Topic for my Philosophy of Law class. I like it a lot so far. Going forward, afaik, most of my classes from here are going to more oriented towards my major, Business Law. So that’s neat.
Besides trying to post more, I have a goal of looking for some help in trying to understand some of the older writings. So far the professors lectures have been pretty easy to understand. Its reading court cases and old writings that’s been hard.
Just started the third module this week. Seems like this week consists of reading a fairly long article summarizing the eight different ways judges approach interpreting the constitution. Stuff like textualism, pragmatism, etc. Outside of that, I just have to read the SCOTUS opinion on Dred Scott and Brown.
For now I just watched two YouTube videos related to the cases to get an idea about them (I was vaguely familiar with the cases but its been a while since I did anything with them):
Does anyone know any good resource for learning American history? Or, better put, does anyone know what stuff to definitely avoid?
Around the time I was into politics years ago I remember the book A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn being really controversial and apparently bad. I heard that the stuff saying Columbus being bad was wrong and bad. At the time I planned to get into learning history but never did. Fast forward to today and now I’m unsure what’s good to read. I remember being recommended A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror by Larry Schweikart. Now looking at it, its probably biased and glosses over a lot of the issues in America.
My goal, for now, is just to refresh and get good general understanding of U.S. history. Maybe I’m overthinking it and just watching something as simple as Crash Course US history is fine. Idk.
Rothbard has a large one called Conceived in Liberty. I only listened to like the first 100 pages or something. It was too complicated to listen to in the background, so I can’t really tell whether it’s good or not, although it did seem good from what I can remember. I would like to know if someone else here has an opinion on the book(s). Rothbard was an anarchist libertarian, so keep that in mind wrt bias.
I listened to half of American Nations by Colin Woodard. It’s about how the different regions of America had very different cultures, which is in large part due to having immigration from different European countries. I liked it. I’ll give it a proper read.
Rothbard has much more concerning biases than libertarianism or anarchism. From Capitalism a Treatise on Economics by George Reisman (who knew Rothbard in person):
13. Cf. Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty (New York: Macmillan, 1973). In that book, Rothbard wrote: “Empirically, the most warlike, most interventionist, most imperial government throughout the twentieth century has been the United States” (p. 287; italics in original). In sharpest contrast to the United States, which has supposedly been more warlike even than Nazi Germany, Rothbard described the Soviets in the following terms: “Before World War II, so devoted was Stalin to peace that he failed to make adequate provision against the Nazi attack. . . . Not only was there no Russian expansion whatever apart from the exigencies of defeating Germany, but the Soviet Union time and again leaned over backward to avoid any cold or hot war with the West” (p. 294).
One issue I’m running into:
The above is the “textbook” for my class. We get assigned different chapters/articles to read. The articles are much more difficult to read compared to how the professor conducts his lectures and what I was expecting getting into the class.
Here’s an example:
Roughly, and not at all originally, and not entirely uncontroversially, we can say that for an object or institution x to have the function of φ-ing, the following conditions must be satisfied:
What is φ-ing? I was never introduced to this kind of terminology and their was no requirement to be familiar with notation like this for the class (the only requirement to take this class is enough credits taken, where I assume they expect us to maybe come across this?). From Google’s AI overview:
In philosophy and formal logic, φ-ing (pronounced “fi-ing”) is a shorthand placeholder for any action, behavior, or doing. Philosophers use the Greek letter φ (phi) as a variable for a verb so they can discuss the rules of actions, ethics, or rationality without getting bogged down in specific, real-world examples. [1, 2, 3]
I’m still a bit confused. So I just asked Gemini again:
In this context, \(\phi \)-ing represents the specific role, purpose, or job that an object or institution is designed to perform.
It didn’t copy and paste the phi correctly here, weird.
I get it now with the overview, but its still annoying.
Also the articles definitely seem to be written for people who are a bit familiar with legal philosophy already. For the most part, my very very basic knowledge of how U.S. law currently works (from some small studying of torts and criminal law) has been irrelevant.(I wonder how other people are handling the reading, if they’re reading at all and not just using AI.) The authors in the reading refer to other scholars and their theories. I will be hit with a “X’s theory says …” in a way where I’m supposed to be familiar with and know X and his theories.
Court cases are easier to read than the articles. Also, there was reading from other material that was easier to handle. I read an article that covered the eight different ways people interpret the constitution. That was fine/easy.
Oddly(?) the professors lectures themselves are fine. They aren’t too hard to handle and are more in line with these expectations. To his discredit(?), he did share a sentiment on an article to more-or-less ignore the difficult to understand complicated analysis and just grab from it the more understandable points. That was lame.
Doing this kind of school reading again after being a bit more familiar with CF made me realize what Elliot means when errors now will affect you later. I’ll read a part where I don’t understand it too well, but I feel like I can go on. Further down in the reading and now I’m getting very lost.
Having to look up one term shouldn’t be a big deal. Yes, in general, I would expect the textbook to teach you its terms itself, but you were able to look it up successfully so it was a minor problem which you’ve now solved.
The professor may not expect you to know X’s theory and may think the article is readable enough anyway. Sometimes students are thrown into the middle of something and expected to figure out the main points but not worry about every detail. I don’t know what your professor is doing here, but in general it’s a good skill to be able to read something where you don’t understand all the parts but you still figure out most of it.
Sometimes I read academic papers from other fields besides philosophy, and I don’t follow every detail but I can still understand a lot. Trying to understand every detail wouldn’t be the right way for me to read a e.g. medicine/health/nutrition paper. I think it’s a good skill that I can read those papers, and understand a lot of main points and sometimes critique some parts, without knowing everything.
