Thinking about my project question.
Thinking about this question, I went to the Unbounded category and read a few posts there.
I guessed that to get a sense for the kind of problems someone could have there would be easiest to find in the topics with a lot of replies, so I sorted by post count and looked at the top topics. That still left quite a few options with a lot of replies, so I only looked at posts written by people other than Elliot as I think those are most relevant to the question.
Of those, the ones that seem to result in the biggest problems. I guess what I mean by “biggest problems” is not stuff like asking for clarifications or pointing out mistakes, but getting seriously into meta issues (which is basically the difference between unbounded and others).
Some of the topics I looked at and some brief notes:
This begins with Justin and Max talking about morality. It gets quite bogged down with a lot of complexity and lots of details. Then meta issues started coming in about Max being evasive/defensive or making ad-hoc arguments. He also starts talking about not having enough time, implying the discussion is placing a lot of burden on him to make progress. I don’t know if that’s generally difficult for people, but I think I’d find it difficult if I was in Max’s position. He takes ~3 months to come back and write a conclusion. This seems like a really long delay! But I checked through his activity at the time and he was active elsewhere and working on related meta issues (like defensiveness).
Answering the question:
From this thread, some criteria for using Unbound:
- Having a good handle on evasiveness/defensiveness. Having a reasonable grasp of being able to self-identify it.
- Able to identify when progress is blocked, and take reasonable steps to identify the underlying issue and work on that.
This seems to be a tangent that Max started following some time after the above topic. Max seems to get stuck in tangles again and tries only a little to bring it into focus. My sense is the main substance of the topic and the replies Max gets are about overreaching (about CF/BoI/Oism knowledge). I don’t think there’s a substantial effort to address the overreaching here (but there may be elsewhere).
Answering the question:
- I think getting tangled/having too many different subjects in a thread is a likely problem in Unbounded. Being aware of this and being able to decide well when to branch subjects off the main topic seems valuable.
I think this topic kinda sputters out without really getting to the point. It’s mostly meta stuff. Maybe anon23 got distracted with meta stuff and lost track of the goal, or got discouraged from talking about it because they didn’t get replies about it? I doubt that they stopped caring about the topic as it seems pretty important but they only really said a couple of things about it after the initial post.
Answering the question:
- A possible skill of note there (though not related entirely to Unbounded) is: You can’t expect anyone else to carry a subject for you. It’s worth thinking about topic review processes: Do you want responses? If so and you’re not getting them, how can you make it more valuable for others to respond? Are you depending on others to follow the original goal? How can you proceed without relying on external input?
This one goes along pretty linearly for the most part, then jumps the rails at the end (starting at post 43). Something seems to connect wrong with Alan and the discussion never reaches a conclusion (in the topic). It’s a bit too light on details to work out why it went that way with much confidence, broadly Alan seems to get defensive.The content starting from 43 is all pretty much on topic and I think would be reasonable to find in non-Unbounded topics too, so this isn’t related to Unbounded specifically.
Answering the question:
- Though not really about anything particular to Unbounded in this case, I think defensiveness seems to be a reasonable thing to be extra vigilant for in Unbounded. A particular mindset is required; one of not having a specific agenda for the subject or being invested in it going a specific way.
One final thought about Unbounded for now:
- Start small and contained. The more complex a subject is the more possible tangents it can spawn.
Project notes
These are my first notes on this subject. There are still a lot more Unbounded topics to look at that may be informative. I looked at mostly long topics, which in hindsight might have been a mistake as they took a long time even skimming. I might find more by looking through a bunch of short topics which possibly got derailed or went very meta very quickly.
I think I do go off on elaborate tangents about subjects sometimes so I see it as something I’ll face in Unbounded. This whole project thread is itself a mess of questions/tangents that I may start branching off into new topics as I explore each question/tangent further. For now I’m going to keep preliminary notes like this within the topic, I’ll consider starting tangent topics for when I start writing in depth answers based on the notes.
That’s my goal met for the week.
Next week I aim to write about this question (which replaces one of the original questions):
I’ll start thinking about how to write up something as an answer based on my notes so far.