How to Cement Knowledge - Part II

Note to readers: This piece is part of the Investor Meta Skills series , the newsletter’s ongoing section on building the skills that make us better investors. It is also Part II of our series on cementing knowledge . You can read Part I here . This second part picks up where Part I left off, exploring how to generate and explain knowledge, vary your practice, test confidence against evidence, and transfer what you learn into useful judgment.

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” - John Locke , “Of the Conduct of the Understanding”

In Part I, I told you two stories.

The first was the parable of Max Planck’s chauffeur , who heard Planck deliver a lecture on the new physics so many times that, one night, he stepped up to the lectern, delivered it himself, and got away with it.

The second was an experiment in St. Louis involving college students learning Swahili word pairs. The students who repeatedly pulled the words from memory remembered 80% of them, while those who repeatedly reread the pairs remembered just 36%.

The lesson is that some of the highest-leverage methods for absorbing and cementing useful knowledge are different applications and variations on the testing effect.

We have to prompt the brain to retrieve the material again and again, in different situations, at different intervals, and in different ways. This strengthens the retrieval pathways that help ingrain and embed the information we want to remember.

Part I of the guide covered the first half of the job. This part focuses on heuristics and methods for cementing knowledge and applying it in different contexts. Locke understood this three centuries ago: reading furnishes the materials, but thinking makes them ours.

Okay, let’s get on to Part II.

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