Some of what I did this week
This week I focused on learning paragraph trees:
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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.
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I took notes on ET’s steps for creating a paragraph tree
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I followed along by creating my own tree in order to familiarize myself with the process of creating a paragraph tree
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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.
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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.
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The paragraph tree I created (before looking at ET’s and ActiveMind’s ones) turned out to not be too dissimilar, which pleased me.
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I did ET’s Pinker video. I was amazed by how good that video is!
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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.
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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.
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Next week
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.