And e.g. philosophy is the wild unknown for you.
I donât think you need an âe.g.â in this sentence from the first paragraph of âConcluding thoughtsâ.
I really like this article as well. I appreciate when articles have overlapping content and connect concepts together in new ways. I have read (at least one pass) all of the articles on critical fallibilism, all the fallible ideas articles, all the essays your main website, and somewhere between 25%-50% of curiosity blog. My memory of this content is not very good so I have been starting to review content. The connections and organization of ideas in these articles are still counter-intuitive to me, and very helpful. Below I have just done something of a free-write, focusing on the first paragraph of the article and a bit about how I guess it relates to the other ideas in the piece. There is also some introspection here too.
Goals are not optional. Without goals you cease acting. I recall Mises making this point in âHuman Actionâ, of which Iâve read about 25%. Action is teleological. He points out that even thinking is action (though it is not the same as the actions being thought about). I consciously agree with the idea that we must always be acting toward our goals, but I rarely hold the full context of my goals and actions in mind. I lapse into habits most of the time.
It is necessary to attempt to achieve our goals. If we donât try, that also leads to a state of non-action. I think of this as the vegetative state (from Mises). The vegetative state is not suitable to remaining alive.
To analyze the idea of âtrying to succeedâ, I suppose you can try without really putting in full effort but that could mean that you are actually aiming at a different goal that you thought. I guess just âtryingâ, in a vague undefined way, is not good enough. You have to have goals specific enough to gauge success or failure. As is pointed out later in the article, this is not always as clear cut as having an answer key. Even without an answer key we can make inroads on judging success by gaining mastery over a larger domain. I like this idea a lot. I find it inspirational to aspire toward mastery, to be able to do more, to integrate my ideas together more, and have a greater domain of competence.
Making judgements about ideas is important (refuted vs non-refuted). Ideas can stick around in the mind without having been criticized. Those uncriticized ideas could be causing failure at a goal, or they could be wrong but irrelevant to any current goals. Some uncriticized ideas can be correct but without having been adequately criticized, they could get dropped in a de facto manner for a worse idea.
I consciously agree that judging is hard. I donât often consciously judge ideas. I guess that when I do try consciously judge things I am overreaching because I get stuck on those issues. I am guessing that my filter for conscious attention is set to issues I perceive as hard but I should be consciously focusing on easier issues. My current attempt at a solution to this problem is to allocate time each week (about 3 hours) to studying lower-level ideas like basic logic and grammar. I have not figured out how to integrate these into my daily life much yet. I also have not learned very much about either topic yet, having started a couple months ago.
Thanks for the feedback/comments.
What are some things you find counter-intuitive?
You can also have partial knowledge (which is often called âknowledgeâ, and could also be called incomplete or unfinished knowledge) when youâve started learning something, and know some things about it, but you havenât finished yet. Partial knowledge can be examine in greater detail, in which case youâll find it involves proper knowledge of some sub-parts of the thing youâre learning.
It may be that partial knowledge actually consists of nothing but some smaller pieces of proper knowledge, but I donât know.
Some knowledge is correct in more contexts than other knowledge. Partial knowledge might just be knowledge that works in some sub-contexts but not others.
If youâre close to the Earthâs surface, then you can understand gravity by saying objects accelerate at 9.8m/s/s. If you get 100km away from Earth then objects accelerate more slowly towards Earth and to understand that you need to know something about how gravitational acceleration varies with distance. If youâre near a black hole objects act very differently under gravity than they do near the Earth and understanding those effects requires understanding general relativity, which is applicable to a lot of other contexts.
Cool. Have you watched much of my YouTube like my Max tutoring videos? I think those would be more helpful than some curi.us articles, particularly old ones.
I think I watched just a bit of the first Max tutoring to preview but I am planning on watching them all in full. I think I must have sampled portions from other episodes because I seem to remember bits and pieces of conversations between you and Max. I think I have listened to all episodes in the podcast playlist and all episodes posted since the last Max tutoring episode. I have sampled parts from a number of the streams on your channel. My engagement with that content has all been quite random and unstructured so my memory of which things I watched is not good.
