When people don't agree about how to cooperate, coordinate or get along, they may try problem solving. If problem solving fails or someone declines to try problem solving, then typically they should leave each other alone on that issue. If the issue is big enough, there are multiple disputes, or someone wants to, then they can leave each other alone entirely.

If there are obligations involved, like a contract, people should commonly either minimally follow the obligations or figure out a way to end the obligations early. If the obligations have only small importance or a weak level of commitment, then they should often just be dropped.

What does it mean to leave each other alone? This is determined by cultural norms. Society decides what people leaving each other alone is, or respecting the rights of others, or acting peacefully, etc. These things can change over time. Political philosophers can develop theories about how these things should work and sometimes influence society.

Our society says leaving people alone means respecting their rights and keeping to yourself. Don't use violence, violate property rights, break laws, break contracts, or commit fraud. Focus on your own life, your own actions, your own property, and your own voluntary interactions with others for mutual benefit. When a potential interaction lacks mutual consent then it shouldn't happen. There are tricky cases, like noise made on your own property or in public may carry onto someone else's property, and society has some ideas (which all adults should have some familiarity with) about what is too loud during the day or at night at what kind of location (it's different at a residential neighborhood or a factory with a night shift).

If you believe someone refuses to leave you alone, what should you do? If it's a minor issue, ignore it. If communication seems potentially productive, you can tell them your concern. If it's a big issue, you can talk to the police or a lawyer (for most disputes, which don't involve serious crimes, you should communicate before taking this step, even if you doubt it will work). Instead of vigilante justice, people can use independent third parties to make judgments about conflicts. Why? Because you might be mistaken, the other guy might be mistaken, you might both be biased, and society doesn't trust either of you to decide who is right or what the right outcome for the conflict is.

If your conflict is with a coworker, you can talk to them about it, talk to your manager or your human resources department about it, ignore it, transfer to another department or change jobs. If your conflict is with a spouse, you could talk with them about it, ignore it, talk to a couples therapist about it, or get a divorce. If the conflict is with a neighbor, you could communicate about it, ignore it, talk to an authority (police, lawyer, court, landlord, home owner's association), or move. The pattern here is you can try to communicate and do problem solving, ignore the issue, talk to a third party, or separate from the person you're in conflict with. In each case, taking matters into your own hands and directly fighting with the person is generally unacceptable.

It may feel unfair that a person has taken aggressive actions against you but you are not supposed to fight back. What is the reasoning for this? In many cases, the situation is symmetric: he thinks that you've been aggressive towards him while he's done nothing wrong. If everyone who thought someone else was being aggressive started fighting with them on purpose, that would lead to a lot of fighting and escalation. People would pick fights over misunderstandings or after they themselves did something wrong.

Note that fighting back in non-violent ways can be socially acceptable, like using passive aggressive comments, gossip, or office politics. That's somewhat discouraged but also widespread, normal and often allowed. In general, you can fight back using actions like gossip that would be socially acceptable even if you weren't a victim and didn't have defense as a justification. But you shouldn't fight back with actions like punching that are unacceptable in general. There are special exceptions like you're allowed to punch to defend yourself from a home invader because there isn't time to wait for the police to come.

Parenting

Parent and child can't just leave each other alone so there's a harder case there. Leaving each other alone in other cases can be difficult too, e.g. people don't want to change jobs, homes or spouses to avoid a conflict.

My former mentor David Deutsch developed a non-coercive parenting philosophy, Taking Children Seriously (TCS), which has errors. TCS says parents and children should do problem solving and seek solutions they're all happy with. They should reach agreement and act with consent. They should use creativity and communication instead of fighting. They should address root causes not just immediate problems. But what if they try really hard and fail to agree about something? As a last resort which should happen rarely, TCS tells parents to defer to their children:

where there is no common preference found, the parent must self-sacrifice ... Occasional failures, or even frequent minor failures, to find solutions, are probably inevitable, and we endorse parental self-sacrifice as the best way of making them less harmful and less frequent.

TCS thought this was a principled stance. I now think it goes against the standard principles that govern other scenarios. If people fail to agree and also fail to leave each other alone, in general they should defer to the judgment of an independent third party who isn't involved in the conflict.

TCS wanted parents to defer to children because parents chose to have children in the first place, which allegedly makes a parent the root cause of the problem. Also, if a parent is being unreasonable then the parent should defer. But if the child is being unreasonable, then TCS says that is due to the bad parenting in the past, so again it is the parent's fault and the child is the innocent victim who should be protected by the parent letting the child have their way.

What would a reasonable, independent third party in our society say about a conflict between a parent and a child? They would first look at the nature of the conflict. Does the conflict involve someone being inappropriately controlling and invasive in someone else's life? For example, if the child is telling the parent to switch careers to be a musician, because the child likes music, that isn't respectful of the parent's autonomy and right to make their own decisions about their own life. If the parent is an accountant and wants to stay an accountant, that's fine. On the other hand, if the parent wants his child to work in a sweat shop, the third party would say that the parent has no right to ask for such a thing and would take the child's side.

What if the conflict involves a legitimate area of mutual concern? Then in general an independent third party would side with the parent. Why? Many reasons. Parents are smarter, wiser, more rational, more knowledgeable, more experienced and more likely to be right. TCS disputes some of this, and I'm also unimpressed by this reasoning because parents are fallible and children are sometimes right.

Good parents tend to do socially acceptable things or persuade their children. So third parties tend to side with them about conflicts because they know what third parties would agree with and are already doing that. If both society and your child disagree with something, and it's your child's business too not your own personal matter, then you generally shouldn't do it.

