How to Truth-Seek?

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Goal: Share my ideas about how to truth-seek such that others can criticize it to put me on the right path.

How should you go about truth seeking?

When can you decide you should integrate and automatize controversial philosophy knowledge like selfishness or altruism, evolution or induction, or objective reality or solipsism?

In a way I think Oism, TOC, CR and CF are awesome and so I want to just go straight ahead and integrate them into my life. But I want to be an honest truth-seeker and I could be wrong that these philosophies are awesome because of fallibilism.

I have listened to 3 books and one course on the history of philosophy, but I haven’t read any visually or taken notes. Should that be requirement? Maybe not taking notes, but at least reading and focusing on each philosophy.

What about finding really obscure philosophies like CF (even though it’s built upon more popular ones)?

Paths Forward (PF) would be a large part. That’s what it’s designed for. We can’t read everything, so we need a way for others to come to us with the important stuff we have missed.

If I made a PF now I think no one would care. If I were a famous intellectual then people would use it. To become a famous intellectual you need to have ideas and be good at them. So how to figure out which ideas to build on? I think you need to do some general survey before deciding on a promising path. My answer is read at least one book covering the field. Then pick some ideas that seem promising to you.

And then just study that stuff in a cave until you’re a master? No. While learning the ideas go to rival ideas and start debating. You should be continually testing your ideas while learning.

So:

  • survey the area
  • pick what you find interesting and promising
  • learn some
  • seek out debate with rivals to continually test your ideas
  • make a PF at some point to let obscure ideas find you which you wouldn’t have sought out by yourself

Try to be rational (depends on what philosophy you learn, but you have to start somewhere) and unbiased throughout the process and then I think you’ve made a good effort at truth-seeking.

My plan now:
I liked Peikoffs lectures on the history of philosophy, but I already like Oism, so I think I should read another book to avoid bias. I found that The Dream of Reason and The Dream of Enlightenment seemed quite neutral and I liked those over The Story of Philosophy by Durant. So I plan on reading those and another book on modern philosophy.

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How’d you pick CF? Why do you like it? Being specific about the opinions you already have, and their reasons, may help.

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The first thing is that I can’t find contradictions in CF. But I guess that if I had found Bayesianism first then I wouldn’t have found many errors in it either.

I think fallibilism is true due to infinite regress. CR is great because it tells me how we can still get knowledge. We get it by guessing, we can start anywhere. Then we can improve by correcting errors which is done by critiquing our guesses. So the problem of how knowledge is possible while fallibilism is true is solved by CR. Great.

Infallibilism promises knowledge and certainty. With certainty it’s easy to be decisive. CF is great because it shows us how we can be decisive. CF gives us great tools for thinking, ToC gives us great tools for thinking as well. So CF shows me how to be decisive and effective.

Should I go into more detail about why I like the tools for thinking CF gives us?

I started liking Oism first. I could write more about that.

When I was ~12 y/o I thought something like:

There are many different way to do things. Some ways are better than others. So there must a best way to do things (objective morality). I ought to figure out what those things are. How? By thinking (reason).

I added parenthesis to say what I now think those sentences imply. Back then I didn’t know about philosophy, epistemology or that morality was for how to live your life instead of how sacrificing for others is good.

Since then I was preoccupied with doing things effectively. My goal was to become the greatest ever in my sport. So I was concerned with having the most optimized training sessions and also live my life optimally to improve as much as possible in my sport.

So I think this made attracted to philosophies that say objective reality is real and that reason is effective.

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Yeah before you have learned at least one school of thought, you have limited skills to evaluate them with. You’ve gotta pick something reasonable that you like and get started somewhere.

With video games, sometimes it’s better to just try playing a game than to do a bunch of research on whether it’s worth playing. That can be faster and more fun, especially if you’re newer to video games and don’t know what they’re like. With more experience, you can translate reviews and other pre-purchase information into practical understanding of the game more quickly and easily but you still have to sometimes just take a risk and try something that you’re not sure about. There are tradeoffs to different approaches with different amounts of planning ahead of time, time spent on research and time spent on actually playing the game. There’s no simple, mechanical rules; logical thinking, intuition and experience can all help you make reasonable decisions, and then the really important thing is to watch out for patterns of recurring errors and make changes if you find one. This comes up with many things besides video games.

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Is it hard to get discussion for or against TOC? Are there even any rival ideas on the whole and not just specific issues? Is it uncontroversial except for harmony of interests, compromising, brain power? Can I treat it like basic math and grammar where it’s safe to learn without doing any debate?

You mentioned there are disagreements with Less Wrong in Tutoring max #5. It still seems like a good place to start because I can power up with philosophy with less controversy and need for debate. I could power up for later debates.

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Or just read a novel instead of reviews like you did with Foundation. I trust your review though.

There aren’t that many major philosophies. I can learn some from each. I can group some philosophers based on shared fundamentals. Then focus on the fundamentals to get a short first hand idea of the major philosophies.

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Type “Alternatives to Theory of Constraints” into ChatGPT.

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