The whole idea of relating the measurement of knowledge confidence to judgement is counter-intuitive to me. Though I donât disagree with this relationship to the extent that I understand it. In my normal daily thinking my habit is to think of knowledge in fields such as math, physics, chemistry, and related fields as more inherently judgeable. I guess some of the underlying concepts in these fields are more common sense to me. Iâm not really knowledgeable in any of these areas though. Maybe its just that fact that these are subjects where genuine expertise is more widespread and there is much more material available to check errors on those topics.
I think I have been implicitly assuming certain topics, like philosophy, will remain more difficult as long as very few people understand much about the subject. It is reliance on self-judgement and self error correction that I have been discounting. I supposed their will always be difficult questions at the frontier of knowledge (personal frontier) but I can see how practice over time can incrementally move that frontier.
GOAL: correct some errors in my own writing.
Should be:
I suppose there will always be difficult questions at the frontier of knowledge (personal frontier) but I can see how practice over time can incrementally move that frontier.
(Disclaimer: these are just some extremely quick thoughts that occurred to me as I was very quickly reading through the article. I wrote them extremely quickly and actually didnât intend to share them (so apologies if some of the notes donât make sense to you). Itâs just that I sometimes uninhibitedly freewrite on a split screen while reading. But since I mentioned reading this article in the Learning Updates Thread I felt I should post it. Let me know if quick n dirty/uninhibited freewritten reactions like this are unwelcome. I might do a closer reading at some point in the future (since I liked this article a lot).)
This is one of the things I found surprising about ETâs philosophy. I remember listening to a podcast on morality where he talked about how everyone has some good in them because they know how to eg walk up stairs. I donât think Iâve ever heard of that perspective on morality or whatever before. (It seemed a bit odd to have the implication that eg Hitler had some good in him cuz he knew how to walk up stairs.) It makes me wonder if like the problem with Hitler according to this perspective was that he didnât have proper moral knowledge. He was confused and couldnât successfully judge what was morally good in the same way he could judge whether something was a cat or reliably successfully achieve/evaluate like pouring milk. (He was overreaching?)
I guess almost nobody has all of their moral knowledge on that level though. Cf. Socratic intellectualism and inner conflicts.
I like the perspective though cause it feels like it sort of unifies all knowledge. I guess in the past I intuitively felt like skills like identifying cats or reliably remembering to put the bin out for the garbage truck are in a different category or are somehow a different thing from philosophical knowledge like being rational and moral. But I guess ideally being rational and moral can be learned as well and mastered as well to the point that itâs as straightforward/reliable/easy/judge-able as taking out the trash or pouring a glass of milk or walking up stairs or identifying a cat vs dog (or doing plumbing if youâre a plumber).
I feel like thatâs a pretty unique perspective. I feel like most people take for granted that some things are easy and some stuff is confusing/hard and that thatâs that. That was me too before reading ET. I like the idea of being able to master philosophical stuff like being rational and moral so itâs as straightforward and easy and easy-to-judge as the other stuff.
It also reminds me of the 10% rule: I guess the reason why people donât master more advanced stuff and it stays confusing is cuz they stop learning/practicing it way too early. When theyâre nowhere near done learning.
Oh, ET actually says this/makes this same point (I wrote these notes before finishing the article):
This is such a big problem that most people actually think itâs impossible to have philosophical knowledge of the same quality as simple examples Iâve given like using your microwave or identifying a dog. They think thatâs fundamentally, inherently not how philosophy (and many other advanced or hard topics) works.
I like this idea a lot. Why?
How to profit from this article/idea?
Well, atm Iâm learning grammar. So applying to grammar: Iâve got subject and verbs to that cat-like (or truck-like to use Peikoff example) (I think). But not eg participles or treeing relative clauses (and reliably identifying what they modify) or even objects in all cases (eg indirect objects or object complements or whether an infinitive is an object or a modifer in a given sentenceâand treeing these things). Or fragments like âA debt she can never repay.â That confused me. (Likewise Peikoffâs mouse darting up the wall.) Or bare infinitives. Or treeing appositives. (I think getting AI to give me example sentences and then getting it to check whether my answers are right or wrong is helpful for this kind of stuff. For more advanced knowledge where thereâs less consensus, itâd be less helpful or not helpful at all.)
