I did five more easy word problems using Alcumus. I missed the first one due to poor focus and multiplying the wrong numbers. The rest I got right. I think in general I’m a bit bored of doing word problems and it’s making harder to focus. I got kind of sloppy with some of my problems. Although today I had to study at my Starbucks today because of some home drama and being around my friends/coworkers distracted me a bit, so that also didn’t help.
On a different note, I found the history function for problems.
The five problems (~34 minutes):
1.)
I did five more easy word problems using Alcumus. I missed the first one due to poor focus and multiplying the wrong numbers. The rest I got right.
Do you think you got the equation setup correct for all of them? That’s the main thing I care about currently.
I think in general I’m a bit bored of doing word problems and it’s making harder to focus. I got kind of sloppy with some of my problems. Although today I had to study at my Starbucks today because of some home drama and being around my friends/coworkers distracted me a bit, so that also didn’t help.
Also, if the skill is automatized, you should be able to do well without focusing. Needing good focus is a sign you’re using significant conscious effort.
Are you bored of doing section 1, 2, and/or 3? It’s 2 that I mainly care about and think you need more practice for.
For section 1, just writing what the variables mean and what to find for the solution is enough if you’re not struggling. Writing more helps if you’re getting stuck.
For section 3, maybe you could just skip it on 80% of problems.
For section 2, do you see the point of it and think you’re learning something? If you’re feeling confident you could do some harder word problems.
Yea more or less. Unless you see a huge issue with any of them. I think I did fine.
Section 3. It could be just the difficulty of the problems I’m doing? I just realized I possibly mis-identified my emotion at the time. I don’t know if bored is the right word. I think due to some issues in the morning at home, by the time I went to do the problems I just felt off. I think I attributed my frustration doing the problems as me being bored of the problems. I was just having trouble focusing and doing them but still got good answers so I attributed my emotion at the time to boredom. “I can do these problems, but I’m annoyed and frustrated doing them. Must be because these are boring.”
Yes. I’m curious is this a method you thought of to approach word problems or you learned from somewhere else? It is interesting how really none of the explanations have me set up the problems like you have me do. I have noticed this method helping and I think I’m coming around to appreciate it more. I’ll try a couple normal level word problems tomorrow.
Kinda? When it came to a lot of my initial reading of Ayn Rands non-fiction works I did a lot of it intentionally. So there various time periods where I committed to reading and doing stuff with it.
In the example shared in my writing, I would wake up every morning, get dressed and all that, and first thing I would do is read an article from Miss Rands periodicals. I did this for a few months more-or-less consistently.
I’ve done similar intentional stuff with her work.
When it comes to CF, however, my approach to reading the stuff you’ve produced is more sporadic. Did I take notes and think on what you wrote? If I was in a note taking mood when I read it then sure. Did I plan out going through CF material for any period of time or do anything similar to what I did with Rand? Nope.
I just treated it as some writing for today because I couldn’t think of an exact reason.
Why haven’t I done similar stuff with CF material like I’ve done with Ayn Rand’s materials.
Long Answer: Lets brainstorm some possible reasons.
Now that I think about it I may have done something comparable to what I’ve done with Ayn Rand’s works. However, the way I had been told to approach CF, or more accurately the way I think I had been told to approach CF, was to work on a lot of stuff besides just philosophy. So I do remember trying to find stuff on how to learn philosophy from Elliot and found, for example, the philosophy outline and due to the outline I went ahead and started learning basic math again.
Another part of the reason is only recently becoming more interested in Elliot as a philosopher. When I initially got into philosophy I only wanted to consume Objectivist material and it was only Objectivism that interested me. If it wasn’t Objectivism I saw no value in consuming it. My view at the time was that studying Objectivism is all I needed to do. Read enough of Rand, maybe some Peikoff, and a little bit of other Objectivist authors and boom I would be set for life. I noticed that a fair number of people mention discovering Elliot due to Karl Popper. I don’t think I’ve seen as many comments saying they discovered him due to an interest in Rand. However, that’s how/why I discovered him. I kept looking for more Objectivist material. At the end of the day, however, all other Objectivists besides Rand (and some Peikoff material) were not, in my head, important to seriously study. They were supplemental material to Rand. My view of Elliot’s material for the longest time was supplemental Objectivist material.
Along with that view being supplemental Objectivist material I evaded a lot of stuff of Elliot’s that I didn’t (initially)like. It was a gradual process of continuously coming back to curi.us and other stuff that eventually changed that. Instead of dealing with the stuff he wrote I just looked for anything directly Objectivism related and ignored the rest.
Hmmm. Besides the above I think my overall study habits have gotten worse !? I don’t know. That’s pretty sad now that I think about it, but I do remember putting more effort into study. Or am I mis-remembering? I don’t know.
Oh yeah I guess I could better clarify how I approached Objectivism. I should really point out how much, for quite a while, I only cared about Objectivism. I didn’t think there was much value in studying other things (including stuff like math, english, history, sciences, etc.) only Objectivism. When it came to various intellectuals my view was if its Objectivism its good, if its anything else its probably bad. Did I ever probably evaluate these things as bad? Nope, I just ignored. I think Miss Rands comments on not evading stuff, over time, helped me a lot with being better with these kinds of things.
Short Answer: He’s not Rand. I only ever seriously tried to study Objectivism as a philosophy. This interest in CF and being more accepting of other thinkers besides Objectivist thinkers is a recent development.
I did five more word problems on the normal difficulty. The problems seemed about the same. I don’t know if that’s because I’ve gotten better (I definitely feel more comfortable doing this) at this or their really is no change in the problems they’ve given me. Their is a noticeable difference with other types of problems with the difficulty levels.
I got all five right. I think the set-up was ok for the problems. ~20 minutes
1.)
Mmm. I guess 3 looks a bit weird. I did write that question mark. I think that could be solved by doing 10 + 1.5c = 75 and having c be additional cups to the stack. And total cups (t) is 1 + c = t.
Yeah, though I wouldn’t say I have the knowledge/capacity to judge their Objectivism knowledge I don’t really try to consume much Objectivism oriented content anymore. I think this is in part due to your influence and seeing how bad some of the (supposedly) best Objectivists today are. Plus I really only liked Rand and some of Peikoff’s stuff. Consuming the stuff by other people was usually a chore.
Did 9 problems in total and got all nine right. They were all on the hard difficulty. I technically did 10, but one specific problem was confusing so I wanted to try it the next morning. I ended up losing the problem coming back the next day. Oh yeah, I did this over ~two days. 5 last night, 5 this morning.
~spent an hour doing all 10. I don’t have access to the problems I did yesterday.
Great. What topic would you like to work on next? Here are some options but you can also suggest some other area of math, or something else, if you have anything in mind.
mathematical logic (and, or, not, xor, truth tables)
This one is in the bottom left. I did a little research on it but not much. The only thing I learned is that expression would deal with 0’s and 1’s instead of True and False.
I take it evaluating would be different than making a truth table? I guess you wouldn’t have a full on table since the values are already there.
