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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.)

1 Like
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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929

I found some stuff in Tutoring Max #24 and #25. I decided to try explaining the evaporation topic from from Tutoring Max #25

Topic: Why do pots get empty when you boil water?

First draft:

Water is made of tiny identical parts called water molecules. Two important properties of these molecules is that they jiggle and that they attract each other. In solid water (ice), molecules jiggle only a little bit relative to their mutual attraction, so the molecules are held more strongly in place by their attractions. However, as they jiggle more, the attractive forces are more and more overcome by the jiggling, so the molecules are held less and less strongly in place. This balance of jiggling and attraction determines which state the water is in; solid, liquid, or gas.

We can increase the jiggling of the water molecules by heating the water. That’s what heat is: molecular jiggling.

So when we heat a pot of water we jiggle its molecules. At the surface of the water, these molecules have less attraction than below the surface where they are fully surrounded by attractive molecules. So molecules at the surface can leave more easily than others for the same amount of jiggling. This is the steam you see rising from heated water. With continued heating, eventually all the liquid water will turn to water vapour.

The air around the water contains some water molecules too. Some of them bump into the surface of the liquid and join the liquid. But the liquid will evaporate if the rate that they leave exceeds the rate that they join.

Second draft:

Water is made of tiny identical parts called water molecules. These molecules have two important properties: they can jiggle and they attract each other. How much they’re jiggling can change. How attractive they are to each other stays the same.

These two properties interact to determine which state of matter the water is in: solid, liquid or gas. As the jiggling lessens, the attractive forces start to dominate, holding the molecules more strongly in place. Likewise, as the jiggling increases, the attractive forces become relatively weaker, holding the molecules less strongly in place.

Temperature is the average amount of molecular jiggling in a substance. If we heat the water, we make its molecules jiggle more on average.

The molecules at the surface of the water are less strongly held in place than molecules under the surface which are surrounded by other attractive molecules. For the same amount of jiggling, the surface molecules will have an easier time leaving their neighbours and going into the air as water vapour or steam. The process of turning liquid water into water vapour is called evaporation. For a heated pot, this process will continue until all the water has evaporated and left the pot empty. The water that was in the pot is now in the air.

Further questions: what explains why a pot of water even at room temperature eventually evaporates?

I figured I could omit the internal details of how molecules work, and that just referring to them as identical parts of the water was fine.

Those two were written more for an adult or a beginner who wasn’t a kid.

Then tried a simpler one intended for a kid:

Water is made of lots of identical tiny parts that want to stick together and that jiggle around.

If they jiggle enough, they can break away from the others and float into the air.

When you heat the water, you make the little parts jiggle more. So heating the water encourages more water to break away and float into the air. That’s why when you heat water, it eventually disappears from the pot.

I started off way less simply than I think I could have. I could’ve started at like a kids level.

I had fun doing this. I think because I understood the topic well enough to actually explain it. I think I defs could do better with what I wrote but it felt like I had a lot more to work with. I think trying to find things that I already understand and trying to explain them in simple ways sounds like a fun idea. Trying more stuff like this seems cool.

930

Great.

Some other topic prompts you could try, all meant for explaining stuff to children:

How do you cook pasta? (plain dry pasta in boiling water)

How do you load and run a dishwasher?

How do you cook chili (or some other dish you’re more familiar with)?

How do you use a microwave?

931

I think this is hard because it’s abstract and it’s trying to say a bunch of new knowledge at once. It’s easier to deal with more concrete topics or to take widespread, typical ideas as a starting point and then make one point to change, correct, reject, improve or build on something.

932

Some explaining practise I did today:

topic: How do you use a microwave?

put in the amount of time you want it on
choose the power setting (usually high)
put your food in there so that it’s covered but not sealed
to keep the microwave clean, place things in a bowl, plate, or container.

i assume microwave is on
i assume the rotating plate is set right so that it’ll spin and be steady

how to use a microwave?

Put your food on a plate, in a bowl, or in a microwave safe container. Open the microwave door. Place your food in the centre of the microwave. Close the door. Punch in the required time on the keypad. Press start.

