[important] How to get ppl to learn FI?

[Elliot Temple]

How to get ppl to learn FI? Steps:

1. Interest
2. Investment
3. Guided learning process
4. Integration
5. Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas

Learning FI is a lot, so investment is required before people will do it. People commonly *overreach* and try to go to stage 5 early, with low investment, learning and integration. Most people are more interested in (5) than (3), and they don’t realize how much content/substance/complexity FI has.

People also try to debate me, about issues where they are massively outclassed, and it’s not an efficient way to teach them. They don’t learn much because learning isn’t their goal, and because they aren’t supplementing the debating with adequate study effort. If it was 4 parts study per 1 part debate, it’d work better.

Existing FI material is oriented to self-starters who will manage their own investment and guide their own learning. It has some weakness at helping with steps 2-4.

Interest is hard because FI says very unpopular things. But FI is controversial and stands out, and my material is very high quality, so getting some interest works OK.

The reason FI is weaker at investment is because investment is normally achieved with social dynamics, not with reason. People are prepared to invest due to certain social dynamics, not because of logical arguments for why something is important. The logical arguments work OK at getting interest, but then people’s behavior is flakey because they aren’t invested. (The long term FI community people are highly invested, but there’s only a few of them.)

The reason FI doesn’t offer a clear, guided learning process is because learners should follow their interests instead of a one-size-fits-all process. And everyone has different questions, confusions, comments, etc, so their learning paths should quickly branch off even if they have the same starting point. The problem is people don’t know how to manage their own learning, so more guidance would help even if it’s not optimal.

Sometimes people read a significant amount of FI material, but then don’t do much. (5) doesn’t happen well. They were interested enough to do it, invested enough to keep going with a significant amount of study, and they went through and learned a lot of the things I write and recommend. And then that’s it, they don’t start asking good questions, creating good criticisms, improving the ideas, making effective material to share the ideas, or effectively arguing the ideas to others. The underlying issue here is inadequate integration: they don’t use the ideas enough in their own life, including, especially, their own thinking. They go through some training, agree with it, but save it in their mind as data instead of executable software. If people learned *and integrated* the ideas enough, then (5) would be easy and kinda automatic. Doesn’t mean they’d know how to get a million fans, but they’d at least regularly do some kinda stuff, like I do, and it’d be pretty good.

What have I told people to address integration? That they must discuss as they read in order to correct errors. Alone, what inevitably happens is they will misunderstand what they read, and then build up layers and layers of misconceptions. So of course that doesn’t work in their lives. If they get all their own doubts and confusions sorted out as they went along, that’d help a ton with integrating it into their thinking and action.

Elliot Temple
www.curi.us

[PAS]

On Feb 22, 2018, at 3:08 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:

> How to get ppl to learn FI? Steps:
>
> 1. Interest
> 2. Investment
> 3. Guided learning process
> 4. Integration
> 5. Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas
>
> Learning FI is a lot, so investment is required before people will do it. People commonly *overreach* and try to go to stage 5 early, with low investment, learning and integration. Most people are more interested in (5) than (3), and they don’t realize how much content/substance/complexity FI has.
>
> People also try to debate me, about issues where they are massively outclassed, and it’s not an efficient way to teach them. They don’t learn much because learning isn’t their goal, and because they aren’t supplementing the debating with adequate study effort. If it was 4 parts study per 1 part debate, it’d work better.

I stopped debating a lot of things I disagree with FI about. I came to a similar conclusion to your 4 parts study per 1 part debate. I don’t currently have the time+interest for the 4 parts study, so I stopped debating. I’m not sure that’s the best approach given my circumstances, but so far I don’t have a better idea.

I think before I can make much more progress I’ll have to get back to debating some, because the areas of disagreement are too big to ignore. I plan to do that when I have time+interest to study more.

> Existing FI material is oriented to self-starters who will manage their own investment and guide their own learning. It has some weakness at helping with steps 2-4.
>
> Interest is hard because FI says very unpopular things. But FI is controversial and stands out, and my material is very high quality, so getting some interest works OK.
>
> The reason FI is weaker at investment is because investment is normally achieved with social dynamics, not with reason. People are prepared to invest due to certain social dynamics, not because of logical arguments for why something is important. The logical arguments work OK at getting interest, but then people’s behavior is flakey because they aren’t invested. (The long term FI community people are highly invested, but there’s only a few of them.)

I’m invested in FI, but not what I'd consider highly. To quantify, FI is in the top 10 things in my life, but it doesn’t make the top 5.

I think social dynamics are one reason. I think the disagreements I stopped debating are another reason.

PAS

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 22, 2018, at 2:51 PM, PAS <p...@paipas.com> wrote:

> On Feb 22, 2018, at 3:08 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:
>
>> How to get ppl to learn FI? Steps:
>>
>> 1. Interest
>> 2. Investment
>> 3. Guided learning process
>> 4. Integration
>> 5. Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas
>>
>> Learning FI is a lot, so investment is required before people will do it. People commonly *overreach* and try to go to stage 5 early, with low investment, learning and integration. Most people are more interested in (5) than (3), and they don’t realize how much content/substance/complexity FI has.
>>
>> People also try to debate me, about issues where they are massively outclassed, and it’s not an efficient way to teach them. They don’t learn much because learning isn’t their goal, and because they aren’t supplementing the debating with adequate study effort. If it was 4 parts study per 1 part debate, it’d work better.
>
> I stopped debating a lot of things I disagree with FI about. I came to a similar conclusion to your 4 parts study per 1 part debate. I don’t currently have the time+interest for the 4 parts study, so I stopped debating. I’m not sure that’s the best approach given my circumstances, but so far I don’t have a better idea.
>
> I think before I can make much more progress I’ll have to get back to debating some, because the areas of disagreement are too big to ignore. I plan to do that when I have time+interest to study more.

I don't agree with your time management. If you had time for 1 part debate then you have time for .8 parts study and .2 parts debate.


Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[PAS]

I agree from a time management perspective. But I wasn't only talking about time management.

That’s why I said explicitly “time+interest”. The debate was interesting enough to do within my current life structure. The study currently isn’t.

I have a guess that the study might become interesting enough to do if I had more free time.

I also guess that it's possible to raise my interest in studying regardless of any changes in free time, but I don’t want to do the things I can think of that might help with that either.

PAS

[Elliot Temple]

When people do try to learn and discuss, it’s usually massive overreaching. They don’t start at the start, get the basics really solid, and then build up layers of complexity that have very low error rates. Instead they fudge the foundations and start talking about stuff they find fun and interest, but which they are unable to productively engage with. This is also why I get limited feedback on most of what I write: people don’t know how! I often write about more advanced topics which interest me (and interest others!), but people don’t know how to deal with those topics effectively. What they should do (but don’t) is start approaching the advanced stuff in basic ways: look at what prerequisites they are missing and ask about those.

It would be good if I somehow figured out the right more-basic material to make. I’ve done things in this direction but it’s still too hard for people. People can’t even read without screwing up all the time (e.g. by glossing over words they don’t know instead of recognizing a potential issue and looking the word up, and overall they read vague gists of things instead of being able to understand stuff). People refuse to write without throwing in a bunch of complexity that is beyond their skill level, and they don’t want to learn the kid stuff they don’t know (or know wrong – schools teach them broken versions). People have trouble following the basic uses of logic which are involved in talking about a more advanced topic (the kind people find interesting), but they try to gloss this over and ignore the problem.

Overall FI presents in a generic way in terms of abstract philosophy. This makes the integration and practical action harder for people. The best way to learn it is for someone to pick a specific topic – e.g. parenting or relationships – to learn and they can use rational methods for learning it and then can learn more theory when they have those examples they’ve already done. A common interest point is politics/economics, but that one is tricky because people treat it as a debating game instead of it affecting their IRL actions. Parenting and relationships relate to their IRL actions. Other things involving concrete action include business management, speed reading/listening, diet, salary negotiation, trying to be great at something (e.g. competitive gaming or speedrunning), not going to a psychiatrist.

## Arguing

People argue according to some bad role models in our culture. They throw a bunch of arguments at me. They don’t ask me to organize the discussion. Often they resist giving me the information to organize it and deferring to me about topic selection. They are pushy and aggressive, and they don’t organize it themselves. They don’t see it as a chance to tangent to underlying issues and seek the truth about the whole big picture. They want to debate a local point, and they throw out a bunch of biased arguments for only their side, and their quality control is inadequate, and then they evade the ones that don’t work well (their worst arguments) and also try to ignore your best arguments. This is not very productive.

Elliot Temple
www.elliottemple.com

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 22, 2018, at 2:08 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:

> How to get ppl to learn FI? Steps:
>
> 1. Interest
> 2. Investment
> 3. Guided learning process
> 4. Integration
> 5. Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas

What steps would work on you?

Why aren't you engaging with this thread?


Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[Anne B]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 5:08 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
[fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> How to get ppl to learn FI? Steps:
>
> 1. Interest
> 2. Investment
> 3. Guided learning process
> 4. Integration
> 5. Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas
>
> Learning FI is a lot, so investment is required before people will do it. People commonly *overreach* and try to go to stage 5 early, with low investment, learning and integration. Most people are more interested in (5) than (3), and they don’t realize how much content/substance/complexity FI has.
>
> People also try to debate me, about issues where they are massively outclassed, and it’s not an efficient way to teach them. They don’t learn much because learning isn’t their goal, and because they aren’t supplementing the debating with adequate study effort. If it was 4 parts study per 1 part debate, it’d work better.
>
> Existing FI material is oriented to self-starters who will manage their own investment and guide their own learning. It has some weakness at helping with steps 2-4.
>
> Interest is hard because FI says very unpopular things. But FI is controversial and stands out, and my material is very high quality, so getting some interest works OK.

I do have interest.

> The reason FI is weaker at investment is because investment is normally achieved with social dynamics, not with reason. People are prepared to invest due to certain social dynamics, not because of logical arguments for why something is important. The logical arguments work OK at getting interest, but then people’s behavior is flakey because they aren’t invested. (The long term FI community people are highly invested, but there’s only a few of them.)

I think I have investment. Other things I do in my life come with a
social support group and FI doesn't (that could change). But I care
enough about the content that it's okay.

> The reason FI doesn’t offer a clear, guided learning process is because learners should follow their interests instead of a one-size-fits-all process. And everyone has different questions, confusions, comments, etc, so their learning paths should quickly branch off even if they have the same starting point. The problem is people don’t know how to manage their own learning, so more guidance would help even if it’s not optimal.

I have gotten some guidance in my learning in the form of good
questions about my posts or suggestions as to what I can do next.
Without guidance, I do do stuff but it may not be very effective
stuff.

> Sometimes people read a significant amount of FI material, but then don’t do much. (5) doesn’t happen well. They were interested enough to do it, invested enough to keep going with a significant amount of study, and they went through and learned a lot of the things I write and recommend. And then that’s it, they don’t start asking good questions, creating good criticisms, improving the ideas, making effective material to share the ideas, or effectively arguing the ideas to others. The underlying issue here is inadequate integration: they don’t use the ideas enough in their own life, including, especially, their own thinking. They go through some training, agree with it, but save it in their mind as data instead of executable software. If people learned *and integrated* the ideas enough, then (5) would be easy and kinda automatic. Doesn’t mean they’d know how to get a million fans, but they’d at least regularly do some kinda stuff, like I do, and it’d be pretty good.

I don't feel ready for (5).

> What have I told people to address integration? That they must discuss as they read in order to correct errors. Alone, what inevitably happens is they will misunderstand what they read, and then build up layers and layers of misconceptions. So of course that doesn’t work in their lives. If they get all their own doubts and confusions sorted out as they went along, that’d help a ton with integrating it into their thinking and action.

I'm trying to work on integration. I feel kind of lost though.

I am also trying to discuss as I read. I'm doing this with Atlas
Shrugged. But lots of other reading comes to me and I read it and
often don't write about it. It seems bad to *not* read anything except
what I'm officially working on. But there's so much stuff I want to
read and do read that I don't take the time to think about it all
enough to write about it.

[Anne B]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 3:33 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
[fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> On Feb 22, 2018, at 2:08 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:
>
>> How to get ppl to learn FI? Steps:
>>
>> 1. Interest
>> 2. Investment
>> 3. Guided learning process
>> 4. Integration
>> 5. Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas
>>
>> Learning FI is a lot, so investment is required before people will do it. People commonly *overreach* and try to go to stage 5 early, with low investment, learning and integration. Most people are more interested in (5) than (3), and they don’t realize how much content/substance/complexity FI has.
>>
>> People also try to debate me, about issues where they are massively outclassed, and it’s not an efficient way to teach them. They don’t learn much because learning isn’t their goal, and because they aren’t supplementing the debating with adequate study effort. If it was 4 parts study per 1 part debate, it’d work better.
>>
>> Existing FI material is oriented to self-starters who will manage their own investment and guide their own learning. It has some weakness at helping with steps 2-4.
>>
>> Interest is hard because FI says very unpopular things. But FI is controversial and stands out, and my material is very high quality, so getting some interest works OK.
>>
>> The reason FI is weaker at investment is because investment is normally achieved with social dynamics, not with reason. People are prepared to invest due to certain social dynamics, not because of logical arguments for why something is important. The logical arguments work OK at getting interest, but then people’s behavior is flakey because they aren’t invested. (The long term FI community people are highly invested, but there’s only a few of them.)
>>
>> The reason FI doesn’t offer a clear, guided learning process is because learners should follow their interests instead of a one-size-fits-all process. And everyone has different questions, confusions, comments, etc, so their learning paths should quickly branch off even if they have the same starting point. The problem is people don’t know how to manage their own learning, so more guidance would help even if it’s not optimal.
>>

>> Sometimes people read a significant amount of FI material, but then don’t do much. (5) doesn’t happen well. They were interested enough to do it, invested enough to keep going with a significant amount of study, and they went through and learned a lot of the things I write and recommend. And then that’s it, they don’t start asking good questions, creating good criticisms, improving the ideas, making effective material to share the ideas, or effectively arguing the ideas to others. The underlying issue here is inadequate integration: they don’t use the ideas enough in their own life, including, especially, their own thinking.. They go through some training, agree with it, but save it in their mind as data instead of executable software. If people learned *and integrated* the ideas enough, then (5) would be easy and kinda automatic. Doesn’t mean they’d know how to get a million fans, but they’d at least regularly do some kinda stuff, like I do, and it’d be pretty good.

>>
>> What have I told people to address integration? That they must discuss as they read in order to correct errors. Alone, what inevitably happens is they will misunderstand what they read, and then build up layers and layers of misconceptions. So of course that doesn’t work in their lives. If they get all their own doubts and confusions sorted out as they went along, that’d help a ton with integrating it into their thinking and action.
>
> When people do try to learn and discuss, it’s usually massive overreaching. They don’t start at the start, get the basics really solid, and then build up layers of complexity that have very low error rates. Instead they fudge the foundations and start talking about stuff they find fun and interest, but which they are unable to productively engage with. This is also why I get limited feedback on most of what I write: people don’t know how! I often write about more advanced topics which interest me (and interest others!), but people don’t know how to deal with those topics effectively. What they should do (but don’t) is start approaching the advanced stuff in basic ways: look at what prerequisites they are missing and ask about those.

Can you give some examples of basics we should be working on? Do you
mean things like reading comprehension and grammar?

> It would be good if I somehow figured out the right more-basic material to make. I’ve done things in this direction but it’s still too hard for people. People can’t even read without screwing up all the time (e.g. by glossing over words they don’t know instead of recognizing a potential issue and looking the word up, and overall they read vague gists of things instead of being able to understand stuff). People refuse to write without throwing in a bunch of complexity that is beyond their skill level, and they don’t want to learn the kid stuff they don’t know (or know wrong – schools teach them broken versions). People have trouble following the basic uses of logic which are involved in talking about a more advanced topic (the kind people find interesting), but they try to gloss this over and ignore the problem.

I'm not even sure which kid stuff I don't know or know wrong.

I do look up words and ideas I don't know now, which I didn't do before FI.

> Overall FI presents in a generic way in terms of abstract philosophy. This makes the integration and practical action harder for people. The best way to learn it is for someone to pick a specific topic – e.g. parenting or relationships – to learn and they can use rational methods for learning it and then can learn more theory when they have those examples they’ve already done. A common interest point is politics/economics, but that one is tricky because people treat it as a debating game instead of it affecting their IRL actions. Parenting and relationships relate to their IRL actions. Other things involving concrete action include business management, speed reading/listening, diet, salary negotiation, trying to be great at something (e.g. competitive gaming or speedrunning), not going to a psychiatrist.

I have thought about really studying diet. It's something I'm
interested in and have read a lot about in the past. Books about diet
contradict each other a lot! I'm wondering if there's any good
scientific knowledge in the field at all. It could be satisfying to
really look and see what I find. It would be time-consuming though,
and maybe for now it would be better to spend my time on Rand and
Deutsch and other must-reads on your reading list, plus all the stuff
that comes up in the FI world. I don't know.

> ## Arguing
>
> People argue according to some bad role models in our culture. They throw a bunch of arguments at me. They don’t ask me to organize the discussion. Often they resist giving me the information to organize it and deferring to me about topic selection. They are pushy and aggressive, and they don’t organize it themselves. They don’t see it as a chance to tangent to underlying issues and seek the truth about the whole big picture. They want to debate a local point, and they throw out a bunch of biased arguments for only their side, and their quality control is inadequate, and then they evade the ones that don’t work well (their worst arguments) and also try to ignore your best arguments. This is not very productive.

