Sub-discussions about errors tend to be about prior, easier topics. If your background knowledge is solid, then you shouldn’t make a ton of mistakes in most sub-discussions.
This seems really significant.
One thing I’m trying at the moment is to treat criticisms as more significant, and by default: correct.[1] If I do have the background knowledge to understand it, then I should be able to do significant work to figure out what the criticism meant (or have a reasonable criticism of that criticism). But I’d still fail at that if I’m too hasty to respond, or if I respond casually/unseriously (which would reflect that I’m treating the subject casually – not good for learning philosophy). If I don’t have the background knowledge, then trying to seriously understand the criticism should make it obvious to me that I don’t have the bg knowledge.
I think, maybe, that when most people write down (or think / act on) complex ideas, they often have more background knowledge than they use. But partial use of bg knowledge, I suspect, means that they’re not addressing contradictions between ideas, or haven’t fully integrated all the relevant background knowledge.
This is something I’m doing b/c of reading AS. Maybe a crude way to explain it: a criticism of something I’m confident in is a claim that I’m faking reality in some way. If that’s correct, then I can learn from it and fake less. If it’s not correct, then it’s possible to figure that out (and in doing so, would have a criticism of that criticism). ↩︎
It’s the same kind of thing as
The method of constructing P2 [problem number 2] goes like this: given we disagree about P1, what should we do? P3 is constructed like this: given we disagree about P1 and P2, what should we do?
The new problems tend to get easier. If they didn’t, the method wouldn’t work well.
A reason sub-discussions tend to be simpler is they tend to challenge one or two parts of what you said. You have a tree of knowledge, and a critic looks through it and disagrees with some parts, and those parts are less than the whole. And disagreements are generally on the same level of abstraction as your top level comments or lower – a critic won’t usually comment on a higher level than anything you said, since then he wouldn’t be commenting on something you said. But he can easily comment on a lower level than your main point, and that’s common.
Yeah.
I did some exploratory writing (below) about this for two different cases and convinced myself that neither case were an issue.
(If people were creating sub-discussions that were more complicated than the prior discussion, then complexity would escalate and there’d be no realistic hope of resolving the issues. The occasional sub/tangential/branch discussion can increase complexity, but most shouldn’t.)
Is philosophy an exception here? Like, maybe there are (seemingly) simple ideas / questions with a mistake, where understanding the mistake is a bigger task (and maybe that’s common). But the sub-discussion doesn’t have to be about the whole topic – maybe this can always be avoided if the more knowledgeable person can reduce the scope of the sub-discussion to address a specific error? Taking a step back, if two ppl discuss philosophy and at least one can identify some errors, but their sub-discussions get increasingly complex, well that sounds like either: neither understand enough to succeed at that discussion anyway, or that it’s an error in discussion methodology. So this gets resolved by focusing on the bottleneck and figuring out how to find and resolve simpler or more foundational mistakes. I’m not sure if Paths Forward would help, but there is definitely a way to make progress. In fact, simply knowing that increasing complexity indicates some generic issue like this is enough for people to identify it – so there is always a sub-discussion topic of: “how do we reduce sub-discussion complexity instead of increase it?”
Another thought – what if someone were a malicious discussion partner, maybe they could always increase the complexity of sub-discussions. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be possible to arbitrarily inflate the complexity of a sub-discussion. But a malicious discussion partner might be easy to detect (and so you could opt out) and if not then Paths Forwards solves that problem.
In both cases, the problem of increasing complexity isn’t the issue that really matters – there are bigger problems, but they’re soluble.
This page is 404ing.
thanks, fixed. somehow when i updated it from Ulysses it set it to draft mode instead of published.
I think I can phrase the first sentence to say something like this: Making progress = finding errors + fixing errors.
The second sentence is about a key. I can look up what “key” means but intuitively I think that means an important idea. It’s an important idea to understand to be successful. Also, being able to successfully judge for yourself what’s an error is part of finding errors. If you find errors and fix them then you can make progress.