Open the microwave door. Place your food in the centre of the microwave in a container. Close the door. Input the time required on the keypad. Press start. Wait until timer runs out and beeps.

topic: How to cook pasta?

measure out water
put water in pot
turn stove on
wait til boiling
keep water at a rolling boil (lots of bubbles)
measure out pasta
place pasta in water
set timer for amount of time it says on pasta packet
get a colander ready
when timer beeps take pasta off stove, and strain

how much water depends on how much pasta.

Place water in a pot, and put the pot on the stove. Turn on the stove element to high. Bring the water to a rolling boil. Measure out pasta, and carefully place it in the boiling water. Check the pasta packet for cooking time and set a timer for that time. Get a colander ready in the sink. When the timer goes off, remove the pot from the stove, and pour the pasta and water into the colander.

topic: What is an audio equaliser? (5yo)

We can hear a range of sounds, from low to high.
Turning the volume up turns the volume of range up equally
an equaliser lets you turn a smaller part of the range up
An equaliser allows us to be selective about which part of the range we turn up or down in volume
An audio equaliser is a frequency specific amplifier. It allows us to turn up or down in volume a portion of the frequency spectrum. Normal amplifiers are not frequency specific; they just turn up or down the volume of the whole range frequency spectrum.
When processing sound electronically, we use various devices to adjust the sounds.
An amplifier allows us to turn the volume of a sound up or down.
An audio equaliser allows us to turn just part of a sound up or down in volume.
How can you talk about EQ without talking about frequency?
There are many sounds, like there are many colours. You have low sounds like thunder and high sounds like birds chirping. And everything in between.

first draft:

Like how we can see a range of different colours, we can hear a range of different sounds. When we listen to music, we can turn the volume up or down. That turns the entire range of sounds in the music up or down by the same amount. An audio equaliser allows us to turn only a small part of the range of sounds in music up or down. We could turn up just the low or high sounds, instead of all the sounds.

Maybe I don’t need to explain the concept of volume?

second draft:

Like how we can see a range of different colours, we can hear a range of different sounds. An audio equaliser is a tool that allows us to change the volume of parts of the range of sounds in music.

More advanced:

1st:

The range of sounds we can hear, like the range of colours we can see, exist on a spectrum from lowest to highest. When listening to audio, an audio equaliser allows us to change the volume of specific portions of that spectrum.

2nd:

The range of sounds we can hear, like the range of colours we can see, exist on a spectrum from lowest to highest. An audio equaliser is a tool that allows us to change the volume of specific portions of that spectrum.

These assume that the reader knows the concept of a spectrum.

topic: What is a microphone? (5yo)

1st

A tool for turning sound waves into electricity.

2nd:

A tool for turning sound into electricity.

I ommitted the concept of waves.

This is simple

Further questions that could be raised:

  • why would we want to do that? What is that used for?

topic: How does a speaker work?

A speaker turns electricity into sound.
Sound is vibrations in air.
A speaker vibrates when electricity is put into it.
The vibrating speaker in turn vibrates the air, making sound.
Maybe i don’t need to talk about electricity?

A speaker makes sound by vibrating the air.

Topic: How to leave the house

check the lights are off
check that all kitchen appliances are off
find your keys, wallet, and phone
check you have any other things you’ll need
close and lock the door behind you

Find your keys, phone, and wallet. Find any other items you’ll need while away from the house. Check that all the kitchen appliances are off (except the fridge, leave that on). Turn any lights off. Exit the house. Close and lock the door behind you.

topic: why do we live indoors and not outside?

protected from rain
protected from wind
From sun too
keep our things away from animals and bugs
we can control the temperature better
Better control over our immediate environment

We live indoors so that we are sheltered from the weather, and so that we can keep ourselves and our things away from animals, bugs and other people.

933

You haven’t said that a microwave heats food or that it’s used for cooking. Other important information includes not putting metal containers in it. I think you’re skipping some steps, making assumptions that aren’t getting into words, or imagining a different context than me. For context, someone who needs to be told to open the microwave door sounds like a a total beginner, so including the basic concepts could help them.

Another topic idea you could try is: Why do we cook food?

Why is it named an equalizer when it makes the volume of different frequencies unequal?

Also I tried writing a short explanation: An audio equalizer turns some sounds up or down while leaving the rest of the sound unchanged. It’s kind of like turning up or down the blue in a photo while leaving the other colors alone.

