There are multiple reasons. You’re doing fine.
I’m continuing the Resolving Conflicting Ideas article by going through its child article Curiosity – We Can Always Act on Non-Criticized Ideas :
Consider situations in the general form:
X disagrees with (conflicts with) Y about Z.
Let’s consider a more specific example.
X is some idea, e.g. that I’ll have pizza for dinner.
Y is a criticism of X, e.g. that I haven’t got enough money to afford pizza.
So, what happens? I use an option that I have no criticism of. I get a dinner I can afford.
Now we’ll add more detail to make it harder. This time, X also includes criticism of all non-X dinner plans, e.g. that they won’t taste like pizza (and pizza tastes good, which is a good thing).
Now I can’t simply choose some other dinner which I can afford, because I have a criticism of that.
X = X1 + X2 . . .
X1 = have pizza for dinner
X2 = non-pizza things don’t taste like pizza and pizza tastes good
Y = I haven’t got enough money for pizza
W = Get a non-pizza dinner that you can afford
Y is a criticism of X. X2 is a criticism of W.
So we can’t afford pizza. But we can’t get something non-pizza.
To solve this, I could refute the second part of X and change my preferences, e.g. by figuring out that something else besides pizza is good too. Or I could acquire some more money. Or adjust my budget.
Right. Refuting X2 means that we could get something else for dinner. Refuting Y (by e.g getting more money or adjusting budget) means we could get pizza.
What if I get stuck? I want pizza, because it’s delicious, but I also don’t want pizza, because I’m too poor. Whatever I do I have a criticism of it. I try to think of ideas like adjusting my budget, or eating something else, but I don’t see how to make them work.
So getting stuck here means: not having a way to proceed that you don’t have criticisms of. That makes sense and resembles what stuck normally means to me. You get stuck when you’re e.g. playing a video game, and you’ve tried a bunch of things that haven’t worked, and you can’t think of something to try yet (that you don’t think will fail).
All conflicts, as we’ve been discussing, always raise new problems. In particular:
X disagrees with (conflicts with) Y about Z.
If we don’t solve this directly, it raises the problem:
Given X disagrees with (conflicts with) Y about Z, then what should I do?
This is a new problem. And it has several positive features:
Solving it directly I think would be like how in the first pizza example the idea of getting something you can afford solves it.
Likewise, in the second pizza example, if we refute Y or X2, that would solve the conflict directly.
Given X disagrees with (conflicts with) Y about Z, then what should I do?
I think I’m a little confused here, because this is a similar question to what you’d ask yourself if you were going to try and solve it directly, like the examples above. (I might be making a mistake about what solving it ‘directly’ means here.) Like with the first pizza example one, the question you ask yourself is: given I can’t afford pizza for dinner, what should I do? So it seems like the problem raised when directly solving it, and the problem raised if you don’t solve it directly, are the same?
Maybe putting it like this makes the distinction clearer:
- Given X disagrees with (conflicts with) Y about Z, and we’re stuck on that conflict, then what should I do?
Because I think being stuck means being unable to directly solve the conflict (?).
So it’s like: what do we do if we get stuck?
The title of this article is “we can always act on non-criticized ideas”. In the parent article Resolving Conflicting Ideas, Elliot says:
In We Can Always Act on Non-Criticized Ideas, I talk about how there are always win/win solutions available that none of our ideas have objections to (criticisms of).
I think the point of this article is that we never have to stay stuck, or act on ideas we have criticisms of (which is related to being stuck, and the concept of TCS-coercion).
We can always ask: what we can do given we’re stuck? and find some new idea that we aren’t conflicted about. We can always avoid acting on criticised ideas by raising that problem of what to do when we’re stuck.
I’ll stop there for now.
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Read it as
Given X disagrees with (conflicts with) Y about Z, and that conflict remains unresolved, then what should I do?
yes
we can always ask what to do given we’re stuck about some specific, finite thing (or list of things). being stuck on some things, some sub-points, is different than being stuck globally, so it’s still possible to be unstuck (regarding what actions to take in your life) in the big picture even without solving those particular problems.
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