Answering this question.
Which after some consideration I replaced with this question and it’s connected notes.
I’m finding it difficult to write about this question in an impersonal way, as it entangles with some intuitive stuff for me that I’m not sure I have the right words for yet. This may be more like a stream of consciousness.
Part of my inner conflicts on this is, I think, trying to find a reliable way to accept answers. I think it’s connecting to some authoritarian-type ideas, trying to find a way to use some perfect method X to solve problems.
In principle I have what I think is an acceptable method X - that is, to select the ideas/answers that have not been successfully criticised. To explore and refute criticisms, or create new ideas in response to them.
There’s a part of me saying something like “but you haven’t asked everyone yet, you could have missed something”, which can be confusing and overwhelming. There’s no practical way of asking literally everyone for their answer to a problem. So when opening up discussion to people in general (rather than keeping in a closed system with possibly very limited access to good ideas) I guess this part of me immediately makes the problem unmanageably large.
It’s a part of me that isn’t always active, sometimes it isn’t active at all. For some reason I’m not sure about, it’s particularly active with this question.
Some other parts of me try to find answers in bad things. E.g. finding a person who’s judgement I can take on, or by trying to find ways to denigrate some people to limit the pool of people to talk to. I don’t want these parts of me to be the best answers I have to for trying to manage discussing ideas in public.
Considering this question reminded me of one of Elliot’s article:
I think this problem is a kind of bottleneck for me. A significant part of me is trying to find a perfect way of trying to get the best possible advice and make the best possible decision based on it, far beyond a “good enough” outcome.
The intuition behind “best possible” there is not a realistic one, it’s by some unrealistic imagined and not even very clearly defined perfection. Something where the goalposts could be very easily moved without even realising it. For reference I’m going to call this kind of thinking “mystic perfectionism”.
Even if I thought that all the best ideas in the world could only be found on CF, and the people who have them are willing to put the effort in to write them/provide them for me (including possibly me being convinced to pay for it), this mystic perfectionism would still be saying “you don’t know everyone else in the world, you might have missed someone”.
I don’t think this mystic perfectionism is misguided in it’s intent - it’s trying to find the truth. But it’s method is bad, and comes with a lot of empty worry with no clear cause.
I think I need some sort of “good enough” pass/fail approach to answer this mystic perfectionism. And this answer may be part of or the entire answer to the question I’m writing about.
My stream of consciousness is drying up here so I’m going to make some rough guesses about possible methods and my current main thoughts. These are not attempts to pick a final answer - just making some notes for next time.
Measures for picking a “good enough” method to get useful advice:
- Think about who would know about the subject. Target exploration there. E.g. a programming forum/discussion group for code-related problems. CF is a useful universal answer here as truth seeking and critical thinking are universal goods. It’s good to mention which other sources have been targeted to find answers.
- The problem may be about knowing how much work looking for answers/knowledgeable people is enough work. A possible method here is, if after searching for a while if you stop seeing new answers/criticisms to a problem/idea maybe 10+ times in a row it may be worth stopping and accepting the results so far as the best found.
- Take these best results and try to answer them. Follow tangents. Look for others answers to these problems too, and create some answers too.
- If there is some sort of flaw with all the answers, try to think of a solution that doesn’t have that flaw. Failing that, think about the flaws - are some of them acceptable for the benefit of having an otherwise useful answer? Consider IGC charts to analyse the competing ideas.
- Discuss this analysis of the different answers.
- Make a decisions of your own. Not only is it not good to seek out someone else’s answer to replace your own thinking with, people who want to get that kind of submission are not great thinkers.
- Mystic perfectionism note: How do you know you’ve done enough of all of this? This hasn’t solved this underlying intuitive conflict that I have. Part of the problem is, doing this for everything seems like it would make it impossible to get anything done. It may be better to just make a choice of some method or other, try it out for a while, and then look at how it worked out. That seems like a better option than following some mystic perfectionism.
Project notes
That’s my project goal for the week.
Next week I plan to write about this question more, particularly as it’s been an active issue for me this week:
Side note: I have some other ongoing conversations elsewhere on this forum which I haven’t read yet, I plan to get to them in the next day or two. This isn’t entirely about posting reluctance - I’ve been busy with another project this week which I wanted to get finished and has taken up almost all of my conscious thought.