Max Learning Objectivism (Spoilers for AS & FH)

Do you mean that what I said was misleading, or that b/c I’m not in a good position to do that analysis that I shouldn’t, or both? (Or something else?)

Reading it literally: it sounds like just the first one.

But it feels like there’s an implication that it wasn’t an effective/efficient way to spend my time. (In which case, I’m not really sure what would have been better besides asking for examples or more explanation.)

Maybe I should re-read Elliot’s post from a few days ago – that I’ve already read.

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.

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I think reading some LO (if interested) is a good idea to see an example of what high skill/quality text analysis can look like.

Just a short note to say that I am and have been thinking about this daily. (in a broad sense)

One thing I realized – it’s not profound or new but it was surprising to me – is that consistency of learning habits is way more important than intensity or ~expertise or ~efficiency. That’s a thing I’m focusing on now.

It was surprising in part b/c I know this WRT non-philosophy / non-meta-learning things, like w/ climbing my major goals are about consistency and broad competence, not personal-bests. But I didn’t / haven’t / wouldn’t approach philosophy like that. I think I’m mb gaining some appreciation/intuition for it. Over the last week (and the past few days particularly) I’ve been working on finding ways to integrate idea-trees into day-to-day stuff (both analyzing text and structuring new text). Also paying a lot more attention to my own feelings of confidence/competence with stuff I try – I suspect that I (and most ppl) have a lot more info about self-judged competence available to them than they use or admit.

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This has maybe resolved my long-running learning conflict, too. I’m not sure yet, but I don’t feel the same conflict between my (implicit) preferences and explicit ideas that I used to.

Thank you for discussing this and all the other things with me. I appreciate it.

A chess coach once told me that if I got out a chess set and set up the pieces every day for a month, with zero days missed, then in the future I would reach chess master (2200 rating). He said I could practice/study after setting up the pieces but that was optional based on whether I wanted to that day.

Yes people do know that they’re unsure/unclear about tons of stuff. They normalize and rationalize that in their minds and ignore it. They think having much higher standards would never work, so they keep doing stuff on top of a foundation that has many errors.

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Post some.

Tracinski (one of the more well known non-ARI Objectivists who blogs primarily about news/politics not philosophy) published a book on Atlas Shrugged in 2019. I just saw it exists:

I read the table of contents. I would not call it a guide. It’s an essay collection. It doesn’t guide you in how to read AS. And each essay looks roughly independent, so it’s not very comprehensive, thorough or organized either. It’s nothing like explaining AS chapter by chapter.

I wouldn’t call my own text analysis a guide either, but it’s more suitable for helping someone actually understand what AS says.

There are two character from AS who get chapters about them. Galt is in the title and gets two chapters. And James Taggart gets a chapter. There’s also a chapter related to Dominique Francon, who is from a different book. Dagny Taggart, the main character, does not get a chapter explaining her in this alleged Reader’s Guide. Hank Rearden, the clear second-most-main character, also doesn’t get a chapter.

The word “cabin” only has two search results via Amazon Look Inside (which appears to give the number of pages the term is on, not the number of times the term appears). (“quarry” has three search results despite being about a different book). The first result is about Francisco’s cabin at Galt’s Gulch. The second result is about Dagny’s time at her cabin, but it hardly says anything about that long, important scene. E.g. there seems to be no discussion about Dagny telling herself to “stop it” multiple times.

I’ve been thinking about this frequently but am finding it hard. I think that’s probably due to a lack of structured practice. (Both not doing any and failing to allocate time to it.)

‘Hard’ is a cop-out word: I mean that I would need to change things (how I structure my time and what I prioritize) and that I’m not changing those things.
If I did implement structured practice – I have a plan wrt refreshing grammar, at least – then I could post stuff easily (copy paste or link to a new page on the old max-learning-fi site).

