@ActiveMind and I had the idea of creating a learning updates thread:
So I’m creating this so people can post their learning updates here if they want to.
Btw, this thread isn’t just for learning updates but also for people to discuss and critique each other’s stuff. Because the whole point of sharing is to get feedback and ideas/tips that one wouldn’t have thought of by oneself.
Going forward I might post updates here on a ~weekly basis (as suggested in the original Learning Updates Thread).
But for now—to start off—I’ll just mention some stuff I’ve been working on recently plus my ideas about what I might do going forward.
Grammar
ET’s grammar article.
Some of ET’s dependency grammar tree videos. I’m still going through that Text Analysis playlist.
Some of Peikoff’s Principles of Grammar course. I’m still going through it.
CF Reading
I like the idea of automatizing the ability to quickly identify the key idea or conclusion of a whole paragraph and see how the other sentences/ideas tie into that. I feel like having x-ray vision like that would be cool.
Also atm I feel like that’s something I’m bad at. I often just read stuff and then some random thing the person mentions will remind me of some other thing and so it’s a very chaotic reading method. Whereas being able to quickly grasp the overall point/main idea/conclusion sounds like it could be super helpful cuz then I can respond to (or consider) the main idea rather than getting distracted by some random idea that I noticed that might not necessarily be the key idea that the person was trying to communicate.
I feel like practicing this could improve my reading comprehension skills (along with having other uses like paraphrasing stuff for big paragraph trees).
I saw LMD, in his async tutoring, did some brainstorming practice after grammar and paragraph trees and paraphrasing. So I feel like I might want to loosely follow along by also practicing brainstorming after I do those other things.
Also brainstorming seems like it could be super helpful for coming up with creative solutions to things. I’ve seen this mentioned in other books I’ve read and liked, like Chapter 7 of Scenario-Focused Engineering and Accidental Genius, so the idea of being great at brainstorming seems appealing cuz I feel like it could make me more creative and better able to come up with solutions to problems.
Also ET wrote a CF article on brainstorming (which I haven’t read yet).
Also ET has brainstorming as a skill on his An Organized Plan for Learning Philosophy tree. So if I try to learn the stuff on that tree, then that’s one of the skills I’ll have to learn.
If I do all that, I’m not sure what the next thing I’ll do is. LMD stopped his async tutoring so I’m not sure what he would’ve done after that. Maybe I can do some math stuff like arithmetic trees but I’m not a huge fan of math (I prefer language stuff) so I feel like I might like to do other stuff first.
Writing Habit: I wonder if I should begin a writing habit. I noticed that in the async tutoring I think they—as part of that—were doing some regular (daily?) private writing (and sharing some of it once a fortnight or something like that). I’m not entirely sure what the point of that is or whether I should do that too.
Practice CF Concepts: Practice some CF concepts using the Practice Thinking in Terms of Error Correction method. Maybe I could study some other CF articles and practice the concepts like breakpoints or whatever using that method. Idk tho. I’m more excited by the other stuff I mentioned atm so I think I’ll prioritize that for now.
Comment on Some of What I Read: Maybe comment on some of ET’s articles that I read. That’d both help me learn the stuff a bit better (since it gets me to articulate my understanding of it) plus it might make ET a bit more inclined to share stuff in the future since I guess there’s not much point in him sharing his writing if nobody comments on it.
Why not share more of your work on grammar and stuff in a project or just in a normal thread like I did? Do you find that you don’t need error correction help other than comparing to past stuff like mine? I mean that’s fair if you find that’s enough. I would look at your work and try to catch errors if you did share.
Yeah I guess I just found that comparing my grammar practice to stuff like your project (which was very helpful, so thanks for that! 
) and also using ET’s grammar tree prompt (which sometimes makes errors, but I still found it to be helpful) was enough.
But now you mention it, and since I’m moving on to stuff that’s more complex than “John threw the red ball”, I might start a grammar thread at some point. So thanks for the suggestion.
That’s a very generous offer. I don’t want you to feel obligated to check my stuff though, so it’s fine if you don’t.
I’d recommend daily writing, even just 10 minutes. You can write about philosophy topics or about personal problems, emotions, day planning, goals, reflection on yesterday, analyzing recent things you did, etc.
Writing is important to participating in philosophy and to getting better at putting your thoughts into words, then analyzing and improving them.
Ok, thank you for your explanation. I’ll definitely begin a writing habit. I found your list of topic suggestions super helpful. I feel like I’ve got an endless amount to write about now.
Is there a good rule of thumb or approximate ratio/percentage for how much writing one should do versus other learning activities? Like if one is devoting, say, 3 hours to philosophy a day, then how much of that would be good to devote to writing vs other learning activities? Would that change on days one devotes more time (e.g., 6 hours) to philosophy?
I’d guess for a world-class philosopher like you, a higher percentage of time spent on writing would make sense. But for a total beginner like me, I’d guess it should be much less. Would 20% be too much or too little for a beginner?
