Goals: get perspective on unbounded progress. Give some feedback.
This is one of my favorite blog posts. I really like the attitude of the article. It gives me spiritual fuel.
What do you want a break for? Don’t you like making progress more than anything else? What else would you want to do? Some rest is necessary, but not resting on one’s laurels.
This is what life should be like. If you aren’t doing a productive activity which you begrudgingly have to take breaks from then you aren’t living ideally. It’s fine to not be in this situation. Everyone was forced into that with school. But everyone should aim to make rapid progress and not want to stop.
Do you long for a break or do you long to get back from your break? That’s an important distinction. That’s the difference of an energetic and happy life where you make rapid progress and one where you don’t.
A life of rapid progress is one where you aggressively and energetically pursue value. Life is great but you can always do better. Why would you do anything else than even better? Why stop?
I used to be confused by people breaking. I expected people to be more similar to myself. I thought they’d want to know about problems. i thought that of course they’d value truth-seeking above all else.
@Elliot, did you expect this from the beginning? Was this an expectation you developed after learning about philosophy?
FoR and BoI held back 99% of what DD knows.
99% is very surprising to me.
whenever people try to deal with unbounded criticism, everything starts falling apart.
If I want to want unbounded criticism why not just ask for it already? Because I’ve felt some bad feelings about appearing/not being intelligent. Others have broken because they couldn’t handle unbounded criticism. I think I would persist, but I don’t want to take that risk. There’s a risk everything falls apart and I quit philosophy. Again I feel quite committed to philosophy, but I haven’t proven that. So I shouldn’t arrogantly assume I could take unbounded criticism.
I could ask for Elliot to test me. What I would have to do is be honest with how I react. I can’t rely on Elliot guessing my emotional state. I may have to get better at introspection and honesty to do that.
my self-esteem comes from more like being rational itself, being interested in learning, being willing to change and fix mistakes, etc.
This is really good. You should take self-esteem from this. If you act like this there isn’t much risk of losing this self esteem. If you were wrong about how to learn you were still trying and you would be happy to change and improve.
But when you do get really smart and achieve things, shouldn’t you get self-esteem from that too? It’s kind of risky because you can figure out your achievement wasn’t really worthwhile or that you weren’t that intelligent. But you don’t have to be devastated. You can get self-esteem the other way and work again at becoming smart and achieving worthwhile things.
but internally it often involves some serious breach of integrity to pull that off, and a whole web of dishonest rationalizations.
What about just evasion? Can they just shut off their mind and never think about it again? I think there needs to be some rationalization that lets them shut off their mind. There has to be some bridge. It can’t go straight from active discussion to evasion.
or suppressed a lot of thought behind the scenes, which has consequences.
oh, that answers it doesn’t it?
and if you don’t personalize and you don’t call out individuals, mostly everyone just acts like you’re talking to someone else. kinda like if someone is hurt you don’t want to shout “someone call 911” to the crowd while you try to perform CPR. it’s too likely that no one will do it. it’s more effective to pick a random person and tell them personally to call 911.
Because of this I have thought more about how articles apply to me and not just nod along when Elliot criticizes “people.”
i used to say, more or less, that DD was always right about everything.
i didn’t 100% literally expect him to know everything,
I have the same attitude towards Elliot. I believe reason is effective. I would expect the most rational person to be right on almost everything he has a considered opinion about. Otherwise what would reason be for? Reason wouldn’t have to be that effective to be useful, but I believe reason is that powerful.
I think I intuitively had expectations like that before learning about philosophy.
Maybe I exaggerated a bit. But it’s hard to measure.
My perspective at the time overestimated (in my current opinion) DD’s knowledge about many topics like: moral philosophy, political philosophy, economics, psychiatry, interpersonal relationships, common preference finding, problem solving, parenting, romantic relationships, Israel, anti-semitism, William Godwin, Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. Those are some topics that DD largely left out of his books.
DD’s books also left out most of what he knows about math, physics and programming.
I’m wrong about lots of things. Reason gives me an edge compared to people who are worse at it.
In recent years, I discovered I was wrong about the food supply, the lawfulness of big companies, and Silent Spring. Those are just a few examples. I know of many more errors I found out about recently and I don’t think I’m getting low on errors to find.
Reason has helped me correct some errors instead of staying wrong. And it will help with that in the future because I’m definitely still wrong about many things.
As in how safe our food is? Like what you talked about in: