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I was listening to this podcast and ET mentioned the example of slowing down one’s reaction to social stuff so that one can unlearn bad ways of evaluating ideas (i.e., subconsciously evaluating ideas based on social dynamics/social status).
And then ET mentioned the example of learning grammar.
It occurred to me that some people learning CF devote a lot of effort (seemingly 100+ hours) to studying and practicing grammar. But I don’t recall seeing anyone do the same for analyzing social dynamics and practicing not allowing social stuff (e.g., status) to bias their evaluation of ideas.
So I wondered whether unlearning social stuff was just a casual example ET gave offhand or whether he actually thinks it deserves to be on the same level as grammar in terms of the time and attention that one devotes to studying and practicing it.
To help answer this question myself, I took a look at the tree from “An Organized Plan for Learning Philosophy (explained with a tree diagram)” and saw that “not judging by social status” is in there (as a child of “handling bias”, along with stuff like “engaging with public criticism” and “introspection”). (Also, there are other nodes elsewhere like “social status”, “social rules/dynamics”, “social dynamics”.)
So it seems like the answer to my question is: yes, it does deserve the same time and attention as grammar.
In that case, I wonder why I haven’t really seen many people (or anyone? (apart from ET)) study it that much? Whereas heaps of FI/CF fans have done grammar projects.
Anyway, the reason I posted this is because it never really occurred to me (before listening to this podcast) to devote ~100 hours to studying social dynamics/status and practicing not having it influence my judgement of ideas—i.e., to devote a similar amount of effort to it as to grammar. (And ditto for other stuff he mentions in the podcast like “looking out for bias and dishonesty in yourself and others” and “emotional reactions”.)
Also, looking at that “Plan for Learning Philosophy” tree, it occurred to me: I wonder how long it’d take to learn philosophy by mastering that whole tree? I counted (very quickly—I may have miscounted) 144 leaf nodes. If it takes an average of ~100 hours per leaf node, and if I assume that that tree is comprehensive, then that’s 14,400 hours of study and practice. If one did 6 hours of study and practice every day, then that’s ~6.6 years to master philosophy.
P.S. I found it kind of funny that in the podcast ET says something like that quitting smoking is easier than learning philosophy.
My first guess is because grammar is easier to study and to evaluate. With social dynamics, people are more unsure if what they’re doing is productive or not.
This is relevant for practicing harder-to-practice topics: Practice Thinking in Terms of Error Correction
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Like on CF you mean? Or in general?
Hmm. Maybe it could’ve been something to actually consider, but I think its just something that’s harder to work on. There are grammar resources. Their is less stuff to help you deal with fixing your mind from social dynamics.
On the forum? I mean there’s other things people don’t do as much. I think there is lots of examples of grammar here, but not as much as math for example. Idk why.
In general? I think there are a decent number of people who study social dynamics (whether they’re trying to free their mind from bias is different).
Yeah, good point. It seems like lots of people do the easy stuff but then stagnate and fail to progress to being as good at philosophy as you.
Thank you for sharing that—and pointing out how it’s relevant to this issue. I wouldn’t have made that connection otherwise. I’ll try to keep that in mind when/if I get to harder-to-practice topics. Or use it to practice CF concepts I learn when cycling back and forth between learning prerequisites and CF.
On FI/CF.
True, but the article Elliot shared helps address this problem thankfully:
Yeah, I meant on the forum (and in the previous FI community). And true, like out of the whole “Plan for Learning Philosophy” tree, nobody (apart from ET) has seriously practiced almost any of it.
In my case, I (currently) find language stuff more fun/appealing than math. Like in school, I enjoyed English/humanities type subjects more than math/physics type stuff.