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922

I’m running into some problems here and I’m not sure what to do about it. It might be time to change assignment, or change my approach, or do some simpler version.

Reading articles and taking notes and summarising/trying to outline has been taking a long time, and it’s been disorganised. It feels hard and like I’m just making up the process. I’ve become increasingly avoidant of it. I’ve spent a couple of hours on each of the past two days on your Avoiding Coercion article, and haven’t got together something that I thought was worth posting.

I think I’m understanding the articles, but I’m having a hard time organising it. Or organising my thinking about it.

Reflecting on what I’ve been doing, I’ve been trying to cover a whole sub-article of the Resolving Conflicting Ideas article at a time. Yesterday I was trying to kind of outline some of the ideas in Avoiding Coercion but ended up writing a question/answer or problem/solution type thing but in the end I didn’t it necessarily reflected what was in the article (there were some ideas I wrote that weren’t in the article.) Trying to do a whole article at a time could be too much?

I think unless I change something here I’m going to feel worse about this project. But it’s something I’d really like to be able to do. I just feel a bit lost/stuck. I’ve put off mentioning this for a couple days to see if I could get somewhere.

I’ll post what I was working on yesterday just if it’s any help at all

What I was working on yesterday

Article: Avoiding Coercion

Context:

Cooperation is valuable, but problems can arise due to conflicting ideas between people. In theory, people who disagree can come to agree. But that could take literally forever.

Problem:

Can coercion always be avoided without agreeing on everything and within time constraints?

Answer: Yes.

Why can coercion be avoided without agreeing on everything?

Agreeing on everything is very difficult and unnecessary for cooperation. We just need to agree on how to cooperate. It’s in disagreements over those issues that we risk coercion. We regularly avoid coercion with strangers (with whom we may disagree on many things) by agreeing to leave each other alone. We only risk coercion over a small set of immediate, practical issues in our joint projects with others.

Why can coercion be avoided within time constraints?

We can always include the time constraints in our problem, and ask what to do given those constraints. There are things that aren’t reasonable to expect under certain time constraints, so if we’re reasonable we can change our mind about what we want and come up with an option that fits those constraints.

Yesterday's unstructured notes/thoughts about the topic

There are many, many people in the world that you disagree with and yet you avoid coercion with. How? You don’t try to cooperate with them to any significant extent; you agree to leave each other alone. This shows that avoiding coercion only requires that we agree on a relatively small set of issues. We just need to agree on how to cooperate together right now. In the limit, we can cooperate minimally like strangers: leave each other alone and go our separate ways. We can disagree on many things and avoid coercion so long as we agree on what to do next.

Cooperation is about acting together, and the set of issues we risk coercion over is limited to the immediate, practical issues of cooperation.

There is a risk of coercion between people when they try to cooperate but have conflicting ideas for what they should do next. Cooperation is about acting together, so cooperation requires the constant solving of these kinds of conflicts. The set of issues we risk coercion over is limited to the immediate, practical issues of cooperation.

People risk coercion when they try to cooperate on joint projects with others.

For any problem that we disagree on, we can always raise the new problem of what to do given we disagree. (And we could also include time constraints here in our problem. In fact we could include basically any constraints in our problem, and ask what to do given those constraints.)

We can repeat this an unlimited number of times and make our problem easier and less ambitious. We can include limiting factors like how much time we have, and what prior obligations we have to each other too. In this way we tend towards needing to agree about less and less, and so cooperate less and less.

If we can’t agree on a solution for this, we can raise a problem 4 and so on.

How can coercion be avoided within time constraints?

[Its interesting how non-cooperation in this sense does require some minimal amount of agreement. And even with strangers you are kind of cooperating in some sense. In order to live non-coercively in a society as strangers, those strangers need to agree on basic rules about how to treat each other. So it seems avoiding coercion requires some cooperation, or the ability to physically defend yourself from strangers that aren’t interested in avoiding coercion (because then by definition they are willing to have you act against your will)]

In order to avoid coercion, you need to be able to physically defend yourself from those who don’t wish to avoid coercion.