It really depends on how well writing is working for you. Speaking generally:
If writing is really psychologically painful, maybe do none and try to fix that.
If writing is merely low productivity, do at least a little.
If writing is fun and high productivity, you could spend a lot of your time on it. It’s still important to read too though.
I do a fair amount of my thinking/brainstorming as writing instead of just thinking in my head. That increases writing time but thinking without writing is fine too.
Here is some of what I did this week:
identifying participles (e.g., a winning smile), which led me to notice that participles can also function as adverbs (e.g., He died fighting for his beliefs) (happily, ActiveMind and ET confirmed that participles can act as adverbs)
infinitives of purpose (e.g., She put a pie into the oven to bake) vs adjectival infinitives (e.g., I need a house to live in)
differentiating “that” as a relative pronoun (which introduces adjective clauses, e.g., I want a dog that is quiet and well-behaved) vs “that” as a conjunction (which introduces noun clauses, e.g., I think that he is awesome).
But idk if I should practice the more advanced stuff from Peikoff’s course to the point of it being more intuitive. (If anyone has any thoughts or advice on this matter, please let me know.) My current idea is that I should master the more basic parts of grammar before working on mastering the more advanced ideas from Peikoff’s later lectures. To elaborate:
At the moment, I’m still not very good at reading complicated text. For example, before learning grammar, I didn’t really understand the Taggart Terminal quote that Peikoff used as an example in the first lecture of his course. There’s also lots of other text that I still don’t really understand at first glance, e.g., the paragraph from ET’s Steven Pinker video or even other quotes from Atlas Shrugged, e.g.:
Dagny, every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor—by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence—and every achievement is an expression of it.
I couldn’t immediately comprehend and summarize that. Let alone more complicated sentences.
So I feel like maybe I should master the basics of grammar first and get super good at rapidly understanding, analyzing, and summarizing sentences. That might be more useful to me at the moment than mastering ideas from Peikoff’s later lectures such as putting the main idea in the main clause, parallelism after correlatives, pluperfect vs present perfect tense, proper use of pronouns, etc. I guess Peikoff’s course is intended more for people who want to write correctly rather than analyze text/read correctly. But atm I think I might want to focus more on text analysis. And I feel like I still have a lot more work to do to master basic grammar.
So I might pause Peikoff’s course for a bit and instead refocus on mastering basic grammar and sentence diagramming. (And perhaps have a go at some other text analysis stuff like paragraph trees and paraphrasing.)
I haven’t decided for sure yet. Maybe I’ll work on both mastering Peikoff’s grammar principles and mastering text analysis in parallel. If anyone has any suggestions or thoughts, I’m all ears.
Depends on your goals. I’m guessing you know enough grammar to get started on some paragraph trees, writing, or various other next steps.
Working on more advanced things then revisiting earlier things is called the spiral theory of knowledge by Peikoff in Understanding Objectivism and I think is commonly advocated by others.
Working on more advanced stuff can help you see where your prior knowledge works and where it has gaps. It gives you a chance to use your knowledge in a different way (as background knowledge instead of as the direct target of learning) and get a different perspective on it.
It can also help with motivation (people often are most interested in some later more advanced stuff, and see that as more fun, so it’s good to go back and forth trying it out sometimes and seeing how well you do, rather than waiting a long time to get to it. also basically you want to find out if you even like philosophy quickly, and keep double checking it in case it changes, so that means skipping ahead to more advanced things sometimes and doing your best. and that also gives you an idea of how the more basic things connect to more advanced things and whether they’re actually helping solve the problems you face with the more advanced things).
That’s a pretty complicated sentence. If you can understand what it’s saying (main points, not all the grammar) in a couple minutes, you could probably analyze some paragraphs or do some writing or discussion.
Thank you for your advice. I’ll start doing paragraph trees.
Regarding your earlier post about daily writing (my bold):
Do you have any tips/pointers/leads on “analyzing and improving them”—like how does one go about doing that?
(I guess it’d be the same as analyzing other people’s writing/thoughts, but idk how one does that either—apart from grammar, paragraph trees, etc. And idk if there’s much value in creating some trees of one’s own writing. I suppose it’d improve one’s grammar and sentence organization skills.)
Do what you can for analysis and critical thinking. Review sometimes for ways to improve or notice some as you go along. Get feedback from others sometimes (directly asking for feedback, or discussing or debating and seeing how well your ideas are received). Look at what others do and compare (e.g. if you like a book or essay, you can try to do some of the same stuff as it).
This week I focused on learning paragraph trees:
I went through ET’s Philosopher Does Analysis (Paragraph Tree) YouTube video, which was about making a paragraph tree out of JustinCEO’s forum post about whether focusing on SENS would be an error.
I took notes on ET’s steps for creating a paragraph tree
I followed along by creating my own tree in order to familiarize myself with the process of creating a paragraph tree
I went through ET’s Philosophical Perspective: Complexity in a Regular Paragraph YouTube video, which was about making grammar trees and a paragraph tree out of a paragraph about the Apple Newsroom saying goodbye to the iPod.