What to call this unified knowledge idea?
It reminds me of Rand quote about standing naked in face of reality or something after rejecting/abandoning all your half-baked knowledge/ideas/notions or whatever:
the choice is still open to be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand naked in the face of reality [âŚ] Live and act within the limit of your knowledge
From ETâs article:
Problems like improper knowledge are why you arenât a genius, a top philosopher, a great thinker, or an innovator in your field.
This makes me motivated to take this problem seriously. I also wonder what the other problems (plural) like this are? That are why Iâm not a genius, a top philosopher, etc? Iâd like to know about them too so I can be motivated to take them seriously too. (Maybe honesty, integrity, etc but presumably they are skills that can be similarly mastered?)
Knowing what you can do to make progress is a good thing which means you have a huge opportunity.
Thanks ET for telling me âwhat you can do to make progressâ and thus providing me with âa huge opportunityâ! 
I liked the explanation of how people begin lowering their standards of knowledge as children due to parents.
Context: trying to write more and ask more questions. I read until the âParentel Rulesâ section. Will read the rest soon.
For efficiency you want to learn exactly as much and as well as you need to. âAs you need toâ means to achieve goals you have. Knowing when you have achieved those goals can be difficult, especially for intellectual skills. Having good judgment of your skills is thus really helpful for learning faster.
Itâs not just about efficiency either. If you canât judge well you might stop learning before actually reaching your goals. This is failure in itself, and if you build upon the knowledge or skills that you didnât fully learn then that can lead to failure in future learning too.
So to achieve all the learning we want to do, we need good judgment.
Iâve heard some from business circles that you should use measurable goals, or that non-measurable goals are useless. I think they would say that non-measurable goals are subjective and practically arbitrary for evaluating success. But we do use non-measurable goals all the time and you lose out on a lot of goals if you canât use non-measurable goals.
I think many self-help gurus also advocate measurable goals. I donât know of any that advocate getting better at judging non-measurable goals.
I donât know what goals to make wrt philosophy. It would be a useful skill to learn.
I think just knowing that I should be confident in judging my success is a lot of help. Iâm not sure whether this answer is correct? Then I need to learn more. Figure out what I would need to know to be confident.
Critical Rationalism sometimes calls it âconjectural knowledgeâ, which is fine but doesnât convey having a high standard for quality, reaching a clear conclusion or becoming confident.
Do we have theory for how you can be more confident in knowledge despite fallibilism?Justificationism would say difference in confidence should/does come from different levels of justification. I think this is where some of the common intuition for justificationism comes from. People observe that theyâre more confident about some knowledge than others, so they assume thatâs because they have more justification for the one over the others.
Is the fallibilist theory of rational confidence that we should be more confident in better tested theories? I donât think it is.
Is the issue that Iâm thinking confidence about knowledge is a degree? Does CF say confident means being able to evaluate something as true or false in a binary way?
If so, how would that be compatible with situations like: when you get a test question and you donât feel really sure but you have something which would be the best guess. And you would have multiple questions like that, and it turns out you consistently score better than random on these types of questions.
I think the CF answer is that the questions have sub-goals, and you know that the answer you think is the best guess achieves some of the sub-goals but not all. For example you know the answer has to be positive because the question is about the sum of two positive numbers. Itâs better to guess a positive number rather a negative one.
So CF would say that different confidence levels comes from being able to achieve different amounts of sub-goals?
You can also have partial knowledge (which is often called âknowledgeâ, and could also be called incomplete or unfinished knowledge) when youâve started learning something, and know some things about it, but you havenât finished yet. Partial knowledge can be examine in greater detail, in which case youâll find it involves proper knowledge of some sub-parts of the thing youâre learning.
