GOAL: Practice thinking in terms of error correction using this chair as an example:
The goal of this chair is to sit comfortably while performing work.
- It has a back rest to provide stability and comfort while sitting. The back rest helps prevent falling backwards and it helps prevent hunching by providing a way to relax some of the back muscles. The back rest is some kind of soft mesh material which stretches and offers more comfort than a hard back or something way too elastic.
- The seat of the chair is cushioned to prevent soreness from sitting on a hard surface. This allows for sitting longer and being more focused on working while sitting.
- The chair has wheels to allow the chair to move which fixes the problem of needing to get up or scoot the chair to reach items that are more than a stretch away. There are five wheels instead of only three or four but I’m not entirely sure why. I guess this allows the chair to roll with more stability when under a weight load, thus preventing tipping over.
- The chair has arm rests to provide a place to set arms when not using them, allowing for more rest.
- The chair has swivel to allow for turning without needing to roll on the chair or twist your body.
- The chair has a mechanism for adjusting the height off the ground which corrects for the different heights of people who might sit in the chair. I think the height adjustment uses pnuematics to adjust height which allows the chair to be raised up quickly. The system also allows it to sink down under normal human weight when unlocked.
- The chair has a mechanism for adjusting the sitting angle which allows people to shift to different positions for comfort.
Idk if I’m just super dumb, but this part of the article tripped me up/confused me when I read it:
But there’s a big gap from math and language skill to reading an advanced philosophy article. People need a gradual succession of steps to practice.
My initial thoughts upon reading it were:
Why is there a big gap? (And a succession of steps to practice what?) I thought mastering grammar and stuff would be enough to be able to read an advanced philosophy article. What is the extra stuff that is needed (to fill the gap)? Is it that you need to intuitively understand certain philosophy concepts before you can read/understand an advanced article? (In which case, is that a the chicken or the egg dilemma—i.e., how do you learn the philosophy concept if not by reading the article?)
But then I figured that what (I think) it actually means is something like this: there’s a difference between practicing math and grammar and practicing a philosophy idea that you learned about from an article. In the case of math and grammar, you can find premade worksheets to go through. But in the case of a philosophy article, you need to create your own worksheets (so to speak), i.e., figure out yourself how to practice the article’s idea.
Also, another small problem: I looked at the top of the article to see what category it was. Was it a “Research” article or a “Skills” article or a…? And there was nothing there. Looking on the CF homepage, it’s under the “Skills” category, but it doesn’t say that on the article itself.
From the article:
Practice finding and understanding … philosophy concepts… in real life.
This reminds me of a story I heard about Peikoff where apparently—on Rand’s advice—he’d practice a philosophy concept (e.g., the concept of causality) by going for a walk and verbalizing every instance of it that he saw.
I just looked it up and found it. From “Objective Communication” by Leonard Peikoff:
Causality was very abstract in my mind, and she [Rand] suggested that I go for a walk and try to find examples of cause and effect on the streets of New York. I was a little dubious about whether I would find them. But I saw trucks turning, and people moving, and feathers floating, and planes flying, and so on, and I noted each one down and worked over how in each case it was an entity of a certain nature acting accordingly. I remember coming back with a real sense of astonishment and telling her, “Causality is all over the place!” And since that walk, it has had a solidity in my mind that it never had before.