Tips for new people using the Fallible Ideas discussion group:
- If you think a criticism is irrelevant, say so and give your reasoning. The person who posted it thought it was relevant. You disagree with him. Discuss your disagreement instead of assuming he’s stupid or acting in bad faith.
- If you think a criticism is unimportant, say so and give your reasoning. For example, you can point out a small change to your idea which solves the criticized problem and which you think your critic should have been able to think of himself. Then ask if he disagrees with that analysis – maybe he sees a problem with that alternative or there was a reason he didn’t want to put words in your mouth by assuming that is the adjustment you’d want to make. (Putting words in your mouth without saying them out loud, just in his own head, is in general worse, not better because it’s more prone to lead to confusion and misunderstanding. It doesn’t have the social problems of attributing his dumb ideas to you, but in terms or having an effective discussion if he thinks you mean something you don’t mean, and he doesn’t say this out loud, it can get really confusing.)
- If you think a criticism is pointlessly picky, pedantic, or hair splitting, say so and give your reasoning. Don’t think it’s obviously so and the person did it on purpose. They disagree with you. You may be right, but you can’t change their mind without giving some sort of explanation/argument/reason that is new information to them.
- If you think someone does something mean, rude or bad, say so and give your reasoning. You may have misunderstood something. They may thank you for the critical feedback and apologize. If you don’t communicate about the problem you perceive, you are preventing problem solving, and anything bad that happens (e.g. you holding a grudge or forming a negative opinion of someone) is your fault and your error. Sarcasm or any sort of insulting joke is considered mean -- don’t post it, and do say something if you think someone did it to you.
- If you have a problem of any kind with FI, say so and give your reasoning. That’s how truth seeking works.
- Never use quotes when something isn’t an exact quote. Never manually type quotes, only copy/paste. (An exception is you can manually type in quotes from a paper book, but be careful to copy the exact words and review it for typos. Another exception is typing in quotes from a video or audio recording.)
- Try to answer questions with clear, direct answers.
- Try hard not to lie. Expect that you will lie anyway. Be open to criticism of your lying which can help you learn about your lying. If someone thinks you’re lying, that is productive criticism, it’s not a personal attack. If you don’t understand their reasoning, ask questions. And read this article about lying.
- Try to understand things really clearly. Raise your standards for what you regard as actually understanding something. When in doubt, ask questions. If you’re not sure if you should ask a question, ask it.
- “I don’t understand” is a bad question. Don’t say that. Which part don’t you understand? What issue are you having with it? When asking a question, or asking for help, you have to give some new information. People can’t give you a better answer without some kind of info about what the problem you’re having is. If you don’t give new info to let them customize what they say for you, they are in the same situation they were in originally when they first wrote it for a general audience, and they already wrote their generic answer for that.
- When you want help, give information about what you tried. What is your problem? And what have you already done to try to solve the problem? And why didn’t those problem solving attempts work? What went wrong with them? Info about how/why/where you got stuck, what’s going wrong, is crucial for people to help you.
- Keep your posts pretty short and have at most 3 sections (3 different quotes that you respond to). Most of your posts should have only one section – just reply at the bottom to the overall point instead of reply to details like specific sentences. Knowing how and when to reply to small parts is a skill which is hard and you shouldn’t worry about it for months. If your discussion is too complicated to write one reply at the bottom – if you feel like you need to reply to a bunch of details – then ask for help about how to simplify it.
- Only post when calm. If you’re even a little bit emotional, don’t post. (BTW, your emotionalness can be divided into two categories: the stuff you’re aware of and the stuff you’re not aware of. So you’re basically always more emotional than you realize. For most people, the part they aren’t aware of is the majority.)
- If you have negative emotions in reaction to a post, that is your choice. That is something you are doing to yourself. It’s about you, not the post. It’s your error. You could learn better and change. Don’t blame the other guy. Even if he was rude, your emotions are your responsibility. And, as above, don’t assume he was rude without a rational discussion where you explain reasoning and so does he.