I mostly follow the societal rule that nice women don't argue and nice
is the most important thing for a woman to be. I also recognize that I
don't know enough about pretty much anything to argue about it.

[Anne B]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 5:30 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
[fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> On Feb 22, 2018, at 2:08 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:
>
>> How to get ppl to learn FI? Steps:
>>
>> 1. Interest
>> 2. Investment
>> 3. Guided learning process
>> 4. Integration
>> 5. Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas
>
> What steps would work on you?
>
> Why aren't you engaging with this thread?

I started to write a reply to this thread a few days ago and deleted
it. I felt like no one would want to read about where I am in this
process and I couldn't think of anything non-personal to say about it.

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 28, 2018, at 4:57 PM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am also trying to discuss as I read. I'm doing this with Atlas
> Shrugged. But lots of other reading comes to me and I read it and
> often don't write about it. It seems bad to *not* read anything except
> what I'm officially working on. But there's so much stuff I want to
> read and do read that I don't take the time to think about it all
> enough to write about it.

what's the point of reading it without thinking about it much?

serious question. there are answers. but it needs considering. you might find e.g. that the reasons you figure out apply to some things you read but not others.

Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 28, 2018, at 5:11 PM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 3:33 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
> [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
>> On Feb 22, 2018, at 2:08 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:
>>
>>> How to get ppl to learn FI? Steps:
>>>
>>> 1. Interest
>>> 2. Investment
>>> 3. Guided learning process
>>> 4. Integration
>>> 5. Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas
>>>
>>> Learning FI is a lot, so investment is required before people will do it. People commonly *overreach* and try to go to stage 5 early, with low investment, learning and integration. Most people are more interested in (5) than (3), and they don’t realize how much content/substance/complexity FI has.
>>>
>>> People also try to debate me, about issues where they are massively outclassed, and it’s not an efficient way to teach them. They don’t learn much because learning isn’t their goal, and because they aren’t supplementing the debating with adequate study effort. If it was 4 parts study per 1 part debate, it’d work better.
>>>
>>> Existing FI material is oriented to self-starters who will manage their own investment and guide their own learning. It has some weakness at helping with steps 2-4.
>>>
>>> Interest is hard because FI says very unpopular things. But FI is controversial and stands out, and my material is very high quality, so getting some interest works OK.
>>>
>>> The reason FI is weaker at investment is because investment is normally achieved with social dynamics, not with reason. People are prepared to invest due to certain social dynamics, not because of logical arguments for why something is important. The logical arguments work OK at getting interest, but then people’s behavior is flakey because they aren’t invested. (The long term FI community people are highly invested, but there’s only a few of them.)
>>>
>>> The reason FI doesn’t offer a clear, guided learning process is because learners should follow their interests instead of a one-size-fits-all process. And everyone has different questions, confusions, comments, etc, so their learning paths should quickly branch off even if they have the same starting point. The problem is people don’t know how to manage their own learning, so more guidance would help even if it’s not optimal.
>>>
>>> Sometimes people read a significant amount of FI material, but then don’t do much. (5) doesn’t happen well. They were interested enough to do it, invested enough to keep going with a significant amount of study, and they went through and learned a lot of the things I write and recommend. And then that’s it, they don’t start asking good questions, creating good criticisms, improving the ideas, making effective material to share the ideas, or effectively arguing the ideas to others. The underlying issue here is inadequate integration: they don’t use the ideas enough in their own life, including, especially, their own thinking.. They go through some training, agree with it, but save it in their mind as data instead of executable software. If people learned *and integrated* the ideas enough, then (5) would be easy and kinda automatic. Doesn’t mean they’d know how to get a million fans, but they’d at least regularly do some kinda stuff, like I do, and it’d be pretty good.
>>>
>>> What have I told people to address integration? That they must discuss as they read in order to correct errors. Alone, what inevitably happens is they will misunderstand what they read, and then build up layers and layers of misconceptions. So of course that doesn’t work in their lives. If they get all their own doubts and confusions sorted out as they went along, that’d help a ton with integrating it into their thinking and action.
>>
>> When people do try to learn and discuss, it’s usually massive overreaching. They don’t start at the start, get the basics really solid, and then build up layers of complexity that have very low error rates. Instead they fudge the foundations and start talking about stuff they find fun and interest, but which they are unable to productively engage with. This is also why I get limited feedback on most of what I write: people don’t know how! I often write about more advanced topics which interest me (and interest others!), but people don’t know how to deal with those topics effectively. What they should do (but don’t) is start approaching the advanced stuff in basic ways: look at what prerequisites they are missing and ask about those.
>
> Can you give some examples of basics we should be working on? Do you
> mean things like reading comprehension and grammar?

that's one kind of basic. similarly, basic math and logic are important, and speed reading/listening. those are tools that are used to do more complex projects.

another kind of basic is getting a basic overall understanding of a subject and what you're doing:

what do you want to learn? why? what's the point of philosophy? what's the point of more specific subjects? what will you do with whatever you learn? what problems are you trying to solve? why? why do you think those problems are important? how did you choose them over other problems? what are you goals?

it's important to do this on multiple levels. people have trouble because the most abstract level is abstract. the answers don't give concrete, practical, direct guidance. that's ok. the most abstract answers can be short and broad. you also need to consider things at other levels of analysis, rather than make the biggest picture stuff complete.

another level of analysis, for example, is: what's epistemology about? it's about knowledge. how do you create knowledge? what is knowledge? what sort of status do different ideas have and how do you know and what does that mean? how do you find and correct errors? etc. to deal with the field it's really useful to have some idea of what the field is and what it's for. e.g. one of the main problems in the field is that some ideas are good, some are bad, and you want to evaluate which are which. that problem gives you some context in which to use various other epistemology ideas.

there are more specific fields, e.g. parenting. a way to look at parenting is:

parents are routinely cruel to their children and fight with their children. why? and how can you avoid doing that, given that people are often blind to their own mistakes?

there are other ways to approach parenting too, e.g. via trying to understand the implications of static meme stuff for parenting. or via trying to apply the Popperian theory of how people learn in order to avoid doing ineffective educational methods.

from these things, you can ask further questions and see where it leads. what do you need to do or know next to make progress on these things? first figure that out without the answers to get a basic overview of what you're doing, then you can try to work on solving it.

>> Overall FI presents in a generic way in terms of abstract philosophy. This makes the integration and practical action harder for people. The best way to learn it is for someone to pick a specific topic – e.g. parenting or relationships – to learn and they can use rational methods for learning it and then can learn more theory when they have those examples they’ve already done. A common interest point is politics/economics, but that one is tricky because people treat it as a debating game instead of it affecting their IRL actions. Parenting and relationships relate to their IRL actions. Other things involving concrete action include business management, speed reading/listening, diet, salary negotiation, trying to be great at something (e.g. competitive gaming or speedrunning), not going to a psychiatrist.
>
> I have thought about really studying diet. It's something I'm
> interested in and have read a lot about in the past.

why?

> Books about diet
> contradict each other a lot! I'm wondering if there's any good
> scientific knowledge in the field at all.

sure, e.g. the concept of a "calorie" is a good idea. that's a scientific kind of measurement thing which allows a meaningful, useful measurement of something notable about many foods.


Elliot Temple
www.elliottemple.com

[Elliot Temple]

There's people who ask short, vague, broad stuff like "What is philosophy?" or "How do I learn?" or "How do I not overreach?"

And there's plenty of discussion of specific, detailed topics.

There's something missing though: the broad, overview stuff that is productive instead of vague. People fail at getting the overall picture and then give up and do details, instead of fixing the problem.

Roughly what you should often do is: start vague and simple, get a very limited answer (e.g.: "philosophy is about thinking, being wise, and living well"). and then move on to a little more specific instead of jumping to way more specific. keep working step by step.

ppl do get the really simple, big picture answers. that's no problem. but then they don't know how to use it and give up. the thing to do next is ask another question that builds on it like, "ok cool. thinking, wisdom and morality sound important. what are some of the big important questions that the philosophy of wisdom tries to answer?" (hopefully you can see how that will build to some slightly more specific but still big picture discussion, that can get more concrete at the next step.)

this is not the only way to learn something but lots of ppl here seem to be missing a lot of the big picture (like 90th percentile bigness. they do have the biggest picture like "reason is good and don't be mean to kids", but it's the next step of starting to actually get a useful big picture handle on things that's missing IMO.) this (start broad, narrow down incrementally) is an important, good technique that should be common.

Elliot Temple
www.elliottemple.com

[Anne B]

There are shorter things, like articles that people recommend to me or
recommend in general. Then sometimes those articles link to other
things that look interesting. Then I find I've spent hours or days
reading stuff and haven't written anything down that I got out of it.
And then I also feel bad because I haven't gotten to other things that
I've started and not finished. And there are books. When I come across
mention of a book that seems interesting I tend to order it from the
library and then when it's ready I usually read it or at least read
enough to know whether I want to continue.

