Imma just say potential spoiler below for Atlas Shrugged:
What would happen if he had his speech IRL to the whole world? I think some people wouldn’t get it. I think it would have to say something that resonates with people that makes them think it’s important to listen to. I think people usually don’t care about tragedies or big events happening if it doesn’t really affect them and they don’t see the connection to it in their lives.
I was thinking about all this cuz I want people to learn more about philosophy and create a world that is more wanting to be better in that way.
I think I should mind my business and focus on learning of my own.
I think you should focus on your own learning between 50% and 95% of the time. But I don’t think you should do that exclusively. It’s OK to have big thoughts sometimes, even if you don’t really know what you’re talking about, but it should be a minority of the time.
This is related to periodically trying to take things you’ve learned and use them, and connect them with other harder topics, and exploring stuff beyond what you can currently do low-error-rate incremental progress on. I think learners should do that sometimes – not too often and not never.
I see a lot of people at one of the two extremes, e.g. they will have philosophy debates but never study, or they will study but never try to debate nor have an advanced discussion.
I’ve been focusing on learning ~100% of the time. I’m at that extreme. This is something I think will need to change if I want to make serious progress. I think partly I’m avoiding advanced discussion because I’m worried about embarrassing myself. Perhaps this contributes why I can find it hard to comment on things.
I’ve noticed that if I try imagine that I’m writing things to just myself I can write more and more freely. Otherwise, I notice myself editing or filtering kind of heavily the things I might write before I write it. I can kind of switch between the two modes and it feels different. Writing to share, or writing for myself. The editing and filtering for embarrassment is probably occurring on subconscious levels too.
Hmm. I don’t know if this would help but for me personally I have (over time) been able to share more without getting embarrassed. I think the reason that is, is that over time I share stuff with more of a mindset that is ok being corrected and with me being wrong. Whenever I’ve gotten embarrassed in the past (at least partially) is because I valued showing that I was right in a sense. From google:
embarrassment
a feeling of self-consciousness, shame, or awkwardness.
Ok. I don’t know how to work with the self-conscious part but the shame and awkwardness make sense to me. In school if I answered a teachers question and got it wrong I felt ashamed because it was important to me to get it right. Not doing so was embarrassing I think.
Anyways to what I was trying to share:
Do you get embarrassed if Elliot corrects you in your tutoring thread? I don’t. In general I take it seriously that I make plenty of mistakes. Also, I’m aware of how much smarter(?) Elliot is than me (probably even more than I am aware of tbh). I expect to get corrected. I appreciate it. Plus he isn’t mean about it.
The point being: maybe try treating the writing you share out there like you sharing it with Elliot in your tutoring thread. Its fine if people criticize you and its fine if your wrong. Don’t share it in a manner where you have to be right.
Write down some comments that you won’t share. Practice some writing privately. See if it actually helps you get more thoughts into words and gain confidence and experience with the activity.
A similar thing happens to me too but in a general sense like when I’m talking to family and friends. I notice I do it when I don’t have anything important to add to the convo or I might say something dumb subconsciously to them. I have to think harder about to give them a response and it feels fake doing it.
Sometimes it helps when they’re real to me and tell me not to worry too much about giving them a response. After that I feel like I can be myself and be ok with being silent around them. And if I have something to say to them it doesnt sound so bad saying somethind dumb and them correcting me.
I’ve had a hard time answering this. I’m not sure why. I’ve gone back to this question a few times.
I’m not sure that it’s being corrected that is the embarrassing part. But sometimes yes I feel embarrassed, but rarely. I don’t think I’ve been paying much attention to it because I can’t think of specific instances, I just get a general impression. Though, on maybe one or two occasions early on in tutoring I realised that I was hiding from myself that I was confused about some things, but was still trying to give answers. I felt embarrassed when that was revealed. But I think I learned from that, and I am much more comfortable sharing my confusions. In fact I’ve seen that finding things I’m confused about is really helpful. That’s not to say that I’m now really good at knowing when I’m confused, I’m not, I’m getting better.
