In my daily life, I encounter a lot of anxiety over feeling that I need to memorize material. I seek to overcome my use-it-or-lose-it memory system by sheer force, by clinging desperately onto concepts, only to find that after a certain amount of time I can no longer recall the concept perfectly. The idea behind this series of entries is that perhaps the minimal set of things that it would serve me well to memorize are methodologies for acquiring and generating knowledge about the world, rather than particular truths within particular systems of knowledge. My hope is that by recording here particular strategies and methodologies for generating knowledge, I can improve my effectiveness at learning and conducting research and alleviate my feeling of needing to memorize concepts. A further hope is that by employing these methodologies, such as critical reading, the memorization of concepts that repeatedly turn out to be important will naturally follow without desperate grasping.

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1. Generating Theory

Below is a basic methodology for developing theory. The point is that you need to subject your ideas to criticism, both from yourself and others:

1. Write down ideas (i.e. externalize them).
2. Subject them to criticism.
3. Incorporate feedback from your own criticism into the external manifestation of the ideas.
4. At some point, share the ideas with others.
5. Seek out existing theory related to the ideas. Put your ideas in conversation with others’.
6. Continually incorporate feedback from yourself and others.

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2. Reading Tips

Always write while reading. This allows you to engage with the content critically. Additionally, identify questions and/or hypotheses before reading. This allows you to read with intention and focuses your critical thinking and questioning.

Below is a template that one can follow to create an active engagement with a text:

Document 1: Claims and Questions

Begin with a broad claim or claims. These might be philosophical and conjectural in nature.

Enumerate questions based on these claims. These might be questions that challenge the premises of the claim, clarify the claim, investigate mechanisms by which the claim is actualized, etc.

Document 2: Questions and Notes

At the top of the document, list the initial questions that you will be addressing by your reading, as well as any hypotheses that you have in answer to those questions.

Following the questions and hypotheses, construct a table as follows:

Source	Excerpt	Takeaways	Further Questions

Building out a table like this will allow your thought process to develop organically as you explore multiple sources.

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