I feel overwhelmed because there are so many different directions I
want to go in at once.

I need a better plan for deciding what to do with my time.

There are some times when I want to read something and not write
detailed comments or notes, like when I'm especially tired or when I'm
driving. But most of the time I want to take the time to think more
carefully and write more about what I read and I'm not doing this.

[Elliot Temple]

in the morning every day you could decide on a few important goals for the day. (they should NOT be expected to take up all ~16 hours of the day. not even close. don't try to schedule or plan all your time.)

Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[Anne B]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 8:37 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us

[fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> On Feb 28, 2018, at 5:11 PM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 3:33 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
>> [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Feb 22, 2018, at 2:08 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:
>>>
>>>> How to get ppl to learn FI? Steps:
>>>>
>>>> 1. Interest
>>>> 2. Investment
>>>> 3. Guided learning process
>>>> 4. Integration
>>>> 5. Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas
>>>>
>>>> Learning FI is a lot, so investment is required before people will do it. People commonly *overreach* and try to go to stage 5 early, with low investment, learning and integration. Most people are more interested in (5) than (3), and they don’t realize how much content/substance/complexity FI has.
>>>>
>>>> People also try to debate me, about issues where they are massively outclassed, and it’s not an efficient way to teach them. They don’t learn much because learning isn’t their goal, and because they aren’t supplementing the debating with adequate study effort. If it was 4 parts study per 1 part debate, it’d work better.
>>>>
>>>> Existing FI material is oriented to self-starters who will manage their own investment and guide their own learning. It has some weakness at helping with steps 2-4.
>>>>
>>>> Interest is hard because FI says very unpopular things. But FI is controversial and stands out, and my material is very high quality, so getting some interest works OK.
>>>>
>>>> The reason FI is weaker at investment is because investment is normally achieved with social dynamics, not with reason. People are prepared to invest due to certain social dynamics, not because of logical arguments for why something is important. The logical arguments work OK at getting interest, but then people’s behavior is flakey because they aren’t invested. (The long term FI community people are highly invested, but there’s only a few of them.)
>>>>
>>>> The reason FI doesn’t offer a clear, guided learning process is because learners should follow their interests instead of a one-size-fits-all process. And everyone has different questions, confusions, comments, etc, so their learning paths should quickly branch off even if they have the same starting point. The problem is people don’t know how to manage their own learning, so more guidance would help even if it’s not optimal.
>>>>

>>>> Sometimes people read a significant amount of FI material, but then don’t do much. (5) doesn’t happen well. They were interested enough to do it, invested enough to keep going with a significant amount of study, and they went through and learned a lot of the things I write and recommend. And then that’s it, they don’t start asking good questions, creating good criticisms, improving the ideas, making effective material to share the ideas, or effectively arguing the ideas to others. The underlying issue here is inadequate integration: they don’t use the ideas enough in their own life, including, especially, their own thinking... They go through some training, agree with it, but save it in their mind as data instead of executable software. If people learned *and integrated* the ideas enough, then (5) would be easy and kinda automatic. Doesn’t mean they’d know how to get a million fans, but they’d at least regularly do some kinda stuff, like I do, and it’d be pretty good.

>>>>
>>>> What have I told people to address integration? That they must discuss as they read in order to correct errors. Alone, what inevitably happens is they will misunderstand what they read, and then build up layers and layers of misconceptions. So of course that doesn’t work in their lives. If they get all their own doubts and confusions sorted out as they went along, that’d help a ton with integrating it into their thinking and action.
>>>
>>> When people do try to learn and discuss, it’s usually massive overreaching. They don’t start at the start, get the basics really solid, and then build up layers of complexity that have very low error rates. Instead they fudge the foundations and start talking about stuff they find fun and interest, but which they are unable to productively engage with. This is also why I get limited feedback on most of what I write: people don’t know how! I often write about more advanced topics which interest me (and interest others!), but people don’t know how to deal with those topics effectively. What they should do (but don’t) is start approaching the advanced stuff in basic ways: look at what prerequisites they are missing and ask about those.
>>
>> Can you give some examples of basics we should be working on? Do you
>> mean things like reading comprehension and grammar?
>
> that's one kind of basic. similarly, basic math and logic are important, and speed reading/listening. those are tools that are used to do more complex projects.

I have thought I shouldn't learn speed reading/listening because I
miss a lot at normal speed so going faster would mean I'd miss even
more. But maybe I'm looking at it wrong. Would speed reading/listening
help me get more understanding at whatever speed I'm at?

> another kind of basic is getting a basic overall understanding of a subject and what you're doing:
>
> what do you want to learn? why? what's the point of philosophy? what's the point of more specific subjects? what will you do with whatever you learn? what problems are you trying to solve? why? why do you think those problems are important? how did you choose them over other problems? what are you goals?

The big picture is: I want to learn better ideas and spread those
ideas and make the world a better place for humanity. The point of
philosophy is to make life better.

I'm still working out which specific subjects most interest me and
have potential to help people.

Also, I'm not sure that I can get good enough to make much difference.

> it's important to do this on multiple levels. people have trouble because the most abstract level is abstract. the answers don't give concrete, practical, direct guidance. that's ok. the most abstract answers can be short and broad. you also need to consider things at other levels of analysis, rather than make the biggest picture stuff complete.
>
> another level of analysis, for example, is: what's epistemology about? it's about knowledge. how do you create knowledge? what is knowledge? what sort of status do different ideas have and how do you know and what does that mean? how do you find and correct errors? etc. to deal with the field it's really useful to have some idea of what the field is and what it's for. e.g. one of the main problems in the field is that some ideas are good, some are bad, and you want to evaluate which are which. that problem gives you some context in which to use various other epistemology ideas.
>
> there are more specific fields, e.g. parenting. a way to look at parenting is:
>

> parents are routinely cruel to their children and fight with their children.. why? and how can you avoid doing that, given that people are often blind to their own mistakes?

>
> there are other ways to approach parenting too, e.g. via trying to understand the implications of static meme stuff for parenting. or via trying to apply the Popperian theory of how people learn in order to avoid doing ineffective educational methods.
>
> from these things, you can ask further questions and see where it leads. what do you need to do or know next to make progress on these things? first figure that out without the answers to get a basic overview of what you're doing, then you can try to work on solving it.
>
>
>>> Overall FI presents in a generic way in terms of abstract philosophy. This makes the integration and practical action harder for people. The best way to learn it is for someone to pick a specific topic – e.g. parenting or relationships – to learn and they can use rational methods for learning it and then can learn more theory when they have those examples they’ve already done. A common interest point is politics/economics, but that one is tricky because people treat it as a debating game instead of it affecting their IRL actions. Parenting and relationships relate to their IRL actions. Other things involving concrete action include business management, speed reading/listening, diet, salary negotiation, trying to be great at something (e.g. competitive gaming or speedrunning), not going to a psychiatrist.

So for me at this point, would you suggest studying a specific topic
now rather than generally studying philosophy? I feel like I need more
general study first.

>> I have thought about really studying diet. It's something I'm
>> interested in and have read a lot about in the past.
>
> why?

I want to understand the relationship between what I eat and my
health. I want to stay healthy. It's not clear to me what the best way
to do that is. Maybe instead of diet, I should aim for a broader topic
like human health.

>> Books about diet
>> contradict each other a lot! I'm wondering if there's any good
>> scientific knowledge in the field at all.
>
> sure, e.g. the concept of a "calorie" is a good idea. that's a scientific kind of measurement thing which allows a meaningful, useful measurement of something notable about many foods.

Other specific topics I've thought about studying more:

- Politics and values. See my post in the Anti-American thread:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/fallible-ideas/conversations/messages/25552

- Psychology. That is, personal psychology: how to deal with unhappy
or anxious feelings that you don't know the cause of, how to get along
with people better, what advice to give to friends who struggle with
this kind of thing.

- How to teach martial arts to kids. How to effectively teach them
martial arts skills. How to help them learn and think well, and to
have good values. How to spread better ideas to other martial arts
teachers.

[Kate Sams]

On Mar 3, 2018, at 7:54 AM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 8:37 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
> [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
>> On Feb 28, 2018, at 5:11 PM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I have thought about really studying diet. It's something I'm
>>> interested in and have read a lot about in the past.
>>
>> why?
>
> I want to understand the relationship between what I eat and my
> health. I want to stay healthy.

Typical reasons ppl want to stay healthy include living longer and being strong and powerful, rather than being weak, injured or diseased. (Another reason is wanting to look more attractive.)

Here’s a way to think of philosophy: Philosophy is what helps your *mind* be strong and powerful, rather than weak and incompetent. Philosophy is what helps you actually *live* (in the Oist sense) or flourish.

