Shorts

Overthinking and Not Knowing What Success Is

A common cause of overthinking is that you’re confused, so you keep trying to do better, but you’re not really sure what’s better, so you stay confused. If you’re doing something that you don’t know how to do, you may keep retrying unsuccessfully. Then you

Shorts

Overthinking and Perfectionism

Sometimes people get stuck overthinking things when writing or making decisions. This can be caused by perfectionism. People may keep trying to make their writing or plan more and more perfect. CF and Theory of Constraints (TOC) ideas about goals, variance, limiting factors and excess capacity can help with perfectionism.

Shorts

Overthinking and the Subconscious

Sometimes people get stuck overthinking when writing or making decisions. This often means they’re relying too much on conscious effort and too little on subconscious effort. They get stuck partly because conscious effort is a very limited resource so they don’t have enough. I’m only talking about

News

Critical Fallibilism Site Updates, March 2023

I added a new short article category, multiple email newsletters choices, and donation options. There are three separate email newsletters to choose from: CF Philosophy, CF News, and Elliot’s Thoughts. CF Philosophy will have fewer emails than I’ve sent in the past, and Elliot’s Thoughts will have

Skills

Cycle Between Learning Critical Fallibilism and Its Prerequisites

Summary: If you want to be a great philosopher, you’ll need to get really good at a bunch of prerequisites. But don’t just study one prerequisite at a time until you finish it. Instead, you should cycle back and forth between learning prerequisites and learning the more advanced

Skills

Learning and the Subconscious Bullet Points

Summary: Your subconscious has most of your brainpower. To become a great thinker, focus on teaching your subconscious and delegating work to it. Don’t focus on conscious analysis. The subconscious isn’t the irrational part of your mind; it’s a necessary part of rational thinking. I explain the

Research

Procrastination

Procrastination is due to internal conflicts which need problem solving.

Research

Purpose of Thinking; Positive and Negative Arguments; Clear Goals

Summary: Thinking is complicated but worth working on and improving. Positive arguments aren’t as good as negative arguments, because we care whether an idea is broken (and will fail) or not. One negative argument can imply an idea is broken; a dozen positive arguments cannot rule out the idea

Research

Academic Literature for Multi-Factor Decision Making

Abstract: After writing my article Multi-Factor Decision Making Math, I found and reviewed relevant academic literature about Multi-Criterion Decision Making (MCDM). I found no criticisms of my beliefs in the literature. I found that the MCDM and epistemology literatures mutually ignore each other, to their detriment. And I determined that

News

Newsletter January 2023

Many, many links.

Research

Taking Personal Responsibility for Debating Your Ideas

Anyone can take responsibility for defending some ideas. People can defend different but overlapping sets of ideas and still help each other. To the extent other people do useful stuff, it’s less work for you. To the extent no one else helps defend the ideas you care about, then

Research

Debate, Rejection, Priorities and Endless Meta Levels

Open debate policies involve more honesty than people are used to. If you don’t ignore people with no explanation, then you have to explain when you don’t debate people. That makes your reason for not debating be transparent and open to criticism. But people often take rejection poorly.

Research

Checking Citations from David Thorstad

I checked three cites from Against the singularity hypothesis by David Thorstad. I specifically looked for quotations and checked the first three I found. I wanted to test my theory that Thorstad’s cites should be assumed unreliable due to some other errors he made. I also wanted to test

Research

Postmortems Help Address Causes of Errors

After you make an error, you should investigate what caused the error, and what changes you should make to prevent other errors due to the same underlying cause. This is called a postmortem (the root words mean “after death”). Sometimes postmortems are quick and easy. That’s fine. They don’

Research

Ignoring “Small” Errors

Attitudes enabling ignoring “small” errors makes it significantly harder for critics to get attention and make progress. Even if they point out an error, and they are correct that it’s an error, and people agree with them … that often isn’t good enough. That makes the job of the

Research

Rationality Policies

The rule of law is one of our most important political inventions. Written rules help address problems with biased, corrupt or otherwise untrustworthy people in power. Who shouldn’t be trusted with arbitrary power? Everyone. We’re all fallible. We all have biases. We all make mistakes. If you’re

Research

Engaging with Long Articles

Reply to the first error.

Skills

Conscious and Subconscious Ideas

As a useful approximation, we can divide all our ideas into two categories. One category is conscious or explicit ideas (ideas that you can put into words). The other category is subconscious, inexplicit or intuitive ideas, including emotions. Sometimes we have no conscious awareness of a subconscious idea. However, it’

Research

My Experience with My Debate Policy

How guaranteeing debates saves time.

Research

Fallibilism, Bias, and the Rule of Law

Effective Altruism can learn from the rule of law.

Skills

Intuition Is Part of Rational Living

Your conscious and subconscious mind are like a boss and workers.

Skills

Intuition and Rational Debate

Previously I wrote Don’t Suppress Your Intuition and Intuition and Rationality. I’m now expanding on ideas in those articles. I recommend reading them first. A key to not being bullied in debates is knowing how to say “I intuitively disagree with that.” If you won’t express intuitive

Skills

Intuition and Rationality

Intuitions are part of rational thinking and debate.

Skills

Don’t Suppress Your Intuition

Intuitions aren't irrational.

Research

Grammar as Functions

Grammar concepts can be thought of like mathematical functions.