What I Engage With Most / What I Think People Should Do

I’m most willing to engage with people who respond to my articles (and videos) and, especially, who try to understand what I’m saying. Trying to learn Popper, Rand and Goldratt is good too.

Precursor activities like trying to get better at grammar, math, reading, scheduling or goal-directed use of your time can be reasonable things to do, too. But people should go back and forth between some of that and some attempts to work on philosophy, rather than only doing precursors. Work on precursors should be connected to actual problems that come up when trying to do philosophy, and progress should be checked regularly by trying to work on philosophy.

I basically think people should read stuff and try to figure out what the words mean and understand what it says. Start there before doing cleverer stuff like trying to criticize or teach things.

I broadly don’t know how to get people to actually do this. I think partly people don’t know what to do, or think they don’t know what to do. But I don’t think that’s really it. Go slow. Try to understand what each sentence and paragraph means. Why is each word there? What is the point or purpose of each sentence. Why is it included? What is the bigger goal of this section and how does this word, sentence or paragraph connect to it? Make trees. People could do more of this if they wanted to. It’s a different attitude than trying to add thoughts to what you read, critique it, or figure out further implications. Keep it more basic than that. You’ve gotta start with more understanding.

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