Max Learning Objectivism (Spoilers for AS & FH)

Unbounded
,
21

When it comes to honesty – in the objectivist sense – the first thing I remember from AS is:

Nobody stays in this valley except by a full, conscious choice based on a full, conscious knowledge of every fact involved in his decision. Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever. [emph mine]

The valley to me, as a metaphorical stand-in, is this forum.
(That’s the primary thing; there are other things they valley could represent too.)

Faking reality means being dishonest about reality and your approach to life. The antithesis of faking reality is deliberate, conscious, undiluted, thoughtful awareness and the enduring desire for that.

Note: analyze passage containing “faking reality” about Dagny’s struggle – 3.VIII

Note: did Rearden talk to Galt before saying “faking reality” in 3.III? (I noticed this on my first reading as something to come back and check later)

22

The second view to analyze is that Dagny’s journey (or heroes in general) is one of flawed-to-unflawed. Similar to the other view, this contradicts BoI, Popper, and personal growth and change.

Although I might name Dagny specifically, this view would be just as bad to hold about any other hero, e.g., Roark.

These contradictions are important. The broader topic around flawed/unflawed is also important in its own right because it can prevent growth and destroy lives (via self-sabotage, unaddressed negative feelings, rejection of criticism, etc).

This view includes some ideas about growth and change, but that’s just lip-service; the ideas (about growth) are superficial. That’s because the ideas imply that there’s only one step that the hero takes (or a limited number). Also that the end state of the hero is unflawed – they basically become the static hero from the first view. This has all the problems of that view, but also additional problems:

It implies that the goal of personal growth (or, a goal that makes one heroic) is to become unflawed (static, the end of personal growth), that this is possible/attainable, and that it is good – all of these are wrong.

I think that, on an individual flaw-by-flaw basis, a character can make progress and effectively solve a flaw. However, different flaws will be created after that and have different effects. This is compatible with BoI, Popper, and personal growth and change.

Note for future: look at Dagny’s arc with the view that she’s the main hero. Where does she grow and develop? How does that growth happen? What choices does she make? How do her choices change? How do her ideas change and at what moments? What are they beforehand, what are they after?

23

I think there might be a few things going on here.

One is that I don’t know much about the history of feminism, like I just have some vague ideas about things like bra burning in the 60s. I know that lots of important things happened, but don’t know when or what was going on around that time or before. So I have no idea what Rand’s world was like and shouldn’t make snap judgements about it, and esp not guessed her mind.

Second is that I suspect I have some biases about the way that some ideas are written, and who I thought wrote them – particularly WRT anything related to current-day political issues. Like, if I read something that I guess was written by someone in X group, I’ll have a negative bias.

So – in analyzing something like “successful as a woman in a man’s world” – I’m guessing both at the author and have biases about the wording; that’s at least two sources of error that I don’t know how to correct for.

Ahh, yeah. I looked up some relevant passages. Rand is directly connecting (via adjacent statements) some important stuff.

I said this earlier which is wrong (Jim got the controlling stock, so it’s not clear that Dagny was left any stock):

I avoided replying to this topic a bit. I’m less confident in my posts.

Topic for later: analyze her father’s emotions; how/why they change.

24

FYI the “bra burning” stuff is mostly just myth.

I find it weird that you would be unaware that around the time the novel was written (and basically when it seems to be set), it was a “man’s world” in a lot of ways. All the presidents up to that point were men. And almost all the congressmen and senators, the scientists and professors, and the presidents of the companies.

Were you unaware of that stuff? The US has still never had a female president. I just looked it up, and apparently Australia had their first female Prime Minister in 2010. Surely you knew that?

Did you think that women just weren’t interested in politics or science or running companies? So they just weren’t trying to get any of those jobs?

But then you said yourself about the book:

So you did notice that her being a woman was a downside for her. But you didn’t connect that to it being a “man’s world”. She was prevented from officially running the company – despite being the most competent person for the job and being an heir – because she was a woman. And you didn’t see that as it being a man’s world?

Btw, I think there is potentially some connection between this issue and the issue in the other thread that I also responded to where you commented on the woman’s makeup/appearance. (And also there is connection between the makeup comment and your earlier makeup project.)

