I wrote a comment replying to Elliot’s article Treating Ideas Badly - #3 by S_Emiya. In this comment I tried to do some practice related to Paths Forward. Here are the attempts:
For example, I think Paths Forward is related to the concept of practice. I think that practicing things will expose your mistakes and errors more quickly. Like you’ll try to do things and fail and you’ll realize you’re making an error. If you don’t practice your ideas, then you could go for a long while without running into an error. So you could be stuck with bad ideas while ignoring other paths forward you could find by practicing.
I think it’s related to Paths Forward because Paths Forward aren’t always obvious (for me at least). If you dismiss paths based only on your initial impression then you’ll dismiss a lot of Paths forward and and end up on bad paths. You can’t trust that your judgement is good enough to dismiss ideas without refuting them. Not being able to refute an idea is like a warning sign that you shouldn’t dismiss it.
I was trying to follow the example suggested in Elliot’s article A Succession of Practice Activities. This is the example I was thinking of:
You can do something similar with other concepts. For example, you can use the concept of freedom, and look at various example scenarios and look for ways they involve freedom or lack of freedom.
I was trying to look at example scenarios and look for ways they involved Paths Forward.
The problem I ran into is that I don’t know how to judge if I was successful.
I would appreciate any advice on how to judge whether my practice attempts were successful. Right now, all I can say is that I haven’t heard any criticisms of the attempts I made.