- Because you can and should ask for help with any problem at FI, then all your problems are your own fault, unless you actually raised the problem, discussed it calmly and reasonably (including answering clarifying questions), and then explained why you find the help inadequate and explained what you think is the source of the problem (e.g. you think something about FI’s design is bad, and you think it should be changed in a certain way, but people just refuse for no reason – which wouldn’t happen, but that is the sort of thing it takes for your problems to stop being your own fault.)
- Be really careful with your preconceptions. FI has lots of unconventional ideas. It has something to offend everyone. You have to be tolerant, patient and interested, rather than just assuming that different ideas are bad ideas. Some different ideas are bad, but why? Consider and share your reasoning. We’ve probably heard it before and already written answers.
Update: See also my newer post Rational Discussion Tips
Messages (16)
How Long To Learn FI Basics?
TheRat on Discord:
> @AnneB I'd like to ask you a few things if that's okay. You said you got better at discussing things, I can see that being the case. My question though is how long have you been with FI? And after that time have you finally started talking about CR and Popper? I ask because I recall seeing an older email or curi website post in where you said you want to do this but you felt not ready. My assumption, and please forgive me if I am wrong and correct this assumption, is that after perhaps years you still aren't discussing Popper but still in the process of *getting ready to* discuss Popper.
K-12 school is 13 years of getting *partially* ready to discuss Popper. It’s not enough. Throw in 10 more years to get a philosophy PhD and people are often worse at it than when they graduated high school. It takes a lot of knowledge to be ready to discuss Popper productively, as well as unlearning some of the bad ideas of our culture.
K-12 is not focused on teaching the minimal stuff needed for Popper discussions. But I don’t think it has a lot extra, either. Being well-rounded matters. I don’t think sports and art are irrelevant anymore than I’d think getting good at chess or Overwatch was irrelevant. I think sports and art aren’t taught very well or usefully in K-12, and pushing them on people who don’t want them is bad, but the same thing would happen with chess or Overwatch if they were taught in K-12. The problem isn’t inherent in sports or art.
Could people on FI get to Popper discussions faster? Sure. Anne *has been voluntarily choosing* not to go for Popper ASAP. She’s not in a hurry. She’s acting in a way that is OK with her. Anne has been doing grammar stuff productively for a few months. That’s not that long. And she’s gotten dramatically better at it. The difference is really visible. She considered moving on to something else a few weeks ago, which would have been OK, but decided to continue with more grammar (using the Peikoff materials).
To have a productive discussion about Popper, people ought to have like ten substantial, productive discussions first. Maybe fewer would do but I don’t think ten is too much to ask. That could be done in under a month if it goes well.
What happens with some people is they resist the introductory steps, and skip them, and spend months not doing them. They do a bunch of unproductive stuff when they could have learned the basics in less time if they hadn’t refused.
People are allowed to post about Popper at the start but what usually happens is they make a bunch of discussion and method mistakes *and* a bunch of mistakes about Popper. And it’s hard to deal with so many mistakes, of multiple types, at the same time, while also dealing with a person who doesn’t know discussion methods for handling such a thing.
Most people don’t want to face reality regarding how ineffective their education was, how ignorant they are, and how far they are from being a productive philosopher. Their *professors* (or middle school teachers) are not productive philosophers, and there’s a *big* gap from their professors to someone like me or DD, so they should have low expectations about their starting place.
It’s not that Popper is so hard, inherently, but that people have a lot of bad ideas from our culture that get in the way. Those are what make ten successful discussions – even about easier topics – take months or years (or usually just never) to achieve. E.g. Rat is already predisposed to think accurate quoting isn’t important. He’s coming to us with bad attitudes to scholarship standards. And he isn’t neutral on the matter and open to finding out what the right standards are, he’s actually adversarial about it.
