A summary:
four kinds of learning: two way communication, one way outgoing communication, one way incoming communication and no communication.
people sometimes learn with no incoming communication, e.g. - playing a video game without tips or guides.
A video game communicates information about how to play it so playing it is one way communication like reading a book.
interactive communication enables personalised feedback, unlike reading a book or watching a video.
some people communicate in youtube comments or on reddit or whatever, but they don’t get much interaction.
communicating with no responses can negatively affect your ideas cuz you change what you say to be more popular. it can also matter positively cuz people put what they think into words instead of relying on knowing your own ideas.
customised external criticism is a form of two way communication where you communicate some ideas and then another person writes criticism of those ideas. this can provide advice that is applicable to your individual problems.
books don’t offer that cuz the author doesn’t receive communication from the reader and adjust the book’s content accordingly. since the criticism isn’t customised to a person’s life it’s easier for the person to imagine it doesn’t apply to him and ignore it out of lack of knowledge about how to apply it or not wanting to be criticised.
people often want two way communication for purposes other than customised external criticism: teaching other people, talking down to people when they can reply so you look stronger by beating somebody who can reply.
two way communication allows people to make progress by coming up with ideas and criticisms that others would have missed cuz different people have different weaknesses. different people may also have the same weaknesses. some weaknesses are common in our culture.
teaching = somebody giving you external guidance. shouldn’t people lead their own learning? when a teacher is forced on you that’s evil. when a person gets stuck a lot he may want a teacher.
school teachers and parents teachers children coercively and often make them worse at learning. a teacher chooses topics and the pace of learning and people may become dependent on that.
damage is a bad way of thinking about problems produced by coercive teaching. everyone has flaws so you need to solve problems from whatever your current situation is.
teachers were also educated coercively and so are bad at choosing what to learn, choosing their own pace and taking responsibility.
standard teaching is authoritarian: the teacher decides what counts as good learning, a pupil’s disagreement isn’t taken seriously. pupils lose the ability to judge for themselves. pupils also learn to judge who has authority and how to navigate social status hierarchies. this is complicated and requires a lot of time and effort.
adults seek out teachers cuz they’re bad at learning, but universities teach in a similar irrational way to schools. and adults don’t want to experience boredom, powerlessness and low social status that comes with being a learner in those institutions.
debates are two way communication with high social stakes. debates between high status people are usually shows to change the audience’s mind - they’re time limited, and don’t have much time for questions between debaters or from the audience. informal debates aren’t well organised.
people try to avoid debate when they cooperate to avoid conflict.
off topic (and just don’t reply if you don’t want to talk about it – or let me know if you do appreciate this kind of message) but how come you haven’t made grammar trees? do you disagree with me about them being useful in general? disagree about useful to you? are you just too busy and couldn’t spare more energy for CF than what you’re already using on posts, and you already have plenty to do here (you never don’t post due to a shortage of ideas about what to do)? note: i don’t want you to just start doing it on my initiative because i brought it up. i brought it up to potentially talk about it, not to get some other result.
I have been busy. I haven’t got around to reviewing all the material about grammar trees yet and haven’t come to a decision about whether making them should be my next priority.