Current main skills related to CF that I’m consciously working on:
- Grammar
- Studying Karl Popper (or more generally, studying articles, and this would overlap with e.g. studying CF articles)
- Creating answers to some big life goal questions (more generally, writing articles)
The grammar is something that I’m sure would be advantageous to automate. I’ve tried doing it while practising the other skills and I think it just makes me worse at both. In other words (referencing 18:40 in the video) I’m overloading my conscious thought bottleneck.
The other two I don’t think can be meaningfully automated. I guess e.g. if I knew Popper well enough to read his books and analyse them that would be a kind of automation. But I don’t think it’s a priority to know all of Popper’s writing in lots of detail, I’m interested in beneficial ideas that I can use without knowing all of the details too.
I think I can do well enough for now at studying and writing articles for the amount I’m doing it. I want to improve at it but don’t think it’s the right skill to develop consciously at the moment. I probably make quite a few mistakes in both. I think once I have a good automatised understanding of grammar I’ll find it easier to work on studying and writing skills (such as paragraph trees, reading comprehension, research skills). I think studying and writing articles at the moment can also help me identify specific areas I need to improve on, so it’s useful to do even knowing that I’m probably making mistakes.
Learning grammar is about changing automatisation for me (referencing 21.40 in video.) I already used a lot of grammar subsconsciously. I don’t have a good sense of how accurate my subconscious grammar is. I think I get enough right most of the time for people to mostly understand me, but I don’t have a way of measuring that. Even if I was super good subconsciously (which I don’t think I am), I still think it’s useful to understand the grammar language so I can talk about it.
The biggest change I think in learning grammar for me now is that I can go back and read over my sentences and more often than not describe which word is serving which purpose - though in more complex cases this is still a conscious effort for me. It has also made me more mindful of trying to write complete sentences; that’s something I’m currently consciously doing as I write and I’m rewriting sentences a lot. It would be better if I didn’t need to rewrite so much.
Maybe a sub-skill to develop for improving my use of grammar is having more complete thoughts before I start typing. I sometimes start typing and fairly often change my mind or add the rest of a thought mid sentence and that leads to lots of rewriting and possibly introduces more errors. I guess that would be an example of making more automatisations conscious.
Noting I’ve stopped watching at 25.03 for now (Mental Skills) so I can come back to this another time.