I get it. It makes sense to me that you don’t understand because I see now that I wrote a confusing message. I think my message can be broken into three parts to get a bit more clarity. I will break it into three parts below.
Part 1: Direct question
Part 2: Social signalling
Part 3: Postmortem
The postmortem part is itself a confusing message so I will rewrite it into the hopes of making it better so that it can convey what I actually meant.
Rewrite: There’s two things here. One is: I actually want to know why Elliot decided to make a request. Second is: I think that requests doesn’t make sense. I think that making requests is begging. If one thinks something doesn’t make sense then one should explain why it shouldn’t be done instead of begging someone to not do it. I think that making requests is a non robotic thing to do. A robotic person is someone who works only on reason and nothing else like reason. Mostly whenever requests are being made there are two people involved. One who is making request (Requester) and the one to whom the request is being made (Requestee). I think non robotic people use things other than reason. I think a requester is a non robotic person because they decided to use request instead of reason. The requester is also assuming that that the requestee is a non robotic person because the requester decided to use request instead of reason.
I tried to do a postmortem of why I socially signaled. I think I signaled two things.
I made these social signals because I think these social signals imply that I am robotic person like who doesn’t require requests, only reason. I think people consider robotic people like Spock cool. I think that’s why I socially signaled.
I don’t have enough skills (these are grammatical skills I guess) to understand your points here with high confidence. I would be able to post replies which take care of these problems you mentioned but it will take a lot of effort from me. I think the new postmortem I posted where I started fresh takes enough care so that the problems you mentioned don’t occur. That’s because I started fresh not because I developed the skills and understood your points here.
You aren’t talking in the Unbounded category. It’s important at this forum to be aware of what category you’re in and follow the rules for that category.
Regardless, my comment on the whole discussion is that you should try to learn some CF ideas. It’d be better to talk about my articles and try to understand them instead of bringing up other stuff. And you need to practice ideas (like trees or post mortems) before trying to use them.
I suggest:
I’m still confused by what parts you currently believe & agree with, and what parts you are saying are mistakes that you are trying to postmortem.
For example you said this in your postmortem re-write:
Is this a thing you agree with and believe, or is this something you think you are wrong about and are trying to postmortem?
I don’t see any inconsistency between requests and reason, and I’m not sure why you seem to.
If I make a request of someone, it is often the case that I am making a request because I think they are amenable to reason. Consider the situations when you might make a request of someone versus when you might call the police to deal with them.
If a neighbor seems pretty decent but is being kind of noisy late at night playing music really loudly, I might request that they lower the volume so that I can sleep. I might not state anything more sophisticated than “Can you please lower the music, I’m trying to sleep.” But in making that request, I’m making them aware of a fact (my perception that they are being disruptive) and implicitly trying to appeal to some values I hope they share (like caring about not being disruptive to neighbors).
OTOH if the neighbor making noise is running an apparent drug den and the noise involves them firing off one of their guns for fun, most people are going to be much less likely to treat them as open to reason and amenable to polite requests, and will instead probably just call the cops right away. In that situation, you can’t reasonably expect the neighbor to be someone who will be open to polite requests and who might care about the disruption they are causing. So you wind up using government force as an alternative to requests in order to deal with the situation.
FWIW I’m a big grammar fan and have spent a bunch of time on grammar stuff in the past couple of years. That is despite not being in a demographic that most people would think of as benefitting from extensive grammar study. I think that learning grammar to a reasonably high standard is worthwhile.
Got it. I still want to try to finish the goal oriented part of my conversation with ingracke. Should I move it to unbounded or friendly? (I don’t know how to move conversation)
I feel proud right now. That is because I think I’ve accomplished some things. By that I mean learning something. It will take me some time to get some perspective and only then will I be able to identify what I’ve learnt. High quality criticisms played a major role in stimulating that learning. I don’t think having unbounded conversation with high quality people is the best way to learn things but for me in this case high quality conversation did help me in identifying problems. Saying that it helped me in identifying problem is an understatement. It actually made the problems starkly apparent. Earlier, the problems were somewhere in the back of my mind, now they are staring me right in the face. Some of the realizations I had are:
This reply is emotionally helpful to me. The fact that you decided to take time to read my discussion and give feedback makes me think that you care about my learning progress. This makes me feel good.
My ‘I feel proud’ message explains that I’m feeling some positive emotions now. I feel motivated to learn things now so there’s a high likelihood that I will do this learning activity. I did some programming today after 18 months. I didn’t do any considerable learning activities for past 18 months. I’m crediting this conversation for too many things. Hopefully I’m correctly assigning credit.
It makes sense to me that you are confused.
I lied here. I didn’t take care to remove those errors. I just hoped those errors didn’t happen. I got an intuitive understanding of your this feedback and just hoped I didn’t make an error using just my intuition.
I don’t have the skills to do postmortem. I don’t even fully understand what postmortem is. I will instead mark ‘what parts I currently believe & agree with, and what parts I am saying are mistakes’. I think you have so much skill that when mark this, it will be enough for you to achieve the goal.
(To confirm, I think) The goal is that you want to understand what I meant here:
I was trying to give you some help with your posting.
It was unclear in your posts which statements you meant you agreed with and thought were good, vs which statements you were identifying as possible mistakes in your thinking.
So I was just trying to point out how your writing was difficult to respond to: You wrote a bunch of stuff, and it was unclear which things you thought were true and which things you thought were mistakes. If you make it clear which are which, it will be easier for other people to be helpful.
So if you want, you can try to re-write some of your previous posts and be more clear about which parts are things you actually believe are true, and which parts are things that you believe are mistakes in your thinking. But you don’t need to do that right now - it might be better to work on simpler learning activities first.