I wrote the above before reading this. This seems like it fits with what I wrote. I think I had the term âpartial knowledgeâ in mind but didnât write it down.
It may be that partial knowledge actually consists of nothing but some smaller pieces of proper knowledge, but I donât know.
My intuition says that partial knowledge could be built up from (at least some) partial knowledge. I donât see why it couldnât.
Proper knowledge can also be called conclusive, confident or decisive knowledge, or just plain âknowledgeâ.
Would proper knowledge be when you can evaluate an IGC?
You can pick something up and say how heavy it is by feeling its weight. Just because this isnât perfect doesnât mean itâs not measurement.
I felt a bit surprised that this is true. I donât usually think about feeling stuff as measurement, but they are. I think I got used to thinking about measuring being about using tools to measure things âwellâ, so only that gets associated with âmeasuringâ.
I think lots of people would say that isnât measurement even though they would sometimes act as if that is implicitly true. Probably for similar reasons to why I felt a little surprised. Maybe they think their food scale is perfect.
They learn some arithmetic and some logic (like the difference between âandâ and âorâ). They learn about none, all, any, one, some, almost all, all but three, and so on.
Do kids typically learn these words in a structured manner? Like is it typical in childrenâs books or do they just pick it up as a part of spoken language? I would think providing children with examples of these concepts would be helpful at like age 2 or 3. Or some other age where theyâre still learning language. Do most parents consciously know theyâre teaching their children logic? I would guess no.
Iâve been thinking about whether conscious practice/tutoring about stuff like object permanence and theory of mind could help children learn them faster. Stuff I donât think people usually teach children and that they maybe donât even think about as a thing a child has to learn.
It would be teaching them metaphysics, but not like a philosopher knows metaphysics. It would be implicit metaphysics that most people just think about as common sense.
They may consciously understand a concept like âallâ but they havenât practiced using it correctly enough to form good habits about how to use it (they didnât automatize and master their knowledge, which means they arenât ready to build to more advanced stuff).
I think practicing here doesnât necessarily mean filling out worksheets about âallâ. It could just be an attitude towards trying to use it correctly, and thus practicing every time it comes up.
Nor do I, except for vague and short-term goals. E.g., atm my goal is to learn some of the stuff from the Yes or No Philosophy product and the Critical Fallibilism Course Videos product.
To get goals, do something. Enjoy it but also fail in some way. Then the goal is to improve.
What something for philosophy? E.g. write essays, debate or discuss. You can lose debates or receive criticism for your essays and then see your weaknesses. Then if you like something about the activity you can want to improve and do it again but better. If you canât even get that far, e.g. you see a lot of errors in your own essay so you donât want to publish it, then youâve got a goal right there: to improve at understanding the topic, and at writing, so that you can finish and share an essay.
Ok, cool. I like that perspective. Thank you for sharing. I guess I was thinking that goals had to be big and long-term and specific. I like the perspective that the goal can just be to improve at doing something that I enjoy.
Context: done reading.
I think itâs interesting and important that merely expecting a two year old to understand a parentâs rules, orders, requests or ideas could be more irrational and damaging than what is done to the child if he disobeys.
That would be interesting and unexpected.
But adults often donât realize how ignorant two year olds are and how much âobviousâ stuff they donât know. The perspective of a two year old is very different than an adultâs perspective, and unfortunately people (of all ages) are generally pretty bad at thinking about other peopleâs perspectives.
Being a good teacher (or learning guide) requires two things: conceptually understanding the material well and being able to model the mind of the learner, i.e., know what knowledge the learner has and whatâs missing to understand the next step. Thatâs the same as seeing it from the perspective as the learner or knowing the relevant context of the learnerâs knowledge.
And asking questions about a rule is often seen as an adversarial attempt to find loopholes (for the purpose of not doing what the parent wants) rather than an attempt to understand it (for the purpose of following the rule).
The child might have higher standards for how logical a rule should be. And that would include what logic to follow when presented with edge cases.
An impression I have of most people regarding the nature vs nurture debate is that they think that nurture is primarily about the explicit teaching done in schools (I think lefty nurture types think about the general social environment more than others though).
