Topic for async tutoring @Eternity.
Before posting in this topic, read the rules.
First assignments:
Read Student Information and Tutoring Category Rules
Take an online typing test. Let me know your words per minute and accuracy.
I read the the two posts.
I did the typing test on typing.com. I did two types of tests. I did the one page test and my results 85wpm with 98% accuracy, finished in 2 minutes and 52 seconds. I did the one minute test and got 86wpm with 97% accuracy.
That’s good typing speed. Let’s try 15min/day of typing practice and retest at 1 and 2 weeks. It’s practice practicing and we’ll see if you can get some quick improvements. Focus on accuracy first. If you could get 100% accuracy at the same speed that’d be good.
Read Introduction to Critical Fallibilism and write down things you don’t understand.
10-60 minutes.
Set a forum profile pic.
From Critical Rationalism (CR), by Karl Popper, CF accepts that we’re fallible (we often make mistakes and we can’t get a guarantee that an idea is true) and we learn by critical discussion. Learning is an evolutionary process which focuses on error correction, not positive justification for ideas. We can’t establish that we’re right (or probably right), but we can make progress by finding and correcting errors. Positive arguments and induction are errors.
“Learning is an evolutionary process which focuses on error correction, not positive justification for ideas.” - Does this mean we learn about and improve our ideas (evolution) through error correction? Trying to get clarification on what evolutionary process here means.
From Theory of Constraints (TOC), by Eli Goldratt, CF accepts focusing on constraints (bottlenecks, limiting factors) for achieving goals. Most factors have excess capacity and should not be optimized. Optimizing them is focusing on local optima (trying to improve any factor) instead of global optima (considering which improvements will make a significant difference to a big picture goal, and focusing on those). Optimization away from the constraint is wasted. TOC also explains using tree diagrams, using buffers to deal with variance, and finding silver bullet solutions using inherent simplicity.
Don’t understand “using buffers to deal with variance, and finding silver bullet solutions using inherent simplicity.” Unfamiliar with what those are referring to.
CF also accepts that digital systems are fundamentally better at error correction than analog systems. This comes from computer science theory and is a reason that modern computers are digital.
After reading through I’m still not too sure as to what a digital system is as opposed to an analog system. Looking at a later paragraph, it seems that digital deals with small values while analog deals with large or continuous numbers. If I understand that correctly is digital better because it deals with smaller more manageable numbers versus larger numbers? Such as when we’re evaluating ideas it is more efficient to evaluate pass/fail versus a bunch of factors at once?
CF says valid arguments are criticisms or equivalent to criticisms. A criticism should contradict an idea and explain that the idea fails. Criticisms should be decisive, rather than merely saying an idea isn’t great. That means you don’t accept both the criticism and its target because they’re incompatible (unless you find an error in some background knowledge, e.g. a flaw in your understanding of logic that affects whether they contradict).
Decisive criticisms are criticisms that disprove an idea. They show that the idea doesn’t work. A decisive criticism is not showing that an idea has better alternatives or that an idea can be improved. Is my understanding correct?
Spent 54 minutes (not including a 10 minutes break) to read it and check what I did and did not understand. Read it once and took notes and then skimmed through it a second time with my notes to write this post.
RSS Assignment
Download https://www.vienna-rss.com/ on Mac.
Make a CF folder in it. Add feeds:
- https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/latest.rss
- https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Elliot/activity.rss
- https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/posts.rss
- https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/eternity-async-tutoring/1932.rss
- https://curi.us/rss
- https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCOyCX1UYR7mJQmm8TXrGlhA
Figure out how to add CF website articles and CF youtube.
Make a Videos folder. Add some YT channels you like.
Make a Text folder. Add something. Blogs, newsletters, news sites and forums often have RSS feeds.
Optional: Podcasts folder.
Share a screenshot of your results.
Report if this was pretty easy or you had difficulties.
Is there any reason in particular I should use Vienna? I already use a rss app. Its called Reader by Readwise. The website is Readwise Reader | The first read-it-later app built for power readers..
If that’s fine I can go ahead and organize it to the assignment as it’s not that organized.
Another reader could be fine, but from looking at their homepage I think it’s missing some features Vienna has (and has others Vienna doesn’t) and has different design priorities.