I am practicing where it’s low friction – like with work stuff.
BTW, often I find I save time (or there’s only negligible overhead) using CF techniques; that’s a major reason I consider it ‘low friction’ – practicing them is often free or profitable. (Is there anything with less friction than what is profitable?)
e.g., yesterday I solved a major problem I’d had with a software implementation at work. Mostly using: idea trees, brainstorming non-suppression, planning out breadth first exploration + noticing errors early and many little yes/no evaluations as I went, and goldratt’s inherent simplicity (probably more CF stuff, too). Basically stepping back and going at the problem from CF principles, including breaking it down, notes as I went, exploratory writing, etc.

Note: I guess that this type of practice, while convenient, is mb dangerous: there’s a lack of feedback outside colleagues; and there’s a lack of breadth without criticism, like I could over-specialize in on some topic/idea without realizing wider contradictions or criticisms with more reach (those particularly are powerful but might not be obvious).

The problem, ofc, is that work stuff isn’t very easy to share – not ideal. That’s one reason I’ve been focusing a bit on improving my self-error-spidey-sense feeling (à la Judging and Fixing Your Own Errors [CF Article]). (This is something I need to stay conscious of, which I haven’t been doing as much lately)

I’m not sure I want to add more atm, but practice and posting it is something I’m actively thinking about.

I want to add a little testimonial: I find CF stuff incredibly useful day-to-day. I’m far more capable with what I’ve learned than I was without it. Literally nothing significant in my life is untouched b/c of it, and I don’t think I’m worse off in any way that I value.
(I still feel this even knowing that I’m not making as much progress as I could – I don’t think that should lesson my appreciation for all the good it has done me.)

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A rough rule of thumb is that between 20% and 80% of your stuff should be public. (It also works for private since it’s symmetric.)

This is for adults not children. And it’s kinda progress oriented. If someone isn’t trying to learn or do much, then “capable of being public” could substitute for “public” – it’s not necessary to share if you aren’t trying to do anything important and also aren’t trying to get feedback and improve. Not everyone needs a blog. But if you want to e.g. be an intellectual, then having a blog (or an alternative way to share stuff online) is good. Or if you’re an artist, you probably ought to be able to share 20% of what you make for feedback. Or if you’re an electrician, you shouldn’t mind having other people see and review your work sometimes, and if you care about your career you ought to post something online sometimes.

In other words, if nearly everything or nearly nothing is private, that indicates a problem.

In this case, one problem to consider is work/life balance. Are over 80% of your intellectual activities either at work or work-related? Is work getting over 80% of your mental energy?

PS The specific numbers are debatable, e.g. maybe the good range should be 10-50% public – avoid near-zero public and avoid sharing over half your life with others. However, it depends so much on how you count/measure that I don’t think the specific numbers are very important.

I had an idea tonight; i think this is related to oism (pretty sure I learned some of constituent ideas from Elliot, though, so mb there’s a bit extra – ofc this is just my take atm, I don’t want to imply Elliot shares any of my views.)

basically: keeping commitments shows that you have control of your life – and this is a good thing to have a track record of and seek a track record of.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of having control over your own life lately (unrelated to Ukraine). Like with work choices, or personal/life stuff, or even just every day common stuff like social commitments.

Outside oneself, who do you deal with? business-wise, socially, etc. For most ppl: you have to choose them (or get to choose them) at some point, in some way.
I think it’s important that – if you have control over your life – you maintain that by moderating your relationships with other ppl. don’t become over invested in ppl that are unreliable, or are consistently a drain. (mb others too, but those are two major groups)

“unreliable” is meant mb more broadly than typical: someone can be high-capacity but unreliable, and they can be delivering on other things (for other ppl) but not on stuff they agreed to you about (that’s still unreliable as far as you’re concerned).
so in that case it’s like they’re contextually unreliable. who’s context? yours.

