Ask HN: How to Learn 'To Think'?

Writing is very underrated way of thinking, but I can recommend it highly. Start journaling and/or writing essays. Just write down what you think, feel, want to communicate, and what you understand. Just be clear and honest. pg has repeatedly written about this [0]. You can also choose to write technical posts.

Solving Math problems and competitive programming problems also enhace thinking.

Teaching is an underrated way, too. When you teach a hard concept, you really need to think a lot about how to get the idea across, how to make it accessible to different kinds of pupils.

[0]: https://paulgraham.com/writing44.html

I am not sure what exactly OP's condition is, but I can attest that writing will help to a degree regardless of whether you are overthinking, "thinking too little" or feeling unable to keep a chain of thoughts.

Generally, I'd like to learn more about what OP actually means. I would be pretty happy if I could stop my inner monologue most of the time. So I guess OP refers to the perceived inability to hold a chain of thought in their mind?

Writing is absolutely the way. In the long term it probably helps with reasoning, but its medium term effect of mitigating memory issues is undeniable and in my opinion even more impactful.

I genuinely think they're being hyperbolic, or reaching for a metaphor, in order to regain agency. I'd wager his "inability to think" is an "inability to think for myself." Resolving the former is insurmountable (if not downright pointless because of the presuppositions involved; it's tilting at windmills), but resolving the latter is straightforward: read and write argumentative works more, study the structure of arguments, explain to yourself why one is more convincing than another, rinse and repeat. That follows with fixing a car just as much as it follows learning "how to think."

If the inability to think stems from the thought “I am unable to think”, then OP might be better off with written CBT tasks than just writing in general.

That’s pretty much doing what you suggested but with a clear instruction set on how to.

My experience is that under certain conditions your mind might not be able to get free writing correct in a way to make it really help you. Then, it might further discourage you from trying even though all that was wrong was not missing thoughts but habitual negative thoughts preventing you from doing what you want to do to begin with.

This can be quite tricky so it would be very helpful to learn more details about OP’s exact issue.

Writing is the most powerful way. I must recommend this blog at least once a month

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zRbqwbnhmVdfLtKxMCibMoX

The whole site is full of high quality wisdom on note taking and writing.

This is really awesome!