So let’s do this:
Try Vienna for a little bit and compare them. Write down some features, advantages and disadvantages each has that the other doesn’t.
OK, that’s some good info. Let’s start here:
Assignment: Look up what analog and digital mean. Write brief explanations of them and revise the ideas in the paragraph I quoted. 20-60min
If you don’t have one yet, you may want a CF forum phone app. I use DiscourseHub.
Yeah they are very different.
Question about Vienna: what are the features in Vienna you think Vienna has that the app I shared doesn’t? Or is there some kind of FAQ that covers any interesting features of Vienna? The one on their website doesn’t really cover using the app. Just from a quick 30 minute set-up of the assignment stuff you asked me, I can’t find anything that Vienna has in specific that Reader doesn’t. The only thing so far is that Vienna is an app, while Reader is a website.
Done. I already had it set up on my Android. I got DiscourseHub on my IPhone.
Screenshot your RSS section in Readwise Reader. They didn’t show it on their homepage.
Does it do nested folders and smart folders? And can you click a folder and see the posts from every feed (including in subfolders) within it? In my screenshot below, you can see posts by multiple authors showing. Also I don’t see space to read the full posts like Vienna has. Do you have to open them on a different screen where you no longer see the folders/feeds and the posts list?
Ahh I see now.
No it does not do nested folders or smart folders. However, the folder does show posts from every feed under it.
There is no specific space to read the full posts while still being able to see the folder/feeds and the posts list. If you click on a post it opens up the entire post.
I think Vienna is a better RSS app. I tried out the smart folders thing and it seemed interesting. Never used it before. It also lets me organize all the feeds better.
I think where Reader is better is that I originally used it as a replacement for Pocket to store articles as I go. It also lets me highlight articles, pdfs, and books and review the highlights and any associated notes with the highlights at a later time. Thats my biggest use as I like to just highlight specific parts and write down my thoughts. I used to pay a subscription for adobe acrobat just to do this with PDFs. It also lets me listen to articles, and books, with their built in TTS. Though it does fail about ~10% of the time at transcribing a website as it does not show you the original website on the app. Though you can go to the original website on another page. I think Vienna is better here at just having the original webpage open in another tab.
I think Vienna would be better as a RSS feed and tbh I don’t really use the RSS feed feature on Reader. I just remembered that I have it set-up. Most of the time I just go through articles I’ve come across and saved. Imma try setting up Vienna a bit more and then see how I overall feel. I think I’ll just use it as my RSS feed and use Reader for its article saving feature, note taking, and TTS if needed.
The big things Vienna is missing (besides non-RSS features) are cloud sync and a phone version. It just imports and exports subscriptions.
Vienna also doesn’t show YouTube thumbnails. I prefer the post list with no thumbnails to save space but I wish when you selected a YouTube video you’d see the thumbnail instead of only the text description.
Some goals for RSS:
- Helps you find/organize/track CF posts
- Helps you find YT videos yourself more and use the algorithm less
- Helps you find stuff on smaller websites that you might have lost track of because you don’t visit them regularly
- Helps you be more organized with your online activities
- Helps you see when new stuff is posted
- Helps you avoid missing stuff (because it stays unread even long after it’s gone from your YouTube notifications)
From merriam-webster I got that digital means “of, relating to, or using calculation by numerical methods or by discrete units” and that analog means " of, relating to, or being a mechanism or device in which information is represented by continuously variable physical quantities". This website cleared it up for me quite a bit. Analog systems are continuous and infinite, while digital systems are discrete and finite.
Revising my paragraph:
Digital systems deal with discrete values. A common example of a digital system is a binary system. A binary system only deals with two values such as 3 or 4. An analog system deals with continuous values. They would deal with all values between 3 and 4. The benefit of a digital system over an analog system is that the digital system is less prone to values that may create an issue to deal with in the system. An example I was given from the website above is with voltage. An analog system may have undesirable variations in voltage that may create problems, while a digital system will only deal with two levels of voltage making it much easier to deal with.
I know at the end of the quoted paragraph I mentioned evaluating ideas. I just wanted to make sure I understood analog and digital before integrating these concepts into how they deal with evaluating ideas.
Spent around ~50 minutes.