Also, the parent is responsible for parenting outcomes, and control and decision making authority should be with the person who will be blamed for bad outcomes. Even TCS didn't think responsibility could or should be transferred to children.

Also, the child is a dependent who doesn't know how to run his own life, so it makes sense for the person in charge of making the child's life work out would also need to sometimes make some decisions to achieve that.

Also, sometimes the child wants things the parent doesn't know how to accomplish or even considers impossible. So then how can the parent defer to the child? This comes up less in the other direction because adults generally have a decent understanding of what is possible or realistic. A child might want a pet unicorn, a visit to mars, a birthday party that costs a million dollars, to meet a celebrity, to do something unsafe, or to go to a business that is currently closed (young children may lack a good understanding of time and schedules and may be impatient and want things now).

Parents can ask for unreasonable things that are too invasive too. It's reasonable for a parent to ask a child to spend time on his math homework and ask a child to try, but it's unreasonable for a parent to demand that the child understand math really well and become a top mathematician who does original research. The child doesn't know how to do that, so even if he wants and tries to obey his parent, it still won't work. An independent third party would likely see the issue with demanding great mathematical ability and disagree with the parent.

In general, these points are more relevant for 5 year olds than 15 year olds (and even more relevant for 1 year olds). If your child is 15 and you can't get along with him, maybe you should give him food, housing, transportation and a bit of money for 3 more years without being too pushy or interfering too much. Wanting him to graduate high school and stay away from drugs and crime would be normal but you don't need to micromanage a teenager who is unreceptive. An independent third party is much more likely to tell you to stop trying to control your teenager than your 5 year old.

In general, actually asking an independent third party to make a judgment is uncommon. And asking someone can be unreliable: people's opinions vary so you won't won't necessarily get you an accurate answer about mainstream opinion. And standard opinions can vary by region and sub-culture (e.g. by religion or ethnicity), so there are issues with asking the right type of third party (sometimes you should ask someone who is the same religion as you, but sometimes you ought to follow the mainstream opinion for your city, region or country). These principles for dealing with conflicts are often reasonably easy to use but are sometimes difficult to use.

Most adults know what standard opinions society has and can follow them without actually having a judge, jury, mutual friend or Reddit thread tell them what's normal. Even adults who are angry at each other can often mostly agree about what is socially acceptable without asking anyone else. And adults can often challenge each other when they think someone is getting the mainstream opinion wrong. When dealing with children, adults should double check themselves more than they usually do: ask friends more, do more internet searches, and ask AI chatbots more. Children often can't correct adults effectively, so adults should do more error correction on their own initiative.

Spheres of Legitimate Authority

Society has ideas about what is each person's sphere of legitimate authority where they get to have control and make decisions. Infants have a small sphere of legitimate authority, but it does include some things like infants may get hungry and want to be fed and parents are supposed to listen and feed them (and if a parent didn't do that, an independent third party would side with the infant). As children get older, their sphere of legitimate authority increases. They start owning property which they can make some decisions about. They start being responsible for some things in their life and therefore also getting some decision making authority. They become more familiar with their culture, more knowledgeable about what is acceptable behavior, more able to predict what judgments independent third parties would make, and more able to think like an adult. They get incrementally closer to independence.

When people are in conflict and fail to agree, if the conflict involves someone's sphere of legitimate authority, then the other person should back off. If the conflict involves an area of legitimate mutual concern, then the situation is harder. Parents and their children, especially young children, have a lot of areas of legitimate mutual concern where they need to get along somehow. E.g. if an adult doesn't brush his teeth, that is his business, not your business. But if a child doesn't brush his teeth, that is the parent's business too because the parent will have to pay for the dentist and also because society expects parents to educate their children on how to live a decent life which includes reasonable dental hygiene.

Conclusion

So I think TCS was wrong. "Parent defers to the child" is the wrong answer. "Child defers to the parent" is also wrong: following general principles, they should both defer to an independent third party.

Conflicts between adults tend to get bad when someone is mistaken about what society's mainstream view or purposefully going against it, or when society would actually consider it a complex situation where multiple opinions have a lot of supporters. Parenting can be hard because children often don't know about or ignore society's opinions, so a parent and child are often less able to use cultural norms as a mutually acceptable default answer than two adults are.

What if a cultural norm is mistaken? Should people still defer to it? If they both think it's mistaken, and they can agree about that, then they can do their own thing with mutual consent (as long as they aren't violating anyone else's rights). And even if people sometimes defer to mistaken ideas, overall progress and error correction remain possible. Cultural norms can improve over time. Anyone may work to try to improve them. I don't think we currently have a great system for improving cultural norms or for other intellectual progress, but progress can and does happen. I've developed some ideas about how to improve the system, e.g. public intellectuals could have Paths Forward and debate policies.

Is deferring to a third party, society or mainstream opinion a good system when people disagree? It's not great for figuring out what's true, but it's pretty good for keeping society peaceful: preventing violence and rights violations. If a disagreement is purely intellectual, people can just agree to disagree, have a debate, call each other idiots, or leave each other alone. The hard problems are when there is a potential for serious fighting and rights violations, in which case it's hard to come up with anything better than having people outside of the dispute decide on the outcome (and, for high stakes issues, to decide primarily in accordance with laws that were written down in advance). Many disputes deescalate because the participants already have a lot of mainstream opinions or know what the mainstream opinions are, and actual third party juries or judges can be used when necessary.

