Pretend smart

The best way to learn something is to teach another.

Came January, students begin to pass exams. And often the most difficult exam is math. My good friend asked me: “What is the Lagrange theorem, how to prove and understand it?”

I know the definition and proof of this theorem, but I could only understand it after explaining to a friend.

And I remembered that this happens all the time. Best of all, I play chess when I speak out loud what is happening on the board (I play on the Internet), I write the code best when I explain myself out loud to myself what I want and how to get it. And I understand the material from the lectures when I explain it to others.
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We always give good advice, but, like Alice in Wonderland, we follow them infrequently. This happens because we are in a hurry, we have created patterns of behavior for ourselves, and we do not think about what we are doing.

Sometimes I make up problems for myself and try to solve them. For example, one of them:

You are given a text file in which several thousand characters are written after the comma of the number pi. One sign in a random place is wrong, how to find the position of this sign with the least expenditure of effort, time or money?

Think how to solve this problem? How would a smart person solve this problem?

How would this task a smart person? I reason like this:
I know programming, and I can write a program that will compare character by character with the "correct string" that can be taken on the Internet. But how would this problem be solved by a person without programming knowledge?

• You can compare the signs manually, but a large proportion of the error, and too much work.
• You can try to find and change the script on the Internet to solve this problem. But there is a risk of error, and there is no certainty that this will happen quickly.
• You can hire a freelance person who will write this program. I do not think it will cost more than 500 rubles.
• You can ask a programmer friend to write this program, and if there are none, find undergraduates of technical universities, and ask them.
• You can write on the forum programmers request to help with this task and, most likely, you will bring a solution, and maybe an answer.
• You can also manually check the first 50–100 characters to avoid being a fool. The probability is low, but it will take not so much energy and there is a chance to immediately get rid of the problem.

With such chains of reasoning, I try to arrive at the optimal variant in the general case. But I did not apply this algorithm to life tasks! Tasks from life are better than fictional tasks: they are real, and you can test your solution in practice.

The problem is that I do not argue "as an intelligent person," I do not explain to anyone how I am going to solve this problem, and this makes me autonomous, formulaic. Most of the time, I don’t even think about how I’m going to solve this problem, but just start doing something. And this is not always good.

Theodore Roosevelt had a portrait of Lincoln on the wall. And when a difficult task arose, Roosevelt looked at the portrait and asked himself: “What would Lincoln do in this situation? How would he solve this problem? ”(From Dale Carnegie’s book)

And this is a really good way to find a solution to the problem: to imagine how an intelligent person would solve this problem.

According to statistics, more than half of people consider themselves smarter than the average person, but hardly anyone considers himself the most intelligent person. Everyone can imagine that his problems can be solved in a better way, as a smarter person would solve them in your own circumstances.

I do not want to leave this article as another argument, a simple set of thoughts, so I will write several ways that can help you solve problems, find motivation and overcome laziness.

Ways

• Start thinking out loud, it's more useful than it might seem at first glance. Comment on what you need to do and how to do it best. Perhaps your first monologue will remind mine:

So, you need to prepare for exams. I am missing several lectures on which there will be questions. I need to ask a classmate to photograph these lectures, then I can prepare for these topics. Open the browser, bookmarks, oh, the new edition. What if? great Probably the new xkcd came out, you need to see ...

But because of voicing out loud, you will quickly notice that you are doing something wrong. In silence, you can spend hours on the Internet, but if you say “I open another entertainment site,” you feel uneasy.

• Find a listener. When I come to a friend to help him with programming, I can’t check my email, start reading an interesting article that I don’t need right now, and be distracted in general. He just stares with a raised eyebrow: "What are you doing?"

Surely you can find a friend, meet him at an Internet café and agree to explain to each other what you are doing, how to do it better, and not give each other distractions. Of course, the problem remains that you may be distracted by each other.

On Habré there was an article about how a man hired a girl to hit him in the face every time he logs on to social networks. The alternative with a friend is better because you help each other, you do not need to pay him, and he may have a harder hand :)

• This method is difficult to decide, because it is strange. But I consider it the most effective. Set an exact goal for the next half hour ( tomato method ), turn on the video on your smartphone (or video camera) and start working, explaining in passing what you are doing. Then send this entry to your friend whose opinion you value, and do not want to spoil yourself in his eyes. It should not be the friend who laughs and approves when you throw up your hands on a video with the words “And to hell!”

Thus, you can do something without a person near you, you can choose a time convenient for you. A friend can easily view your recording at x4 speed. This is enough to understand whether you worked or not.

• Write a lesson on the subject of your task, if possible. The best way to deal with theorems in mathematics is to write a small lesson about what a theorem is, what it is for, where it came from and how to prove it. The lesson does not have to be published, but it will not be worse.

This method is not suitable for all tasks. Hardly you write a lesson on "how to finally remove all the trash from the balcony," but this method really organizes the knowledge in your head. You cannot teach what you do not understand.

• Ask people how to solve your problem. Do not be afraid to ask questions, even if you are very smart, people always have a different life experience and mindset, a different opinion, and it is always useful to look at your task with more than one point of view. Even with as good as yours.

Conclusion

Our brain does not like to think. He creates his own patterns of behavior, stereotypes, verbal cliches and tries to reduce everything to proven algorithms. And almost always this is good. We do not need to think about how to rearrange our legs, how to brush our teeth or drive a car.

But many tasks can be solved in another way, in an optimal way, which you can think of, but do not even begin to think. And then it is worth asking the question: “How would an intelligent person decide this task?”, Pretend to be an intelligent person and solve it.

The scope of this method is much wider than solving problems for work. Sometimes it is worth stopping and thinking out loud: how would an intelligent person find a way to go to bed on time? What would an intelligent person do to not quarrel with a loved one?

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Several tasks in the end

I especially advise you to think about the last question. What will a smart person advise you on what to do or stop?

It will be interesting to read in the comments possible solutions to these problems and comments habr-users to them. I am sure that there will also be a simpler solution to find my problem with finding the wrong number in pi.

About any errors in the text, please write to private messages.

UPDATE :
I did not think that people on Habré are such “nerds”. Of course, by Barack Obama is meant the president of the United States. Otherwise, one could say “let's call the number 1,11111 ... pi, then it is not difficult to find a different sign ...”

This is a made-up task, they are given for that, in order to bring interesting solutions, and not throw them away.