1 Like
25

Regarding both the static hero stuff and the flawed-to-unflawed character growth, the stuff you are writing does line up with what I was getting at. (This isn’t unconditional approval of what you said, but you seem to have gotten the point.)

But this is stuff you should have already known. You are familiar with Popper and BoI. It’s a pretty big error to be making, given that. So I think it betrays some of your deeper, subconscious thinking that is probably getting in the way of your own personal growth and learning. For example, if you see the goal of learning or growth to be that you should reach some kind of unflawed end-state, that is going to lead to counter-productive learning behaviors.

So it’s good that you are able to consciously see the issue when it is pointed out to you. But you need to actually understand and integrate the ideas more so that you can use them in your thinking and apply them in your own life.

1 Like
26

I was aware of it and knew that.

No – I knew there were women interested in that – not just recently, but over the last few centuries.

I’m not sure. I think I knew it at some level but didn’t pay much attention or like disregarded it sometimes. I noticed it sometimes. Like that Dagny sometimes assumed to not be the VP, often put down / mistreated, that other characters would default to speaking to a man if present – her and Rearden talking to the Mayor comes to mind. Also the absence of other high-ranking women (in NY, Washington), and that there were fewer women mentioned at GG than men – Kay and the wife of an economist at least (I remember that their marriage pre-dated moving to GG and it being a minor plot point).

Maybe, and yes.

I am cautious about discussing it. I don’t want to react too quickly, and I’m somewhat worried about discussing it publicly. (This last bit feels like it might conflict with oism but I don’t know how.)

I drafted a postmortem that I haven’t posted. It doesn’t include the connection to the makeup project, though. The connection is twofold: after noticing the filter I looked more closely than I would have w/o the makeup project (and I probably can notice more, now), and I felt like it was okay to say something because I thought I had some experience (even tho it’s very little). Those details feel relevant to the postmortem now that I’ve said them.

27

I think there is a problem (or problems) here, and in a broader context doing this is contributing to something bad.

28

Another example where this type of thinking showed up is the blog post you made unendorsing your past views. You stated in your video that your views had significantly improved, and you wanted an easy to find line in the sand between before and after.

Do you see how wanting to draw that line and separate your ideas into “before” and “after” some change is related to your views about Dagny and her arc from flawed to unflawed?

Recently – about a year after you made the video unendorsing your old views – you made another blog post about how you were “so very wrong” about something. (You also posted about it in the forum.)

I’m not saying you were wrong to post about your mistake. But do you see how your “line in the sand” doesn’t really work? You made a major error after you said you were going to be more careful and more serious about philosophy. And if you try to make a “line in the sand” with this one, you are just going to have the same problem again in the future.

The whole idea of trying to have a “fresh start” and saying everything going forward counts, and the stuff from before doesn’t count, is flawed in a similar way to your views on Dagny (the flawed to unflawed character arc). It is anti-beginning of infinity. You keep thinking that NOW you’re past the mistakes, and going forward you will be careful & things will be better & you will stop making such egregious mistakes.

(There are attitudes you can have to minimize the impact or damage of your mistakes, to make them easier to find and change. But having an attitude that you are now past the mistakes is not the way to do that. It is actually counter-productive to trying to do that.)

2 Likes
29

Sorta yes – I’m starting to. I think I see it but it’s not fully integrated.
(Note: the rest of this post doesn’t draw a connection to Dagny and flawed-to-unflawed; I’m going to think about that and post separately.)

Yes.

Yesterday I thought about your earlier post and tried to come up with problems that might be due to anti-boi/unflawed ideas. I didn’t get very far, but one was: “maybe i think of learning as one-sided or only on some highly focused thing. like my only mistakes will be related to the thing at hand.” Like, if I’m learning X or paying attention to X, then all other A…W,Y,Z things won’t be a source of mistakes (I know some stuff related to X might be, but most things aren’t things I would have thought of as related). I assumed the rest of my ideas were unflawed. But that’s anti-boi because criticism can come from anywhere, and any idea in my brain can be a bottleneck (like, cause a mistake). Sometimes a mistake has an amplified effect, too, b/c I spend more time thinking/writing about a topic after I’ve made an error. Thinking that I’m past mistakes about A…L will make me complacent about errors from A…L, and contribute to bad reactions to crits about A…L, and mean I’ll be unwilling to revisit A…L (because I think I don’t need to).