Why is that lame?
Two things:
1.) Mmm. I get that. I’ve been tired the past few days (keeping the same wake-up time but went to bed late a few times, getting back on track tonight) and I think it was bit of an overreaction. I’ve had to look up terms before and I didn’t mind it. However, I think what annoyed me there (and I think I would’ve been annoyed still at great energy) is understanding the concept itself. Looking up what “phi” meant was not enough and, tbh, I still don’t really get it. I needed the AI explanation for phi in that context. I don’t think you can provide me a different context where you use phi right now where I’d get it. Dictionary looking up isn’t annoying to me, understanding the concept was.
2.) That wasn’t the only term. Just the one that stood out the most. In general, I’ve been using a dictionary a lot and it’s been fine. Most of the time I’m just having trouble understanding a sentence and then clearing up one word has done wonders (I learned the difference between proscribe vs. prescribe, that helped a lot in reading a court opinion). That phi stuff (and a few other things) were just conceptually hard to wrap my head around even after explanation.
Related to this:
I’ve struggled with this kind of thing before even when teachers (of any kind) have communicated that I don’t need to understand everything. I feel uncomfortable? don’t believe it?
In my head I saw it as lame because I subconsciously (maybe?) assumed that he wants me to just ignore a big piece of text that is important and just glean something out of it. However, in my head I feel like I need to understand that part.
Hmm. Maybe this is kinda related?:
When I was playing Baba I didn’t skip to other areas and do the easier levels there. I felt like I needed to 100% an area. That to me felt like the intention and I would feel dishonest(?)/stupid(?)/idk if I were to skip ahead to another area and revisit. Same kind of feeling when I’m just told to skip a bunch of text. Does that make sense?
It makes sense like I can understand what you’re saying. But I think your feeling/perspective is mistaken.
For example, in Baba Is You, the intention was clearly for most players to move on without 100%ing areas. Baba put in a rule for each area saying “you can go to the next area when you do this much”. If they wanted you to get 100% before moving on, they’d set the requirement at 100%, but they set it at more like 50%. The game tells you how much you need to move on and it’s not everything. IIRC I pointed this out before.
You have some sort of perfectionism bias.
If you could articulate your reasons more clearly I could critique them.
BTW, moving forward and revisiting past things, repeatedly, is advocated by Peikoff and called something like spiral learning.
ye, its come up a bunch before. i think im getting better at fixing that mentality in games and stuff (at least im always aware now im being perfectionist and attempt to stop it). any advice on practicing that kind of thing for life in general or, at the very least, for education stuff?
Hmm. The only other thing I can think of is that I think articles, or really any kind of writing, are these kind of perfect(?) or whatever wholes. So I have trouble believing that I can really get any value out one while only understanding like some or half or whatever.
I don’t think this has been true in my experience necessarily. Like even from the article I just read yesterday, I learned that three of the defining things for Aquinas to consider something law is that: it has to be promulgated, it has to be given by someone who has care of the community, and it has to be for the common god. I picked that information up while still struggling with the whole thing and I feel like I could understand those three better if I had understood the whole article better.
To practice, you could take a novel you don’t care very much about and read one chapter from somewhere in the middle. Or watch one episode from the middle of a TV series or anime. Or listen to 5 minutes from the middle of a podcast. Or do no-reset speedruns without practicing first.
That’s about getting more used to having incomplete information or doing things imperfectly. A totally different option is to make trees and map out what information is present and what is missing. Document it and do analysis of what can be understood while treating the missing parts as unknown variables. X and Y are missing, and could be anything within some constraints, but you can still work some stuff out that doesn’t depend on the specific details of what X and Y are.
They really aren’t. People don’t write perfectly. And people know readers will miss bits so they include lots of redundancy. If you had to read the whole article and keep it all in your mind and once and it could only be understood as a whole without any sub-parts being understandable … no one would succeed at reading it. It’d be way too hard.
Maybe you don’t recognize how much you miss or misunderstand in other cases where you feel like there was nothing missing and you’re satisfied. It’s not actually so different. If you revisit an article or book months later you’ll often find more stuff you missed before. Maybe you could do that and see for yourself. The difficulty is you’d forget what you knew and didn’t know the first time. If you have something you took notes on, you could read it again and take separate notes without reviewing your old notes, then compare the notes and you’ll see they aren’t even close to identical.
Hmm. I’ll try some of them.
Yeah that’s happened before. That’s happened with a lot of things actually. Sometimes its a matter of me forgetting details, but a lot of times I do think I genuinely notice/understand new things.
Now that I think about it, when I did a lot of reading growing up I would skip lots of parts. I did this with Harry Potter a lot. If I was finding a part difficult or uninteresting I would skip/skim around a bit until I get to an easier/more interesting part. When I went re-read Harry Potter I realized how much stuff I actually missed. However, I did still understand the story for the most part I think with all my skipping. Thought a lot of details got cleared up for me later.
One other issue I have that I think is mainly school related:
I think part of me doesn’t trust my professor when he says I can skip something. Its probably related to being perfectionist, idk.
My thought process is sometimes like this:
I read this hard thing and just get what I can. I was told I can skip a part. I end up not understanding any of it well. Even though my poor understanding was probably not related to skipping a part, I feel that it was.
Why trust him that this book is important but distrust him on which parts? Doesn’t make sense IMO. A lot of people, if distrusting the professor, would doubt the book he assigned is even important, rather than assuming parts of the book are important that he doesn’t even claim are important.