Goal: figure out how to learn philosophy. How to manage prerequisites. What to do forward. Give feedback on article.
I would like to different things at the same time as an approach to cycling between prerequisites and philosophy. I would like to have a prerequisite project, like learning grammar, and read an article, like I’m doing now, while I have that project ongoing.
@Elliot, analyzing an article like this is close to a project, but I think you think it’s fine, do you? What about what I did in Introduction to Critical Fallibilism, that’s more like a project.
From now on I would like to almost always have an active topic in the projects category. They wouldn’t all have to be prerequisites, but they may only be prerequisites for a while. So I would like to comment on CF/Curiosity articles in while doing prerequisite projects and not have to wait to do that in between projects.
You don’t need to thoroughly learn each prerequisite, finish it, and then move on to the next topic until you work your way up to CF.
I think I have this tendency and would’ve done it more in the future if I hadn’t read this article. So I think this article is very useful. I think going through the whole Peikoff course is more than I need to currently.
Point System Model
100 points in grammar for CF isn’t being the most knowledgeable person on grammar in the world. That person has a lot of excess capacity in grammar for learning CF. Grammar being a prerequisite for CF means there is an amount of grammar knowledge that needs to cross a breakpoint, not that you have to max out on grammar knowledge.
The point system model is breakpoint and goal based. Cross certain breakpoints in prerequisites and then that allows you to learn CF stuff easier or at all. You need to cross breakpoints in prerequisites to do some CF goal, but if you try immediately after crossing the breakpoint then it’s hard and inefficient. You should actually have excess capacity such that learning the CF stuff is easy. That could be thought of as another breakpoint where learning the CF stuff is at an roughly ideal amount of difficulty.
There is a last breakpoint for when more prerequisite knowledge isn’t helping, beyond that is the true excess capacity (there is also excess capacity between breakpoints.) You might want a bit of such excess capacity in order to be sure you crossed the last breakpoint. Crossing the last breakpoint isn’t necessarily the best method either because it might take more effort to cross that breakpoint than it’s to do the CF goal from the current breakpoint. So the optimal way of learning prerequisites is to cross the breakpoint where the next breakpoint takes more effort than directly achieving the goal the prerequisite was for.
Also, each time your improve your CF knowledge, it may let you understand some prerequisites in a deeper, better way.
I think analyzing Introduction to Critical Fallibilism helped me understand the point system model better. So that would be an example of CF knowledge improving my understanding of this life skill prerequisite.
If I self-evaluate I would say I did pretty good at applying breakpoints, goal-based and excess capacity to this section. This part was really fun to do! It was cool recognizing that breakpoints and excess capacity are useful in this model even if Elliot didn’t write about them. Even if I’m wrong and my application was poor then I can get useful feedback/criticism on how well I understand breakpoints, which would be good. After reading Introduction to Critical Fallibilism I didn’t exactly have a good idea of how I could test my knowledge, but here I found an opportunity.
Approximations
So the point system model says there is one global prerequisite score. However prerequisites are skills you need to learn other skills. So there are many different prerequisites that apply to some parts of CF and not other parts.
Prerequisites come in layers, or in trees. There are prerequisites for your prerequisites, so they are layers. There can multiple prerequisites for one prerequisites so that would be a tree.
When you’re learning CF, you have to pay attention to how hard different things are – how slow your progress is, how many errors you make, how confusing it is – to judge how good your prerequisites are for that part of CF. You can also directly evaluate your knowledge of a particular prerequisite, e.g. by doing practice activities then checking your work for errors.
I’ll document more when I try to learn stuff.
I’ll use this immediately:
I read this part twice and only thought to write this comment the second time. The first time I read this quote it didn’t stand that much out to me. But now I see the value, so my reading wasn’t good enough the first time. So what is my missing skill? I don’t think it’s grammar, it wasn’t that I didn’t understand what this quote was saying. It could be a bit about paragraph analysis, because that can help you figure out what’s important in an article. But it’s not really that either I think. I think it’s more just thinking about what I can comment on. It’s about being more active in reading the article, responding to things the article suggests and taking action on them (if I agree.) Not just nod my head at things that sound good.
In general I time when I do philosophy stuff, so I can take note of the time I spent and add it in my post. Although not all my thinking and notes will be posted, so it might seem like I got less done than what I actually did.
Automatization
How can cycling between topics be compatible with subconscious automatization?
I had this concern.
The basic solution is to practice, automatize and master small chunks. You can finish learning a small chunk before moving on. If you divide your learning up into chunks that can be finished in under a week, then you can cycle between three major areas in less than a month.
My current approach to CF articles is to read the whole and make comments on everything I can. I can mostly do that within one day, but it’s probably better to take only a section or one idea and try to automatize it. But, for example, I don’t really know if I need to take anything from this article and practice it or how to do that.
you should often do some cycling between a layer of knowledge and the next few layers before and after it, rather than trying to 100% finish each layer of knowledge before doing any work on the next layer.
Sounds like a good idea. I’ll try this with paragraph analysis, analyzing an article (the layer above) and grammar (the layer below.)
I spent 2 hours and 25 minutes on this.