My former mentor David Deutsch taught me an idea that victims of injustices should be made whole by the person or group who wronged them. If someone violates the non-aggression principle, they should pay for all the harm they caused so that no one innocent is worse off than before. Victims should be restored to their original condition before they were victimized. You can consider "If someone offered me $X to accept Y happening to me, would I accept?" If the answer is no, then damages for Y are above $X. Payouts should be enough that victims are indifferent to the injustice never having happened or receiving the payout.

Deutsch took this principle of restitution much more strictly and literally than society usually does. His view is most similar to libertarians. He's trying to be pure and principled, but it actually conflicts with other principles. I now think Deutsch's strong approach to victim compensation is wrong and dangerous, so I've tried to question, unpack and critique it.

Disclaimer: My understanding of Deutsch's view comes primarily from discussions and posts from over 10 years ago. I don't follow his social media much lately. If he's changed his mind, I'm not aware of it.

Analyzing the Principle

According to Deutsch's position, the legal system frequently under-compensates victims, often by hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, if someone is mugged at gunpoint, they would be asked, "Would you have been willing to be mugged at gunpoint for a million dollars? Keep in mind it'd be a real mugging with a real gun and an unpredictable outcome. Even though you survived your mugging, take into account the risk of death when answering this question." If the answer is "no" then they should receive at least a million dollars in compensation for being mugged. (How can it be determined if they're being honest or how much compensation is really fair? There's no real way to know. But Deutsch was concerned with the principle more than practical details like methods of accurately determining damages.)

In Deutsch's approach, damages for all sorts of injustices can be very high and also include all costs of lawyers, therapists, courts, etc. Damages include your time dealing with everything, including your time spent helping catch the aggressor, choosing your lawyer, talking with your lawyer, travel time to visit your lawyer, travel time to buy a note pad to take notes while talking with your lawyer, time in court, the gas for your car, etc., all costs.

Today, if you buy a false-advertised product on Amazon which doesn't function as advertised (e.g. you buy something metal but receive a plastic product), you'll get a refund and free return shipping. According to Deutsch's view, you should also be paid for your wasted time, for not having a working product sooner, and potentially for feeling frustrated, unsafe and violated. If someone had offered you $20,000 to find out the world is worse than you thought, so that you become disillusioned and cynical, maybe you would have declined. And if the product was important to your child's fancy birthday party that you said was going to be super amazing and perfect (so your child will be very upset and disappointed if it goes wrong), and you can't get a working product in time, there could be big damages.

Victims are required to make reasonable efforts to minimize the harm they suffer, so at some size of damages the victim ought to have bought backup products to reduce risk or bought the product early enough to still have time to buy another. How big do the damages have to be before the victim should have been more careful? $1k, 10k, $100k or what? It's very hard to know, which is a problem with this approach: it doesn't provide enough predictability or enough ease for people to agree on how large damages are. Ideally, everyone ought to be able to pretty easily know in advance what legal outcomes to expect for various actions. Our current legal system isn't great at providing predictability but Deutsch's alternative would be less predictable. E.g. a negligent Amazon seller today knows they're just going to have to pay for a full refund and either let the customer keep the item or pay for return shipping, but they won't have to pay thousands of additional dollars just for sending the wrong product. They'll have to pay a lot more only if they do something especially bad like contaminate their products with lead. This isn't a perfect system but it's more predictable and has significantly lower amounts of victim compensation than Deutsch's system.

A strong approach to making victims whole focuses too much on figuring out who to blame and assigning all the large costs and harms to be their responsibility. It doesn't adequately address people's fallibility. Mistakes happen. Also there are disagreements about fault. And focusing on who to blame is often the wrong way to approach problem solving.

The allegedly principled approach to making victims whole also allows disproportionate responses, e.g. it can justify using guns and violence to get a million dollars back for one gunpoint mugging that took $20. This sort of escalation can easily lead to escalations by the other side who now thinks they're the victim.

Because a strong making whole doctrine tends to assign blame for all the damages from a conflict to one side and none to the other side, it can embolden both sides to use very aggressive, destructive methods since they believe the other side ought to pay the full bill for everything. Also, the damages are often already high enough that they would be unable to pay if they were determined to be the aggressor, so there's little incentive to avoid additional damages even if they know they might be at fault. And the difficulty of figuring out who is the victim can lead to multiple parties thinking they're the victim and then acting very aggressively to "defend" themselves.

It's really problematic for a huge bill of damages to be accumulating while there's uncertainty, unpredictability or disagreement about who will be liable for the bill. It's also really problematic to accumulate such big damages when it will never be paid because whoever is at fault isn't rich enough.

Deutsch taught me that collateral damage should be blamed on the original aggressor (as long as the defender used minimum necessary force to fully defend himself from harms and be made whole, or less). So you can have two sides shooting at each other, who both think they're the victim, and some third party (who everyone agrees is fully innocent) may be shot. Deutsch's view is that whoever is actually the aggressor is responsible for that, but even if fault is eventually determined in a clear way that everyone agrees on, that won't heal the gunshot wound or make the aggressor rich enough to pay for the damage.

It's also problematic when victims give up on justice because the aggressor doesn't have enough money to pay for their lawsuit (so even if they win and are entitled to be paid for their legal costs, they won't be paid). And it's also problematic when the victim wins in court and the aggressor files for bankruptcy (or otherwise doesn't pay because he can't) and the victim is never paid back for the original injustice and also has now lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees.