The third sentence seems to be related to the second to say if you don’t know what an error is then you won’t find them. If you can’t find them then you won’t be able to fix errors.
Fourth sentence:
I think if you’re not good at finding errors then it’ll be a good thing to focus on first for you. You probably are kind of good at fixing them but you don’t really know how they look like right now. It’s probably at a bottleneck.
I’m wondering if you can be good at finding errors at certain things you practice more vs. something new you just started with?? Like, let’s say you’re getting good at finding errors in video games does that mean, you’re gonna be good at finding errors at anything else?? i think maybe a little bit. Like, errors that seem similar are easier to find. Idk
The fact that people can already find errors well for some topics and not others means it’s something to get better at. Like, just cuz you can find erorrs in your niche well doesn’t mean you’re really good at doing it in general? Do you gotta be good at finding errors in general? Like maybe for easy errors yes but you don’t have to be super good at everything I think.
“This” refers to finding errors
Double or triple checking if the animal is correct or not is a lot like double or triple checking your math. I think in the animal example, if it was hard to identify a dog from a cat, I would probably double check the whiskers, the eyes, if it meows, if it’s energetic maybe or how slow/fast its stride is. In math, I would maybe double check if I added a series of addends well. Like, if I added the first two or three or four addends right.
I think in both cases I’m checking if I made a mistake or an error. There’s probably something in my math or identification of a dog that’s not correcting errors well. I have to double check when I do the math or when I differentiate a dog from a cat.
I wanna analyze the paragraph above but I wanna say I already read the article ahead and I like the idea of having goals in mind that will fail due to a problem and thinking about the goals you actually have:
The article made me think that what if you brainstorm goals you have while reading or analyzing? Goals like analyze paragraph x or analyze idea y. That seems to me that it can help with perfectionism cuz you won’t want to analyze every single thing that comes to mind that you end up running out of time. Idk
Pparagraph talking about difficult cases in identifying animals and about how being unsure helps to know about errors:
There are more difficult cases, e.g. some small dogs look similar to some cats. Sometimes you only get a glance at the animal. Sometimes you only hear the animal but don’t see it. Sometimes you’re asked the particular species of bird but you don’t know much about birds. Reasonable people can tell when they’re unsure. You can say “I’m confident that this one is a sheep, but while I can make a guess about that other one, I’m not confident.” Knowing when you know, or not, is an important part of the skill of being able to check for errors. If it was really important to identify the exact species of bird, and you knew you were unsure, you could look it up (but being overconfident could prevent you from looking it up).
The first few setnences of the quote above about difficult cases:
There are more difficult cases, e.g. some small dogs look similar to some cats. Sometimes you only get a glance at the animal. Sometimes you only hear the animal but don’t see it. Sometimes you’re asked the particular species of bird but you don’t know much about birds.
Error-correcting mechanisms for the quote above(brainstorm):
- I think talking about Difficult cases in identifying animals shows that people do double check stuff. Even with something seemingly easy as identifying animals
- Prevents the error of thinking “identifying animals is too easy. What are you talking about author??”
- The second example prevents the error of thinking you only see the animal as long as you want and not think there’s hard cases to identifying animals
Sometimes you only hear the animal but don’t see it. Sometimes you’re asked the particular species of bird but you don’t know much about birds.
The cases in the quote above are where you would probably double check or not be sure if you’re correct or not.
The first sentence in the quote shows that we may not be so familiar with animal sounds as we are with how they look. That leads to us having to probably double check if it’s the right animal.
The second sentence of the quote shows that since you don’t know much about birds, it’s hard to tell if you’re right about a bird being a particular species.
Reasonable people can tell when they’re unsure. You can say “I’m confident that this one is a sheep, but while I can make a guess about that other one, I’m not confident.” Knowing when you know, or not, is an important part of the skill of being able to check for errors.
In the first sentence of the quote, it says reasonable people can tell when they’re unsure. There’s something about them being reasonable that let’s them know that they’re unsure. A part of me automatically thinks that a reasonable person would have the answer to something they don’t know. Being reasonable seems to be about errors. Like, they know they’re making an error or not.
