Newsletter July 2022

You can find my Critical Fallibilism articles on the homepage. Below, I share links to other things I’ve been working on.

A theme of my recent videos is grammar. Why? It’s one of the skills that can help people do better at analyzing text, which is a big part of philosophy. Grammar confusion and misreading sentences is also a real problem that I’ve experienced in discussions and found is, in practice, a key bottleneck.

A theme of my recent writing is health and food. Besides being relevant to everyone, it’s interesting as an example of how our society is bad at things. Surprisingly little competent scientific research has ever been done even on well known health topics like caffeine, MSG, gluten, cholesterol, fat and vegetable oil. (Disagree? I’m open to serious debates.) Looking at the bigger picture, one of the causes is that our society is bad at having organized, rational debates which reach decisive conclusions. That’s one of the reasons errors aren’t being corrected very well in science. And it’s a philosophical topic I’ve researched and developed new ideas for.

Critical Fallibilism Videos

I’ve been making videos to help explain CF ideas. I think videos can help people learn and bring some advantages to supplement my articles. I’ve been learning to use more animation. I made two long videos:

• Philosophical analysis of Steven Pinker passage | Everything explained from grammar to arguments (2 hours)
• An Organized Plan for Learning Philosophy (explained with a tree diagram) (1 hour)

And shorter videos:

• Philosophical Introduction to Tree Diagrams
• Learn grammar trees (they're better than sentence diagrams)
• How to do arithmetic with tree diagrams | Understand math and philosophy better
• Learn to analyze writing (with grammar trees)
• Philosopher breaks down tough sentence | Learn how to do it
• Demonstrating a type of grammar analysis (dependency trees)
• How to Practice Abstract, Philosophical Concepts like Error Correction
• Philosopher Does Analysis (Paragraph Tree)
• Philosophical Perspective: Complexity in a Regular Paragraph
• Practice Grammar with Harry Potter Sentences

Curiosity Blog Posts

I put more informal or off-topic articles on my personal blog:

• Beware Processed Food
• Plants vs. Mammals (Energy, Digestion, Broad Conceptual Explanations, and the Lion Diet)
• Tribalist Medical Journal Editors
• Do You Really, Actually, Genuinely Want Unbounded Discussion?
• I Less Often Reply to Anons
• Discussion and Boundary Based Relationships
• Beware Jordan Peterson
• Caffeine Is Bad
• Restating Opposing Views; Charity in Debates
• Roe vs. Wade Overturned
• Analyzing Dishonest Ads
• Specialist Creators with Small Audiences

Curiosity Videos

I put more informal or off-topic videos on my personal channel:

• How to Learn Advanced Philosophy (Why to Learn Grammar Trees)
• Sketching Grammar Trees 2
• Healthy Food | Food Processing and Additives | Milk Homogenization

Critical Fallibilism Forum Topics

Here are a few recent discussions from the CF forum:

• Vegetable Oil Is Bad?
• Learning Grammar #2 - More Parts Trees and Sentence Analyses
• Roe vs. Wade Overturned
• Controlling Your Life and Methodology [Fallible Ideas podcast]

Subscribe

Newsletters will remain infrequent and incomplete, so subscribe to stuff that interests you.