Yeah. When reading your post the first time, I had some thoughts about retconning stuff around the unendorsement vid – responding with these would have been dishonest, but I think they’re worth me discussing a bit here.

(retcon analysis)

The two things I would have retconned were: attitudes and methods – particularly around problems and problem solving. Like I might have said: now that my attitude/method to X has improved, there’s a whole class of problems I won’t have ever again, so the unendorsement vid was okay. But both of these responses aren’t really answering the issue, because they both imply that something has become unflawed. If I said them, it would mean that I haven’t fully understood that everything can be improved and that I can’t predict what the improvement would be (even my methods/attitudes). That’d be a serious problem with my attitude and/or methods!

I could have, for example, claimed that my methods of criticizing my own ideas had like gotten past some important breakpoint and now I wouldn’t make a whole class of mistakes. Even if I never made a mistake in that class that for 50 years, someone could come up with an improvement that meant I had been making some mistakes and just hadn’t known about it (including being overly critical). Would 50 years of success mean that the original statement (50 yrs prior) was okay? No. In fact, 50 years of success probably means the opposite: a class of mistakes became invisible to me because I thought my method was unflawed. It wouldn’t have been a way of automatizing better error correction, it was a way of automatizing ignoring errors.

(end retcon analysis)

I think this error goes back to when I originally read BoI. I knew that my understanding of BoI might be flawed, or that my interpretation might be. But that knowledge (I think) was also, like, my confidence in my own ideas being unflawed. Since I knew that flaws can exist anywhere, how could my knowledge of flaws be flawed?

Yeah!

30

This sounds like it might be 80% integrated. It’s not.

Yesterday I thought about your earlier post and tried to come up with problems that might be due to anti-boi/unflawed ideas.

This suggests that you’re in a good position to do that analysis. You’re not.

Yeah!

The 4 sections of the post all open with agreement. That makes it sound like you agree more than you do. It gets in the way of discussing remaining disagreements.

When reading your post the first time, I had some thoughts about retconning

Those thoughts, like the previous analysis, are an attempt at fairly sophisticated philosophy.

They aren’t worthless. There are decent ideas in there.

But basically the error rate is too high to engage with. I think there are too many errors to comment on, and they’re local errors anyway. That’s a theme I see in your recent posts.

What can be done? Dig deeper for underlying causes instead of dealing with whatever comes up. Look at the bigger picture. Make a plan.

What sort of plan? Improve foundational knowledge. The steps are:

First, you learn to do something at all, once, successfully. Second, you learn to do it repeatedly and improve your success rate. Third, you learn to do it efficiently (using less resources, e.g. less time and attention) and achieve mastery.

Let’s call the steps (initial) learning (1), practice (2) and automatization (3) (which is also a practice step, but I wanted short, unique terms).

In our tutoring sessions, we made some good progress on learning (1).

We made a little progress on practice (2) because we did it some during sessions. But you didn’t do enough practice (2) outside of sessions. You need a lot more practice (2).

Practice (2) will uncover some errors in learning (1). So you’ll go back and improve learning (1), too. But I think you know enough learning (1) to do some practice (2).

After more practice (2) and learning (1) would come automatization (3). You shouldn’t begin automatization (3) until after the first two steps are close to complete so that you don’t form bad habits. Automatizing errors sucks.

After automatization (3) would come more layers of knowledge. You do 1-3 (all three steps) for some stuff, then you repeat for some more advanced stuff, then repeat again for more advanced stuff, etc. You’re multiple iterations of 1-3 away from effectively having some of the discussions and thoughts you want to have. You don’t seem to recognize and take seriously this situation.

You know some stuff, but you’re unreliable at using it even when consciously trying. Practice (2) makes the knowledge reliable for conscious use. Automatization (3) makes it reliable for subconscious use, which lets you put your conscious attention on something else such as learning higher level stuff.

Broadly, other people are in similar situations or earlier (they might still need more learning (1)).