I was pleased that I was able to create grammar trees for all of the sentences with minimal errors. This surprised me, as I thought I’d find it harder.
The paragraph tree I created (before looking at ET’s and ActiveMind’s ones) turned out to not be too dissimilar, which pleased me.
I did ET’s Pinker video. I was amazed by how good that video is!
I followed along at almost every step (doing my own work before seeing ET’s versions), summarizing the sentences, creating the grammar trees, creating the paragraph tree, taking a stab at analyzing each sentence, etc.
In the video, ET said: “So when you break things down, sometimes they’re not as impressive as they might have seemed at first.” ET’s video demonstrated that to an astonishing degree. I went into the Pinker video with not a very high opinion of Pinker, but somehow—after ET broke it down and explained it like that—it turns out that Pinker’s writing is so enormously more vacuous than I ever would’ve imagined.
I might continue practicing paragraph trees. I might do the Szasz tree from Max’s tutoring, some trees from the async tutoring threads, etc. I might also take a look at the the lying analysis from ET’s grammar videos product on Gumroad.
I didn’t do practice stuff this week, but I consumed some content:
I watched some of the gigahurt Discussion Tree videos
I watched the main Yes or No Philosophy video and I really liked it. (I bought this product ages ago but I never went through it properly.) I think I might like to go through the main video again (and also go through the other Yes/No material) and practice the concepts a bit and consider how I might be able to apply it to my own life and thinking.
I bought the Critical Fallibilism Course Videos from Gumroad and went through the first lecture.
I read the first chapter of The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch.
I finished watching all of the videos in the Critical Fallibilism Videos Course product.
This is my 4th weekly update. The original curi Learning Updates Thread blog post says to write a monthly update. I’ll do one every 4 weeks. Here’s a summary of what I got done this month:
Text analysis
I practiced grammar and did some of Peikoff’s course
I learned paragraph trees
I did the Pinker video
I watched some gigahurt discussion tree videos
CF
I watched the main Yes or No Philosophy video
I watched all of the Critical Fallibilism Course Videos
Great. I hope you’ll share some thoughts, opinions, comments, notes, feedback or something.
I will. I’m planning on studying/practicing the content this week.
Some thoughts to start off with:
I liked the course a lot. I liked lectures 4 and 5 the most. I took by far the most notes on them. (My notes are too messy to share atm and are mostly just copying points from slides and quotes from you speaking. I might try to summarize some of the lectures or key concepts to help me retain the ideas better. I can share that.)
I think recognizing that degree criticism and praise (if they can’t be converted into decisive criticism) aren’t cognitively meaningful is a big deal. I found that super exciting. I think it’s exciting to learn to differentiate between arguments that work (i.e., actual arguments) versus arguments that don’t work (i.e., non-arguments). It reminds me of learning about informal logical fallacies (e.g., ad hominem, appeal to popularity, appeal to nature, etc.) in high school. I found that super exciting because it made me realize that so much of what people say in arguments is actually irrelevant. I feel the same way about learning about this CF idea.
There’s other stuff that I like as well (e.g., meta problem solving technique, IGC charts, etc.). I’m looking forward to studying them more and practicing them. I’ll share that.
Here’s my current (rough) idea for how I might proceed with learning and practicing the concepts and methods from the Yes or No Philosophy and Critical Fallibilism Course Videos products:
Try to write some summaries of the key concepts
Try to think of some examples of the key concepts; practice using them
Consider how I might apply them to my own life and thinking; consider whether I find that helpful or not
I think I’ll start by practicing IGC charts.
If you have any ideas/tips (or better plans) for how I should proceed, I’d be very glad to know.
I also wondered if I should practice the Yes/No and CF Course stuff first before reading Multi-Factor Decision Making Math. I think I should because I haven’t properly digested the Yes/No & CF Course content I’ve consumed so far.
I reviewed some of the concepts that I learned from the Critical Fallibilism Course Videos:
I wrote about my current understanding of some of those concepts
I created some IGC charts for practice
I looked into qualitative versus quantitative distinctions a bit more.
I watched a few videos on qualitative vs quantitative distinctions, but so far I found that they didn’t help me to understand CF better.
I brainstormed some examples of qualitative vs quantitative traits of health, relationships, hobbies, and work.
I got Gemini to quiz me on examples of qualitative versus quantitative traits.
I read to chapters 2–5 of The Fabric of Reality.
Some articles I read:
I read Multi-Factor Decision Making Math. I didn’t notice any major new CF ideas (apart from the math) that I didn’t already know about from the CF Course Videos and Y/N Philosophy products. It was interesting to see IGC evaluations done as math though.
I read “The Order of Things” by Malcolm Gladwell (it has examples of weighing and scoring) and liked it.
I’m not sure how to proceed or what to do next, so if anyone has any ideas or suggestions, then please let me know. I feel that I’d like to continue learning/practicing binary epistemology more, but I’m not sure how to do so. I feel a bit stuck or unsure how to proceed.