You can say “I’m confident that this one is a sheep, but while I can make a guess about that other one, I’m not confident.” Knowing when you know, or not, is an important part of the skill of being able to check for errors.
So to connect the first sentence of the quote above to the second sentence: You say that you’re confident that an animal is a sheep. That’s knowing when you know. The person is confident in it. They don’t find any known errors.
In the second part of the quote, the person says that they can make a guess about the animal but they’re not confident. That’s them knowing when they don’t know. They know that they’re making errors I think.
The person in the quote seems to be practicing the important part of the skill of being able to check for errors. I think since they know that they know or not, they can then work on finding errors and fixing them.
correct. the skill of finding errors only partially transfers between topics.
yes but usually it’s not hard. if you see a cow, you don’t usually go “hmm, i wonder if it’s a cow or a cat, i better check carefully”. usually it’s really obvious to you.
there’s some stuff people think is obvious but they actually get wrong too often. there’s other they think is obvious that they approximately always get right – it became obvious because their skill level is genuinely way more than needed. we can get to the point that some things become really easy and reliable for us. (we should still be potentially open to critical thinking about it if someone says we’re wrong and wants to share criticism. we should never close our minds entirely and refuse to think about it ever again no matter what. but typically that doesn’t come up.)
I wonder how the transfer of the skill between topics is related to learning CF prerequisites. If you’re learning CF prerequisites and you cycle between them then you’re for sure getting some help from learning about another topic. Maybe not “for sure” tho
Also, it’s good that the skill transfers. That’s better than no skill transferring at all.
So the first sentence and second sentence say that people think it’s obvious to identify animals in certain cases.
In the first sentence it says:
I think the “too often” means that maybe the person should rethink that identifying those animals was obvious. I think they identified the animal incorrectly so often that it’s too much for it to be considered obvious.
After “other” i think it should say “stuff”
The part in the quote above where it says their skill level is way more than needed reminds me of excess capacity or breakpoints. I think their skill level at identifying common animals is at excess capacity that if they tried to learn more about how to identify common animals they would get the same result.
I’m gonna analyze the part after the hyphen a little:
“it” I think refers to identifying common animals.
“became obvious” I think means that it became obvious to them. I think it means that they’re not double or triple checking.
I think the “genuinely way more than needed.” means way more than needed to identify common animals. So if people’s goal were to identify common animals with very good accuracy then they already passed that goal. They don’t need to up that skill level more. I think it also means that they have a lot of ways to make sure they’re correct that they don’t need to double check
Yes it is hard to tell what’s an error.
Knowing what’s an error sounds important to learn philosophy. It also seems important to be able to tell what’s an error or not.
In arithmetic, you can add 2 plus 2 and be able to tell that it’s 4. If you work on a bigger problem that involves adding 2 plus 2 then you’ll be able to tell you got that part right.
What does clear cut mean? I saw that merriam webster said it’s something that’s free from ambiguity or uncertainty. So I think it’s stuff you don’t have to double check so much.
I think the quoted sentence above is related to the other quoted sentence, talking about why it’s hard to tell what’s an error in philosophy.
Learning the names of a country on a globe sounds more clear cut cuz if you have good memory skills then you can get less errors.
I kind of can’t tell if I write something philosophical or not sometimes. I think that needs some work probably. I think “good” or “bad” means if it has errors or not.
In the second sentence it says it’s easy to reread and still be unsure. I think that probably has to be related to your goals. You’re not able to find your goals and see if any of the ideas fail at the goal. It sounds complicated. Philosophy does seem not as clear cut.
Quote from the article:
So, to learn philosophy, you need to take areas where you can find (and fix) your errors and expand on those. Build up from there. Don’t jump into stuff where you can’t effectively judge what’s correct or working.
So in the first sentence, it says to learn philosophy. That means if it’s your goal.
Also, the first sentence is talking about areas. I kind of dont know what that means or what that looks like. Maybe if I did then I would be able to identify such areas.
