Practicing reading and posting

Project Summary: Read something by Elliot for 15-30 minutes for the next three days and post something about what I read. This includes stuff from the CF website, curi, fallible ideas.

Goal:
Get more consistent with reading and posting.
Success criteria (& optional failure criteria):
Read for at least 15 minutes a day and write a post of any length about what I read for the next three days (including today).

Big picture goal, why you want to do this, or CF relevance:
Getting back into a habit of reading. Reading is an important skill for CF and in general. Also to get into a habot of posting more and posting more about stuff I read without worrying too much about formatting it and stuff.
Plan: Make it my first activity after I get dressed and stuff for the day. Typically my first activity is Japanese, but I will start with this for the next few days. I am consistent at getting my first activity for the day done.
Context: I want to do a longer term project related to legal books. However, I noticed I have a tendency of starting stuff but not finishing it. I want to build up the habit of just reading and posting in general before starting another project I may drop.

I read Fallible Ideas – Reason or Why is Reason Important?". Oh yeah for this project I’m not doing what I typically do and note down thoughts as they come to me. I’m just reading for a certain time period and then writing about what I read. No writing while reading. Reading this article took about 5 minutes.

Thoughts:

Reason is not about truth seeking. Reason is not for finding true ideas (separately from the article: is that maybe what logic is, kinda?). Reason is about how we treat ideas. Mistakes are bad and hurt people. Reason helps address those times we make mistakes. The scientific method is an example of a method of reason.

Oh yeah thoughts are from what I remember not going through it again. I just skimmed it quickly to make sure I didn’t say the article said something it definitely didn’t say.

Also read Fallible Ideas – Parenting And Reason, ~6ish minutes

Thoughts:
Kids don’t listen to their parents because, for various reasons, the kid isn’t convinced by what their parents said. The typical assumption is that kids don’t listen to their parents because they are malicious, stupid, rebellious, etc. That really isn’t the case however. Kids don’t listen to you because they have issues with what you’re saying. An example (not in the article) that comes to mind is with drug use. Parents may give good arguments about why they’re kid should avoid using drugs but the kid may struggle with accepting those arguments for the simple fact that they’re parent uses the drugs. Also parents typically just give the bads of using a drug without addressing the actual positives people get from them.

Read the beginning part of Fallible Ideas – Relationships And Reason. I read up until “Judging and Comparing Ideas” for about 5ish minutes.

Thoughts:
The article starts off by quoting Godwin (@Elliot , I don’t know how important the FI articles are but the link ,to what I assume is the source of the Godwin quote, is broken). Marriage was done in a manner that lead people to deceive themselves because its an eternal commitment. People lie in relationships. Marriage has certain rules that you are supposed to follow that can go against your judgement. Those rules have reasons for existing however.

2 Likes

FYI with old webpages, it’s common and expected for some outgoing links to be broken and for you to need to use archive.org for them.

I’ll probably fix it though.

1 Like

Day two of my project:

I read the rest of Fallible Ideas – Relationships And Reason from “Judging and Comparing Ideas” to the end. I really liked the article. Took around ~10 minutes. Some quotes I highlighted while reading:

They may have a permanent breakup just because of an attempt to learn something which led to a positive intellectual conclusion about their relationship.

When we have the truth on our side, we appeal to it; it’s only when we don’t that we seek promises and faith.

Mistakes are common, and they are OK. What’s important is we don’t close our eyes to them, but instead strive to do better.

My favorite is the last quote. I like the idea of constantly trying to improve.

Thoughts:

Marriage prevents error correction. Your marriage could be good (or bad) but you have no good way to verify it. Any attempt to verify can lead to bad consequences. Relationships/people should look for people who are willing to learn, not perfect people (which don’t exist).

I also read some of Fallible Ideas – Paths Forward. Took me around ~6 minutes to read up until the “Saving Time” section.

Thoughts:

Hmmm. The article began with when is it fine to stop or continue discussion. Its not fine if the discussion blocks a path forward. A path forward is a way(?) for a discussion to move forward. Path forwards is about discussions(?).


So far i think I’m doing fine with this mini project. I didn’t do it exactly as my plan wanted, but I am achieving my goal of posting consistently. So I think its a success so far. We’ll see tomorrow.

