Systems/ Models
The process of studying is all about understanding different systems/models. A medical student learns how the body functions. In much more advanced cases you will be studying the functioning of the body at a low level. Studying is all about understanding the underlying system which functions in a specific way. Take another example of studying law, you can imagine law as a knob that controls the flow of the system which is society. Law is meant to regulate activities in a society you don’t want criminal activities in the society, you regular this by regulations to it, which is what the law is all about.
A good student should see ideas in terms of connections and components of the system. This is what a context of an idea is all about. In most cases, your books are just a documentation of ideas. It's not necessary that your books take you to the context of it. So in a best-case scenario, it would be great if you could at least understand a high-level picture of ideas.
Understanding high-level ideas
This is the next layer. When you have a subject to understand, the process is not to dive into it. Rather the first goal is to make observations. Yes, what do I mean by that? Here the entire goal is to look for high-level ideas.
What do I mean by the high-level idea? In the previous blog, I mentioned your components come together and form a system. Ideas are always organized in a hierarchy.
This is an example of how hierarchy would look like . They simply show the relation with one object to another.
Example of the car and how this mechanism works.
Engine
Piston
Shafts
Gears
Oil box
Ignitor
Etc
Gearbox
Flywheels
Shafts
Oil box
Etc
Think about a car and what are the components ? .At a high level, the main components of the car are, wheels, engine, body, interior, controllers. Look at it this is the high-level picture of what a car is all about. But we can drill down each of the portions and keep on creating hierarchy. And finally, the whole can be represented in a complex tree.
Similarly, we can keep on drilling down the concepts considerably further. Everything combines to form a system and all the components are different parts of the system which defines the system. And all these high-level elements are related to each other because they work together to form this system.
When you have subjects all the ideas can be classified into high-level and low-level details, the high-level details show the big picture of events and the low-level details shows how this system works together to execute functionalities.
Strategy
Some of you guys may not know what a strategy is, in simple strategy is the sequence of steps you need to do to accomplish a goal. Usually, it’s the most high-level things you need to get something done. Let's say if you preparing for an exam your goal is to maximize the exam score. The easiest thing you can come up with this is to predict the most possible questions. Also, collect information about the most frequently asked question and then thinking how can you approach those questions to get a maximum score. Am not so good with exam strategy but with more information, you can optimize and result in efficient solving problem. Our structure will provide the user with huge leverage in building great strategies.
Once you have the strategy in place the next goal is to focus on the tactics, that is how are you going to solve it. Those are the daily steps you need to do to get to the goal. You can imagine strategy as the road you are driving and tactics as turns, breaks, halts, skills. We talk about it in detail later.
I have my ways of approaching this. When I have a strategy I break down things into a simple task and use something like scrum and a combination of six sigma to get maximum efficiency. We will talk about this in the coming articles how to accomplish this and how am doing it.
Reductionism
In the previous section, I gave you an introduction to the system theory and models(systems). Now let's look into what is reductionism and how helpful this is ?. This I one of the most important parts of science. The idea of reductionism comes from the system theory itself. So the system is a combination of a group of tiny components. The idea of reductionism is to break down the whole system into tiny modules and understand them.
A school is a system, with the elements represented by teachers, students, principals, custodians, secretaries, bus drivers, cooks, parents, and counselors. The interconnections are the relationships between the elements, the school rules, the schedule, and the communications between all of the individuals in the school. The purpose of a school is to prepare the students for a successful future and to help them reach their full potential.
Everything we have built until now is a by-product of this concept, from computers, space shuttle to grand movies. Computers are an engineering marvel, whenever I think about it, I get sucked into a vortex of complexity. We managed to crack something like this because we human beings could break down complex ideas into tiny modules and make them work and reassemble. At the lowest level, a computer starts with turning on and off a switch which is done automatically by billions of transistors size of a couple of atoms. How do we manage to do this, a part of the credit goes to reductionism.
Take an example of amoeba, it can be broken down into a combination of cells, protein structure, molecules, tiny atoms. The entire thing can be studied with the help of this.
How to reduce?
I have different methods for the reduction of ideas, one of my favourite methods is the usage of mind maps, and different diagrams. Mind map a fabulous tool to do reduce the concepts, however, complex ideas is mind map can be used to organize the ideas in a hierarchy.
My mind maps give me a very good picture and the idea of where things are coming from and how to merge them together.It provides me a holistic view of ideas and different systems operating in it. So here is an example of a simple mind map, this is a still work-in-progress mind map, I get more creative in this and make a different level of mind maps, mind maps which handles high-level picture of things to low-level details. You can also use this mind map to track your activities.
Reduction method
You might ask me how all these things are implemented practically, how do you do a reduction of any concept or idea. I have my own techniques for it . And as I progress I add more to the list. But 2 of my favorites are
Mind maps
Strategic map
Both of these are reduction through visuals, in the coming blogs you will get deeper into the note-making system there we will explore more into how can you use questions effectively to organize ideas and reduce concepts. Mind maps are some great tools. It help you see the big picture, it gives you an idea of all the weak links and other priorities.
Mind map:
This is a simple mind map I created to organize the process in the machine learning pipeline. Totally ignore what is on the map, and just focus on how I reduced these ideas to small parts.
Strategic map:
This is our strategic map, this article is following this particular map design at a high level.
Tools used :
Mind map: www.mindmeister.com
Diagrams : http://draw.io/
Task management :https://www.meistertask.com/
Adobe Illustrator for infographics
Note making
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