Suppose you're accused of aggression and asked to pay $5,000. If you admit your guilt and pay now it'll be done. But if you deny your guilt and go to court and lose, it could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars for your lawyers, hundreds of thousands of dollars for the other guy's lawyers, and also hundreds of thousands of dollars in court costs in a libertarian society (today, in the US, the court costs will mostly be paid by tax payers). So to defend your $5,000 you might have to risk losing a million dollars and going bankrupt (and a libertarian society with these principles might not allow bankruptcy). So it's much safer to just pay. But the incentive to pay, even when in the right, encourages false, exaggerated or otherwise problematic accusations.

Should court be cheaper? Yes. But doing a good job of reaching a conclusion about complex cases is hard and expensive. These issues would be mitigated some by more efficient courts but wouldn't fundamentally change.

What if you and someone else both made mistakes and both harmed each other some? So sure maybe you did $5,000 of harm to him, but also he did $8,000 of harm to you. Now he demands $5,000 in compensation, and it's true that you did harm him that much, but it isn't true that you should owe him that much taking into account everything that happened. Then what? If you fight in court to avoid paying $5,000, seek $8,000, or seek $3,000 by having both your and his claims handled in one case, that is all risky. It could cost you over $100,000 in legal fees, which you'll never get back if you win and he's poor. And what if you lose and have to pay his legal fees too? What if the court finds that actually you harmed him $500 more than he harmed you? Your evaluation of the harms was incorrect by $3500 which just barely makes you the more guilty party, so then you have to pay over $100,000 for his lawyers and can't ask him to pay for your lawyers, just because you should have owed him $500 in the first place but figuring that out was expensive. I think this is a bad system that's worse than the status quo.

Trying to be made fully whole also ignores the 80/20 rule. Basically, getting pretty good or good enough outcomes is often cheap but getting perfect outcomes is often super expensive and inefficient. For example, after an injustice, 20 therapy sessions might get you back to being reasonably functional and happy, while 500 therapy sessions still might not get you back to 100% unbothered.

Communication

Sometimes people think someone is an aggressor but they don't tell that person. They think it's obvious that he's violating their rights, and he should know, does know, and did it on purpose, so they don't communicate. Often, people don't know about your complaint, don't know there's a problem without being told, and don't see it the same way as you. If you start "defending" yourself without first telling the person about the problem, that's frequently actually aggression by you.

Sometimes people ghost others and expect them to know the reason and take the hint. Ghosting isn't communication, is inherently ambiguous, and often doesn't work well as a first resort.

There are cases where you shouldn't communicate and should go straight the police, like when you're the victim of a violent crime. But for anything that's more of a petty issue, you should probably communicate before forming a grudge or taking any action that would be aggressive if it wasn't justified defense.

Israel and Palestine

Deutsch often used this idea of making victims fully whole in his analysis of issues. For example, he applied it to Israel and Palestine. Based on many conversations, here's what I think he'd say today, which I disagree with (I've put my own comments in parentheses): Israel is the innocent victim of Hamas' October 7, 2023 attack. Israel is justified in defensively dropping thousands of bombs and killing thousands of people until Israel has used enough violence to be made whole (which will never happen) or Hamas is entirely destroyed or fully surrenders (at which point bombing more is pointless). Excessive defensive violence (more than needed to prevent any future attacks and be made whole) isn't allowed but massively disproportionate violence, including using nuclear weapons, is justified as long as Israel still isn't 100% whole and safe. The only ethical question about using nuclear weapons is whether using them in a specific case will help Israel get closer to being made whole or would be counter-productive. If the Palestinians don't like being collateral damage, Deutsch would tell them to demand Hamas make them whole or to attack and destroy Hamas so Israel stops bombing.

Parenting

Deutsch also brought this attitude to his parenting philosophy, Taking Children Seriously (TCS). I think it's a flaw in TCS (see my Fundamental Philosophical Errors in Taking Children Seriously for more).

TCS looks at things kind of like this: When the parent and child have a conflict and get stuck and fail to resolve the conflict, whose fault is it? Either the parent is being unreasonable or the child is being unreasonable. If the child is being unreasonable, that is due to the parent's past mistakes for being coercive or not helping the child well enough to become reasonable. So either way it's the parent's fault. So the child is the innocent victim and ought to be protected from harm and made whole with compensation. So, while the ideal is to find a solution everyone is happy with, the backup plan is for the parent to at least protect the child, make up for whatever past injustices they can, and avoid victimizing the child further. I disagree with this analysis.

TCS tends to put large burdens on parents and assign them huge obligations to their children. I think this is connected with the strong doctrine of making victims 100% whole, which Deutsch believed and taught me, but which I now think is a bad doctrine.

Justice

What is the correct approach to justice? That's a hard question which I won't try to answer here. I do think a more proportional, limited approach to responding to injustice is better and more compatible with fallibility. Having extremely high stakes hinge on getting a judgment of initial fault right, and extremely high risk if you made a judgment error (or if a judge or jury makes a mistake), is a bad approach from the perspective of taking fallibilism seriously (which TCS and Deutsch claimed to do). Fallibilists should care a lot about having more predictable outcomes that are pretty easy to understand and agree on and which don't bankrupt people when they make mistakes. Peace-loving people should also care about preventing conflicts and total damages from escalating.

