Topic Summary:
I’ll be getting quotes from the article and replying to them. I think I’m going to also reply to the comments. There’s comments about actual intellectual postmortems. Here’s the article:
Goal:
Learn about postmortems, like how to do them or how a good one looks like.
CF Relevance:
Postmortems are part of CF
Here’s the title with the first paragraph:
Errors Merit Post-Mortems
After people make errors, they should do post-mortems. How did that error happen? What caused it? What thinking processes were used and how did they fail? Try to ask “Why?” several times to get to deeper issues than your initial answers.
The word postmortem seems to have a dash in between. What’s the correct phrase? Also, what does the title mean? What does it mean when something merits another thing? Like, there’s good reason for something to take place? What’s the definition? Here’s the definition from Cambridge dictionary:
If something merits a particular treatment, it deserves or is considered important enough to be treated in that way:
That’s cool that it says that something merits a particular treatment. For the article’s title, you can say that errors merit a particular treatment. Idk how much sense that makes cuz it sounds like a medical treatment. The particular treatment could be the postmortem. Postmortems investigate errors and fix them.
I know errors are important, like when we talk about errors, we’re not talking about small errors. If you’re having so many errors then you might be doing overly ambitious stuff or already have enough to investigate. When you make an error that for sure merits a postmortem cuz usually there’s an underlying cause. I think this has to do with generally seeing mistakes as a fairly big deal. Here’s part of the og quote:
Most mistakes come from underlying causes. That cause most likely caused a mistake you made. I think it makes sense then that a mistake merits a postmortem.
Here’s the first sentence of the top quote:
After people make errors, they should do post-mortems.
Saying they “should” means there’s reasons for it. Does the quote apply to everybody? Like, let’s say a person with 2-3 jobs? Or someone who’s in college studying for a degree? Should couples in relationships do postmortems? I think postmortems are good to get to the truth. If you get to the truth then you can understand things better and make better projects.
What about people doing overly ambitious stuff? Like, get rich projects? Should they do postmortems? I think the fact that you investigate errors is good in itself cuz you’re curious about them. You can figure out maybe that you make so many errors and that you’re really lost on something. Maybe, the get rich project isn’t a good idea?
How DID that error happen? Also, how is this related to doing a postmortem after making mistake? Maybe, if you know that the error wasn’t a big deal you could move on. But if you don’t then why not? If you don’t know how the error happened, I would ask, “do you know how other errors happened?”
I think it’s good to ask how an error happened. Cuz that’s knowledge about a problem. I think that’s knowledge about your errors. That’s useful information cuz it helps solve the problem of why you make mistakes. That or the problem of how to fix many of the mistakes you make.
I like thinking about this question from the perspective of someone who doesn’t read philosophy. I think they would ask something caused it? Like, they would be slightly curious about something causing the error. Talking about something causing an error is stuff that not a lot of people talk about. It’s like stuff that would take place in essays and higher academia. What about it applying to real life? People make mistakes there. Why not learn about postmortems for those?
I think if you asked the question in the quote after making an error then that’s valid. Like, are errors deeper than what they seem? One could think that errors are small and you need to think about the big stuff only. There’s unknown stuff about “small” errors that don’t get addressed in life.
This part was the hardest for me to understand. Like, it was hard to get what caused many mistakes. I thought the cause is what caused it. Like, there was something between the thought process and the mistake that was the actual issue. That rather than a thinking process being faulty and causing a mistake. I still think tho that I don’t know too much about the causes of errors but I do know some now.
What is a thinking process? That sounds related to computation. Like, adding 2+2 is a thinking process. Like, that goal uses the thinking process of addition. Your addition can be off and you might end up subtracting the numbers instead. How? Idk it’s hard to think about thinking processes and how they fail.
What does it mean to ask, “how did they fail?” Like, it sounds that that thinking process is an error. Cuz it fails at a goal it’s an error. That’s similar to the idea about how one piece of info may be knowledge for one context but not another. Like, using a fork may be good for eating, but not for traveling to work. Also, if you ask how did the thinking process fail? You could answer that with more than one answer. Like, if you know a thinking process is faulty and you kind of get how it works then you could think of other things where it would fail at. I think that’s part of this same article.
I’ve seen this work with other forum members. How does asking “Why?” work to get to deeper issues? What about the word why does that? I think I know it intuitively but it’s hard to know out loud. When you ask why, you think about reasons for something or maybe an underlying process. Like, why does the sun rise from the east and fall in the west? You can talk about concepts related to space and objects there to answer. Like, there are processes at work that cause the sun to rise and fall like that. Is that similar to asking “Why?” for a mistake?
It’s interesting that you get to deeper issues than your initial answer. That seems like the goal. You may get to deeper issues about a mistake but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you fix your mistake. That’s the investigation phase. You learn more about the issue. It seems that the initial answer was insufficient to explain the issue about your errors. That’s similar to getting evidence about the problem in our heads. It’s from the following quote:
I think if you ask “Why?” several times you understand problems in your head. Like, you might not be aware of them, which is why you’re asking “Why?” several times. If you knew then you’re initial answer would have been sufficient.