 
• 'How does this relate to other material I know?’ 

When it comes to learning a difficult subject, people often believe you should practice one thing at a time.

How to really learn: Mixing it up, however, is a better approach. In mixed learning, you get a chance to see the core idea below it.

A mental model is an explanation of how something works. They are beliefs, worldviews or frameworks of thinking. You carry a certain kind of thinking in you to arrive at a solution to a problem.

Some examples:

• Demand and Supply: to understand the economy
• Game Theory: to understand trust and relationships
• Entropy: to understand disorder and decay

“Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100 percent correct. Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility.”

Many skilled people excel at single loop learning where they become accustomed only to success. 

They aren’t used to failing, so they struggle to learn from their mistakes and often respond by blaming someone else.

“their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.”

• Stop getting defensive. Instead, collect and analyze relevant data, draw conclusions and test  them.
• Change your mental models. Problem-solving isn’t a linear process where you can make one decision and then sit back and await success.
• Fail early. Fail fast. If you learn to deal with failure you can have a worthwhile career.

In a 1904 study by English physician Havelock Ellis, a list was made of 1030 individuals through extensive research, examining thoroughly the intellectual distinction people had by the various factors like heredity, general health, and social class.

These works established that genius minds are often hereditary.

A body of work of Stanford psychologist Lewis M. Terman, was an in-depth multi-decade study of gifted individuals, and an attempt to improve the measurement of genius and its association with the degradation of mental stability. This also included an enhanced version of the French IQ (Intelligence Quotient) test.

If we are learning for work, then in our brains learning equals work. So we think we have to do it during the day, at our workplace.

We think that walking is not learning. It’s ‘taking a break’. We instinctively believe that reading is learning. Having discussions about what you’ve read, however, is often not considered work, again it’s ‘taking a break’.

When mastering a subject, our brain has two general modes of thinking: focused and diffuse, both important in the learning process.

The focused mode is what we traditionally associate with learning. But we need time to process what we pick up, to get this new information integrated into our existing knowledge. We need time to make new connections. This is where the diffuse mode comes in.

We can never do one thing. We should consider what the second-order consequences will be. When we interact with a system, we need to find out what the broader repercussions of our actions will be.

They can occur during the production or consumption of a service or goods. Calling something a negative externality can be a way of avoiding responsibility.

If a factory pollutes nearby water supplies, it causes harm without added costs to the factory. The costs to society are high and are not reflected in the price of whatever the factory produces. Even if pollution is taxed, the harmful effects still remain.

Learning is a two-step process:

• Read/listen: feeding ourselves new information.
• Process and recall what you’ve just ‘learned’: connecting new materials to what we already knew.

You should not waste your time by committing unimportant details to memory. 

Your focus should be on understanding the bigger picture, on how things relate to each other.