I’m going to write about the following quote:
Lots of things merit post-mortems other than losing a debate. If you have an inconclusive debate, why didn’t you do better? No doubt there were errors in your communication and ideas. If you ask a question, why were you ignorant of the answer? What happened there? Maybe you made a mistake. That should be considered. After you ask a question and get an answer, you should post-mortem whether your understanding is now adequate. People usually don’t discuss thoroughly enough to effectively learn the answers to their questions.
The first sentence:
Lots of things merit post-mortems other than losing a debate.
I agree you can postmortem after making a mistake in a videogame, at work, in school, or while writing. If you make a mistake then you can postmortem. Most mistakes are caused by an underlying error so they merit a postmortem.
I don’t usually do postmortems when I make a mistake. I do something small where I try to investigate the issue in my head. Doing that helped me see how much I need to learn about my mistakes. I think I was in the habit of just assuming an issue was a cause. Like, if you did find the cause then it would be causing many of your errors. I think it’s gotta be a thought process or pattern no? That’s different than an issue. Idk
Are postmortems usually done in debates? Is that why the quote talks about not just doing them while losing debates? If they do that’s interesting cuz you got people actually doing postmortems. How much do they learn from doing that? I bet probably a lot if they do effective postmortems. I think there’s social dynamics to debates so that might get involved a lot too. Idk