But hereâs an example of inexplicit teaching done through parenting matters a lot in nurture, which partly explains the correlation of childrenâs and parentâs intelligence. More intelligent parents are better at logic, and so theyâll be better about giving logical explanations of their rules to their children. They might also be better at modeling the mind of the child. They might not think about these things explicitly, but it might seem natural to them that the rules should be logical and that they need to model the mind of the child. So the child suffers to a lesser degree the harms from the pressure of acting on improper knowledge.
The parents might then be unknowingly teaching their child logic and an attitude to look for patterns in logic and reality instead of looking for the arbitrary whims of authority figures.
Another way the child could be taught to look for the arbitrary whims of authority figures is if the parents punish according to their intent instead of what the rule literally said. If the parents would say âOK, thatâs wasnât what we intended to achieve with this rule, but you didnât logically break it, so itâs fineâ then they will look for logical explanations. If the parents recognize the child didnât logically break the rule but still punishes the child, then child will be more concerned about guessing what the parents think rather than what reality and logic says. This also applies to teachers and tests, where the child is incentivized to guess the answer the teacher wants instead of the logical answer. I got the teacher and test idea from Guessing the Teacherâs Password â LessWrong which I remember Elliot linking to, but I canât remember where.
Even though IQ doesnât exactly measure intelligence (which I donât think can be done numerically), it is to a large degree about recognizing logical patterns. If the parents are good at recognizing logical patterns they can teach to their child through setting logical rules, how they talk and how they act. This can teach their children the attitude to look for logical patterns and so they get practice doing it. This eventually leads to the child scoring better on IQ tests. So the parents have been implicitly teaching their child to score better on IQ tests, explaining some of the correlation between parents and child IQ.
Nice. I think Iâve struggled with philosophy goals because I thought they ought to be measurable, like any good goal would be. But now I know all good goals donât have to be measurable.
Measurable deals with quantities. You can also use e.g. yes or no questions for success or failure criteria. They should be evaluatable, not measurable.
The precision of goals and their evaluations can be high or low depending on the scenario. You can put effort into more precision when itâs useful.
I wrote a mini-essay inspired by this article and Rational Confidence and Standards for Knowledge. I started writing the day after I read the last article. I didnât look at the articles after that. I looked at my notes (which I have already shared in the threads) after feeling a bit stumped at ~700 words.
I spent in total 3 hours writing it. I havenât done an editing pass. I guess I would say I do some light editing while writing just to make things work.
The purpose is both to practice writing and to check my understanding of what Iâve just read. I think it exposed a weaker understanding than I thought I had.
I didnât think too much about the structure of the essay or about the global optimum of the essay. I think I was mostly focused on local optimums about getting each local part of the essay to work. So I would expect there to be issues there.
Criticism would be welcome. I had my guards low such that perfectionism wouldnât stop me from getting writing practice. So lots of errors are expected.
1.9k words mini-essay
Too often people fall short of learning to the point of gaining proper knowledge. Proper knowledge is knowledge youâre confident about and have mastered. Itâs knowledge that you can easily evaluate like how you can identify whether youâre looking at an orange or an apple.
What counts as proper knowledge for an idea depends on the goals you want to achieve with using the idea.
goals and judgment
Effective learning requires setting goals. Without goals you donât know how much or to what level you need to learn something. With clear goals you know when you have succeeded and are done learning for that purpose. Without goals you might waste time spend more time on a topic than you need to or you might not spend enough time and thus not learn what you wanted to learn. With goals you can also see yourself improving and know that what youâre doing is effective and will lead to success. If you arenât improving or arenât improving fast enough you can either change your learning method or change the goal.
Itâs often given as advice to set measurable goals. This is because itâs believed that non-measurable goals are inherently hard to evaluate. So when people use non-measurable goals they have a hard time checking their progress and they often use biased judgment to deem success to early or spin the goal in a way that looks like success was achieved. People are generally better at evaluating measurable goals. They can confidently read the value of a scale and evaluate whether they hit their weight target or not. They can confidently keep track of days journaled and check if it reached the amount of days they wanted to reach. People are better about not lying to themselves when measurements donât indicate success, though itâs still many ways people do cheat their measurable goals.
