Suggest edit — 18-01-08 How to Clarify Thoughts

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title: "18-01-08 How to Clarify Thoughts"
visibility: public
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# 18-01-08 How to Clarify Thoughts

Category: [[idea-lists-upon-request|Idea Lists (Upon Request)]]

[Read the original document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nFG56w9Y26jrKWi4ialzCICLLc204J9wSWnKULVp7nM/edit?usp=drivesdk&sa=D&ust=1596495076867000&usg=AOvVaw1j6oroKa6ysrIGPs7L3HL3)

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1. Write about the idea
2. Describe the idea to another person
3. Take sub-thoughts or sub-ideas apart, decomposing the thought into interacting sub-thoughts
4. Become concrete, giving a number of examples of the idea. Ensure that the idea isn’t overfit to a single datapoint, or if it is make that clear to yourself.
5. Identify the most unclear, uncertain or ambiguous parts of the thought and explain their relative weaknesses
6. Distinguish the intuition pump for the idea from its conceptual content
7. Eliminate jargon / overly complex language used to describe the idea to yourself & others or on paper.
8. Create a map of the relationships between the ideas that are involved in the thought (concept map) 
9. Create a causal graph for the idea
   1. Construct by asking why recursively
10. Map the thought to a number of thoughts with similar structure (metaphors)
   1. Make it clear where the metaphor extends properly and where it breaks down, as a way of clarifying the idea itself

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*Source: [Original Google Doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nFG56w9Y26jrKWi4ialzCICLLc204J9wSWnKULVp7nM/edit?usp=drivesdk&sa=D&ust=1596495076867000&usg=AOvVaw1j6oroKa6ysrIGPs7L3HL3)*