To have successful conversations, you need some baseline understanding of what those look like, what they take, how they work. This includes e.g. a reasonable understanding of how to use quotes and engage with people, rather than talking past them or responding to in inaccurate summary of what you remember them saying. And it includes some understanding of how to ask questions about problems, or otherwise bring them up, rather than making a bunch of silent (not communicated) assumptions with no way for problem solving to happen. And it includes being able to ask and answer clear, short, direct questions, including a bunch in a row that clarify small things. And it involves having an attitude to discussion where you respect error correction instead of dismissing it as a minor – or if you actually have an argument why certain errors don’t matter to the goals at hand, you say the argument. But without an argument for some error not mattering, *and* the other guy thinking it matters, you should be *happy* to address it and view it as progress. Without that sort of attitude, lots of errors accumulate in a complex discussion and destroy it.
Having some *examples* of successful conversations gives you some guidance for how to discuss. It gives you something to aim for. It gives you targets and experience with what works and doesn’t work. It’s best if you have at least one successful prior conversation with complexity of at least 80% as much as your target conversation. That is, don’t increase conversation complexity by more than 25% at a time. That’s fast and lenient, and is too much in many cases, but it gives some guidance that I think people should be able to agree is reasonable. Success rate matters too. If you have one success in one try at 80 complexity, that’s different than one success out of five tries. It’s also different if you failed 4 times, then got it on the 5th try – maybe you figured out a few key things – vs. if you failed twice, succeeded once, then failed twice more (your reliability of conversation success at that complexity level is definitely still bad).
Most people come to FI with a view that most errors don’t matter much and can and should mostly be ignored, especially small errors. They cannot define which errors are small and don’t have a clear idea of when errors need addressing. But overall their attitude is quite different than the FI attitude. This is the sort of thing where, if you don’t address it, it causes problems in many other discussions on any topic. So it should get some attention early. Lots of people disagree about something like this but then don’t bring it up, they just dislike it without saying so, so they can neither persuade nor be persuaded about it.
People should say their concerns like that dealing with all the errors will be endless hairsplitting. They should talk about that instead of just disliking replies they get but not expressing the problem.
Can I address this kind of thing preemptively with an essay? Sure. I do have relevant essays. But there are many other things too. Even if I write about all of them, people won’t (and shouldn’t) read *and understand* all that before talking. The method of saying disagreements (including things you dislike, people should recognize those as points of disagreement) is crucial to having successful conversations.
There is also discussion organization stuff that’s needed before complex discussions. Can't discuss a 20-part topic if you don't know how to organize a 50+ part discussion (it's gonna branch some). How to (and not to) focus a discussion is a key issue. How branches can and can't be pruned or kept to a low number. How to keep track of them all, set some aside for later, choose which to prioritize, etc.
Also not getting mad is a pretty prerequisite skill.
The view of *everything* as ideas that reason applies to – and getting that to be ingrained in how you think – is one of the basic skills which is really helpful to discussing e.g. Popper productively.
Another thing people do is they don’t like something, don’t reply directly, and then bring it up in passing later. It matters to them, but they bring it up in a negative way that isn’t trying to do problem solving or truth seeking, and assumes the conclusion.
> Never use quotes when something isn’t an exact quote. Never manually type quotes, only copy/paste. (*The one exception* is you can manually type in quotes from a paper book, but be careful to copy the exact words and review it for typos.)
(My emphasis.)
How about when quoting from a video talk / lecture? Should we just link with a time stamp?
I think manually typing the quote, as well as linking the source, would make a *second exception* for manual typing of quotes. Am I wrong?
#13490 You're right. My mistake. I've edited it.
There is good explanation of why FI is hard at https://curi.us/2174-differences-between-my-free-resources-and-paid-help
People cannot and should not offer all information preemptively. Instead, people mention information and you can pick and choose which parts to ask more about. If you do this badly, you won’t have much success at FI. If you assume people don’t have more to say about something they mentioned – no more reasoning, arguments, etc. – you are mistreating them, acting irrationally, and sabotaging the discussion.
