Purpose of Thinking; Positive and Negative Arguments; Clear Goals

[Elliot]

Summary: Thinking is complicated but worth working on and improving. Positive arguments aren’t as good as negative arguments, because we care whether an idea is broken (and will fail) or not. One negative argument can imply an idea is broken; a dozen positive arguments cannot rule out the idea being broken. In order to improve at decisive criticism, we need to define goals more clearly. To remain flexible, we need to consider multiple goals instead of just one. It’s easy to give decisive, pass/fail judgments to candidate houses in terms of a clear goal like “at least 3 bedrooms, a pool, and costs under $300,000 (plus works for background context goals like having a roof)”.

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://criticalfallibilism.com/purpose-of-thinking-positive-and-negative-arguments-clear-goals/

[Dface]

@Elliot

In order to improve at decisive criticism, we need to define goals more clearly

Seems like the quote above is related to the quote below which are the sentences before:

@Elliot

Positive arguments aren’t as good as negative arguments, because we care whether an idea is broken (and will fail) or not. One negative argument can imply an idea is broken; a dozen positive arguments cannot rule out the idea being broken.

It seems that being able to tell what’s wrong with an idea is what decisive criticism is. It seems that defining your goals more lets you find what’s wrong with them maybe? And that improves your ability to decisively criticize things. Btw the writing in the article comes off as exploratory in a way. Intuitively btw. Like, I think I have to think a lot to connect the ideas in each sentences like there’s gaps. I don’t know if im right

@Elliot

Thinking lets me achieve goals like walking across a room or acquiring and driving a car without crashing. Thinking also helps me decide which goals to pursue.

I’ve always noticed that in CF goals can be something you achieve but also something that you can define to get better at decisive criticism. I don’t know why those two ideas don’t flow or connect well with me. I didn’t think goals could do so much. Seems like goals are related to knowledge. Like, knowledge is useful information i think and if that information helped you succeed at a goal then it’s stuff that can be decisively criticized.

@Elliot

Thinking also helps me decide which goals to pursue.

This is the one i want to know the most about. I think it’s such a big bottleneck. It’s what smart people use to quickly improve at stuff and how they seem so “amazing” and “cool.” Those words are in quotes cuz I think everyone can be like that not just smart people. Like, you don’t have to be the chosen one to be smart. Also, being smart doesn’t seem so hard if i get good at deciding what goals to pursue

@Elliot

How can we narrow our attention without missing something important? How can we exclude a bunch of junk from our thoughts without excluding great ideas? How can we know what is junk without thinking about it first? But if we think about it first then we may spend too much time thinking about junk. We must focus on what’s important but it’s easy to screw that up.

I think about this similarly everyday, like when Im trying to get good at something. Those are valid questions to ask right? I don’t want to just try to improve and see what works. That sounds cool and all but what if you don’t get anywhere? It’s deep imo improving at something is deeper than it seems

@Elliot

All people share the same reality which has facts and objective truths about e.g. what physical objects exist at what locations and what laws of physics govern them.

I can’t lie im questioning what a fact is while reading this. This is after reading about digital vs. analog articles. Also, I’m skeptical of the definition i use everyday. It’s related to the use when people present statistics in a heated political discussion or debate–’those statistics are facts.’

@Elliot

Any of our beliefs could potentially be worth revisiting and revising if we got new information. Some people disagree with these things, but they’re pretty common ideas, and they’re explained and argued a bunch elsewhere. I have reasons to believe them. Let’s assume them here and focus on other stuff.

I had a feeling you would say the last sentence cuz it seems you’re mostly asserting those ideas. It has to do with the structure of the article. I’m ok with assuming the ideas tho

@Elliot

If we have five positive arguments in favor of an idea, and they all deal with important issues (not minor details), and they’re all true, it could easily be the case that we still shouldn’t act on or believe the idea.

The positive arguments probably don’t even address the criticism of why should we act on the idea?

@Elliot

Positive traits are often shared by many or all of the ideas being considered, so finding that a specific idea has a positive trait doesn’t mean it’s better than the other ideas. On the other hand, important negative traits often aren’t shared by the other ideas. Ideas we’re considering often aren’t all broken in the same way. (Sometimes they are and we need to think of some new ideas.)

This quote seems to be an example of the asymmetry between positive arguments vs. negative arguments.

@Elliot

Both positive and negative arguments must be considered in context: What is the goal? What ideas have we thought of to achieve this goal? We want to avoid ideas that will fail at the goal (this requires critical thinking) and compare the remaining ideas in some way to figure out which one is best (if optimization is worth the effort – for less important goals we’ll often just go with the first idea we think will work).

It doesn’t break the laws of physics can be a goal. I just don’t know much about how that looks like. Only thing i can think of is trying to create something faster than the speed of light. That something would fail at the goal. That’s a negative trait of the idea.

BTW if something is false or wrong does that mean it fails at a goal? It’s hard to connect truth with goal setting. It’s not intuitive to me.

Another BTW I wonder when optimization of ideas becomes important.

@Elliot

I have an original proposal, which is to use only the first phase and avoid the second phase of comparing ideas by degrees of how good they are. With better decisive criticism, we can narrow things down enough.

The last sentence seems like it’s related to thinking in digital terms. At least related to digital stuff.

@Elliot

Most background goals are easy. If they were hard for us, they’d get more active attention. But sometimes background context makes a difference and arguments are allowed to bring it up. We do have other goals we want to simultaneously succeed at, like safety.

The quote above seems like something hard to talk about and I guess convey to an audience. Do you find it hard to talk about background goals and when it’s important to bring them up?

@Elliot

So, goal, brainstorm, criticism in context. And people’s main concern is there will be a bunch of ideas that survive criticism and we (often, when it’s worth the effort) need to rank them by how good they are or otherwise compare them. There’s also the potential case where we don’t have any good ideas.

Having goals and ideas that achieve them seems very related to conflict resolution. Like, how do you use an idea that passes at one goal but fails at another? I think in conflict resolution x says to do one thing and y says to do something else. What idea do you act on that doesn’t have any criticism?