Extreme cases with intentional and very serious mistakes, like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, can be handled more aggressively like with bankruptcy and jail. But I think Deutsch is wrong to take a lot of cases that are handled more leniently today and say those cases should be handled much more harshly with much larger victim compensation. I do think in general our society could compensate victims better, and there's room for improvement, but having huge, unpredictable damages in far more scenarios wouldn't be an improvement. And it's dangerous how Deutsch's principle encourages people to do large escalations and think they're justified. Deutsch doesn't require victims go through the courts or police nearly as much as today's society does. He instead says they would be justified in principle to do various "defensive" actions, including disproportionate escalations, so he's encouraging various types of vigilante "justice".

Deutsch's principles also view inappropriate, unjustified lawsuits or police reports as a form of aggression which justifies defensive actions and compensation to make the victim 100% whole. I think he's right to view using the police or courts as a type of force which must be justified as defensive force or else it's aggression. Non-libertarians sometimes downplay the seriousness of socially-legitimized government force. However, even when it's genuinely defensive, I think it's generally still a bad idea to use the police or courts when it's a disproportionate escalation.

Conclusion

Everyone, especially fallibilists, should try to be robust and resilient. They shouldn't have a rigid sense of justice where they can't tolerate the slightest loss. They should approach life in a way where they can handle some bad luck, some unresolved disputes, and even some injustices or receiving only partial compensation. They should recognize that getting along with other people is hard and other people have different ideas about what behaviors are reasonable, acceptable, defensive or aggressive. Social harmony requires significant tolerance of different perspectives on justice, aggression and rights. Thinking you're a victim doesn't justify massively disproportionate escalations. A better more fallibilist principle is don't escalate much. One or two small escalations can be OK sometimes though it's usually a bad idea, but one large escalation or many small escalations are almost always terrible decisions. People often need to let things go or deescalate, and if the matter is so serious that they consider that impossible, then they should generally go to the police or courts instead of pursuing vigilante justice (but people should be hesitant to do that because those government systems can do a lot of harm and be very expensive, so using them can be a disproportionate escalation).

Taking Children Seriously (TCS) is a parenting philosophy by David Deutsch and Sarah Fitz-Claridge. It advocates a non-coercive, anti-authoritarian, fallibilist approach. It draws inspiration from Karl Popper's fallibilist epistemology and from libertarianism. Deutsch was my mentor. I learned a lot about TCS and was a fan. TCS was largely abandoned by its founders 20 years ago and became a pretty dead movement. Some recent attempts to revive it do not appear to be going well and I'm unaware of any TCS advocates who are open to debate today.

This essay discusses philosophical errors in TCS theory, some of which are related to Critical Fallibilism, the epistemology I developed to improve on Popper's Critical Rationalism. While I don't recommend people try to follow TCS parenting practices, I still think TCS is intellectually interesting, partly because of its connections with Critical Rationalism, and partly because I still agree that conventional parenting is flawed, irrational and mean. Like many reform movements, TCS was right about more of its social critiques than its solutions.

TCS Introduction

TCS interprets disputes between parents and children as disagreements about ideas rather than as disobedience, misbehavior, mistakes, human nature, sin or wickedness. TCS says the parent is fallible and may be wrong, and disagreements should be approached rationally with truth-seeking methods that are not biased in parents' favor. Punishment is a clearly irrational way to deal with disagreement; debate is more appropriate. A parent shouldn't be an authority with the final word who can get his way at any moment just because he says so and he's physically stronger.

TCS rejects forcing children to do anything they don't want to. TCS is highly critical of schools and recommends something along the lines of extreme, pure unschooling (which is like homeschooling but without a set curriculum or anything else resembling school). TCS also criticizes parenting behavior that's illegal to do to other adults, such as hitting someone or physically moving them to a different location against their will. TCS also had some weird, deeply problematic ideas, including about doing some things to children that are currently illegal, e.g. TCS favored abolishing age of consent laws. There are old TCS discussion emails, including by Deutsch, that are dismissive of the danger from child predators, but I think that attitude is factually mistaken.

TCS rejects the goal of passing on all of the parents' ideas to the children. Instead, it says children should be free to choose what to agree and disagree with. In this way, it's expected that each generation will reject and correct errors from the previous generation and humanity will rapidly improve. TCS had a tendency to think utopia was within reach in just one generation if people would listen. Anyone who rejected TCS was seen as standing in the way of a better world by intentionally choosing to be an irrational child abuser. Despite advocating more gentle parenting towards children, TCS was quite harsh with parents and would call them abusers for doing normal, conventional, socially acceptable actions. TCS even compared mainstream parents to slaveowners since they don't give their children total freedom, but that comparison is an error.

TCS advocates dispute resolution by common preference finding. The basic idea is to use creativity to find a solution that everyone is happy with, not coerced by. It's like seeking mutual consent plus more (begrudging consent isn't good enough). TCS's focus was on specifying what attributes a good solution would have (no one is coerced) and on arguing that that goal is possible not impossible, but TCS didn't give enough practical guidance (there was nothing like a common preference finding flowchart to follow). I did develop a common preference finding method myself (which I think is a good start but inadequate to enable most people to do it).

Coercion

TCS redefined the word "coercion" to mean:

the psychological state of enacting one idea or impulse while a conflicting impulse is still active in one's mind.

This is an inherently binary definition: either a person is in this state or they aren't. This definition doesn't specify any amounts or degrees. And TCS advocates sometimes denied that any coercion is less bad than any other coercion, which fits with a binary view. In line with that attitude, Deutsch responded (mirror) to an article about traumatic teen wilderness camps by denying that those camps are worse than other schools (even though the article talks about prosecutors filing over 100 charges of physical and sexual abuse for one of the camps).

