Concepts

Concepts (What)

A concept refers to a generalization of a thing, an event, or an idea.

In other words, a concept is a category and items that meet certain criteria can be placed in this category.

Examples

Things

A concept can refer to something that exists in the world, a thing.

For example, “chair” is a concept because it is a generalization of something that we sit on. Within this category, there are many things in the real world that can be described as a chair.

Other examples of concepts that refer to things are screwdrivers, cars, computers, birds, watches, lights, fish, and so on.

Events

A concept can refer to an action, something that is done in the world, an event.

Running is a concept because it is a generalization of movement by a person or animal in which all the legs are off the ground at the same time during some instances in the motion.

Other examples of concepts that refer to events are eating, sleeping, flying, driving, navigating, troubleshooting, setting goals, and so on.

Ideas

A concept can refer to an idea that is generalized.

We can say that a clock is running, or a car is running, or a computer program is running. In this case, the term “running” means that the entity is in operation.

We can say that everyone gets an equal vote in decisions in the context of a family, team, or political group. In this case, we might call this idea “democracy.”

Other examples of concepts that refer to ideas are fairness, justice, energy, truth, force, acceleration, and so on.

Summary

A concept is a pattern that allows us to group similar things together. Skill with concepts is the same as skill with pattern recognition.

Concepts (Rationale)

Skill with concepts is worthwhile for several reasons.

  1. Greatly simplifies things, especially really complex things. This makes hard things much easier to figure out, understand, and communicate about.

  2. Much of learning and teaching involves recognizing, figuring out, and using concepts.

  3. Conceptual thinking greatly facilitates application (skillfully doing useful things in the real world).

How to Learn and Teach and Apply Concepts

Principles

  1. See the world through the lens of “concepts.” Example: all bridges are structures that can span a body of water or chasm. This breaks down into subconcepts: suspension bridges, arch bridges, truss bridges, and so on.

  2. Recognize concepts and continually figure out what each one means. When you encounter a concept (e.g., energy, monad, business), figure out exactly what it means and be able to create countless examples.

  3. Do things by applying concepts, not by pattern matching from examples.

Framework

For each topic of interest

  1. Identify. Recognize which ideas are concepts.

  2. Figure Out: Figure out exactly what each concept means.

  3. Examples: Come up with many examples of each concept. Be able to explain which each instance of the concept is an example of this concept.

  4. Improvement: Continually check your understanding of each concept and refine your abilities to explain and communicate this meaning. Keep this up until the concept has become part of who you are; you see the world and think using this concept.

  5. Application: When you are doing things, structure your thinking and actions through main concept. Avoid templating from

Tips

  1. Give yourself ample time and experiences. Many concepts are hard to figure out. Gnaw on them like a dog gnaws on a bone. Space this out over weeks or months of time.

  2. Many concepts are familiar but not well understood. For example, everyone is familiar with energy, government, freedom, and force but few of us can explain exactly what each of these concepts means then give a myriad of examples. Hold yourself accountable for a deep understanding of concepts.

  3. Use multiple resources to learn about a given concept. AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepThink, CoPilot, and so on are especially useful.

  4. When you are first learning, templating off examples is essential. However, as you advance, wean yourself off of this practice and slowly move towards building solutions by applying main concepts.

Summary

A concept is an abstraction that encompasses a variety of instances from the real world. Concepts describe things, actions or events, and ideas.

Concepts are super useful because they allow us to recognize and use patterns, thereby simplifying complexity.

To teach or learn a concept, connect many examples of the concept in the real world to a definition that explains what entities fit into the concept category.