Research Organized Writing Based on a Tree How do you make writing organized and easy to understand? There are many options. A standard approach is to make the writing correspond well to a tree diagram. (I'll talk primarily about essay writing, but the same techniques work with longer or shorter pieces. Just make every part
Research Treating Ideas Badly People encounter ideas, think they are bad ideas, and then want to treat those ideas badly because they're (allegedly) bad. They want their treatment of ideas to correspond to the nature or quality of the ideas. They want to be interested in good ideas, and uninterested in bad
Research Rationality Is Counter-Intuitive Rationality requires some attention be allocated contrary to what most people find draws their attention. If different creators each independently try to draw attention, that isn't a truth-seeking process. Getting popularity or attention are different things than having correct ideas. For a rational world, some people will have
Research Write How You Speak Some people want to do philosophy but will barely talk on a philosophy forum because it takes them a lot of time and effort to write anything. They also don’t do enough private writing – notes, journaling, written brainstorming, written pro/con lists, essays, tree diagrams, etc. (Other quiet people
Research A Succession of Practice Activities There are many ways to view learning philosophy and making unbounded progress. A Popperian view is it's problem solving. You solve one problem then move on to another (that's better in some way), and keep going forever. Popper saw progress as progressing from problem to problem.
Research What Nodes Go In Debate Trees? And Other Debate Tree Questions This article answers several common questions about debate trees. It discusses mechanics of how trees work, addressing all criticism instead of excluding arguments from discussions, and how to protect your time. Adding Nodes When making debate trees, what nodes should be added? (Suppose you're the one with the
Research Learning Many Small Skills Instead of Getting Stuck I see people get stuck while trying to learn philosophy. I'll tell you what they don't do: incrementally learn a dozen different small skills, of multiple types, successfully, with some skills building on previous skills, and practice each skill. You might think "Of course they
Research To Make Unbounded Progress, Do Similar Activities to Past Successes I see people overreach and do overly difficult activities even after reading my essays about overreaching and claiming that they agree with me. Then they may fail a bunch, get stuck, and give up without ever trying easy enough activities. Why do they do this? Perhaps they don't
Research Arguing Without Discussing Opposing Arguments I read A serious case for dynamic scoring, an essay discussing how the U.S. government inaccurately scores the budget impact of potential laws by ignoring complex, dynamic factors like how a law could increase economic growth. Proposals to bring in more high-skilled immigrants are calculated as costly because the
Research Substantive Learning Processes Some changes require a substantive learning process, such as hours of intentional, focused practice. There are other options too, like reading several books over the course of a few months and thinking about it many times during those months. Or you can immerse yourself in a subculture, for months, that&
Research Science Needs Rational Debate I wrote Objective Judgment, Chess Competition and How Science Is Failing. Here are some further comments on those issues. Skill at winning chess games is skill at chess. To a good approximation, there's just one thing, not two separate things. By contrast, skill at doing scientific research is
Research Objective Judgment, Chess Competition and How Science Is Failing Summary: I discuss how the impact of bias is limited in chess competition. Then I discuss how bias is a bigger factor in philosophy and science. Then I discuss what chess is doing better and propose a solution for philosophy and science. Bias in Chess There is bias in the
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
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