How to Learn

Learning is all that matters in the age of AI. Here are some tips.

In a previous blog, I mentioned the Bitter Lesson of animal activism. We optimize too much on a specific tactic, and not enough on the general capacities that will allow our movement to scale over time. Among the most important of those capacities is the ability to learn. And this ability is likely to become even more important as new technologies are unleashed at an exponential pace in the age of AI. Everything we thought we knew last year will no longer matter. We’ll only be able to create impact if we learn things that are new.

So how do we create a movement that learns? How do we improve our learning as individual activists, too? I have been a lifelong learner, and am particularly gifted at picking up new things with relative speed and ease. I jumped from organic chemistry to philosophy to economics in the span of a year. I have gone from doing scientific experiments on activism to leading rescue teams in fields to arguing to defend activists in court. In all of these areas, I’ve been forced to learn — and quickly, too. And here are some tips I’ve picked up on how to learn as efficiently as possible.

• Don’t just listen or read. Do. Most people think about doing things far longer than they should. You can’t understand the dimensions of a problem, or the nuances of possible solutions, unless you’re taking it on. This is partly because you simply don’t recognize some aspects of a problem until you try to solve it. But it’s also because you don’t have the same motivation to understand things unless you have a concrete challenge in front of you.

• Identify best practices and best practitioners. Humans are extremely good at social learning. It is the secret to our success. But most humans learn only from those local to them. Highly effective learners skip local networks and focus on finding people who are world-class.

• Be skeptical; don’t accept shibboleths. But it’s not enough to find best practices. To truly learn, one has to understand why those best practices are, in fact, best. This is where extreme skepticism comes into play. At the University of Chicago economics department, where I cut my intellectual teeth as an undergraduate, we started from the assumption that all assertions are wrong. This applied even to Nobel Prize winners giving lectures. That assumption does two things that are very powerful for learning. First, it forces you to build an argument from the ground up. There are no shortcuts based on a speaker’s status or a journal's prestige. Second, it allows for best practices to be challenged and improved. Shibboleths can thus be seen as such; age-old stories that are more fiction than fact.

• But be curious, too. Skepticism, however, cannot devolve into nihilism. It’s important that the pursuit of knowledge be one that’s filled with joy. Otherwise, there’s no motivation to truly innovate. Thankfully, curiosity is something that can be cultivated. Merely exposing oneself to new people and ideas more often will make one more curious. This is particularly important for people, like me, who are creatures of habit. Without actively cultivating curiosity, we won’t be exposed to sufficiently diverse ideas that will allow our learning to grow.

There is, in truth, probably a large differential in people’s inherent capacity to learn. However, it is just as true that those who learn, even at the slowest rate, are expanding their capabilities far faster than those who refuse. It does not matter how high your IQ is, or how many cycles your brain can compute, if you choose not to harness that cognitive ability on the most important problems, or refuse to learn the most important tools for amplifying native ability.

In a future blog, I’ll share more about something that is even more important, though: learning collectively. The superpower of our species is our ability to build knowledge over space and time. The fact that I can learn from something discovered by Arab mathematicians one thousand years ago, and from Chinese AI researchers 5,000 miles away, is the most important breakthrough in the history of Earthly knowledge. And there are certain key factors in facilitating this collective ability to learn, specific to movements.

But for now, let me end with this: What are your tricks for enhancing your ability to learn?