So far I have said there are three ways of getting perspective on your environment: leaving it, imagining yourself into someone outside of it, and assuming that it’s hostile.
What are some other ways of getting a better perspective on your environment?
Imagining myself explaining the environment to someone else, or literally doing that. That’s also a very useful technique for checking understanding, and I think it uses the same mechanism: when you read a paper, you feel a sense of familiarity and obviousness that makes you think you understand. But if you have to actually explain it, completely, then you can’t really do that anymore.
I tend to do that a lot, be it for “getting outside of my head/environnment” or for learning.
I would expect the imagined version to not work as well for someone who isn’t already used to trying to see their environment from the outside, since they’re likely to just imagine someone else who’s used to the same environment (because it’s normal and obvious, right?), after which the explanation can just be the “official” explanation. Any experiential information on that?
Not sure I’m not right person to ask for that, because I tend to often doubt basically almost anything I say or think (not at the same time), and sometimes I forget why something makes sense, and spend quite some time trying to find a good explanation. So I guess I’m naturally the type that gets something out of the imagined version.
Imagining myself explaining the environment to someone else, or literally doing that. That’s also a very useful technique for checking understanding, and I think it uses the same mechanism: when you read a paper, you feel a sense of familiarity and obviousness that makes you think you understand. But if you have to actually explain it, completely, then you can’t really do that anymore.
I tend to do that a lot, be it for “getting outside of my head/environnment” or for learning.
I would expect the imagined version to not work as well for someone who isn’t already used to trying to see their environment from the outside, since they’re likely to just imagine someone else who’s used to the same environment (because it’s normal and obvious, right?), after which the explanation can just be the “official” explanation. Any experiential information on that?
Not sure I’m not right person to ask for that, because I tend to often doubt basically almost anything I say or think (not at the same time), and sometimes I forget why something makes sense, and spend quite some time trying to find a good explanation. So I guess I’m naturally the type that gets something out of the imagined version.