I read a series of tweets that I found to be pretty interesting from Farmville creator Sizhao Yang. His thoughts on this concept of intellectual compounding were a bit hard to read in tweet form, so I copied and pasted below. The idea of training your mind the same way that athletes train their bodies appeals to me, and I think there’s much to be learned here.

There’s a concept known as financial compounding, but most people don’t know about intellectual compounding. Buffett and Munger employed this to great effect and to accumulate mental models such that they can make large decisions quickly. Intuition is simply reading a lot.

This allows people to convert typically slow thinking and bad fast thinking (bad intuition) into good intuition. In academic literature this is known as Type 1 and Type 2 thinking. Most people don’t accumulate enough of knowledge the tree.

One of the common patterns for a self made billionaires is their ability to self study, self reason and accumulate a set of their own mental model. Intellectual capital compounds at a hidden rate and most people use tangible badges and net worth as measures.

Intellectual capital is filling out the decision tree and is a forward looking view and net worth is backward looking. Just like how the wrong way to value tech companies with network effects is revenue but instead by their retention rate and network effects.

Most people value themselves on their individual badges, which is what society labels for you. But most of what is predictive in life, is how you make decisions. Being effective and investing your time in the right area at the right time is a skill, not purely luck.

Allowing readings to fill your mind takes advantage of your diffuse/focused mode of thinking and type 1 and type 2 decision making. Meaning you can focus and use your creative brain (diffuse mode) to wander and make associations. This is the key toward STEM education.

More and more, just like the last 20 years was focused on physical athletes, the next 20 years would be focused on mental atheletes. These ways of thinking and compounding, Buffett, Munger, and polymaths have already used to a large degree and have been confirmed by academia.

As the world get faster and faster with AR/VR, AI, crypto. The ability to invest in your own intellectual capital is a crucial prerequisite to maintaining and succeeding in this world and also for your children.

While politicians say it’s education that’s important, it’s only partially true, it’s the ability to assimilate knowledge trees and compound knowledge that leads to satisfaction, mental stimulation, and long term wealth.

What politicians are doing now is simply aiming backwards, but how can you scale this to everyone? It turns out that charter school have been doing a grand experiment.

Taking children from disadvantaged backgrounds and making them fit for college. This has worked and three of the results are the following.

“Growth mindset” not “Fixed mindset”

“Motivation mindset” not “Fixed mindset”

“Student directed AND teacher directed education and projects”

In turns out statistically those three items are the most predictive. What are they? I’m glad you asked.

It turns out that if you just tell students that their mind is like a “muscle” and spend just 10 minutes explaining that concept they will improve their grades dramatically.

It turns out this concept is for a person’s mind and for each skill set. People can have verbal “fixed” mindsets, humor “fixed” mindsets, math “fixed” mindsets. Almost everything. So, you have to consciously unlearn this and apply it consciously even if you know it.

Why is this? It turns out people are criticized by society and labeled. So even if you have a “growth” mindset for physical items, you don’t have it for mental items. This applies not only for students but also for adults. You always hear “That’s not me.” It’s a label.

There’s another concept called “motivational mindset” which teaches the person “what good looks like” which simply teaches the kid to follow “go do the extra problems” “go to office hours” “do more problems” Follow the process of the “motivated student” and it will work.

It turns out these two concepts turn someone that’s socio economically disadvantaged similar to the education status of someone who grew up upper middle class. This is not a panacea as a lot of people have so much stressors in their lives that they can’t study.

The last concept is student self directed project plus teacher lectures is the best. This surprised me, but conceptually, it gives the student agency and motivation. Most students have been so battered down by the system that they can’t do this, but that’s another story.

These concepts have to be mind beliefs. Just like in Dune how they cite “fear is the mindkiller” These concepts have to be constantly applied to adults and children as they opposite tends to be pervasive and insidious.

These are mindsets and as for strategies. People need to take concepts from Learning how to Learn by @barbaraoakley and @sejnowski  and Art of Learning from Josh Waitzkin. They are are a manual for your brain.

You thought just because you own a brain you knew how to operate it right? Why do you think the drop out rates for STEM is so high. Most people attribute it to pipeline or professor, but perhaps it’s because people don’t know how to learn difficult subjects.

@LHTL_MOOC takes you from beginner to intermediate, and art of learning takes you from expert to being world class. Then you have Cal Newport’s material, and those three resources are simply the best that I know of to hack your own brain