What good is a long life physically if it’s filled with suffering mentally, which ppl evade to varying degrees?

btw, I’m making general comments about the value of philosophy. I’m not trying to imply that you don’t value learning philosophy or that you value physical life/power/strength over mental life/power/strength.

To be clear, both aspects — physical and mental — are important. In our culture, though, it’s worth noting that many ppl vastly underestimate the importance of ideas, philosophy, how they think while overestimating the importance of physical or material aspects of life (e.g. money, their physical body).

[Elliot Temple]

reading/listening takes effort. this is a distraction from learning/thinking about the content.

the worse you are at reading/listening, the more effort you have to put into them, and the more distracting they are.

if you can do reading/listening more efficiently and automatically, then you can focus on the content more.

speed reading is the skill of being able to read with less effort so the thing limiting your reading is your mental understanding of the issues, not your ability to read. you want the actual act of reading/listening to be a minimal issue.

when you do this, people find they can read/listen faster. in other words, they were being held back – by quite a bit – by inadequate skill at reading/listening themselves (as against being limited by their ability to understand concepts).

the same skill of being better at reading itself also lets you read at the same speed with less effort, which is useful for hard content. how much effort it takes you for reading itself is an issue at any speed.

>> another kind of basic is getting a basic overall understanding of a subject and what you're doing:
>>
>> what do you want to learn? why? what's the point of philosophy? what's the point of more specific subjects? what will you do with whatever you learn? what problems are you trying to solve? why? why do you think those problems are important? how did you choose them over other problems? what are you goals?
>
> The big picture is: I want to learn better ideas and spread those
> ideas and make the world a better place for humanity. The point of
> philosophy is to make life better.
>
> I'm still working out which specific subjects most interest me and
> have potential to help people.

Sounds altruistic!?

> Also, I'm not sure that I can get good enough to make much difference.

Read _The Choice_ by Eli Goldratt.

>> it's important to do this on multiple levels. people have trouble because the most abstract level is abstract. the answers don't give concrete, practical, direct guidance. that's ok. the most abstract answers can be short and broad. you also need to consider things at other levels of analysis, rather than make the biggest picture stuff complete.
>>
>> another level of analysis, for example, is: what's epistemology about? it's about knowledge. how do you create knowledge? what is knowledge? what sort of status do different ideas have and how do you know and what does that mean? how do you find and correct errors? etc. to deal with the field it's really useful to have some idea of what the field is and what it's for. e.g. one of the main problems in the field is that some ideas are good, some are bad, and you want to evaluate which are which. that problem gives you some context in which to use various other epistemology ideas.
>>
>> there are more specific fields, e.g. parenting. a way to look at parenting is:
>>
>> parents are routinely cruel to their children and fight with their children.. why? and how can you avoid doing that, given that people are often blind to their own mistakes?
>>
>> there are other ways to approach parenting too, e.g. via trying to understand the implications of static meme stuff for parenting. or via trying to apply the Popperian theory of how people learn in order to avoid doing ineffective educational methods.
>>
>> from these things, you can ask further questions and see where it leads. what do you need to do or know next to make progress on these things? first figure that out without the answers to get a basic overview of what you're doing, then you can try to work on solving it.
>>
>>
>>>> Overall FI presents in a generic way in terms of abstract philosophy. This makes the integration and practical action harder for people. The best way to learn it is for someone to pick a specific topic – e.g. parenting or relationships – to learn and they can use rational methods for learning it and then can learn more theory when they have those examples they’ve already done. A common interest point is politics/economics, but that one is tricky because people treat it as a debating game instead of it affecting their IRL actions. Parenting and relationships relate to their IRL actions. Other things involving concrete action include business management, speed reading/listening, diet, salary negotiation, trying to be great at something (e.g. competitive gaming or speedrunning), not going to a psychiatrist.
>
> So for me at this point, would you suggest studying a specific topic
> now rather than generally studying philosophy? I feel like I need more
> general study first.

do you think you’re doing effective, purposeful general study? of what, specifically?

>>> I have thought about really studying diet. It's something I'm
>>> interested in and have read a lot about in the past.
>>
>> why?
>
> I want to understand the relationship between what I eat and my
> health. I want to stay healthy. It's not clear to me what the best way
> to do that is. Maybe instead of diet, I should aim for a broader topic
> like human health.

it’s pretty simple:

existing advice on this stuff is utter crap.

don’t overeat – don’t eat when you aren’t hungry.

that’s about it.

there are more details about specific ways our culture is stupid about this stuff, but the positive stuff about how to improve health is such bullshit. you’d have to invent the field instead of learn it.

and anyway your body is very robust, it has very good error correction around what you eat. so what you eat just plain doesn’t matter that much. did you eat enough calories, but not way too many? congratulations, your body can handle that. there are a few edge cases like scurvy but they’re rare today because our food is plenty diverse and healthy. if you’re really worried, take a vitamin pill once a week so you can relax b/c that’s way easier and cheaper than learning about the topic.

>>> Books about diet
>>> contradict each other a lot! I'm wondering if there's any good
>>> scientific knowledge in the field at all.
>>
>> sure, e.g. the concept of a "calorie" is a good idea. that's a scientific kind of measurement thing which allows a meaningful, useful measurement of something notable about many foods.
>
> Other specific topics I've thought about studying more:
>
> - Politics and values. See my post in the Anti-American thread:
> https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/fallible-ideas/conversations/messages/25552

this is a field where there are lots of other ppl, alive today, writing good things (as against most of the good material being from death authors, or not existing at all). and tons of ppl are interested. those are some advantages.

one of the problems is ppl are mostly really focused on the politics of *today* – e.g. events from the last month – instead of on concepts, principles, reasoning (political philosophy). ppl often throw in some half-assed political philosophy claims when it’s convenient for their claim about today’s news, rather than discussing it seriously and using it as a starting point (instead of starting with ideas and figuring out the implications, they already have a political position and then biasedly bring up some principles in defense of it). also ppl are known for getting angry, emotional, etc, about politics.

> - Psychology. That is, personal psychology: how to deal with unhappy
> or anxious feelings that you don't know the cause of, how to get along
> with people better, what advice to give to friends who struggle with
> this kind of thing.

basically this field sucks and the best way to approach this is with good philosophy.

> - How to teach martial arts to kids. How to effectively teach them
> martial arts skills. How to help them learn and think well, and to
> have good values. How to spread better ideas to other martial arts
> teachers.

teaching is a really bad field too. gotta basically ignore the field and learn and apply Popper.


since your ideas (politics, health, psychology, martial arts teaching) are all over the place, i’m guessing you don’t already have really strong, clear interests to guide you. sound right?

Elliot Temple
www.curi.us

[Elliot Temple]

On Mar 3, 2018, at 8:28 AM, 'Kate Sams' via Fallible Ideas <fallibl...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> On Mar 3, 2018, at 7:54 AM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 8:37 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
>> [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Feb 28, 2018, at 5:11 PM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I have thought about really studying diet. It's something I'm
>>>> interested in and have read a lot about in the past.
>>>
>>> why?
>>
>> I want to understand the relationship between what I eat and my
>> health. I want to stay healthy.
>
> Typical reasons ppl want to stay healthy include living longer and being strong and powerful, rather than being weak, injured or diseased. (Another reason is wanting to look more attractive.)

the attraction thing is the *main* reason, even for people who don’t know it and would deny it. (this includes married ppl who don’t have affairs. ppl internalized and automatized caring about attractiveness, so it doesn’t matter if they are in a situation where they need it in a practical way or not.)

> Here’s a way to think of philosophy: Philosophy is what helps your *mind* be strong and powerful, rather than weak and incompetent. Philosophy is what helps you actually *live* (in the Oist sense) or flourish.
>
> What good is a long life physically if it’s filled with suffering mentally, which ppl evade to varying degrees?
>
> btw, I’m making general comments about the value of philosophy. I’m not trying to imply that you don’t value learning philosophy or that you value physical life/power/strength over mental life/power/strength.
>
> To be clear, both aspects — physical and mental — are important. In our culture, though, it’s worth noting that many ppl vastly underestimate the importance of ideas, philosophy, how they think while overestimating the importance of physical or material aspects of life (e.g. money, their physical body).

i agree.

Elliot Temple
www.elliottemple.com

[Anne B]

On Sat, Mar 3, 2018 at 3:21 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us

[fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> On Mar 3, 2018, at 8:28 AM, 'Kate Sams' via Fallible Ideas <fallibl...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mar 3, 2018, at 7:54 AM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 8:37 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
>>> [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Feb 28, 2018, at 5:11 PM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I have thought about really studying diet. It's something I'm
>>>>> interested in and have read a lot about in the past.
>>>>
>>>> why?
>>>
>>> I want to understand the relationship between what I eat and my
>>> health. I want to stay healthy.
>>
>> Typical reasons ppl want to stay healthy include living longer and being strong and powerful, rather than being weak, injured or diseased. (Another reason is wanting to look more attractive.)
>
> the attraction thing is the *main* reason, even for people who don’t know it and would deny it. (this includes married ppl who don’t have affairs. ppl internalized and automatized caring about attractiveness, so it doesn’t matter if they are in a situation where they need it in a practical way or not.)

