Learning Updates Thread

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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.

Some learning I’ve done recently:

Ideas for what I might do in the future:

1) More grammar

  • I might take a look at the Peikoff recommended grammar book, Writing and Thinking.
  • I bought ET’s grammar videos on Gumroad so I might go through them. I might at some point try doing the lying analysis (in that Gumroad product) myself and compare what I do with what ET did. Or just watch/read ET’s analysis. I feel like it could be good to be good at analyzing text like ET so I feel like that could be an interesting exercise or at least interesting to read/watch.
  • Just generally practice grammar way more so it becomes more automatized.

2) Paragraph trees

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.

2) Paraphrasing practice

I feel like practicing this could improve my reading comprehension skills (along with having other uses like paraphrasing stuff for big paragraph trees).

4) Brainstorming practice

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.

5) Then what?

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.

Other ideas:

  • 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.

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Proper Knowledge [CF Article]