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
Research Attention to Detail What does it mean to be detail oriented, to have good attention to detail, or to have good memory? It can’t just mean paying a lot of attention to every detail. There are way too many details. There are actually infinitely many details one could consider, but people have
Research Being Open to Debate (and Judging Intellectuals) Ways to be open to debate, ways I'm open, and ways I might not be.
Research Uncertainty and Binary Epistemology The way to correct errors involves looking for errors – for causes of failure – and trying to fix them. Fixing means changing from failure to success. It does not involve increasing the goodness of factors. Most factors had no error anyway, so an increase won’t change an error to a
Research Evolution and Epistemology How evolution relates to intelligent thinking and error correction
Research Similarity and Contextual Conversion Between Dimensions In Multi-Factor Decision Making Math [https://criticalfallibilism.com/multi-factor-decision-making-math/], I discussed converting (measurements or judgments of) decision-making factors to other dimensions. I said that this broadly can’t be done and we need other approaches to decision making. However, I said, the narrower the context you care about, the more
Research Learning With and Without Two-Way Communication with Others Reading a book is learning “alone” in some sense, even though the author is involved in your learning process. You don’t have a back-and-forth discussion with the author. There’s a worthwhile division of learning into two to four types. The main two types are learning with two-way communication
Research Positively Presenting Ideas and Negatively Arguing about Ideas There are two parts of debate or critical thinking. First, you present an idea. Second, you make and evaluate arguments. After some arguing you can still do more presenting. You can’t start with arguing before any presenting, though. When presenting, you say what an idea is. You explain what
Research Debate, Criticism, Argument Strengths and Intuitions Critical Fallibilism (CF) loosely separates debate into two parts. First, you explain your idea. You present it and say what it is and how it works. This is not arguing how great or strong it is, nor arguing that your idea is correct. Sharing ideas is different than arguing. You
Research Weighty Arguments or Decisive Arguments The standard view of debate uses weighted factors. Arguments are factors which add support (or strength, weight, points, justification, etc.) for a side. Critical arguments subtract instead of adding. Arguments have different weights which determine how much they add or subtract (some arguments are stronger than others). A debate is
Research Kialo and Indecisive Arguments Kialo [https://www.kialo.com/tour] claims to be an online “debate platform powered by reason” and explains: > Kialo enables you to visualize discussions as an interactive tree of pro and con arguments. At the top is the thesis, which is supported or weakened by pro and con arguments underneath.
Research People Use Weighted Factors The weighted factor epistemology, which is criticized by Critical Fallibilism, is widespread. It’s talked about in many terms including score systems, strengths of arguments, weight of evidence, or the power of a case. People also use it intuitively or subconsciously. Here are some ways people talk about weighted factors
Research Optimize Limiting Factors Critical Fallibilism says it’s important to differentiate ideas in terms of success and failure at goals rather than differentiating them by degree of goodness. Why? It’s technically correct [https://criticalfallibilism.com/multi-factor-decision-making-math/] and I’ve explained various reasons [https://criticalfallibilism.com/yes-or-no-philosophy-and-score-systems/]. Here I’ll focus on one