I’ve decided to write about this question.
This is Elliot’s article on unbounded criticism:
Following block quotes are from the article.
You could show knowledge of what unbounded criticism looks like.
This is a key part. It’s easy to understand the words “unbounded criticism” and some people might think that’s enough. It’s not. The actual activity has a lot to it and the words don’t carry that meaning.
<irony>Maybe it should be written as: unbounded!!! criticism</irony>. Taking contained criticism is not too hard, doesn’t require so much mental gear shifting, and works towards solving an immediately relevant problem. Unbounded criticism might go anywhere: it might lead to dredging up painful ten year old memories, it might lead to needing to completely change major life choices, or it might lead to discovering you’re a terrible person that needs to make lots of big moral changes. Understanding this possibility is important to understanding unbounded criticism.
Elliot provides a number of examples for activities someone could carry out to demonstrate
The article is framed as being what it would take to convince Elliot that you honestly want unbounded criticism. I think it’s also a reasonable guide and starting point to how to be good at unbounded criticism. If you claim to be good at unbounded criticism but haven’t made the activities that you did to develop this skill public, then you haven’t exposed the skill to criticism. In other words, doing the sort of activities that Elliot suggests to convince him that you understand and want unbounded criticism are also perfect examples of how to understand unbounded criticism in the first place. I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim you’re good at responding to unbounded criticism if you haven’t publicly studied the subject.
Summary conclusions
- Unbounded criticism isn’t a simple or easy to understand concept. It has large scope.
- It’s worth studying unbounded criticism before asking for it.
- I don’t think it needs to be treated in a perfectionist way though. I don’t think there’s a clear objective way of measuring if you’re good at taking unbounded criticism beside actually asking for it.
- It does however require some intellectual humility. I think it’s reasonable to guess that most people who ask for unbounded criticism should expect to get it wrong a lot. Going in to it arrogantly or impatiently is doomed to fail.
Personal note
I don’t intend to post anything in unbounded this year.
Project notes
I failed my project goal last week as I didn’t write a post.
I wrote about why I failed it (basically: overreach and burnout) and my plans to avoid the cause of failure again here.
This post is a catch-up post for last week. I plan to write another post in this topic before the end of this week.
I think I have the workings of an article on unbounded criticism here (including my other post on the subject) but I want to think about it and write it about it more first.
I’ve decided that I’ve answered these questions for now in my article How should you take advice online?.
For my post for this week I’ll write an article about this question:
I’ve picked this because I think I can wrap up my thoughts about this question and reduce the number of open questions I have in this topic so I can focus better on the remaining ones.
@Elliot I’d like to include the relevant section of your post about this question as a quote with link and attribution in my article. Is this okay?