One of the major, original ideas of my Critical Fallibilism (CF) is to evaluate ideas in a binary way, with criticisms either refuting or not refuting ideas. CF rejects credences, rejects the concept of arguments strengthening or weakening ideas by degrees, and rejects the approach of evaluating ideas by how good they are then reaching a conclusion based on which idea has the highest evaluation. CF puts a lot of effort into discussing what binary ideas are, how they're different than matters of degree, how to work with them effectively, how to avoid potential problems with them, how to get benefits from them, what degrees still can be used for, etc. It's a major change to approach epistemology in a binary way and it requires a lot of explanations and methods to make it work and replace everything that it's logically incompatible with.

TCS brought up but didn't answer some potentially confusing issues. If coercion is binary, then whipping a child isn't more coercive than yelling because there's no such thing as more coercive. So is whipping worse in some other ways? Should we be looking at other issues besides coercion? But TCS focuses heavily on coercion. If whipping isn't worse, what does that mean for how we live or how we judge parents? Whipping could be replaced with something worse, and yelling with something milder (TCS sometimes used frowning as an example of coercive parental behavior), and the same questions still apply.

When you approach an issue in a binary way, and it's counter-intuitive to most people, a lot of analysis and explanation is needed to help people make sense of it, which TCS didn't provide. TCS didn't say their coercion definition was binary, let alone explain how to deal with that. I searched over 49,000 TCS emails and only found two short conversations that discussed coercion being potentially binary. There was one in 2002 and I brought it up myself in 2004. TCS emails began in 1996 and the TCS founders never discussed coercion being binary.

Can CF's analysis of binary evaluations of ideas be used for TCS? I think it's relevant and useful, but you'd have to change it and add some new stuff to try to make it work for TCS. I haven't done that so I don't know how well it would work out. There are significant differences between binary evaluations of ideas as refuted or non-refuted and binary evaluations of states of mind as coerced or not coerced. A refutation means an idea fails at a goal, and we can consider multiple goals and give an idea multiple evaluations (one per goal), so within CF's binary approach we can differentiate one idea as better than another, even though they both have the same evaluation for one goal, because they have different evaluations for other goals. TCS's goal with coercion is total avoidance, whereas with CF it's fine if an idea is refuted for some goals: you can still use it for other goals. (In fact, for any idea, you can specify many goals which it fails at.)

Fallibility and Mutual Consent

TCS seeks mutual consent as a way of dealing with fallibility. People can be wrong. Even when you're really confident, you might be mistaken. If you ignore critics without their consent, you may be wrong and stay wrong even though a better idea is available.

Why does consent matter? If someone thinks they have an important correction of an error you're making, which they want to share, it's intellectually dangerous to ignore that. Consent means that someone agrees with you (they aren't a critic) or they are fine with you not changing your mind at this time (so e.g. they don't see their correction as important or don't want to make the effort to share it).

TCS correctly points out that children are people with ideas who may be correct when they disagree with their parents. TCS also has arguments about how children are selective about what they disagree with their parents about, and this selectivity can make up for their ignorance, allegedly giving children around a 50% rate of being correct when they disagree with their parents. It can of course be much higher or lower than 50% depending on the child and the parents. But the common assumption that the parent is right 99% of the time is unreasonable. Fallibility isn't just a technical point about edge cases; it's pretty common that parents are wrong when they disagree with their children. (I don't agree with the 50% claim but I do agree that parents are mistaken reasonably often.)

Note that the parent being mistaken doesn't mean the child is correct about what they want to do. It's often easier to be right about a criticism than a solution or proposal. It's often easier to point out errors than avoid errors. Just because a child correctly recognizes a flaw in a parent's idea doesn't mean the child's alternative idea is correct or better. It's common that the initial ideas of the parents and children are all incorrect.

Note: This section about fallibility uses my own way of explaining TCS. I think I made presentation improvements while staying accurate to TCS's claims.

Handling Fallibility

Seeking mutual consent runs into some difficulties. It can be too time consuming to answer every critic who wants your attention. And after you answer, they might still disagree and want more answers. They might have reasonable followup points, or they might be a beginner who is effectively seeking free tutoring disguised as critical debate, or they might be an unreasonable person who doesn't listen well.

The mainstream, conventional answer to this is to legitimize ignoring dissent when you judge that engaging with a critic isn't the best use of your time. You estimate which critics have the most promising points, if any, and ignore any person or idea that you want to ignore. This basically enables an unlimited amount of bias. I consider it one of the largest errors in our society which is systematically making all of science and academia much less productive or rational.

TCS's answer is, at least with your own children, to basically spend unlimited time and energy addressing disagreements. Just keep at it until you get mutual consent about what conclusion(s) to reach or what to do.

TCS and Deutsch didn't give clear guidance on how to handle fallibility regarding online debates with strangers. I personally tried to follow their principles by seeking mutual consent to end debates. I tried to be open to criticism from anyone. I tried not to unilaterally judge that a conversation should end. I tried not to be dismissive of ideas even if they sounded dumb to me because, as a fallibilist, I didn't want to risk being wrong about that decision to be dismissive. I even engaged with ideas that I'd already addressed in the past because I could potentially be mistaken that it's a repeat of a past idea, rather than a similar idea that's actually correct. Or even if some ideas are identical to ones I refuted in the past, this person could have an additional argument that the past person didn't which changes the final conclusion.