I definitely wouldn’t bring up electricity when explaining a microphone to a young child. Want to try again?

934

I believe it has something to do with the idea of making corrections or balancing the frequencies in a signal.

I looked it up, and yes historically the concept came from compensating for frequency losses in telephone transmission lines. The thing it would be ‘equalising’ that case was the frequency response of the input vs the output of the transmission line.

From wikipedia:

The concept of equalization was first applied in correcting the frequency response of telephone lines using passive filters; this was prior to the invention of electronic amplification. Initially, equalization was used to compensate for the uneven frequency response of an electric system by applying a filter having the opposite response, thus restoring the fidelity of the transmission. A plot of the system’s net frequency response would be a flat line, as its response at any frequency would be equal to its response at any other frequency. Hence the term equalization.

Did you think explaining the term would improve explanation or were you just curious?

Woah yeah, it does actually leave out a lot. I think I was approaching this as like a method or flowchart and not as well rounded explanation.

I have a busy day today so I’ll approach this and the microphone one again tomorrow.

935

Just curious.

936

Topic: How do you use a microwave?

A microwave is for cooking or heating food. Using it is as simple as placing your food in a suitable container, placing that in the microwave, setting the timer, and pressing start. Make sure you don’t seal the food inside the container so that steam can escape. Ceramic and glass containers are suitable, but plastic containers must be microwave-safe. Importantly, don’t use metal containers or put any other metal in the microwave.

Topic: Why do we cook food?

kills bacteria
makes it safer to eat
makes it easier to digest (net more calories)
allows us to combine different flavours and ingredients

We cook food for a few reasons. Cooking and reheating food kills any bacteria and makes the food safer to eat. Cooking also helps begin to break down the food so it’s easier to digest. This allows us to get more calories from eating it.

Cooking food makes food safer and increases the calories we can get from it.

The most important reason we cook food is to make the food safer. Heating food kills any bad bacteria in the food.

Topic: What is a microphone?

A microphone is a tool for picking up sounds. A common place to find them is in phones where they can pick up your voice.

I was just going to have that they were for picking up sounds. But then I thought that might not mean much to a child because they might not realise why that’s useful. A phone is a thing they’re probably familiar with, and they might realise they’ve used microphones before.

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937

Try writing something longer using a topic you know a lot about. Maybe 3 paragraphs. State your target audience at the beginning. For example, you could explain some strategy for a board or card game if there’s one you’re good at (audience: smart 20yo who knows the rules). Or pick a book you’ve read in the last few years and share what it’s about or explain some interesting part of it.

938

I actually found it a bit difficult to find something to write about. I don’t know if I have many topics that I know a lot about. At least I had a hard time thinking of any. I tried an explanation of an audio compressor.

Topic: How does an audio compressor work?

Audience: smart 20y/o who is only a little bit familiar with audio and some math.

A compressor reduces the dynamic range of an audio signal.
The dynamic range is the difference between the lowest and highest volume the signal makes
A compressor turns down signals above a threshold by a given ratio
when the signal crosses the threshold, the compressor automatically turns down the audio by a given ratio. An infinite:1 ratio means that the compressor wont let a signal cross the threshold. A 1:1 ratio means the compressor is not doing anything to the signal.
A compressor automates changing the volume of an audio signal.
This can help control big spikes in volume, or bring up the quieter parts in a signal without also bringing up the loud parts, or sometimes they are used to create special effects.

A compressor reduces the dynamic range of an audio signal. They’re helpful for a variety of things. Some uses are: controlling spikes in a signal’s volume, bringing up the quieter parts in a signal, or for musical and special effects. The dynamic range of a signal is the difference between its loudest and quietest sound.

A compressor works by automatically turning down signals that cross a threshold. Signals crossing the threshold are quickly turned down by the compressor by a given ratio. A ratio of 1:1 will mean the signal is not compressed at all. A ratio of 4:1 means that for every unit of volume that exceeds the threshold, the compressor will output 1/4 a unit of volume above the threshold. A ratio of infinity:1 will hold all signals exceeding the threshold at the threshold. Most compressors allow the user to change the threshold and ratio, but some don’t - their settings are fixed.

How is it different than just turning the whole signal down? Because just turning the signal down would turn the loudest and quietest parts down. However, when you change the volume of the signal so that it’s quieter when it’s loud, and louder when it’s quiet, you reduce the resulting dynamic range of the signal.

