In your opinion, are you putting in enough time and genuine effort?
Various other people haven’t understood CF close to as well as me. Why do you expect to do better than them?
Why are you confident that you’re studying the correct, rational philosophy when you are not yet an expert and have not carefully studied CF nor a bunch of others to compare. The people studying other philosophies generally think they are the ones studying the good, rational stuff while you aren’t.
Enough time? No. Enough effort? No.
Hmm. Good point. Mmm. I have no good reason/evidence to offer here. I like CF. I like philosophy. I think I want to be a philosopher. I should learn CF because of that. I can’t offer anything in terms of how I’m doing stuff better than people as of right now because I’m probably not.
Only real thing that comes to mind is it seems to me many people drop CF. Is there anyone you’ve worked with that is not as close to you but has been consistently studying CF for a long time? Actually asking. I think I won’t drop it. That’s about it. Idk why others have dropped it.
Mmmm. True and when I read some other philosophical stuff it seems to make sense sometimes.
I have no good reason for the confidence. I just like your stuff. The stuff you write is easy to read. It resonates with me. I like Objectivism and so I’m biased in liking you for that part of you.
Hmm. One thing that’s kinda difficult for me here. I avoid reading “bad philosophy”, in quotes because I don’t really know what’s bad I guess, because I’ve heard stuff about how it can mess up my mind. Apparently Peikoff shared that his time in university messed him up I believe. I avoid, in part due to the difficulty and in part due to messing my mind up, reading philosophies I think are bad and irrational. Are my worries their unfounded?
Liking and resonating is good. But then why don’t you binge it more like some other things you like, or not put in enough time and effort, in your opinion, overall?
I don’t think you should be afraid of reading about other points of view. Also if you are afraid of that, you’d probably also be afraid of discussing them (which is another way to learn about the same ideas), so that’d prevent a lot of critical discussion, debate and Paths Forward.
University has all sorts of problems. The issue isn’t learning about some inferior philosophers. If you read stuff uncritically you can get bad results but that isn’t a book’s fault and it can be done with CF too. Sometimes people (mis)understand CF, don’t think critically about their (mis)understanding, don’t share their (mis)understanding so I don’t even know they have it, and then blame me for their problems. It’s important to have an attitude of taking responsibility for your ideas. It’s important to think critically and be selective about what you accept and act on from what you read, not do it because your’e so impressed with the author and think he wouldn’t make any mistakes (even if he got it right, that doesn’t mean you understood it right).
Hmm. So I have binged some of your stuff before. I think it depends on ease of reading and understanding? Binging CF articles I have done but I have more so done it with curi.us stuff. The reason I don’t binge it more though. Hmm. I think it’s probably because when I get into philosophy I try and do too much. An example I remember from a few years back:
Going out for late night walks is something I find calming and something I feel helps me think. It was actually on a night out I created my CF account (or tried to, I remember emailing that the site had some issues at the time creating an account). So after feeling intellectual or whatever on this occasion walking I may read some of your stuff on curi.us. After liking the stuff and reading it and then some Rand and then some other stuff. After a while (maybe a week?) I then get motivated into philosophy and remember how much I really like this stuff. And then I end up doing too much. I’ll create a whole study plan. block out set study times, do extra stuff to get my life in order such as waking up early and going to bed early etc. Then it all comes crashing down because I’m doing too much and then I just go back to games or something.
Tbh I have done this with games before just not as intensely. I have gotten overambitious on a game I enjoy after a while and start wanting to get really good at it. I then create a plan that I can’t keep up with and that is too much for me and just drop the game.
I don’t put in enough time and effort because of my work schedule and general scheduling. Doing a lot of work has me tired. When I’m tired gaming/reading/viewing is easier. Though I am tired right now. I think just reading and responding is relatively easier for me. I haven’t been working on the coding stuff for a few days because I’ve been busy with work and too tired to actually think on the code. This is doable while very tired. Also with the bits of free time I have on a busy week (if I have pretty free week I do think I put in a good amount of time and effort thats just really rare) the stuff I choose to do can vary. Sometimes its working on here. Other times I notice my house is slowly becoming a mess and I clean up. Other times I just rest .
On the bright side I recently talked to my manager to cut back my working hours starting mid July so I can focus on other stuff. A lot of financial stuff has worked out at home for my family where I don’t have to work as much. So that’s nice. At that time I can see how accurate my assessment is of work being a reason I don’t do as much. A part of me does feel I could always be doing more.
Hmm. Ok. Also from personal experience my opinions have changed a lot. I don’t think they were for the best of reasons or because of amazing arguments or anything but I have been able to change my mind. I remember Kant being my favorite philosopher at some point in high school.
I think when it comes to unlearning bad philosophy that has more to do with unlearning stuff you learned from your culture and stuff you integrated into your sense of life. Stuff that’s automatized and integrated into your life and thinking.