Avoiding coercion requires that we agree on the problem of what to do right now.

We only need to agree on what to do right now.

Coercion is about acting against one’s will. That requires multiple ideas about what to do.

In order to avoid it, we just need to agree on how to act together right now. In the limit, we can abandon attempts at cooperation. We could disagree about many things, but as long as we can agree to leave each other alone, we avoid coercion.

(Even leaving each other alone is a way of cooperating. It requires the minimum amount of agreement.)

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923

Here’s a different approach you can try.

Read an article.

Wait one to four days.

Write an informal rough draft article of your own about the same topic. Try to write based on your own understanding of the topic and your own reasoning, not your memory of specifics that you read (like article organization or phrasing used). You can use the dictionary but shouldn’t be using much else while writing, particularly not looking at philosophy texts.

The rough draft should take 1 hour max and be done in one writing session.

The goal is not to write something as good as the article or cover all the stuff in the article. Just write anything about some of the same topics that you think you understand well enough to explain.

If you’re not satisfied with it, wait one to four days, then write about the same topic again. Just start over with a blank page; don’t continue or edit the previous draft.

You can repeat this rewriting multiple times if desired.

When you’re reasonably satisfied or you don’t want to do it again, reread the article and compare it with what you wrote.

If you understand the articles, then you should be able to explain some of the main ideas in them in your own words without looking things up.

A variant approach, if you want to try it, is recording yourself explaining stuff out loud instead of writing about it. If you do this, feel free to pause and think. You can just let the recording keep going and have silences in it (it’s also ok to pause the recording sometimes if you want, but it might be easier not to worry about pausing and restarting, especially for small pauses). Don’t rush yourself. Don’t say “umm” to fill the silence (it’s no big deal if you say that sometimes). If you end up using this method a lot but don’t like playing back recordings with silent parts, there are technological solutions like https://getrecut.com or Rogue Amoeba | Audio Hijack: Record Any Audio on MacOS But probably don’t worry about those unless you’ve used the method a bunch and it’s working well apart from the recorded silences.

Yeah, focusing on one to three sub-topics at a time sounds good.

Also, writing your own stuff that’s different than what’s in the article is fine. It’s good to have some of your own thoughts and sometimes go off on tangents. Give yourself freedom to do that. If you don’t cover some aspect of the article that you still want to write about, you can return to it next time (and if you go on a tangent again, that’s ok, just return to it again the next time).

Instead of trying to make your writing come out a certain way, I think it’s important to give yourself freedom and permission to explore. You can start a writing session with a goal in mind, but if you go in a different direction, don’t worry about it. Once you start a writing session, it’s usually best to listen to your intuition. School doesn’t work that way and really tries to control what kind of writing output students have (teachers are really pushy that student writing follow the prompt/assignment, and don’t have them try the same prompt multiple times; they just get one try). But if you write more intuitively, it should generally be faster and easier. So you can end up writing 2-5 things for the same effort level as one more consciously controlled write. Reducing editing also increases how many things you can write. So then instead of one high-effort thing, you create several lower effort things and on average you’ll get a lower effort thing that fits the goal pretty well after using less time and effort, and also you’ll get some extra things written that are good for other goals.

To benefit from faster writing, you’ll sometimes want to write multiple things on the same day. The easiest way to make this work well is just write on different topics. Work on multiple projects at the same time. The reason is it can be hard to do two separate, different writes about the same topic without a break in between; without the break, your writing can be too repetitive. You want to return the topic with fresh eyes, and the easiest way to do that is generally to sleep at least once. It’s possible to accomplish in other ways but that can be harder, so probably don’t try it for now unless you get inspired and have a specific new thought that isn’t in the previous draft that you’re inspired to write about. Otherwise if you finish quickly and want to get more done today, you can just do more other stuff.

Let’s start here but if it’s not working let me know and we can try something else.