However not all desirable goals are measurable. Writing better poetry is possible a non-measurable goal you may want to set. Gaining a great conceptual understanding of some piece of math is a non-measurable goal. Becoming a rational person is non-measurable goal. Getting an honest spouse is a great goal, but you canât measure the honesty of the prospective spouses. You shouldnât limit yourself to only measurable goals. Thereâs a lot you would miss out on.
Judging measurements is just something most people in our society are better at then other types of judgment. You can be great at evaluating non-measurable questions like whether or a person is lying or whether or not an actor would be great in a role. Lots of people can confidently and objectively judge that in the sentence âThe Greeks were, great thinkers.â the comma shouldnât be used. Itâs possible to judge non-measurable statements like these just as confidently as you would judge the value of a scale or whether the fruit you are looking is an orange or not.
Different Standards and Rational Confidence
People hold different types of knowledge to different standards. They believe that for some types of knowledge itâs pretty much impossible to be rationally confident about. They would say youâre arrogant or naive if you think you can have a confident opinion on some topics. They think this is inherent in the topic itself. They think that you can hold subjective opinions on such topics, but not objective judgment.
Anything we can learn can be broken up into smaller steps. The steps themselves can be broken into smaller and easier steps. This creates a tree structure of learning steps that become easier the further down the tree we go. If you want to learn quantum mechanics you may not be able to work on much straight away but you could maybe start to learn about atomic theory or electromagnetism. You may not have the prerequisite skills to learn either of those, so maybe you have to start learning about arithmetic instead. There is always a step far enough down the tree where you can achieve it and make progress towards your end goal. The steps for any field arenât more difficult than any other field because we can always break them down into smaller steps. For you, there may be a larger amount of steps to reach an understanding of quantum mechanics than it takes to learn to bake a cake, but this is because of the prerequisite skills you already have. Itâs possible to have your state of knowledge such that learning quantum mechanics would be easier.
In one sense people think that math and science are more difficult fields than the humanities, and in another sense they think the opposite is true. This is because they view math and science as objective fields and the humanities as somewhat subjective fields. That is the sense in which math and science are regarded as easy because they are objective and can thus be judged confidently, whereas for the humanities people can only make uncertain judgments which they shouldnât be so arrogant to confidently claim is universally true. When the field is subjective itâs in another way seen as easier because almost anything you say could be deemed as good, at least within some arbitrary conventions which are malleable, whereas in objective fields you actually have to meet some rigid standards.
A big reason for the bias for the sciences is that our society is worse at language skills.
Confidence Levels with Binary Epistemology
If we can reach high rational confidence in any knowledge, like how weâre confident in identifying apples, then there must surely exist different levels of confidence that you can have about a piece of knowledge. For example you have some exam questions where you donât feel confident about but you have some answer which you think is your best bet. You write down these answers and across many exams you see that you have scored higher than what would be expected by chance though you scored less than on the questions where you were confident. So clearly you were right to have some confidence in those answers even though you werenât fully confident.
The question then is how is this compatible with binary epistemology. After all in binary epistemology we can only evaluate ideas as either true or false. So shouldnât either be in a state where you donât know and canât judge an idea at all, or in a state where youâre fully confident in the idea because you have evaluated it one way or the other?
The answer is that you can have partial knowledge. An idea can consist of sub-ideas. For any idea you may know how to evaluate some of the sub-ideas. Having evaluated some of the sub-ideas you can narrow down your options or we have an idea which only depends upon these sub-ideas. What we consider partial knowledge for one goal could be considered proper knowledge for another goal. There is true knowledge involved but it may not be enough for the purpose at hand. So we can have some lower amount of confidence when we only know the answer about some parts of our question.
The other way could be that we know the question fully but we only have lower amounts of confidence because we havenât practiced it enough. I donât see how this works technically. Maybe itâs that you can judge it with a shortcut which is necessary because the question would otherwise require you to keep too many things in mind at the same time.