I think I failed at following the plan because I changed up my routine without doing any extra stuff to stick to that change. I ended up just doing Japanese first thing this morning cause I had forgot my plan to do this first.

I’d recommend being wary of any Deutsch-influenced stuff that’s revolutionary or poly. I now think TCS and ARR were rather dangerous and were wrong in many ways.

Even if someone gets abstract rationality concepts right, which they may not, applying them to complex topics like relationships is really complicated and difficult. And even if all the comments in the article are correct, they’re short and just give some hints and general guidance, leaving you with many books worth of blank pages to fill in the details yourself. When you fill in all those details, you could easily make tons of errors.

One of the main tricks of TCS and ARR is a very common one used by many other things. Basically it’s easier to criticize than to build. Everything has flaws. It’s easier to point out flaws than to figure out something better. Is marriage perfect? No. Were there good points in some of the ARR critiques of marriage? Yes. Does that mean you should do some alternative to marriage? Not at all. There is no known alternative that couldn’t be criticized a ton too. In a way you can see it as bias: selective attention about what to criticize by DD and SFC. (SFC btw wrote about this stuff when she was divorced, but now she’s married and advocates marriage, but as far as I know she never explained why she was wrong before, what new things she learned that would change the minds of other people who had listened to her ARR writing.)

This is related to how offense tends to be easier than defense in debates. Lots of debates involve both sides going on offense and avoiding responding to most attacks. Politicians prefer being on offense too. Offense means criticizing other stuff rather than having to talk about the weaknesses of your stuff. The issue is partly due to biases in audiences: people should be more impressed by decent defenses than they are, but instead people often see an imperfect defense as an admission of some flaws and an admission of not having much offensive/criticism to say. If the other side’s stuff wasn’t attacked much during a debate, then people may incorrectly sorta assume its flawless.

Yeah, including discussions that haven’t started yet, not just discussions in progress. And using the term “discussion” very broadly, more like any sort of communication.

Also, suppose you don’t read a book that has criticism of your ideas. If a critic told you to read it, then you’re blocking Paths Forward. But what if you just saw it on the internet? You’re still blocking Paths Forward. The author of the book wrote criticism, which you found out about the existence of, and then you ignored that author instead of investigating. Even if he’s dead, you’re blocking the error correction he enabled by writing the book.

Not that you have to read every book you hear about that might be useful. There are valid reasons not to read a book. But “no one told me to read it, I just saw it online myself, so there was no ‘discussion’ of it” isn’t a good reason not to read it.

1 Like

Spent ~23 minutes reading the rest of Fallible Ideas – Paths Forward. Before I share my thoughts one thing I noticed was that just reading something, without noting down thoughts as I read it, made it harder, I feel, to remember what I just read. Maybe I should try and compare the two?

Thoughts:
To be rational you need to have Paths Forward in a discussion. Path Forwards can be quite broad(?):

Offer them a reference to read that can help them learn to discuss better. Give them a path forward even though they messed up. And by approaching it that way, there’s also a path forward in case actually you’re misjudging the situation.

So a Path Forward isn’t just answers per se. Its anything that can help a discussion move forward? Including stuff like resources to discuss better, grammar resources, etc.?

There really isn’t an excuse for an intellectual to not have Paths Forwards. Elliot goes through ways for people to have Paths Forwards.

People who are content can be mistaken.


Ok. Thats three days. Neat. I’ll write a summary for how I felt like this project went and stuff tomorrow.

Ok I think I succeeded at my project. I didn’t follow my plan correctly but I still managed to post for three days consistently. I think having it small and having some kind of accountability (by saying I will do it to a bunch of forum members, regardless of their interest) helped me do it.

Some things that came up as I did this:
Its hard for me to remember stuff as I read it. Especially on the first go. I need to do a little more interaction with some writing before I can easily remember it.

Also this reminded me of some of the value of scheduling/planning. Because I was aware of the mini-project in general so I did it daily, I wasn’t really aware of what my plans were to accomplish the mini-project. So it become a task that I made myself do end of day before I forget.

1 Like

If you want to work on this (you don’t need to now, just letting you know about an option), what you can do is read stuff with no note taking, then write down notes after, then reread and check how you did. You can start with doing the notes immediately after reading and if you get good at that, wait an hour, then a day, then a week after reading.