Being attractive is useful to just about everyone, even if they are
not looking for sex or a romantic partner. It boosts social status,
which has many benefits. It signals to people that you are willing to
put forth effort for things and that you want to fit in.

I know people who have seriously compromised health, in what seems to
be preventable ways, and will probably die decades earlier than they
could. People who can't walk to the next room without getting tired.
People who are in and out of the hospital for diabetes complications
and heart problems. People who have chronic debilitating pain. People
who are so large they can't fit into cars or airplane seats. I do not
want to end up like that. I don't think I'm in any danger of it but
still it's on my mind when I see these people.

>> Here’s a way to think of philosophy: Philosophy is what helps your *mind* be strong and powerful, rather than weak and incompetent. Philosophy is what helps you actually *live* (in the Oist sense) or flourish.
>>
>> What good is a long life physically if it’s filled with suffering mentally, which ppl evade to varying degrees?
>>
>> btw, I’m making general comments about the value of philosophy. I’m not trying to imply that you don’t value learning philosophy or that you value physical life/power/strength over mental life/power/strength.
>>

>> To be clear, both aspects — physical and mental — are important. In our culture, though, it’s worth noting that many ppl vastly underestimate the importance of ideas, philosophy, how they think while overestimating the importance of physical or material aspects of life (e.g.. money, their physical body).
>
> i agree.

Yes. I'd love to be strong in philosophy and mental life too.

[Anne B]

On Sat, Mar 3, 2018 at 3:17 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us

[fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> On Mar 3, 2018, at 4:54 AM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 8:37 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
>> [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Feb 28, 2018, at 5:11 PM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 3:33 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
>>>> [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Feb 22, 2018, at 2:08 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> How to get ppl to learn FI? Steps:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 1. Interest
>>>>>> 2. Investment
>>>>>> 3. Guided learning process
>>>>>> 4. Integration
>>>>>> 5. Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Learning FI is a lot, so investment is required before people will do it. People commonly *overreach* and try to go to stage 5 early, with low investment, learning and integration. Most people are more interested in (5) than (3), and they don’t realize how much content/substance/complexity FI has.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> People also try to debate me, about issues where they are massively outclassed, and it’s not an efficient way to teach them. They don’t learn much because learning isn’t their goal, and because they aren’t supplementing the debating with adequate study effort. If it was 4 parts study per 1 part debate, it’d work better.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Existing FI material is oriented to self-starters who will manage their own investment and guide their own learning. It has some weakness at helping with steps 2-4.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Interest is hard because FI says very unpopular things. But FI is controversial and stands out, and my material is very high quality, so getting some interest works OK.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The reason FI is weaker at investment is because investment is normally achieved with social dynamics, not with reason. People are prepared to invest due to certain social dynamics, not because of logical arguments for why something is important. The logical arguments work OK at getting interest, but then people’s behavior is flakey because they aren’t invested. (The long term FI community people are highly invested, but there’s only a few of them.)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The reason FI doesn’t offer a clear, guided learning process is because learners should follow their interests instead of a one-size-fits-all process. And everyone has different questions, confusions, comments, etc, so their learning paths should quickly branch off even if they have the same starting point. The problem is people don’t know how to manage their own learning, so more guidance would help even if it’s not optimal.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Sometimes people read a significant amount of FI material, but then don’t do much. (5) doesn’t happen well. They were interested enough to do it, invested enough to keep going with a significant amount of study, and they went through and learned a lot of the things I write and recommend. And then that’s it, they don’t start asking good questions, creating good criticisms, improving the ideas, making effective material to share the ideas, or effectively arguing the ideas to others. The underlying issue here is inadequate integration: they don’t use the ideas enough in their own life, including, especially, their own thinking... They go through some training, agree with it, but save it in their mind as data instead of executable software. If people learned *and integrated* the ideas enough, then (5) would be easy and kinda automatic. Doesn’t mean they’d know how to get a million fans, but they’d at least regularly do some kinda stuff, like I do, and it’d be pretty good.
>>>>>>

>>>>>> What have I told people to address integration? That they must discuss as they read in order to correct errors. Alone, what inevitably happens is they will misunderstand what they read, and then build up layers and layers of misconceptions. So of course that doesn’t work in their lives.. If they get all their own doubts and confusions sorted out as they went along, that’d help a ton with integrating it into their thinking and action.

>>>>>
>>>>> When people do try to learn and discuss, it’s usually massive overreaching. They don’t start at the start, get the basics really solid, and then build up layers of complexity that have very low error rates. Instead they fudge the foundations and start talking about stuff they find fun and interest, but which they are unable to productively engage with. This is also why I get limited feedback on most of what I write: people don’t know how! I often write about more advanced topics which interest me (and interest others!), but people don’t know how to deal with those topics effectively. What they should do (but don’t) is start approaching the advanced stuff in basic ways: look at what prerequisites they are missing and ask about those.
>>>>
>>>> Can you give some examples of basics we should be working on? Do you
>>>> mean things like reading comprehension and grammar?
>>>
>>> that's one kind of basic. similarly, basic math and logic are important, and speed reading/listening. those are tools that are used to do more complex projects.
>>
>> I have thought I shouldn't learn speed reading/listening because I
>> miss a lot at normal speed so going faster would mean I'd miss even
>> more. But maybe I'm looking at it wrong. Would speed reading/listening
>> help me get more understanding at whatever speed I'm at?
>
> reading/listening takes effort. this is a distraction from learning/thinking about the content.
>
> the worse you are at reading/listening, the more effort you have to put into them, and the more distracting they are.
>
> if you can do reading/listening more efficiently and automatically, then you can focus on the content more.
>
> speed reading is the skill of being able to read with less effort so the thing limiting your reading is your mental understanding of the issues, not your ability to read. you want the actual act of reading/listening to be a minimal issue.
>
> when you do this, people find they can read/listen faster. in other words, they were being held back – by quite a bit – by inadequate skill at reading/listening themselves (as against being limited by their ability to understand concepts).
>
> the same skill of being better at reading itself also lets you read at the same speed with less effort, which is useful for hard content. how much effort it takes you for reading itself is an issue at any speed.

Do you have a suggestion where to go to start learning about speed
reading or speed listening?

>
>>> another kind of basic is getting a basic overall understanding of a subject and what you're doing:
>>>
>>> what do you want to learn? why? what's the point of philosophy? what's the point of more specific subjects? what will you do with whatever you learn? what problems are you trying to solve? why? why do you think those problems are important? how did you choose them over other problems? what are you goals?
>>
>> The big picture is: I want to learn better ideas and spread those
>> ideas and make the world a better place for humanity. The point of
>> philosophy is to make life better.
>>
>> I'm still working out which specific subjects most interest me and
>> have potential to help people.
>
> Sounds altruistic!?

Yes!

What's wrong with wanting to understand things or think of things that
will be an improvement for humanity?

Why do you pursue philosophy?

>
>> Also, I'm not sure that I can get good enough to make much difference.
>
> Read _The Choice_ by Eli Goldratt.
>
>
>>> it's important to do this on multiple levels. people have trouble because the most abstract level is abstract. the answers don't give concrete, practical, direct guidance. that's ok. the most abstract answers can be short and broad. you also need to consider things at other levels of analysis, rather than make the biggest picture stuff complete.
>>>

>>> another level of analysis, for example, is: what's epistemology about? it's about knowledge. how do you create knowledge? what is knowledge? what sort of status do different ideas have and how do you know and what does that mean? how do you find and correct errors? etc. to deal with the field it's really useful to have some idea of what the field is and what it's for. e..g. one of the main problems in the field is that some ideas are good, some are bad, and you want to evaluate which are which. that problem gives you some context in which to use various other epistemology ideas.

>>>
>>> there are more specific fields, e.g. parenting. a way to look at parenting is:
>>>
>>> parents are routinely cruel to their children and fight with their children.. why? and how can you avoid doing that, given that people are often blind to their own mistakes?
>>>
>>> there are other ways to approach parenting too, e.g. via trying to understand the implications of static meme stuff for parenting. or via trying to apply the Popperian theory of how people learn in order to avoid doing ineffective educational methods.
>>>
>>> from these things, you can ask further questions and see where it leads. what do you need to do or know next to make progress on these things? first figure that out without the answers to get a basic overview of what you're doing, then you can try to work on solving it.
>>>
>>>
>>>>> Overall FI presents in a generic way in terms of abstract philosophy. This makes the integration and practical action harder for people. The best way to learn it is for someone to pick a specific topic – e.g. parenting or relationships – to learn and they can use rational methods for learning it and then can learn more theory when they have those examples they’ve already done. A common interest point is politics/economics, but that one is tricky because people treat it as a debating game instead of it affecting their IRL actions. Parenting and relationships relate to their IRL actions. Other things involving concrete action include business management, speed reading/listening, diet, salary negotiation, trying to be great at something (e.g. competitive gaming or speedrunning), not going to a psychiatrist.
>>
>> So for me at this point, would you suggest studying a specific topic
>> now rather than generally studying philosophy? I feel like I need more
>> general study first.
>
> do you think you’re doing effective, purposeful general study? of what, specifically?