Not being used to binary epistemology, how confidence levels fits in isnât as intuitive as how it would fit in with degree based epistemology. If you believed in Bayesian epistemology itâs quite straightforward. If you have supporting evidence to make something 80% probability of being true, then your confidence level should be 80%.
Parental Rules
For children the natural thing is to only act on proper knowledge. They have high standards for how well they want to understand something before theyâre confident in acting on it. But over time almost everyone drops their standards and starts acting on improper knowledge or partial knowledge and stops reaching for proper knowledge.
Children start dropping their standards when their parents force them into acting on improper knowledge. The parent sets rules the child doesnât understand and expects the child to follow them. From this the child gets used to acting on improper knowledge and continuing with life newer gaining the proper knowledge.
The parent views the rules as clear and easy to follow. When the child fails to follow the rule due to not understanding the parent often interprets it as disobedience. When the child asks clarifying questions about the rules, the parent often interprets it as a bad faith attempt at finding loopholes in the rules.
The parentâs rules rely on a bunch of background and cultural knowledge they take for granted, but which the child actually doesnât know. The parent fails to understand how ignorant the child is and fails to view the world from the perspective of the child. Itâs extra difficult for people to mentally model the ignorance of a child, but most arenât good at mentally modeling other adults either, especially adults from different cultures.
Since the parent canât mentally model the child, theyâll punish the child more for not trying to follow the rules when he doesnât understand how to. If the child tries but fails the parent might understand that the child genuinely doesnât understand and be more forgiving towards the child. Disobedience is generally viewed as worse than incompetence.
The parent has low standards for knowledge, like most other people, and that is reflected in the rules they make. The rules are often illogical, unclear and inconsistent, which leads the child to asking questions and failing to follow the rules. If the parent doesnât like the child asking clarifying questions about the rule, then the childâs best bet is to do their best in following what they think the rule is.
The child might follow the rules exactly, not breaking the logic of the rules, but breaking the intended outcome the parent wanted. If the parent gets angry at the child for violating the intent then the child will learn that theyâre supposed to follow The Rules of Authority and not The Rules of Logic.
The child will also learn from example that the parent doesnât have high standards for knowledge either. The child also view the parent as the best source of truth. If the child asks questions and the parent gives low quality answers the child might assume better answers arenât necessary or arenât possible.
Conclusion
Acting on and gaining proper knowledge is crucial for achieving our goals. To know when we have gained proper knowledge we need to be able to judge when we have reached our learning goals and when we can be rationally confident. Lots of these useful goals are non-measurable goals. People in our society are better at judging measurable goals, but this isnât an inherent feature about measurable goals vs non-measurable goals. It comes down to peopleâs skill level, not the inherent difficulty of the type of knowledge theyâre dealing with. As children, people learn to act on improper knowledge because their parents and other authority figures demanded that they act on rules which they didnât understand fully, which means acting on improper knowledge.
What I had before checking my notes
Too often people fall short of learning to the point of gaining proper knowledge. Proper knowledge is knowledge youâre confident about and have mastered. Itâs knowledge that you can easily evaluate like how you can identify whether youâre looking at an orange or an apple.
What counts as proper knowledge for an idea depends on the goals you want to achieve with using the idea.
Different Standards
People hold different types of knowledge to different standards. They believe that for some types of knowledge itâs pretty much impossible to be rationally confident about. They would say youâre arrogant or naive if you think you can have a confident opinion on some topics. They think this is inherent in the topic itself. They think that you can hold subjective opinions on such topics, but not objective judgment.
Parental Rules
For children the natural thing is to only act on proper knowledge. They have high standards for how well they want to understand something before theyâre confident in acting on it. But over time almost everyone drops their standards and starts acting on improper knowledge and stops reaching for proper knowledge.
Children start dropping their standards when their parents force them into acting on improper knowledge. The parent sets rules the child doesnât understand and expects the child to follow them. From this the child gets used to acting on improper knowledge and continuing with life newer gaining the proper knowledge.