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924

I reread the article Coercion two days ago, and wrote a draft essay today. I didn’t time it but my estimate is ~25 minutes. I think I did better than I expected. That might have something to do with having read it and worked on understanding it previously. I’d be interested to try again tomorrow to see if much changes.

I think for now writing is fine and I won’t need to try explaining things while speaking. But I’ll keep that option in mind incase problems come up.

Avoiding Coercion draft writing #1:

Some unsolved problems cause us distress, and some don’t. There is an important difference there that is worth making clear. When our problems cause us to suffer, what is happening is coercion. Coercion is a state of acting on a conflict of ideas without having first resolved that conflict. When that happens, part of you is chosen, and part is forsaken. If you had resolved the conflict, you would be able to act on an idea that your conflicting ideas didn’t have disagreements with. So you wouldn’t be forsaking parts of you, and you wouldn’t suffer.

Suffering is mental. You can feel physical pain and suffer because of it or not. It depends on whether you mind the pain. Suffering is not a simple sensory response. It’s a higher level evaluation at the level of ideas and reasoning. Physical pain is commonly associated with suffering, but suffering more broadly involves complex non-physical evaluations of one’s situation. People can suffer when they are sad, when a loved one dies, when their life isn’t turning out how they’d prefer, when their intentions are thwarted, when their stuff is stolen, etc etc. These will cause people to suffer if they don’t want them to happen; if they mind them happening. What’s happening in those examples is a conflict between reality and their preferences, and their preferences being forsaken. That state is coercion, and is the cause of all suffering.

Understanding coercion provides a schematic for how suffering works. So anyone who wishes to avoid suffering needs to understand coercion and how to avoid it.

Coercion is due to conflicting ideas. Ideas are approximately autonomous parts of you. They can conflict and want different things; they can contradict each other. You have many many ideas, a lot of which conflict, but coercion isn’t constantly happening because the ideas need to be active. The ideas need to be represented in a choice that you have to make now. If different parts of you think different things about this choice that you have to make, and you side with some and forsake others, you will suffer. But conflicting ideas that aren’t relevant to what you have to do right now won’t cause you to suffer, because they aren’t active.

Since coercion is about conflicting ideas, it can happen within a person, or between people. The result is the same, suffering. (It can also happen between your ideas and reality because our understanding of reality is through our interpretations about it. If reality were actually one way, but we thought it was another, we might not suffer.)

925

coercion draft article day #2:

Suffering is a mental process. When you feel pain, you may suffer, or you may not. In that case and all others, your suffering depends on whether you mind the pain; whether you regard it as bad or unwanted. This state of regarding something as unwanted while also having to do it is an example of coercion.

Coercion happens when you must act but you have an unresolved conflict of ideas about what to do. These ideas can be within a mind in the case of one person’s personal internal conflicts, or between two or more minds in the case of conflicts between people. In both cases, coercion occurs and the result in suffering. When we have disagreements with ourselves or others, yet act without resolving the disagreement, we forsake the parts of ourselves or others that disagree.

We are at risk of coercion only for practical, immediate problems. This is because coercion is about situations where you must act. A common situation is when there are time constraints on when you must decide. If the time comes and you still have not resolved your conflict, you will have to act, and will be in coercion. Abstract ideas that we may disagree about won’t cause coercion unless an answer is required for some immediate purpose. The ideas must be actively involved in a conflict now about what to do now.

Can coercion, and therefore suffering, reliably be avoided or is it sometimes unavoidable? Is there always something you can do to avoid coercion? And if so, is there a method we can use? Elliot Temple answers yes. There is a generic method we can use to avoid coercion.

Since coercion is about acting while having multiple unrefuted ideas for what to do, avoiding coercion requires finding a single unrefuted idea to act on. If we are unable to resolve a conflict in time, or can’t see a way to resolve it under certain constraints, we can always raise a new problem of what to do given we don’t expect to solve the problem. We can raise the problem “Given we can’t resolve conflict C in time, what should we do?”. We create a new problem and context for our action which includes not resolving the previous conflict. Then we attempt to solve this new problem; we try to come up with a single solution that we don’t see a problem with. But this process can be repeated if we get stuck again. We can always raise a new problem of what to do given some constraints.

