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 didn’t 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 haven’t 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 I’ve just read. I think it exposed a weaker understanding than I thought I had.
I didn’t 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 wouldn’t 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 you’re confident about and have mastered. It’s knowledge that you can easily evaluate like how you can identify whether you’re 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 don’t 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 you’re doing is effective and will lead to success. If you aren’t improving or aren’t improving fast enough you can either change your learning method or change the goal.
It’s often given as advice to set measurable goals. This is because it’s 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 don’t indicate success, though it’s 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 can’t measure the honesty of the prospective spouses. You shouldn’t limit yourself to only measurable goals. There’s 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 “The Greeks were, great thinkers.” the comma shouldn’t be used. It’s 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 it’s pretty much impossible to be rationally confident about. They would say you’re 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 aren’t 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. It’s 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 shouldn’t be so arrogant to confidently claim is universally true. When the field is subjective it’s 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 we’re 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 don’t 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 weren’t 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 shouldn’t either be in a state where you don’t know and can’t judge an idea at all, or in a state where you’re 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 haven’t practiced it enough. I don’t see how this works technically. Maybe it’s 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 isn’t as intuitive as how it would fit in with degree based epistemology. If you believed in Bayesian epistemology it’s 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 they’re 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 doesn’t 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 parent’s rules rely on a bunch of background and cultural knowledge they take for granted, but which the child actually doesn’t know. The parent fails to understand how ignorant the child is and fails to view the world from the perspective of the child. It’s extra difficult for people to mentally model the ignorance of a child, but most aren’t good at mentally modeling other adults either, especially adults from different cultures.
Since the parent can’t mentally model the child, they’ll punish the child more for not trying to follow the rules when he doesn’t understand how to. If the child tries but fails the parent might understand that the child genuinely doesn’t 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 doesn’t like the child asking clarifying questions about the rule, then the child’s 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 they’re supposed to follow The Rules of Authority and not The Rules of Logic.
The child will also learn from example that the parent doesn’t 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 aren’t necessary or aren’t 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 isn’t an inherent feature about measurable goals vs non-measurable goals. It comes down to people’s skill level, not the inherent difficulty of the type of knowledge they’re 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 didn’t 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 you’re confident about and have mastered. It’s knowledge that you can easily evaluate like how you can identify whether you’re 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 it’s pretty much impossible to be rationally confident about. They would say you’re 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 they’re 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 doesn’t 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 parent’s rules rely on a bunch of background and cultural knowledge they take for granted, but which the child actually doesn’t know. The parent fails to understand how ignorant the child is and fails to view the world from the perspective of the child. It’s extra difficult for people to mentally model the ignorance of a child, but most aren’t good at mentally modeling other adults either, especially adults from different cultures.
Since the parent can’t mentally model the child, they’ll punish the child more for not trying to follow the rules when he doesn’t understand how to. If the child tries but fails the parent might understand that the child genuinely doesn’t 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 doesn’t like the child asking clarifying questions about the rule, then the child’s 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 they’re supposed to follow The Rules of Authority and not The Rules of Logic.
The child will also learn from example that the parent doesn’t 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 aren’t necessary or aren’t possible.
Edit: Criticizing my essay the day after:
I spent 1 hour and 30 minutes reading my essays and Elliot’s articles looking for errors in my essay. Mostly I noted down lots of things Elliot talked about which I didn’t. I tried to write as much as I could so if something was left out it means I didn’t know it well enough to notice it should be included.
I don’t think the writing was very good but I don’t know exactly what’s wrong about it. Some of my writing I thought was just simple and clear, but I think the structure isn’t very great.
I wasn’t able to find ways in which what I wrote was false. I wouldn’t say what I’m writing about is proper knowledge for me. I’m not super confident it’s all true.