If you know someone who’s like this, calling them out or being combative shouldn’t be the main goal: your own life (and it’s stability / your control over it) should be a bigger goal. I think in lots of cases being combative or trying to help them is probably a self-harmful idea. Not all cases, but it’s hard to tell what boundary might be there.

where this comes back to the topic line is:
the stability of your own life (which is good) is dependent on relationships with other ppl (else you live in the woods mb?). but you can’t make new relationships in a super ad-hoc way, you need to have some planning, and distribute that over a period of time.
so, it’s important to avoid really unreliable ppl/relationships; it’s probably good to have a little lee-way but not too much; and then one should cultivate relationships with ppl that are reliable. Note: reliability implies accuracy – here, it’s meant in a holistic sense: does someone fulfill commitments they make?

If someone can’t fulfill commitments, then they’re not reliable.
If they’re not reliable, then how can they rely on themselves?
If they can’t rely on their own judgement, they can’t be reliable.
If they’re not reliable, then they introduce variance into your life.
If there’s variance in your life, then you can’t keep control of it.

So it’s like a bad feedback loop of non-control.

a note about oism and cf relevance:

thinking about this reminds me of two things:

  1. the absolutely uncompromising control over one’s own life that the strikers at GG had (and presumably many other unaffiliated strikers wanted / sought out / created).
  2. In all my appointments with @Elliot – not once was he ever late. Every commitment to me he made, he kept (beyond appointments – generally). I don’t think I’ve never known anyone else like that – where their word is just their word, consistently.[1] (At least, none come to mind. I’m excluding trivial examples like acquaintances and other short term examples.)

Anyway, on the one hand I worry that I’m becoming contemptuous about this stuff – that makes me unsure of the ideas, or at least unsure of acting on the ideas. I think being conservative here is good – if I acted too readily on contempt then that would make my life less stable, so it’s worth taking my time.
But on the other hand, I can’t help but feel that the topic idea is, on the whole, right. both as a goal and as a way to judge someone’s reliability and/or potential risk.


  1. this is only meant to be a statement of facts. it’s praiseful, but it’s not meant to be praise, just testimony. ↩︎

Choosing a good peer group is also important because they will influence you a lot without (and with) you realizing it.

I don’t think showing up on time to scheduled appointments is all that remarkable, particularly online (no travel time adding variability). Other people can do that, right? Not everyone but maybe like 10% of people? Or is my intuition about that wrong? I don’t actually have a lot of experience with this and realized that my intuition isn’t trustworthy and the world could be worse than I thought.

You should be extra careful judging people, let alone become contemptuous, because you don’t have a substantial objective track record of success. Nor have you demonstrated great Paths Forward in case you make mistakes. You shouldn’t be arrogantly thinking you’re way better than most people. Focus more on yourself and self-improvement.

It depends. In my post I was thinking pretty broadly, and including stuff like if someone says they’ll call you later, and then don’t. It’s an issue of reliability but not a big one. (Note: this isn’t the sort of thing that I’m contemptuous about – will reply separately about that)

Hmm, I remember hearing that Stripe records all their meetings company-wide; I wonder if anyone has used that to measure meeting reliability.

IME WRT scheduled meetings: (rough numbers so take it with a grain of salt)

Say \ge 5 minutes late is ‘late’: lots of ppl are 50% reliable, and some are 90% reliable. Ppl are usually better with regular easy/short things (like standups), and can be 95%+ reliably for those specific things some of the time. I think I’m 95-98% reliable getting to my morning standup within 2 minutes.

However, for some people, being 10-15 min late is more common than not. it depends on the person (and their priorities) and the purpose of the meeting; the same person can be v reliable with important stuff, and way less reliable with like ‘regular’ stuff. (I think this two-tier thing is pretty common.) Systemic lateness is more common with managers and higher-ups IME, but not always.

My impression is that online helps a bit but hasn’t changed major trends – travel time wasn’t the bottleneck for them before covid, so going online doesn’t help much.

