Yeah same concept.
I think I want to keep doing more writing, or something writing/reading adjacent. Do you have any ideas? An idea I just had is that I really liked doing the logic/idea analysis of the D. Friedman quote. Doing assignments like that would be fun, but they might be hard to just come up with off-hand.
But I feel like we’re already in the ballpark of skills that I’d really like to improve at. Noticing myself getting a bit better at writing, or at least finding out that I’m fine at some writing things has been pretty cool. It’s cool how it’s related to reading too. I’m okay with continuing trying to explain things. Maybe there is a way we could slightly change what I’m currently doing?
An idea I just had is that I realised after seeing your post in Eternity’s thread that practising breaking ideas down into sub-ideas could be helpful. I recognised having to do some version of that while I’ve been doing my practise explanations recently. When trying to explain something to a target audience, you have to consider what is reasonable set of sub ideas that you can use to explain it. Using too many sub ideas can make your explanation confusing and like, incomplete? More advanced explanations tend to use use more high-level sub ideas which in turn often need sub explanation. But simpler ones can sometimes be harder, because you have to explain things in ways that are true but that use much more basic concepts.
I’ll do a recap of where I am (for myself, mainly):
So I started with trying to write about what I was reading about conflicting ideas. I was going through your Resolving Conflicting Ideas and making notes basically. Then I encountered a problem where I was being avoidant and it was taking a while. I thought I was understanding the ideas in the articles but wasn’t sure. We tried a different approach where I read an article and wait a few days and then do a draft explanation of some things from the article. I did a few explanation of the Avoiding Coercion article but they were more like notes on your article and were imitating things you’d said in the article too much. You suggested going simpler. I ended up doing a dialog-y thing that wasn’t so simple. We then focused on trying to explain more basic things like you did with Max in Max tutoring. I had fun doing these, and still do have fun. The hard part is actually thinking of something that I understand well enough to not get stuck explaining it.
I notice that I didn’t do a lot of explanations that I couldn’t finish. I was trying to make sure I could explain things before I tried writing explanations for them. Maybe I could get more done and learn more if I was more willing to just try explaining things and maybe failing? Like abandoning explanations. That seems like a good way to find weak points in your understanding of things too.