79 - Cognitive Skills - An important part of thriving in the economy is having an understanding of cognition and the important skills that underly it. Having a solid understanding of the cognitive skills will help you improve in how you work with existing knowledge and generate new knowledge
80 - Attention Abilities - Improving your ability to pay attention helps with knowledge work because it allows you to focus for a longer period of time. Which is necessary for the deep work that is most valuable. One way to improve your attention is through memorizing a deck of cards using a memory palace technique (Newport 2016, pg 97) . This comes from the study of memory champions and looking into if they have improved memory over the average person. Turns out that they do not and a large part…
81 - Forming Knowledge - To work with knowledge , you first must form information in your mind . While this may seem quite obvious to you, there are good and bad ways of doing this. Improving this skill will help you learn quicker and form a more useful understanding of the world.
You want to avoid rote memorization, going for precision memorization (19d2a) instead. Then you want to organize the memorized information into a useful working mental model .
See also 17b - Creation of Knowledge
19d2…
82 - Durable Memories - The knowledge you are forming and working with (17c) is stored in your brain as memories. You can learn more effectively by making sure information is well encoded while learning with the use of effortful processing strategies.
19d3a - Effortful Processing Strategies #todo
83 - Good Judgment - Developing good [judgment] can help you better evaluate the existing evidence, which helps in choosing the right solution in problem solving.
One way to develop better judgment is through forecasting training courses. See the work of Danny Hernandez during his time at Twitch, Open Philanthropy, and OpenAI. For more information see related interview with him .
19d4a - Judgment #todo
84 - Good Reasoning - Good [reasoning] skills help you form more coherent arguments and spot flaws with existing ones. This in turn helps you form a more accurate view of the world, so you can make better decisions .
Related - Critical Thinking (19b1)
19d5a - Reasoning
85 - Problem Solving is one of the key ways you can add value to the world. It is the process where all the other cognitive skills come to fruition and is the driving focus behind Creative Productivity Project . It is an important skill to have even if you aren’t directly solving problems and instead contributing to the knowledge base.
86 - Decision Making - You are constantly making decisions, so honing your decision making skills can help you make better use of your time and efforts in life. One example of this is deciding what knowledge is worth acquiring vs. ignoring.
87 - Communication and Production of Language - is the last step in the creative productivity project because it doesn’t matter how much knowledge you produce if you can’t effective communicate it to others. This is also necessary for gathering the resources (labor, knowledge, technology) needed to act on your new knowledge to the betterment of all. The better you can do this, the more effective you will be in the world.