Wait. I thought of another way to clear your confusion. If this new way doesn’t work then I will do the marking thing you suggested. Instead of doing a postmortem (which I don’t know how to do) I will do commentary on my post.
Why did you say please?
Here I am asking a question. I think this question can be considered a pure question as compared to me trying to do some social stuff.
Your reasons were enough to convince me. And if they weren’t and I didn’t see your point then I would’ve argued with you to get your point.
Here I socially signaled. Also I tried to tell Elliot how I think he should act. I tried to tell him that he shouldn’t make requests. What did I social signal here? I think I signaled that one doesn’t need to make requests to me. Why do I think this is a social signal? Because I think this signal increases my social status. How? Here things get confusing for me so I will try to be more verbose. The question is ‘why do I think that the social signal which says that one doesn’t need to make requests to me increases my social status?’. Answer to that question is: I think so because I believe there is a part of society (which are called nerds like Sheldon from Big Bang Theory TV show for example) consider people like Spock to be cool (/ high social status).
The rest of the message can be ignored. It was trying to say what I said above but failed (due to bad grammar?). I think this clarifies what I actually mean and what I think are possible mistakes. To add more details to provide further clarity: I think that all social signaling is bad so the fact that I social signaled means I am making some mistake somewhere. I’m not sure what the mistake is.
The part of the message that I am asking you to ignore can be considered a commentary instead of a postmortem. Why did I decide to mix commentary and a reply? Because I don’t have good communication skills. Why did I decide to share commentary? Two reasons:
Elliot
I appreciate that you are in a friendly, non-defensive mode and will admit to some stuff that is common but other ppl will not admit to in conversation with me. It’s useful when ppl will share some of their conventional stuff instead of me having to guess it all by reading between the lines.
May 13, 2021 at 3:00 AM Notified 18 people
I think that being open increases my learning opportunities.
I don’t think this conveys what I actually wanted to say. I will write something else which is related which is closer to what I actually believe.
What I actually believe is: whenever there is social stuff happening then there must be something wrong happening because of social stuff. For example if a person becomes interested in learning some ideas because they think it increases their social status then something wrong is happening. In this case the wrong is that the person will not learn the ideas in the best way. Their goal will only be to learn enough so that they can impress people. Learning to socially impress decreases the possibility of producing a good understanding. That is the ‘something wrong’ in this case.
I think there are four other nodes (other than the one I am trying to close) open here for me to reply to but I will choose to do learning activities instead. I hope to come back to them.
The reasoning that pro death people use is: if you could do X (which you liked doing) as many times as you wanted then X stops becoming fun. For example if you liked eating burgers and you could eat burgers for as long as you want then after sometime you won’t enjoy eating burgers. Which means after some time you would lose a fun thing in your life which is the fun of eating burgers. Pro death people say that having a limited amount of time in necessary for a fulfilling life because that way you are limited how many times you can do an activity you find enjoyable. If you had time to do all the activities you enjoyed in life soon you will run out of all fun things in life. This is the reasoning pro death use to argue that death is necessary to give life meaning.
Right now even I don’t know what I mean by you are reasoning like a pro death person. The chain of reasoning that makes sense to me right now is as follows:
Let say a person uses this argument: “This is the last time you get to do activity X. This fact should make activity X more enjoyable”. I would tell that person that you are making a mistake if you accept this argument or what follows from this argument.
This argument can be inverted to say that “in future you cannot have as much fun because of a limit which stops you from doing activity X in future.” this argument is saying that you have to give up fun in life and that is a good thing. If you accept any of this kind of argument I think you are making a mistake.
What I will write below I am paraphrasing and summarizing on my own from my older memory when I was worse at reasoning than I am now so I might have added extra errors on top of Pinker and maybe I misunderstood Pinker so don’t go by my words and think this is what Pinker meant.
I found out where a lot of my misconceptions about language came from. I got it from Steven Pinker. He argues that the capability to learn knowledge is like the capability to grow organs like liver or pancreas. And that the genes have the knowledge to accomplish these tasks to a high level of precision.
I now know that genes do not effect language learning in the same way that it does for organ making.
I decided to open a new learning node by trying to analyze what I said and why I said it. I thought I would learn something this way. I now realize that this way of learning is not effective so it is better to drop whatever I was trying to do there. If you want I could try to analyze what I was trying to do there after doing the learning activities and learning the appropriate skills required to do a successful analysis like making trees and postmortem. Till then I think I should drop this node.
@doubtingthomas what do you think about this:
Life is more enjoyable if you can appreciate the values you already have in it (such as nice food, good friends, and so on). Your ability to appreciate such values is determined by the ideas you have. It can be easy to lose perspective on some of the values in your life and take them for granted.
One way to gain perspective and thus have a happier, more enjoyable life is to engage in thought experiments such as imagining you’re doing something for the last time. The last time thought experiment does not necessarily rely on the idea that death is somehow required to have values or enjoy things. How does it work, then? Here’s one story: if something is a value to you, there are presumably reasons that that is the case. Even if we’re talking about something simple like a slice of pie or a cheeseburger, there are presumably specific aspects of taste or texture that cause the thing to be a value to you. But in going about your life, you may forget about the details of why you like something, totally take it for granted, and so on. The last time thought experiment is a way of calling your attention to the aspects of some thing you value that you may have forgotten about. It does this by suggesting that you imagine an extreme case - that you’re doing something for the last time - in order to break out of the mental frame that takes the thing for granted. There’s no death-worship involved - it’s just a psychological “trick” for helping you to re-appreciate something.