Concretely: if someone says you did something incorrect, dishonest or immoral, *you can ask why they think that, or what their reasons are, or whatever*. If you don’t, you are preventing truth-seeking about the matter, and you’re showing your disinterest in understanding criticism.
Introductory Stuff
http://curi.us/think
https://curi.us/files/keynotes/phil1.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HglYnzSbcI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epbIaGltSHs
http://fallibleideas.com/reason
There is a #1 way that new people cause problems, bother longtime members, and get in trouble. It is *quoting related errors*, including misstating someone's belief or statement without using a quote.
Misquoting someone intentionally is *fraud*, which is a type of force. It violates their rights.
It can be seen as a violation of their property rights – their statements being their property. Their brain and mind are also their property, and it's lying about those just like lying about a product they are selling (which one can be sued for).
Various types of intentional misquoting, and lying about people and their ideas and attributes, are illegal today and you can be sued for them.
Intentionally misstating someone's belief without using a quote is also fraud. E.g. if you say "They knowingly serve unsafe food at their restaurant." – and you know that's bullshit – that is fraud and you are violating their rights.
Honest mistakes aren't fraud. One has to act reasonably, not recklessly. One has to be appropriately careful based on cultural standards and the importance of the situation. Be more careful with millions of dollars at stake. Be more careful when getting it wrong could significantly harm someone's career. etc. If you say something, people think you made a reasonable effort to know that it's true, so if you didn't you're being dishonest.
What happens when you get someone who is frequently dishonest and they start making statements about other people's ideas and putting words in their mouths? You get a bunch of errors which are presented as facts. This is a rights violation. Their own dishonesty is causing them to violate other people's rights. They are initiating force. Dishonest people ought to avoid saying stuff about other people that, if false, would not be OK to say – but they in general won't accept they are dishonest or be careful, which is another way they are guilty.
Requirements For Philosophy Discussions
In general, to make progress at FI requires **all** of the following 4 things. Exceptions are not literally impossible, but shouldn’t be expected.
1) Time, attention, effort, and willingness to **both** read and discuss.
2) Fluent in English. To get into detailed discussions and textual analysis, you need to be much better at English than most people. You can improve at English over time and may or may not specifically study English at some point. If you’re starting below fluent then you should study English.
3) Broad curiosity and interest in ideas, truth and reason. If you’re only interested in one or two narrows areas, it won’t work, because ideas outside of your interests will be relevant and important.
4) At least **one** of the following 3 things (The more the better. I don’t know how to effectively work with people with none of these.):
- Honesty
- Skill/knowledge/smarts
- Social compliance, deference, respect (voluntarily and happily, not begrudgingly). Being impressed by me/FI, seeing value there, wanting to give it a chance.
Issue (4) can also be viewed as a matter of degrees. Score each of the 3 traits from 0-100. The number is the percentile in the population of English speakers with internet access, Western values, and a little bit of interest in ideas. E.g. a 20 means you’re better than 20% of people at that trait, and a 90 means being better than 90% of people at it. Sum the 3 scores. Under 150 is bad, 200 is OK, 250+ is good. The distribution of the scores does matter too. E.g. a 100 in honesty and a 0 in the other scores could actually work well, while a 33 in each trait is really bad. It’s partly that honesty is the most important trait of the three, but it’s more that having a high score in one trait is better than three mediocre scores. Being good at one of the three traits gives me something to work with and use as resource/tool.
FI is a place for *trading value*. Discussion is a value to us *if* it follows rational methodology.
So a good format for talking is *two section posts*, one section where the new person gets info about some topic of interest to them, and one section related to rational methodology – asking about their goals, bringing up methodology problems, etc.
If you talk about something and I think what you're saying is wrong and/or basic stuff that I already know, *and* I think your methodology is irrational, then you aren't offering value.
Debating you about something, or answering your questions, when you don't have knowledge to offer that will help me *and* you aren't debating or asking or learning rationally, is not of value to me.