Note: I ran some numbers. statistically: I’m 95% confident that you’re 95% reliable WRT appointments; and 80% confident that you’re 97.5% reliable. Probably a little higher than those numbers, but I only have ~70 data points (tutoring + cf course). Calculated via binomial survival function.

One thing I didn’t mention was that the feelings of contempt aren’t about small things or being late to meetings – it’s more about bigger stuff where ppl promise something and don’t follow through, or consistently provide excuses, or changing goal posts. Or where there’s an expectation but their actions aren’t consistent with following thru on that.

I think mb the contemptuous feelings come up when there is a problem that is not getting addressed over longer periods of time. Or if I try to bring something up and the person is evasive or doesn’t want to admit the problem (multiple times). Neither case is immediate.

I think it’s worth saying here that you do that too. So look to yourself and self-improvement first.

I think this was a bit dishonest of me to say. Part of the reason that it’s dishonest is because it is true but it’s also not the whole story. I still have some desire for validation / approval / etc. I think that my saying the above is like sorta social hedging. I don’t understand it though.

I want to mention that I’m not ignoring this. I just didn’t have much to say at the time (and still don’t). I thought about posting something in agreement, but I think that’d be being dishonest about the agreement. I hadn’t thought of it before you said it. Reading it did cause me to slow down, though, and be even more cautious about being judgey than I already was (which was a good thing for me to do). I agree that “[I] do that too”, at least partially. (Not just that I used to do that, but am doing that still, tho hopefully less so.)

I also had some ‘undendorsement’ thoughts, too – like that I’d been unreliable in the past but now that I’d read Atlas Shrugged I was taking things more seriously. I’m again grateful for the earlier discussion about the link between unendorsement and unflawedness. I do think that I’ve gotten somewhat more reliable after reading AS, but my first reaction was still to think that I was ‘done’ now (which is problematic, but I liked that I noticed and could think about it more).

This is a quote of me from Academic Epistemology - #34 by Max criticizing one part of RP’s paper. The broad context is that it’s a bad epistemology paper.

I used the word “adducing” there half automatically. When I used it, I noticed that I had and I knew why I had (or why I wanted to keep it, at least).
I think RP’s paper was the first time that I’d read that word (I had to look it up at the time) and I criticized RP for using it somewhat incorrectly. I don’t think it’s a bad word – it seems to fill a niche – but it is fancy. Although the word fits the context, I questioned whether to keep it in.
I kept it in for two reasons:

  1. I thought it was a bit funny, and particularly because it was funny at RP’s expense (a little bit of ‘twisting the knife’ if he were ever to read it); and
  2. I noticed my motivation (point 1.) and I thought it was a bad motivation – but, keeping it in means I can quote myself and discuss it (I don’t want to suppress/avoid it and then make the mistake elsewhere, if it is a mistake).

I think making jokes while doing philosophy is usually harmful to the work. Most of they time jokes aren’t going to make communication clearer, and they’re distracting for the reader and author. Also, making jokes at someones expense is mean.

I actually did this once before in that thread, too:

(The joke being that one of “redundant and superfluous” is redundant/superfluous.)

There’s more that is wrong with both of these, too (besides being distracting and mean): I’m doing something social, like making an appeal to intellectual superiority / cleverness. It’s condescending and communicates something like: “Look at me, I’m better than X, and I’ll prove it by making puns while offering criticism. I’m so smart.”

I don’t like the idea of doing that, and I don’t want to do that.

I think, on the whole, I’m improving in this aspect, but I am not really doing much to make progress besides noticing and reflecting once in a while. (It’s not really a priority atm and I don’t think it’s a big factor in my life.) When I write particular things, I do consciously try not to engage w/ those memes, but I know that they’re still there.

(This post is related to Objectivism because it is practicing the idea of not faking reality. It’s more generally related to CF in a few ways: social dynamics, static memes, non-suppression and pro-discussion, and more. I thought it might be good to occasionally leave a little explainer about my motivations for posting and how I see the post relating to learning CF – so I’m testing the idea out, here.)