In those “areas,” you can find your errors. You can also fix those errors. You can expand on those errors too I think. What does expand mean? Like maybe find other places where you can find and fix errors. If you fix a big error, I think you can learn to do more stuff than you usually could.
In the second sentence, it says, "Build up from there." There I think means where u fixed your errors. I think you fix a bad idea you had and you can now build up from there.
I see it says, “Don’t jump into stuff.” “Stuff” could be mean anything. The infinitive(i think) “jump” sounds kinda important. It’s like going from one point to another isolated point. It’s different than gradually getting there. Like walking there.
What kind of “stuff?” The quote says, “stuff where you can’t effectively judge what’s correct or working.” I could replace what’s after “judge” with anything else to get a better idea. Here:
- Stuff where you can’t effectively judge when the cake is baked.
- Stuff where you can’t effectively judge what animal you’re trying to identify
- Stuff where you can’t effectively judge what time it is.
- Stuff where you can’t effectively judge what’s an error or not
- Stuff where you can’t effectively judge what’s an error mechanism or not.
I think if you “effectively judge what’s correct or working,” then you’ll fix errors. I think what “correct” means is if it has errors or not. “Working” I think means if it’s accomplishing its goal. It seems like it helps to be a good thinker for that stuff. How will you know what’s correct or working if you don’t think well?
It says at the beginning, “To work on learning something.” “To work,” I think means to make progress or to make a plan and be successful. I think it means to develop something. Imma look up the definition rq…
According to Cambridge dictionary “work on something” means:
to spend time repairing or improving something:
I think improving on learning something makes sense. That means to make it better like literally.
I see that you dont need to be perfect at identifying errors. Like, maybe you won’t accomplish every single goal there is to identifying errors. You dont have to get stuck trying to get every single detail right when identifying errors. Imagine how ET identifies errors, he’s probably really good at it. You dont have to get every single thing he does right. It might be too much for you as a beginner.
“Need” means something, like it’s necessary for you to be fairly good. That in order to work on learning something
In the first part of the sentence it says, “To work on learning something.”(my bold) Something could be anything. It could be any skill like learning to bake a cake or identifying common animals.
What the quote above says is if youre bad at identifying errors.
If youre bad at identifying errors you need to find a way to work your way up. That way lets you develop other skills. You develop some other skills to work your way up.
I think if youre kind of bad at identifying errors then developing other skills can help you work your way up. I think it has to do with learning CF prerequisites. If you develop logic skills like learning what a negation of something is then you can work your way up and be able to tell if you did a part of decisive arguments correctly. You can tell if you found the negation of an criticism’s conclusion correctly
People get stuck at learning something. Why? Because they dismiss many errors. How do they dismiss errors? They dismiss them as unimportant or unworthy of their time or attention.
“dismiss” means that people dont take it seriously as something to think about.
People think the errors are unimportant or unworthy of their attention or time.
I think it’s hard to see how an error is important or worthy to look at.
In the first sentence, it seems people can find errors. But they dont care or dont want to deal with it. That error may be important and it could solve their problem. That error is something they can investigate. That error may be the reason theyre failing at their goal. Their current idea of trying to get where their at is failing.
In the second sentence, people ignore important errors. Is that different than refusing to deal with the error? Is there a difference between the error and important error? Maybe the important error is holding them back .
In the third sentence it says people wont listen to some valuable criticism. That criticism is valuable cuz if they understand it and put it to use then they can see how they can fix their problem.
In the fourth sentence, it talks about valuing finding errors. If you value finding errors then you think it’s important. It could be like money; you value money. You can use money to purchase important things. Valuing finding errors sounds important. If you value finding errors then you can implement it in your learning project.
In the fifth sentence it talks about people blocking themselves from making progress. I see that it says, “They end up blocking themselves…” from making progress. Blocking yourself sounds important. It’s not like youre curious trying to find an answer and then you dont learn anything about errors. It’s like you stop being curious. Like you stop yourself from being curious