When learning something, you need to develop a good sense of when you’ve done it right. This requires practice and having ways to consciously check your work.
You should be able to figure out how to consciously check your work for some simple things, such as walking to a location, reading a single word, or arithmetic.
You should be able to identify some common errors, say why they’re an error, say things you look for in a correct answer, etc. E.g. with walking to a location, a common error might be crawling instead, which can be identified by knees touching the ground. Another error would be not ending up at the correction location, which you could judge by looking around to see where you are or using your phone’s GPS.
Once you have some knowledge that includes the ability to judge (which you already do have), then whenever you build on that knowledge and learn something more advanced, you need to figure out how to check your work for that too. It’s realistic to figure out how to check your work for something which is only one step beyond other stuff where you can already check your work.
Things like answer keys and other people can help, but developing your own judgment, and being able to decide for yourself when you should be confident about something or not, is the most important.
Somewhere between simple things and complicated philosophy discussions there are gaps in your knowledge and your ability to judge degraded. There are also some errors. You have to try to find those gaps and errors and fix them, which has some downsides but overall is a way better situation than starting at the beginning.
To help find them, you can try doing different things and see which ones you can do confidently and correctly – and judge that for yourself – in the same way you can identify “cat” as a noun. And find other stuff where you’re more fuzzy, unclear, unsure, etc. That helps narrow things down by indicating problems in between the confident and unconfident stuff.
The prerequisites for learning Goldratt stuff, Popper stuff, Rand stuff, etc., have large overlap. They are things like text analysis, trees and the learning/automatizing process (including some project management like scheduling). Stuff to be able to have a productive, rational discussion or debate – which you can do alone with yourself and it’s pretty similar – is also important. That includes stuff like dealing with biases, emotions and writing. You’d also want some math and logic knowledge.
Once you get that working well, then the interdependencies between different CF things are pretty limited, so it’s not that hard to manage. Like you can learn Popper, Rand and Goldratt in any order – none of them are trying to build on one of the others. Some CF stuff builds on some earlier CF stuff but it’s not subtle about doing that – e.g. if it says “constraints” 20 times then it’s building on Goldratt (plus I probably named him in that article too). I often name concepts I’m building on and link to articles discussing them.
IGCs partly build on Popper but could be learned without knowing Popper first. And you already are familiar with general Popper themes anyway. Similarly, Paths Forward could be learned before Popper but knowing some Popper themes like fallibilism first helps – but I do cover those some in CF material too.
You’ll also find gaps in your prerequisites sometimes, but if it’s just a little here and there then it’s not a big problem to deal with as you go along.
Oh. Grammar alone is multiple iterations. Like you can learn parts of speech before learning clauses. Text analysis should be expected to take multiple iterations, though the different parts of text analysis are harder to name or define than parts of grammar.
Too hard to start with. Get confident with easier texts first.