926

I think you’re trying to cover the same issues as the essay. Instead, I’d recommend starting simpler: cover the topic but begin in a way where a general audience could understand it without any background knowledge for this topic. Start at more of the beginning. I think this is jumping into complex stuff too quickly without enough explanation so it’s hard to tell how well you understand what you’re saying, and it’d be confusing to most audiences.

I think this has elements of being notes about my essay, or being an approximation of my essay, rather than focusing on being a standalone essay that makes sense in its own right.

I think being less ambitious could help. Think about what questions a beginner might have and try to answer them. Those are questions you too should have or have had in the past, and should have or want clear answers to.

927

I’m going to stop here for now and post this. It’s getting late for me and I don’t want to go without posting something for too long if I can avoid it.

I tried to approach this in a way that might be helpful to a beginner. Though I found it hard and I’m not super happy with it.

What I wrote ended up drifting into a kind of dialog. I found that started to work okay.

I think overall, this was bit beyond my skill level. But, I was quite engaged once I had begun. At the beginning, when I was thinking of how to approach it, it felt a bit frustrating and distressing when I didn’t know what to do. Like I was stuck.

This didn’t feel simpler or less ambitious than what I’d tried before. I couldn’t really figure out a simpler way. If anything it felt like zooming into more detail, and being maybe more ambitious.

Are there good ways to practise coming up with questions? What if I don’t have as many question as I should have given my ignorance of a topic?

–

Why is suffering a problem?

In our lives, we seek things that we think are good for us; we do things that we think will make us happy. We act according to our best ideas for what to do. Roughly, we’re happy when we get what we want (though it’s not that simple). We don’t intend to suffer; suffering happens when something has gone wrong somewhere in our pursuit of happiness. So suffering means that things have gone wrong in some way (from our perspective). It involves having a problem that we want to not have.

Isn’t suffering about pain and hardship? Why do you say that it’s about things going wrong?

Pain and hardship can result in suffering, but it’s not that simple. Sometimes people suffer when they’re in pain, and sometimes they don’t. People often voluntarily and knowingly subject themselves to pain, like when they get a tattoo or workout really hard. Some people learn to like the feeling of getting tattooed, and ‘feeling the burn’ when working out, and seek it partly for those reasons. So pain doesn’t reliably cause suffering. It’s the same with hardship. People often subject themselves to hardship when they see it as a means to some end they care about.

So when someone suffers, what is going on there? Under what circumstances does suffering happen?

Elliot Temple’s theory is that suffering results from a psychological state that involves an unresolved conflict of ideas. He calls the state coercion. Specifically, it is a state of acting despite having two or more conflicting ideas about how to act.

How can a person have an internal conflict? How can they believe ideas that contradict each other in the first place?

We have many many different ideas in our mind, all of whose full logical consequences we cannot know. Fallibilism tells us that it is impossible to have a way to guarantee our ideas against error. So even our best efforts to make our ideas consistent is no guarantee that further conflicts will not arise at some point. Knowing our various ideas remain flawed and their consequences non-obvious, we should expect that many of our ideas are in conflict with one another.

Okay, sure. Why is explaining what causes suffering helpful?

If we want to reduce or avoid suffering in anything but an accidental way, we need to know something about how it works.

That makes sense. Elliot Temple’s coercion theory sounds different to what you said at the beginning about suffering being about things going wrong though. Can you say more about that?

I talked about suffering being unintended. That’s because as a rule people intend things they think are good, not things they think are bad. But everyone is fallible and ignorant. They can be wrong about what means will attain what ends, and they can be wrong that the ends they want to attain will actually be good for them. But just failing or getting things you don’t want wont cause you to suffer, if you can resolve that conflict.

What would resolving that conflict mean?

928

I’m busy and haven’t read this yet, but I think maybe you should try some writing excises like I did with Max in my tutoring videos with him. Try writing some simpler practice stuff.

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