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

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

Reply to the first error.

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

How evolution relates to intelligent thinking and error correction

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have to keep track of what you learn. And the more you learn, the more you have to keep track of. You have to organize it, review it, remember stuff, be able to effectively search for stuff, etc. You want to have the most important and most used ideas

We need to have goals, to try to succeed at them, and to judge success and failure at them. Judging lets us make changes when things aren’t working. But judging well can be hard. Being able to objectively, confidently and reliably judge success and failure is a key to

If I hold up a fruit and ask you "Which fruit is this?”, you will know the answer immediately and automatically. And you'll have full confidence in your answer. You'll say “That's an apple.” and you will be right and know you'