I’m no longer sure that embarrassment is what I am filtering for. I’m going to think about this more.
It does make sense. I suppose you thought I’d agree that I don’t get embarrassed with Elliot, but if I’m honest I do, or something like that, albeit in a small way. I think the general idea of finding a mindset where posting works and applying it to new situations is good idea and I appreciate your input.
I think engaging in big ideas discussion would be great to discover skills that you need to practice. You would see a closer connection of the skill you’re learning to what the skill is needed for. You would have a concrete example of how the skill would help rather than it just being a general prerequisite to the whole of philosophy.
I want to talk about philosophy on the forum, but I want it to be unbounded, so that has blocked me from doing much other things than just learning. However, if I’m honest with myself then I think I probably wouldn’t respond well to unbounded criticism. I want to do a project to learn to want unbounded criticism.
One thing to consider is different types of unbounded discussion (not just criticism), then benefits and concerns for each.
E.g. if the original topic is cars, the topic could change to:
personal criticism (you’re biased about fossil fuels)
meta discussion (you should discuss using trees, not be disorganized)
goals (why are you interested in cars? do cars connect to some more important goal?)
other topics
details (engines, windshield wipers)
broader concepts (transportation)
other fields that aren’t obviously related (horses, chess, chemistry)
directly related topics (assembly lines, user interfaces)
Maybe there’s just a couple things you might not respond well to, which you could focus on. Or maybe you’re finding the unknown scary and actually writing out a bunch of possibilities will demystify it.
When I get replies I feel some anticipation, which I think is me wanting the reply to be mostly in agreement with me, wanting to not be criticized too much. I always tell myself that it’s better for the errors to get criticized. I think that the errors are or aren’t there in reality regardless of whether it gets criticized or not. I think to myself that it doesn’t matter to appear intelligent, it’s better to progress. This helps. I guess this is part of how to change your emotions (I haven’t read these essays in some time: Fallible Ideas – Emotions, Bounded and Unbounded Emotions · Elliot Temple).
So this is more about indirection and topic change. I think that’s more okay for me, though I haven’t had major discussions with those kinds of topic changes, so I’m not too sure. I think the issue for me is more the criticism. Although I haven’t gotten harsh criticism and taken it badly either, the stuff you criticized me for in the relationship drama thread went well.
I don’t want to start an unbounded thread and lie about wanting unbounded criticism/discussion, even if I thought I wanted it.
Criticism could be about any of those topics. Which ones would you potentially not want criticism about, or is it all of them? You can also divide criticism up into different types in other ways besides by topic (e.g. harsh vs. mild) to try to focus in on what sort of criticism is a problem and why.
I think harshness and more personal topics are what I worry about. I guess it’s more about my character and ego rather than the abstract topic. I think meta discussion would be totally fine, and probably goals too, although that could impact the ego too.
I have thought of unbounded discussion to be more about the possibility of any criticism that could be harsh and numerous. I think that reflects my worries with it. Now that you say this I remember that lots of people for example want to talk about a specific philosophy topic and nothing else.
I have definitely shifted my self-esteem to be more towards living up to a CF ideal, i.e., accepting any criticism and making rapid progress. But I think I still take pride in my intelligence, and that I want to sound smart here. I can remember that when I was younger I definitely took pride in my intelligence and being able to do well at STEM tests in school with little practice. So I think I’m less of that now, but not fully to where making progress trumps any concern with appearing smart (to myself and others).
It’s problematic to base your self-esteem on an aspiration you haven’t tried much which sounds good to you.
I think it makes more sense to do things first, see how they go, and thereby learn a lot more about them, and then maybe start basing your self-esteem on them after that.
Imagine if you were being judgmental of others for not doing rationality stuff that you haven’t tried much. Judging yourself like that is similar.
Good point. But I think I could judge myself for not having done much rationality stuff. Because that would fit in with previous ideas and moral standards for myself. Those standards would be to do what I believe in, be productive and be rational.
I shouldn’t judge myself according to objectivist standards either given that I haven’t done much serious study of it, even if I have read a lot on it and think it’s good?