Although my debates were time consuming, overall I found them productive and I learned a lot. While I'm sure there was room for improvement, engaging in a lot of debate was valuable for me. However, after around ten years, the value of my debates started noticeably going down for me. Debates started getting too repetitive, both about the specific ideas (like hearing the same old pro-induction or anti-fallibility arguments again) and about the meta patterns (like people making logic errors, failing at reading comprehension, or quitting in the middle).

I developed a solution which I called Paths Forward. The basic idea is to have error correction mechanisms other than continuing to participate in a discussion. That let me decline or end more discussions because I knew that, even if I was wrong about the value of that discussion, there was still a way I could be corrected. Having backup plans for error correction enabled me to opt out of far more discussions without the typical risk of being and staying wrong. I've found this highly effective at protecting my time and energy. I've concluded that it's unnecessary for intellectuals to be bad fallibilists; they should have error correction mechanisms like a debate policy.

Error correction mechanisms, beyond the first one of using your good judgment, require some degree of autonomy or independence to be effective. They should be external things, generally written down in advance. They need the ability to overrule your judgment or exert control over you. If they couldn't, then they wouldn't be able to correct you when your judgment is mistaken. This is similar to a king giving up some arbitrary power to have written laws which even he must follow. Error correction mechanisms are powerful when you genuinely give up some power or authority.

For me, having error correction mechanisms is far less work than putting basically unlimited energy into critical discussions and debates. However, most intellectuals are used to arbitrarily ignoring whatever they want with no transparency. For them, this approach requires them to do more work (and give up some power), which many of them don't want to do. I got the effort required to be rational down from unbounded to maybe 10 hours a month, which I thought was a really good accomplishment. But most intellectuals spend 0 hours a month on being rational so 10 hours still sounds like too much work to them. Also, I think a lot of intellectuals avoid error correction mechanisms because they're making a lot of errors and would in fact be corrected, which they would find embarrassing and unpleasant (they don't consciously view it this way, but they intuitively avoid the sorts of debates they would lose).

The basic issue is how to say "no" without being an authoritarian, irrationalist or infallibilist. It's very important to have good answers to that. Being unable to say "no" is extremely harmful. Being authoritarian, irrationalist or infallibilist is also bad.

So the mainstream approach to fallibility is to be arrogant and have inadequate interest in error correction. And the TCS approach, at least with one's children and ambiguously with everything else, is to put unlimited energy into dealing with one's fallibility. TCS, by advocating mutual consent (or more) as the goal, is demanding people put more energy into error correction on any issue as long as a counterparty isn't satisfied. This is impractical. The mainstream is right to reject this. Neither side (TCS or mainstream) has any practical ideas for how to rationally handle fallibility and error correction in a limited, finite amount of effort. In that context, while I sympathize with TCS's aspirations, I think the mainstream view is better than TCS's view: arbitrarily rejecting error correction (with people encouraged to do their best to be rational and avoid bias, which isn't very effective) to protect people's autonomy is better than placing an unlimited burden on people.

As a fallibilist philosopher, I worked on solutions to the problem of dealing with fallibility well using limited effort. My solutions were developed primarily in the context of online debate between public intellectuals. I think significant modifications would be needed to apply them to parenting. But I think that's what should be done to create a good, new parenting philosophy: adapt CF's error correction mechanisms and develop new ones for interactions between parents and children. I don't expect the results of this project to be an incremental improvement on TCS. I expect it to create a new, separate approach to parenting that takes some inspiration from TCS (particularly the idea of applying Popperian fallibility to parenting). I haven't done this. I haven't worked out the details. Perhaps this project would fail for some reason. But I think I figured out a good lead for how to develop a good parenting philosophy.

Authority and Responsibility

In general, we pair authority with responsibility. If you were responsible for a decision made by someone else, it wouldn't make sense and would be unfair to you. Whoever has control over something is also the person responsible for the outcome. Imagine if a company hired two people: one whose job is to make decisions and another whose job is to be blamed if the decisions are bad. That wouldn't make sense and would be especially unpleasant for the person being blamed for things he had no control over.

TCS takes authority away from parents and tells them to defer to their children when they fail to resolve disagreements through rational discussion and mutual consent:

where there is no common preference found, the parent must self-sacrifice ... Occasional failures, or even frequent minor failures, to find solutions, are probably inevitable, and we endorse parental self-sacrifice as the best way of making them less harmful and less frequent.

TCS also said parents shouldn't self-sacrifice, self-sacrifice is coercive, common preference finding should fail infrequently, people should not ask "What if?" or "Who should rule?" type questions, people should focus on solving underlying root cause problems instead of on solving the immediate problem, people should focus on problem solving not assigning blame, and that asking about what happens when finding a common preference fails shows that you have the wrong attitude and therefore will be unable to find many common preferences. This is confusing. TCS didn't have a good, clear answer here.

The law and society in general hold parents responsible for parenting outcomes. If a child doesn't brush his teeth and gets cavities, that is the parent's fault. If a naked toddler wanders outside in the snow and freezes to death, that is the parent's fault. If the child asked the parent to let him go in the snow with no supervision, and the child kept insisting and wouldn't listen to the parent's concerns, and the parent followed TCS's advice and deferred to the child, that is still the parent's responsibility even though TCS gave the child the authority to get his way and make the decision.

This isn't just the mainstream opinion. TCS also holds parents responsible. If you defer to your child and then he gets a bad outcome, TCS blames you (you should have given your child better advice and warnings, and been more persuasive).

