I’m enjoying reading Why I Left Orthodox Medicine: Healing for the 21st Century by Derrick Lonsdale. I noticed that he uses the word “subconscious” differently than I do. I wanted to clarify my terminology in case anyone is confused. In Critical Fallibilism (CF) essays, “subconscious” refers to the part

The internet can be really smart and effective sometimes. We’ve seen examples where impressive things have been figured out by people on internet platforms like Reddit, Facebook, TikTok or 4chan. In the Netflix documentary Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, a Facebook group helps catch a

Suppose you write a blog post arguing a point. Some readers will reply (or, worse, think it without saying it): “If that was true, you would get it published in a peer reviewed journal. If you don’t do that, it’s because you’re wrong.” The assumption here is

Peer review prevents some ideas from being published. That’s a significant part of the point. What is published is supposed to already be filtered or gatekept to only be high quality ideas. So the public doesn’t even get to see most ideas. A small group of people have

In peer review, part of the idea is you (the article author) don’t get to just arbitrarily ignore the criticisms of the reviewer. You’re supposed to address the issues in some way. But then once you publish, you mostly get to arbitrarily ignore your critics. The peer reviewers

Peer review lacks transparency. Paths Forward commonly involves rational, critical discussions on publicly-readable internet forums. That enables transparency and some other advantages like wider participation. Article authors could be expected to address criticisms. This is like how people have recommended a norm of sharing raw data along with articles. I

I criticize peer review for lacking transparency. Then I talked about friendly, private editing, which is fine, and is usually used for papers before the peer review process. Private editing is fine because no one is asked to trust that it ensured high quality. It isn’t an attempt to

I criticized peer review for lacking transparency. I suggested the process should take place publicly. (I have no objection to anonymizing the discussion until the review process is complete to help reduce bias during the discussion. I’d suggest de-anonymizing it afterwards though.) Do I ever have someone edit one

Who peer reviewed an academic paper? That’s secret. More importantly, what criticisms did the peers reviewers come up with? That’s secret. What changes were made to the paper due to peer review? That’s secret. When your error correction process is secret, the public can’t see how

There are a few standard ways intellectual attention is allocated to ideas. There are social networks. Having allies and fans helps with getting attention. There are gatekeepers and lots of people follow their curated output. There’s popularity or virality. Saying stuff people like and share, or which seems good

Let’s talk more about my post Food Packaging Grammar Error. Summarizing the post, I commented on frozen microwave meal instructions stating “peel film back enough to stir, replace film and cook […]”. I pointed out that it doesn’t say to stir. The steps are to peel, replace and cook.

People often try to become really smart by optimizing their conscious thinking. This can only take you so far. Conscious brainpower is a limited resource. To be a really effective thinker, you have to consider how to use things outside of your conscious mind to help you be smarter. What

This is a brief, question-based outline of some Critical Fallibilist epistemology. What is knowledge? Information that’s effective for (adapted to) a purpose. It has the appearance of design. It’s not arbitrary nor random. How is knowledge created? Evolution (replication with variation and selection). The explanation of why evolution

There are different acting methods which relate to different ways of dealing with subconscious automatizations. Some actors try to get into their character’s mindset and immerse themselves in the part. They’re trying to adjust a bunch of automatizations and intuitions so they actually become more like the character.

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

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.

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