Replying to "Postmortems Help Address Causes of Errors" [Dface]

[Dface]

I’m going to write about the following paragraph:

@Elliot

If you just make a straightforward correction – correct the error you made in this one case, but not in any broader category or pattern of cases – then you’re missing out on a potential opportunity for significant improvement. If you rarely or never postmortem your errors, then you shouldn’t expect to make much intellectual progress. Investigating the causes of errors is one of the main ways to become a better thinker.

First sentence:

@Elliot

If you just make a straightforward correction – correct the error you made in this one case, but not in any broader category or pattern of cases – then you’re missing out on a potential opportunity for significant improvement.

What is a straightforward correction? What’s an example of that? It’s hard to think of some. I could think about typing. Are there any straightforward corrections you can make there? Maybe you can correct an error to pass a typing test. But does that address the cause of the error? You might correct the error for a specific goal but what about a wider goal? What about for correcting a word when you type something philosophical or complicated? Idk

The following describes just making a straightforward correction:

@Elliot

– correct the error you made in this one case, but not in any broader category or pattern of cases –

When you just make a straightforward correction, you correct the error you made in one case. You don’t correct the error made in the kinds of categories or cases described in the quote. What’s the difference between this one case vs. broader categories or patterns of cases? Idk but the straightforward correction only corrects the error in the one case; it doesn’t correct the error in a broader category. Why? What’s broader mean? What’s a broader category? I think there’s pizza and its broader category is food. Pizza is a kind of food.

Let’s say you correct the error of not remembering your left and your right while driving. You do that by looking at your left or right hand. Doing that lets you know which is right and which is left. Ok, lets say you can’t look at your hands when doing something else that requires you to know your left and your right. That’s a different case. The broader category I think here is activities that require left and right knowledge. It’s not just driving now. Driving is part of that category.

The last part of first sentence quote:

@Elliot

then you’re missing out on a potential opportunity for significant improvement.

I can see how you can improve significantly. If you investigate and find out an important thinking error then you will improve way more than if you just fixed it for one case. That’s gonna help you out in the long run. How much is that improvement really tho?

I think this all relates to learning to not be a perfectionist. If you fix your errors so you can figure out easy problems automatically then you don’t have to make so many of those kinds of errors. You won’t have to focus so much attention on errors that you can easily fix now. You can focus more on the harder stuff.