939

Here is another:

Topic: What is money?

Audience: smart 20 year old

Brainstorm:

Money is a tool of trade.
It facilitates indirect trade.
Money solves the coincidence of wants problem.
Consider what trade would be like without money.
Money makes trading much easier.
Money is a commodity, but unlike other commodities it has a special purpose.
Money has been lots of different commodities over history.
Money is a special commodity used in indirect exchange.
Direct exchange is when you exchange what you produce directly for what you want i.e, trading my sheep for your cow.
Indirect exchange is when you trade a good for a good that you will use to facilitate another trade.
Money can be any commodity, it doesn’t have to be issued currency. There have been lots of different kinds of money in history.
Metal money allows you to store wealth (so for example it doesn’t spoil or rot away).
Money is usually easily divided into units, unlike for example a cow.
Money is fungible for the purpose of being money.
What if we didn’t have money?
people seek money because everybody accepts money in trades.
if we didn’t have money, i would have to find people that both wanted what I had to trade, and who made what i wanted to trade for. That makes trade a lot harder.

People work for money and sell their goods for money because then they can decide later what goods to trade their work or goods for. If you could only trade with the people you worked for or traded goods with, you would be limited by what your trading partner wanted. Money solves that problem by allowing everyone to trade for a common good that everyone accepts in trade.

What is money?

Money is a tool of exchange. Specifically, it makes indirect exchange possible. To understand what this means, it can help to first consider what trade would be like without money.

Say I am a farmer who grows carrots. Since I need more than just carrots to survive, I need to trade with other famers and producers for their goods. Say I need a pair of shoes. If the shoemaker also needs carrots then that’s great; we can trade and I can get a pair of shoes. But what if the shoemaker doesn’t want any carrots, or if I need shoes when my carrots aren’t fully grown yet? Then I wont be able to trade for shoes. Because what the shoemaker wants and what I want don’t coincide, we wont be able to trade. If I found out what the shoemaker did want, I might be able to trade my carrots for that, and then I could trade that with the shoemaker. But this might not be possible; we potentially run into the same problem with trying to trade for that new good too. And the shoemaker may not need anything that I could trade for carrots.

Money solves this problem. If everyone accepts money in trade, I can sell my carrots at a market for money, and the shoemaker can sell his shoes at the market for money, and I don’t have to trade my carrots directly with the shoemaker for shoes. I don’t need to sell my carrots to a shoemaker to get shoes. I also don’t have to have carrots ready to trade right now, I can have money saved from last season when I sold my carrots. This is indirect exchange, where instead of trading our goods directly, we trade for a third, commonly accepted good.

940

It can be a topic that other people also know about. Like driving. If you’ve been driving for years, then you definitely know a lot about it, even if you know less than many other drivers who are older and have driven more or are more interested in cars.

Similarly, I guess you know a lot about taking a shower. That one might be hard to write about because you might not have ever given showering much thought. Driving is something you would have spent many hours learning, so it could be easier to talk about.

Another thing you know a lot about is any book you read that you still remember reasonably well. There are a ton of books I remember well enough to write 3 paragraphs about their plot (for fiction) or claims/arguments/information (for non-fiction). I don’t need any special expertise about the books, compared to other people who read them, to have knowledge about what the books say.

It works with TV shows, movies or comics too. If you remember the plots of any stories, that’s knowledge you have. As long as you aren’t forgetting too much, then you should be able to speak with some confidence and not having a lot of trouble with making correct statements.

1 Like
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Oh yeah, I remember learning the very basics of compressors for using audio software tools. I remember the ratio-based changes and the threshold.

An infinite:1 ratio means that the compressor wont let a signal cross the threshold.

This is the most confusing part FYI. I think it’s because you didn’t define what the first number means and what the second number means, and then you’re talking about a special case where people’s intuition will be less help.

Also suppose the compression will turn down the volume by 2x above a loudness of 10. A 9 stays a 9. A 12 gets reduced to a 6? Or to an 11? In other words, does it only reduce the excess volume past the threshold or the whole volume? I’m guessing it’s 11, not 6, just because that answer seems more useful.

PS Please include blank lines between paragraphs.