This is a longstanding practice in law. Many if not most lawyers do this. They do this because no lawyer can hold all the relevant cases in their heads.
And yet, they are able to come up with novel, powerful legal innovations in court. Why?
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This is because the 'chunking' afforded to them by their headnotes allow them to construct novel cases.
We have our first counter-example.
actually argues this is one of the benefits of PS. Milo does not address this.
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Milo’s premise doesn’t seem to match up to reality. There appears to be novel thinkers who are able to do good thinking, and who are aided by blind, raw summaries.
Perhaps critical thinking is orthogonal to summarisation technique? Hmm. We shall see.
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The third theory of truth is the consensus theory of truth. This theory states that what everyone agrees on is true, is true.
You might think that this is a stupid theory, but consider: how do we know that Perelman solved the Poincaré conjecture?
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When Perelman's proof was discovered, there were only a handful of mathematicians in the world who could verify it. Perelman was 39. The Fields Medal (math's highest prize) could only be awarded to mathematicians below the age of 40.
The mathematicians RACED to verify the proof.
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You may read more about it in this fantastic piece: newyorker.com/magazine/2006/
We believe that the Poincaré conjecture is true because those small handful of mathematicians announced that it was true. We must trust in their consensus that it is true.
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The scientific method works similarly as well. We trust in scientific consensus in highly technical domains, because we have no other way to verify what is true, as ordinary laymen.
Back to Milo. This theory of truth doesn't seem to apply here. We shall move on.
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The final theory of truth is the one that I think is more relevant: the pragmatic theory of truth. The pragmatic theory states that what is true is what works for you.
This is most useful, because Progressive Summary and Progressive Ideation are *both* actionable methods.
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This means that we may verify it through actual practice.
But actual application is expensive. It takes time. Are there other ways to apply this theory of truth?
As it turns out, there are.
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One implication of this theory of truth is that practitioners using it *should* be able to demonstrate results. In other words, it is more likely to be true if it works FOR THEM.
So our next question is: is there proof that these practitioners are able to produce novel thinking?
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With , the answer (to me) is a clear yes. I believe PS is the best currently-known application of JIT principles to knowledge work. I even went back to the source (Taiichi Ohno's Toyota Production System) to verify for myself.
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I recognise the contribution Forte has made to the current state of knowledge work.
Further proof, his synthesis of Toyota’s methods continue to haunt me:
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1/ In many ways, we understand less about Toyota's success than ever, despite it being one of the most studied companies in history
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But what about ? What novel insights has he published? Where is his proof of work? Where are the examples of the 'better thinking' that we are promised?
If progressive ideation is that wonderful, we should see the proof in his body of work.
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To be fair, perhaps Milo does not have a large enough body of work to evaluate. But this makes me down-weight the usefulness of his technique.
But. There is a negative signal in the piece itself.
Milo cites ‘mirror neurons’, a highly discredited finding in neuroscience.
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I'm not even talking about 'a little discredited', or 'still hotly debated'. It's been 20 years since V.S. Ramachandran popularised mirror neurons. And that's 20 years for evidence to slowly accumulate AGAINST the thesis.
You don't even have to look very far; just google.
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"Wait, are you telling me that someone who is trying to promote better thinking used an example of a highly discredited theory IN his example of better thinking?"
Uhh, yes.
So that makes me down-weight the technique even more.
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The truth is that I don't really have a dog in this fight. I have tried Progressive Summarisation, and it's worked for me. If Milo had demonstrated good thinking, with novel insight scattered in his body of work, I would be willing to give his technique a go.
But, alas.
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I think the *real* takeaway is this: critical thinking is independent of the tool you use for summarisation.
I wrote this thread as an example of how to apply the four classical theories of truth when evaluating some claim on the internet.
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Arguably, learning to do this is more useful than over-optimising some reading strategy or other.
To recap:
There are 4 theories of truth:
- Coherence
- Correspondence
- Consensus
- Pragmatic.
Use them. You may be surprised at how much better your thinking gets.
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The end.
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