Most people don’t practice the philosophy they read so they don’t automatize it. Then it’s not so hard to change. If you read philosophy that doesn’t resonate with you then I don’t think it’ll impact you a lot. And if it did, it probably wouldn’t be hard to change after reading better philosophy.
Sure if you get really into induction it can be hard to learn from Popper. But I think most people who read a little induction and liked it could quickly change to evolutionary epistemology.
So it seems Kant hasn’t impacted your life and thinking a lot? Was it harder to get into Rand because of Kant? Did you have a lot of resistance initially?
I can binge read your stuff. But I don’t binge posting, doing projects or practicing. Which I think is due to:
I’ve gotten way better at 3, but I’m not perfect at it either. I think it isn’t my bottleneck, but it could be.
2 applies a lot to projects. I feel that my projects aren’t proper. I think projects ought to be more like “learn skill X and verify by getting it right 99% of the time”, but my projects are more like “go through the material”. I feel like I don’t know what goals to set, what success criteria to set and what plan to make. And so I don’t really want to start planning a project because I’m not sure what to do and the project planning I usually do doesn’t seem good enough. Although the end result of the projects seem good.
Also I could’ve read more if I didn’t:
By “heavy analysis” I meant a thorough analysis. Like I can’t just pick out parts of an article and focus on that, I have to analyze pretty much everything. I think that’s a bad perfectionist attitude.
That’s not binging philosophy. That’s doing a bunch of other activities other than reading philosophy.
When you binge games, I guess you more typically just play games. You don’t necessarily change a bunch of other stuff like making a study plan or schedule.
~yeah. The question was:
I do binge it but then proceed to do extra stuff that ends up with me consuming it a lot less. I think part of the reason I do this with philosophy, and not with gaming, is because philosophy makes me want to do more? Mmm. Maybe that’s one way to put it: philosophy (and studying broadly i think, i’ve done it with math before too) makes me want to improve my life, gaming (and reading) is typically an escape from my life and its problems.
Kant hasn’t really impacted my thinking a lot, no. Roughly how I remember getting introduced to Kant is through high school debate. Kant’s Categorical imperative - Wikipedia are a very popular thing to use in the debate in my area (also I think in a lot of other places too as many online resources bring it up). Kant’s morality was presented to me in general (epistemology wasn’t a concern for me at the time and its not a concern in how it was used in debates) as something like: everyone should be morally good,. the categorical imperative is something this smart philosopher dude to prove why we should all be moral all the time.
That’s something that resonated with me because I believe I was quite conservative at the time and was getting into their arguments about god being required for an objective morality.. I got really caught up in wanting morality to be objective.
Kant didn’t really affect me getting into Rand. I actually avoided Objectivism initially because I read somewhere, at the time, that her philosophy was subjective and I was like subjectivity bad.
How I got into Rand is kinda funny. I re-discovered her through debate. My opponent was a socialist who hated Rand. He create an entire debate case using Objectivism as the framework and making it sound bad and evil, but some of the quotations he used really resonated with me. He also made Rand sound very libertarian which I really liked at the time. So right after that debate I started thinking, “Maybe this lady ain’t that bad after all..” He even mentioned that her philosophy had objective morality. I was surprised. I was like thats cool. From there I did some researching and I believe Fountainhead was the first book of hers I read. Mmm. No. I started Fountainhead. Took forever to read it. In between my breaks taking forever to read it I read Anthem and then proceeded to taking forever to finish the fountainhead
If you do more philosophy, less gaming, but skip the extra parts you quit over, then I think you’ll be better off. You could try to add in extra, hard, meta parts gradually, one at a time, when you see them as necessary to solve specific problems you’re having and you can’t figure out any other way to get unstuck. Or add stuff when you’re intuitively happy to, in addition to consciously judging it’s a good idea, so you don’t think it’ll result in stopping because you think no part of you sees any downsides.
I think so too.
In the past I have done improving my life stuff one at a time. I think what’s been happening is that I slowly add stuff to my life gradually and things go fine. I do this for, let’s say, a month. Something will come up to disrupt it. Either binging some entertainment or a really long work week. I’m then out of all the habits and stuff I’ve been trying to built up. I then try to get myself back to where I was before getting out of routine in one go. And then fail at doing so.
Something like: One week I go to bed on a good sleep schedule, next week I workout, the week after I start eating a healthier breakfast. I work and mess all that up. Then I try to do all those things at once because I felt like I was able to them consistently. before. I then keep failing from there. Part of me just gets annoyed at feeling like I need to slowly build back up again, but the alternative typically seems to be getting overwhelmed and not improving at all.
If changes fall away easily, it suggests you don’t fully understand them, aren’t fully persuaded of them and their importance and what’s wrong with alternatives, or didn’t practice them enough.
~mm yeah I think it’s a mix of all three. Especially not understanding their importance and not practicing enough. During really really busy days I will skip somethings usually because I don’t think their that important and if I maybe do think they’re important I drop them because its hard to do something that’s not practiced enough on a busy day.