Not really. I'm doing ineffective slow study. My overall plan is to
finish Atlas Shrugged and then study The Beginning of Infinity.

>
>>>> I have thought about really studying diet. It's something I'm
>>>> interested in and have read a lot about in the past.
>>>
>>> why?
>>
>> I want to understand the relationship between what I eat and my
>> health. I want to stay healthy. It's not clear to me what the best way
>> to do that is. Maybe instead of diet, I should aim for a broader topic
>> like human health.
>
> it’s pretty simple:
>
> existing advice on this stuff is utter crap.
>
> don’t overeat – don’t eat when you aren’t hungry.
>
> that’s about it.
>

> there are more details about specific ways our culture is stupid about this stuff, but the positive stuff about how to improve health is such bullshit.. you’d have to invent the field instead of learn it.

>
> and anyway your body is very robust, it has very good error correction around what you eat. so what you eat just plain doesn’t matter that much. did you eat enough calories, but not way too many? congratulations, your body can handle that. there are a few edge cases like scurvy but they’re rare today because our food is plenty diverse and healthy. if you’re really worried, take a vitamin pill once a week so you can relax b/c that’s way easier and cheaper than learning about the topic.

One of the interesting things about the topic is that common knowledge
about it is so wrong. If I had a better understanding of how and why
it's wrong I could explain it to people better when the topic comes
up. And I could change my own thinking. I feel like a bad person when
I eat candy. I feel like a bad person when I eat candy.

>
>>>> Books about diet
>>>> contradict each other a lot! I'm wondering if there's any good
>>>> scientific knowledge in the field at all.
>>>
>>> sure, e.g. the concept of a "calorie" is a good idea. that's a scientific kind of measurement thing which allows a meaningful, useful measurement of something notable about many foods.
>>
>> Other specific topics I've thought about studying more:
>>
>> - Politics and values. See my post in the Anti-American thread:
>> https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/fallible-ideas/conversations/messages/25552
>
> this is a field where there are lots of other ppl, alive today, writing good things (as against most of the good material being from death authors, or not existing at all). and tons of ppl are interested. those are some advantages.
>
> one of the problems is ppl are mostly really focused on the politics of *today* – e.g. events from the last month – instead of on concepts, principles, reasoning (political philosophy). ppl often throw in some half-assed political philosophy claims when it’s convenient for their claim about today’s news, rather than discussing it seriously and using it as a starting point (instead of starting with ideas and figuring out the implications, they already have a political position and then biasedly bring up some principles in defense of it). also ppl are known for getting angry, emotional, etc, about politics.

People also tend to pick a side and not be able to explain why they
picked that side, and then cheer or jeer current things in the news
based on who's on what side rather than on any principles.

Yes, people get emotional about this stuff. I know people who do.

>
>> - Psychology. That is, personal psychology: how to deal with unhappy
>> or anxious feelings that you don't know the cause of, how to get along
>> with people better, what advice to give to friends who struggle with
>> this kind of thing.
>
> basically this field sucks and the best way to approach this is with good philosophy.

I want good philosophy.

>
>> - How to teach martial arts to kids. How to effectively teach them
>> martial arts skills. How to help them learn and think well, and to
>> have good values. How to spread better ideas to other martial arts
>> teachers.
>
> teaching is a really bad field too. gotta basically ignore the field and learn and apply Popper.

Teaching would be a place I could integrate what I'm learning here
with something I could actually do.

>
> since your ideas (politics, health, psychology, martial arts teaching) are all over the place, i’m guessing you don’t already have really strong, clear interests to guide you. sound right?

Either that or I have lots of strong clear interests. I'm open to
other suggestions too.

Is it best if I focus on one thing at a time? Or not really?

[Anne B]

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 3:56 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us

[fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> On Feb 28, 2018, at 5:37 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:
>
>> On Feb 28, 2018, at 5:11 PM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 3:33 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
>>> [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Feb 22, 2018, at 2:08 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> How to get ppl to learn FI? Steps:
>>>>>
>>>>> 1. Interest
>>>>> 2. Investment
>>>>> 3. Guided learning process
>>>>> 4. Integration
>>>>> 5. Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas
>>>>>
>>>>> Learning FI is a lot, so investment is required before people will do it. People commonly *overreach* and try to go to stage 5 early, with low investment, learning and integration. Most people are more interested in (5) than (3), and they don’t realize how much content/substance/complexity FI has.
>>>>>
>>>>> People also try to debate me, about issues where they are massively outclassed, and it’s not an efficient way to teach them. They don’t learn much because learning isn’t their goal, and because they aren’t supplementing the debating with adequate study effort. If it was 4 parts study per 1 part debate, it’d work better.
>>>>>
>>>>> Existing FI material is oriented to self-starters who will manage their own investment and guide their own learning. It has some weakness at helping with steps 2-4.
>>>>>
>>>>> Interest is hard because FI says very unpopular things. But FI is controversial and stands out, and my material is very high quality, so getting some interest works OK.
>>>>>
>>>>> The reason FI is weaker at investment is because investment is normally achieved with social dynamics, not with reason. People are prepared to invest due to certain social dynamics, not because of logical arguments for why something is important. The logical arguments work OK at getting interest, but then people’s behavior is flakey because they aren’t invested. (The long term FI community people are highly invested, but there’s only a few of them.)
>>>>>
>>>>> The reason FI doesn’t offer a clear, guided learning process is because learners should follow their interests instead of a one-size-fits-all process. And everyone has different questions, confusions, comments, etc, so their learning paths should quickly branch off even if they have the same starting point. The problem is people don’t know how to manage their own learning, so more guidance would help even if it’s not optimal.
>>>>>
>>>>> Sometimes people read a significant amount of FI material, but then don’t do much. (5) doesn’t happen well. They were interested enough to do it, invested enough to keep going with a significant amount of study, and they went through and learned a lot of the things I write and recommend. And then that’s it, they don’t start asking good questions, creating good criticisms, improving the ideas, making effective material to share the ideas, or effectively arguing the ideas to others. The underlying issue here is inadequate integration: they don’t use the ideas enough in their own life, including, especially, their own thinking.. They go through some training, agree with it, but save it in their mind as data instead of executable software. If people learned *and integrated* the ideas enough, then (5) would be easy and kinda automatic. Doesn’t mean they’d know how to get a million fans, but they’d at least regularly do some kinda stuff, like I do, and it’d be pretty good.
>>>>>
>>>>> What have I told people to address integration? That they must discuss as they read in order to correct errors. Alone, what inevitably happens is they will misunderstand what they read, and then build up layers and layers of misconceptions. So of course that doesn’t work in their lives. If they get all their own doubts and confusions sorted out as they went along, that’d help a ton with integrating it into their thinking and action.
>>>>

>>>> When people do try to learn and discuss, it’s usually massive overreaching. They don’t start at the start, get the basics really solid, and then build up layers of complexity that have very low error rates.. Instead they fudge the foundations and start talking about stuff they find fun and interest, but which they are unable to productively engage with. This is also why I get limited feedback on most of what I write: people don’t know how! I often write about more advanced topics which interest me (and interest others!), but people don’t know how to deal with those topics effectively. What they should do (but don’t) is start approaching the advanced stuff in basic ways: look at what prerequisites they are missing and ask about those.