The parent views the rules as clear and easy to follow. When the child fails to follow the rule due to not understanding the parent often interprets it as disobedience. When the child asks clarifying questions about the rules, the parent often interprets it as a bad faith attempt at finding loopholes in the rules.
The parentâs rules rely on a bunch of background and cultural knowledge they take for granted, but which the child actually doesnât know. The parent fails to understand how ignorant the child is and fails to view the world from the perspective of the child. Itâs extra difficult for people to mentally model the ignorance of a child, but most arenât good at mentally modeling other adults either, especially adults from different cultures.
Since the parent canât mentally model the child, theyâll punish the child more for not trying to follow the rules when he doesnât understand how to. If the child tries but fails the parent might understand that the child genuinely doesnât understand and be more forgiving towards the child. Disobedience is generally viewed as worse than incompetence.
The parent has low standards for knowledge, like most other people, and that is reflected in the rules they make. The rules are often illogical, unclear and inconsistent, which leads the child to asking questions and failing to follow the rules. If the parent doesnât like the child asking clarifying questions about the rule, then the childâs best bet is to do their best in following what they think the rule is.
The child might follow the rules exactly, not breaking the logic of the rules, but breaking the intended outcome the parent wanted. If the parent gets angry at the child for violating the intent then the child will learn that theyâre supposed to follow The Rules of Authority and not The Rules of Logic.
The child will also learn from example that the parent doesnât have high standards for knowledge either. The child also view the parent as the best source of truth. If the child asks questions and the parent gives low quality answers the child might assume better answers arenât necessary or arenât possible.
Edit: Criticizing my essay the day after:
I spent 1 hour and 30 minutes reading my essays and Elliotâs articles looking for errors in my essay. Mostly I noted down lots of things Elliot talked about which I didnât. I tried to write as much as I could so if something was left out it means I didnât know it well enough to notice it should be included.
I donât think the writing was very good but I donât know exactly whatâs wrong about it. Some of my writing I thought was just simple and clear, but I think the structure isnât very great.
I wasnât able to find ways in which what I wrote was false. I wouldnât say what Iâm writing about is proper knowledge for me. Iâm not super confident itâs all true.
I think I remember that the article talked about how important it is to know if you have proper knowledge on something or not. Like, you should be able to say you donât know all that much about something, and being able to do that is useful for you. Below, Iâm going to talk about what I donât know about @ActiveMindâs essay, and which skills I think I could work on:
What im unsure about is the, âToo oftenâ part. Iâm not used quantifying how many people do something when reading. I didnât pick up that part or read in between the articleâs lines for it. I think I remember reading a part in the proper knowledge article that talked about how we as kids gained proper knowledge, but that has since stopped.
I think I agree with this, but Iâm unsure that when the word knowledge is talked about that there is more than one kind. Automatically, I think if you have knowledge about something then youâre confident about it already. A part of me thinks proper knowledge is synonymous with knowledge. I donât think I know why kinds of knowledge there are.
Itâs hard for me to agree with this fully cuz Iâm thinking how does identifying something mean youâre evaluating it? I donât think Iâm able to connect the example to how you can easily evaluate something. I think itâs maybe a definitions problem like I donât know how words relate to each and if one is a category of the other.
Another thing I was thinking is how does identifying whether youâre looking at an orange or an apple mean youâre able to identify something easily? Am I not reading between the lines well? Does @ActiveMind not have to say, âlike how easily you can identify whether youâre looking at an orange or an apple?â
Nice work on writing a mini-essay! 
I think thatâs cool!
I read it but couldnât think of any criticism. 
Except maybe that it might not make sense to an outsider whoâs not familiar with ET (but thatâs not really a problem since I think that youâre writing it to test your own understanding).
And also maybe the meta issue of why did you choose this topic (Proper Knowledge) to study over other philosophy/CF topics.
Btw have you seen Odysseas on YouTube? (Iâm not recommending him, I was just wondering because I saw that he has some videos on mini-essays. I was wondering if that was where you got the idea from.)