If I think your methodology is irrational and you think it's rational, we could discuss that. That's a topic I'm especially interested in, so discussion of it can be a value to me even if the quality is low. I would like more people to actually try to specify what discussion methodology they advocate, and answer questions about it (like whether it's original to them or well known, and if it's well known has it already been written down in a high quality way somewhere?), and analyze how certain discussion statements do or don't fit particular methodologies.
Your method is anti CR. It is a form of justificationism. You are operating on the misconception that if you spend years *preparing* to discuss Popper that you will not make mistakes. Or make less mistakes.
This is problem avoidance and shows ignorance of Popper's epistemology.
Problem avoidance is stupid. You should stop pretending to be a fan of Popper. It is dishonest.
Curi is known to ignore criticism he can't answer. Instead, he will go off-topic about a minor pedantic thing. A missing comma, or a misspelled word.
It is a common self-defense mechanism that people with gigantic egos and huge insecurities engage in.
He also often pretends to be anonymous and hunted minors IRC.
Curi never has understood CR and never will. He would have to embrace fallibility and admit that Randianism is incompatible with CR. He can't drop Oism because it protects his ego.
TLDR, don't bother offering real criticism toward curi, he doesn't deserve the gift of criticism.
#13737 yes I've come to realize this is true.
When you participate at FI or curi, other people have no responsibility for any choice you make. It's up to you. Make your own decisions. Anything I say (or anyone else says) is simply an idea for you to evaluate and use (or not) as you see fit. Your role is to engage – read, post stuff, take advice, etc. – in a way that benefits you. Other ppl's role is to do that for themselves. Everyone looks out for their own interests. If everyone does this, then people only interact when there is mutual benefit. This is basically the same as how economic freedom and trade work and how each person pursuing their "selfish" interest causes every trade that happens to be win/win.
> Curi is known to ignore criticism he can't answer. Instead, he will go off-topic about a minor pedantic thing. A missing comma, or a misspelled word.
> It is a common self-defense mechanism that people with gigantic egos and huge insecurities engage in.
It's a common human trait. You also have it. And it's to do with memes, not ego.
You're the one being pedantic thinking you are above and beyond normal human flaws. You're trying to pass by as not having a gigantic ego and huge insecurities.
> He also often pretends to be anonymous and hunted minors IRC.
What?
> Curi never has understood CR and never will. He would have to embrace fallibility and admit that Randianism is incompatible with CR. He can't drop Oism because it protects his ego.
Oism is not about ego as understood normally.
I don't know about curi but it seems to me you never understood CR because "never will" is not a fallibilist position and this paragraph is not a criticism as it contains no explanations.
> TLDR, don't bother offering real criticism toward curi, he doesn't deserve the gift of criticism.
This is how curi thinks. :)
What to do to avoid some potential misunderstandings and bridge the communication gap?
What to do to avoid some potential misunderstandings and bridge the communication gap?
Try to directly answer questions. But that’s not always going to work, so:
* If someone asks you a question, and you don’t answer directly, it can help to add more framing to explain why you’re not answering the question and why you’re answering a different question instead.
* If you don’t answer a question at all, it can help to add more framing to explain why.
* If you don’t answer a question but you intend to answer after another another line of discussion is resolved first, it can help to add framing to explain that.
Try to address people’s explanations/criticisms:
* If you agree, in most cases you should not just say “I agree”. In most cases, especially for non-experts, it’s too easy to agree with
something you misunderstood. And it’s too hard for others to know exactly what you think you’re agreeing to.
* (For live discussion) If you interrupt somebody’s explanation to ask about a tangent, then after that line of discussion it can help to give
some framing like “my point was a tangent anyway. I think your main point was X.” Otherwise the other person won’t know that you understood what his main point was.
If you’re stuck on a problem that you’re discussing with others:
* Try to get unstuck by doing meta self-discussion.
* If that fails, expose your meta self-discussion on an FI forum to get other people’s help.