>>>
>>> Can you give some examples of basics we should be working on? Do you
>>> mean things like reading comprehension and grammar?
>>
>> that's one kind of basic. similarly, basic math and logic are important, and speed reading/listening. those are tools that are used to do more complex projects.
>>
>> another kind of basic is getting a basic overall understanding of a subject and what you're doing:
>>
>> what do you want to learn? why? what's the point of philosophy? what's the point of more specific subjects? what will you do with whatever you learn? what problems are you trying to solve? why? why do you think those problems are important? how did you choose them over other problems? what are you goals?
>>
>> it's important to do this on multiple levels. people have trouble because the most abstract level is abstract. the answers don't give concrete, practical, direct guidance. that's ok. the most abstract answers can be short and broad. you also need to consider things at other levels of analysis, rather than make the biggest picture stuff complete.
>>
>> another level of analysis, for example, is: what's epistemology about? it's about knowledge. how do you create knowledge? what is knowledge? what sort of status do different ideas have and how do you know and what does that mean? how do you find and correct errors? etc. to deal with the field it's really useful to have some idea of what the field is and what it's for. e.g. one of the main problems in the field is that some ideas are good, some are bad, and you want to evaluate which are which. that problem gives you some context in which to use various other epistemology ideas.
>>
>> there are more specific fields, e.g. parenting. a way to look at parenting is:
>>
>> parents are routinely cruel to their children and fight with their children. why? and how can you avoid doing that, given that people are often blind to their own mistakes?
>>
>> there are other ways to approach parenting too, e.g. via trying to understand the implications of static meme stuff for parenting. or via trying to apply the Popperian theory of how people learn in order to avoid doing ineffective educational methods.
>>
>> from these things, you can ask further questions and see where it leads. what do you need to do or know next to make progress on these things? first figure that out without the answers to get a basic overview of what you're doing, then you can try to work on solving it.
>
> There's people who ask short, vague, broad stuff like "What is philosophy?" or "How do I learn?" or "How do I not overreach?"
>
> And there's plenty of discussion of specific, detailed topics.
>
> There's something missing though: the broad, overview stuff that is productive instead of vague. People fail at getting the overall picture and then give up and do details, instead of fixing the problem.
>
> Roughly what you should often do is: start vague and simple, get a very limited answer (e.g.: "philosophy is about thinking, being wise, and living well"). and then move on to a little more specific instead of jumping to way more specific. keep working step by step.
>
> ppl do get the really simple, big picture answers. that's no problem. but then they don't know how to use it and give up. the thing to do next is ask another question that builds on it like, "ok cool. thinking, wisdom and morality sound important. what are some of the big important questions that the philosophy of wisdom tries to answer?" (hopefully you can see how that will build to some slightly more specific but still big picture discussion, that can get more concrete at the next step.)
>
> this is not the only way to learn something but lots of ppl here seem to be missing a lot of the big picture (like 90th percentile bigness. they do have the biggest picture like "reason is good and don't be mean to kids", but it's the next step of starting to actually get a useful big picture handle on things that's missing IMO.) this (start broad, narrow down incrementally) is an important, good technique that should be common.

Yes, I'm missing that 90% big picture.

Reason is good, philosophy is important. Now what? What *are* some of
the big important questions that good philosophy tries to answer?

[Elliot Temple]

On Mar 4, 2018, at 8:34 AM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 3, 2018 at 3:17 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
> [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mar 3, 2018, at 4:54 AM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 8:37 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us
>>> [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Feb 28, 2018, at 5:11 PM, Anne B <anne...@gmail.com> wrote:


> Do you have a suggestion where to go to start learning about speed
> reading or speed listening?

search for things i already wrote about it.

>>> The big picture is: I want to learn better ideas and spread those
>>> ideas and make the world a better place for humanity. The point of
>>> philosophy is to make life better.
>>>
>>> I'm still working out which specific subjects most interest me and
>>> have potential to help people.
>>
>> Sounds altruistic!?
>
> Yes!
>
> What's wrong with wanting to understand things or think of things that
> will be an improvement for humanity?

Ayn Rand addresses altruism. You should try to figure out what her point is, and then see how it applies here, and then see what you think (do you have counter arguments, doubts, etc?)

> Why do you pursue philosophy?

i like it and it's useful.

>>>>> I have thought about really studying diet. It's something I'm
>>>>> interested in and have read a lot about in the past.
>>>>
>>>> why?
>>>
>>> I want to understand the relationship between what I eat and my
>>> health. I want to stay healthy. It's not clear to me what the best way
>>> to do that is. Maybe instead of diet, I should aim for a broader topic
>>> like human health.
>>
>> it’s pretty simple:
>>
>> existing advice on this stuff is utter crap.
>>
>> don’t overeat – don’t eat when you aren’t hungry.
>>
>> that’s about it.
>>
>> there are more details about specific ways our culture is stupid about this stuff, but the positive stuff about how to improve health is such bullshit.. you’d have to invent the field instead of learn it.
>>
>> and anyway your body is very robust, it has very good error correction around what you eat. so what you eat just plain doesn’t matter that much. did you eat enough calories, but not way too many? congratulations, your body can handle that. there are a few edge cases like scurvy but they’re rare today because our food is plenty diverse and healthy. if you’re really worried, take a vitamin pill once a week so you can relax b/c that’s way easier and cheaper than learning about the topic.
>
> One of the interesting things about the topic is that common knowledge
> about it is so wrong.

oh heh. that's really common for many topics. it doesn't differentiate this topic (diet). but ok, if you're new to that, this topic does work fine.

> Is it best if I focus on one thing at a time? Or not really?

it's important to go in depth on something, to have and reach high standards for something.


Elliot Temple
www.curi.us

[Elliot Temple]

what do you think?

research it if you have to. there are many answers to this you can easily find and compare/contrast and judge.

Elliot Temple
www.elliottemple.com

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 22, 2018, at 2:08 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:

> How to get ppl to learn FI? Steps:
>
> 1. Interest
> 2. Investment
> 3. Guided learning process
> 4. Integration
> 5. Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas

Note the ordering is a bit fuzzy. You don't finish (1) then move on to (2). You need some of (1) before (2), but it's not a step that you really complete. Doing (3) helps create (2). (4) will, to some extent, be part of (3).

# Interest

Interest is reasonably achievable if FI has eyeballs and doesn't offend/alienate them. There's plenty of interesting claims. FI has more of a difficulty with being *too controversial* than with failing to stand out.

There are ways to begin with people that connect to values they already have like various aspects of reason they value. But people get offended when you start showing them their own internal conflicts – how some of their ideas and actions contradict some important value they also have. But that's where the interest comes from. People think they're already good at reason, honesty, etc, so they have limited interest and motivation for learning more. So the natural thing to do is point out the flaws they should improve, but they don't like facing flaws. More positive framings (here's how to be even better) can help to some extent but can also be misleading.

# Investment

People are already involved with lots of other stuff, with varying levels of commitment and investment. FI competes with that. Just liking something doesn't mean people find a place for it in their lives.

The main way people get invested in stuff is via social dynamics. They expect it to manipulate them into being more involved and more committed. They don't initiate their own increasing investment, they expect the activity/person/whatever to sell itself and draw them in. FI doesn't do much here because it dislikes manipulative, pressuring social dynamics and it thinks good people should be controlling their own lives (deciding what to invest in, and also making ongoing choices about activities instead of coasting with inertia). People do sometimes choose something themselves and invest in it on purpose, but it's not very common.

# Guided Learning Process

This is tricky because people should guide themselves. People should create and pursue their own goals, and have an active role in choosing and adjusting their methods. But people are usually passive and want to avoid discussion/interaction (until after they know lots of stuff and they're confident) and just have something to read or some instructions to follow. This attitude is pretty incompatible with being very successful, but it's still possible to create resources that help give people guidance they can use on their own, such as the FI reading list.

The reason I think a guided learning process is important is there's few if any people who are ready to do learning the right way immediately. So they need something that better fits what they know how to deal with to get started. As they learn more, hopefully they can use that to help them shift learning styles to a better approach.

# Integration

People separate abstract intellectual discussions and practical daily life. They treat them as different things. Then they're surprised and confused when parts of their life – like emotions – don't obey the rules of their *separate* intellectual beliefs.

Integration is about connecting stuff you're learning to your actual life, finding ways to use it in your life, turning it into policies, habits, behaviors, etc. This includes taking general methods, like conjectures and refutations, and figuring out specific details for how to do it that work well for you and your associates.

Lots of philosophy has a general purpose version. It involves some principles and some explanations that apply to tons of situations. That part is pretty one-size-fits-all. But that version doesn't tell you, step by step, exactly what to do. To use it in your life you need to figure out concrete details, like step by step actions to do. The steps to use are *not* one-size-fits-all, they need to be tailored to your life, so you have to create them yourself. That's a typical example of integration.

# Learn to share, argue and develop the ideas

After learning some ideas, some people want to chat and debate. That's OK, but they can discuss better and more productively once they are actually using ideas successfully in their lives. Using the ideas lets you better check that your understanding is correct and test modifications. And it lets you take a proposed new idea or change and consider how it would work in comparison to what you're already doing, and maybe have a realistic understanding of that since you already know what it's like to integrate ideas into your life, so you can better estimate the results of integrating the new ideas.

Some discussion needs to be relatively early so people don't just misunderstand 50 things then waste tons of time trying to use and build on that. Actually this whole process should be pretty short. People should do all 5 steps before they go read 20 books. They can learn more precise details later after they are better at learning. They can learn in layers: FI at level 10 precision, then FI at level 20 precision, then 30, then 40, etc.

Once things get going well, it's important that people will do some sharing (including debating) ideas in order to spread FI, and also will contribute some improvements to FI. There's plenty of room for mutual benefit here, and it could improve the world a lot.

Elliot Temple
www.elliottemple.com