What sort of material should you do 1-3 with first? As before, I suggest grammar, text analysis and writing, including using trees for all of those. They can be done partly in order (grammar then reading then writing) and partly simultaneously (that’s an example of going a few layers past an unfinished layers being OK). Concepts related to IGCs might come next.

Everything else being equal, math is a better starting point than English. But I’ve made more material about English and we’ve worked on English before. Your interests are another factor.

Going back through all our tutoring videos would be a good way to work on this stuff, in addition to doing practice (2). It’s also a way to find things to practice.

However, you haven’t been doing this for the last year. (Neither have other people that I’ve made similar suggestions to.) So maybe you must first address scheduling, motivation, energy budgets, project management, etc. We talked about those issues in the tutoring videos too, so you could get some ideas there.

So far, you haven’t shown the ability to work on philosophy stuff consistently over time on your own initiative. I also don’t think you’ve ever been very consistent at writing forum posts regularly for more than a couple months. The temporary spurts of energy approach doesn’t work well, especially with bringing up new stuff when you return instead of continuing to build on prior stuff. Lots of people seem to like/use the temporary spurts of energy approach, and like to switch topics a lot without completing much. I think that’s a bad idea if one’s goal is to get good at philosophy and rationality skills.

2 Likes
31

Why no reply? @Max

32

b/c it’s hard and I don’t want to give a response that evades the issue – i want it to be a productive.
will reply in the next few hrs.

33

This seems like the most important thing.

There are some easy things to plan, like revisiting/revising grammar and explicitly practicing more. I still break down some sentences and do outlines, so it’s fairly easy for me to do this more and more explicitly when I do (e.g., writing them out instead of doing some stuff mentally – I do both atm, but mostly mentally).

Similarly with text analysis.

I have some questions, though.

How can I judge this? If I’m moving on too quickly atm after learning something, then isn’t something about my self-judgment broken?

There are some ideas that come to mind, like w/ grammar I could set a breakpoint like correctly analyze 100 sentences consecutively. Is that sort of thing okay as a way to tell if practice (2) is sufficient?

Another idea might be to pay more attention to errors and then, when they happen, to go back to (1) or (2) and focus on things that are specifically related to the error.

I could also post answers here to get error correction from other people, but 100 grammar trees is a lot to check, and I don’t think it’s reasonable that I should expect forum members to do that. So I think I need something less reliant on other ppl. Mb this isn’t a big issue atm though and I shouldn’t worry about it.

I’m not sure how I’d approach things from a math POV instead of english – in part because I’ve done a lot more math stuff (both in school and since then via coding). That’s one reason I’m interested more in analysis/writing. Also b/c writing is an essential skill for interacting via text (e.g., here, on this forum).

Not sure if this is worth thinking about, but wanted to mention.

Do you have like a dependency tree for this sort of thing?

One concern I have is what next? Like, grammar, text analysis, and writing are some things to start with. You suggest IGC related stuff might come next, but I don’t really have an idea what that would look like, nor what other topics might be along-side that (if any), nor what would come after.

Looking at Tutoring Video Activities (renamed from June Learning) - #56 by Elliot – there’s multiple things in videos 48-52 that are relevant (and which I don’t remember), so I’m thinking some of these Qs I’m asking are not worth considering atm. Better to revisit those episodes first. Like IGCs in 52, and 3/8 to 7/8 of 51.

My motivation for asking the above is that I don’t have a clear idea of what those iterations would be (besides the topics mentioned). I think not having a clear path makes it harder to convince myself that it’s what I should focus on. I know how focusing on those things has helped me in the past, though, which is something.

This has improved a bit over the past year – regular exercise is one example. But I know there’s work for me to do there, too.

I’m not sure what to do with things like this thread (particularly LO and discussing AS). I think it was good that I read AS, but it seems like focusing too much on AS (which is one of the topics I want to discuss) would be counter-productive. Or that it’d be counter-productive relative to a more structured, long-term approach.

I could read FH/AS again (or other Rand books) and do grammar/text analysis/writing practice using examples/topics from those, is that sort of thing safe or wise to do?

34

I don’t know how to integrate this (or these sorts of things) besides mb being conscious of it and thinking about it (like, chewing) when relevant things come up.

35

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.)

36

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

37

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.

2 Likes
38

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.

39

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.

1 Like
40

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.