You may think toddlers wandering around in the snow is absurd but TCS's founders communicated very clearly that TCS allows no exceptions and that parents must be open to common preference finding, and acknowledging that they may be mistaken, even in worse scenarios than that. Parents who said they definitely wouldn't let their kid do something really dangerous were called irrational, mocked, and pressured to keep an open mind and seek a common preference instead, and told to never ever use their authority to get their way if common preference finding fails.

Splitting up authority and responsibility, so that one person makes a decision and someone else is responsible for the consequences, is an error. It doesn't work in companies, families, or anywhere else. If you want a rational family, you need to help parents be more rational, not take away their authority (while having no way to take away their responsibility). While you can put some limits on parental power (and society does, e.g. laws against child abuse), parents need to learn to use their power rationally, not try to stop having the power that is paired with their responsibility as parents. Parental responsibility is a burden which parents took on and must use their power to handle well (and should gradually transfer as children grow up and approach independence).

To use their power rationally, parents must handle their fallibility well. They must know that they may be mistaken even when they feel confident that they're right. Neither arbitrarily dismissing disagreements nor putting unlimited energy into discussing disagreements is a good approach. So my abstract suggestion is that parents approach their fallibility with error correction mechanisms similar to how CF advises public intellectuals to have debate policies.

I think one reason TCS didn't want to give parents permission to ever use their authority without their child's consent was because TCS was too controlling towards parents. TCS's founders cared what parents did and pressured them to change their behavior to better suit the preferences of the TCS founders. This is problematic even when the TCS founders have good preferences (like that children shouldn't be spanked or yelled at). It doesn't adequately respect the freedom and autonomy of parents. It tries to transfer some authority from parents to TCS leaders without transferring corresponding responsibility.

Parents and Culture

TCS says parents and children together control children's outcomes. And children aren't born bad. Therefore, if parents changed their behavior and were great, their children would definitely turn out great, and if many parents followed TCS then society would soon be great.

I now think culture is more powerful and influential than parents in many ways, and that even great parents could easily raise mediocre children who accept lots of mainstream errors.

Parents can be more influential than culture by keeping their children extremely isolated, but they shouldn't. Merely homeschooling and being anti-social isn't even close to isolating enough. I mean more like being in a cult or living off-grid with the children not having internet access or any friends with internet access.

I think if you want a better world, you need to figure out how to deal with culture. TCS tried to be a shortcut to a rational world without figuring out how to help adults become rational, just by having adults change their parenting behavior so that the next generation would be rational. I don't think that shortcut can work.

This is related to another mistake TCS made, which was to view coercion as intentionally caused by other people. The idea was that if parents just stopped coercing on purpose then children wouldn't be coerced. I think self-coercion and unintentional coercion are both common and that cultural ideas can cause coercion.

Conclusion

TCS defined coercion in a binary way. TCS didn't recognize this, acknowledge the many difficulties with it, and provide appropriate explanations and analysis to address those difficulties. CF uses a binary approach to evaluating ideas, but it clearly says so, addresses many concerns, and offers a lot of analysis and explanation.

TCS's attitude to fallibilism puts a basically unlimited effort burden on parents (and potentially on everyone, throughout their entire lives, if they apply the principles universally). Putting such a big burden on parents is really harmful and I think this did harm a lot of parents without them recognizing what the source of the harm was. So I think my identification of this issue is important for people who were involved in TCS (and hopefully intellectually interesting for others). And dealing with fallibility is an important philosophical issue that I'd already worked on abstractly and regarding public intellectuals and debates. A middle ground is needed between unbounded effort to handle fallibility or legitimizing arbitrarily dismissing criticism and requiring zero effort. Working on handling fallibility with limited effort in the parenting context, including applying my work about error correction mechanisms to parenting, is a potential way to develop a successful rational parenting philosophy.

Transferring authority from parents to children, without transferring corresponding responsibility, doesn't work.

Culture can be more powerful than individuals including parents.

These are complex ideas and this essay has focused on high level summary. To understand in more detail, you could read my many other essays about TCS, epistemology, fallibility, Critical Rationalism, Critical Fallibilism, decisive arguments, Paths Forward, debate policies, debate methodology, error correction mechanisms, etc.

I also wrote three more TCS related essays shortly after this essay:

• Error Correction Mechanisms and Parenting
• The Injustice of Strictly and Literally Making Victims Whole, Such as All Children
• Conflict Resolution, Including for Parenting

Here is an imperfect goal productivity method which I think is interesting. Please read the whole essay before trying to use (or criticize) this method because there are clarifications and extra details later.

This isn't a philosophical principle. It's a self-help method. The chance that any self-help method is useful for you is under 50%, maybe under 5%. If you intuitively or explicitly don't like it, don't do it. Don't pressure yourself about it. If you try it, feel free to stop at any time.

The Method

Write down your goals. Include at least 10 goals, maybe around 25.

Then order your listed goals from most to least important. Write the date and save the document.

Do it again a month later.

Then do it again a month later.

Repeat until some goals are in your top five for three months in a row.

The goals that reoccur are more stable. You shouldn't pursue goals in a longterm way until you’re confident you’ll have the same goals in the future.

Focus on your stable goals. Prioritize them.

Consider avoiding or rejecting some of the other goals.

The numbers are completely made up and can be adjusted to suit you. For some goals, you might want them to be stable for 12+ months before you do them. For tiny goals, there's no need to track them for 3 months before doing them. You can also do way more than 5 small goals, but if you're focusing on really big goals, 5 could be too many.

The most important part of my method is writing down goal lists multiple times and comparing them. What you do with the results is pretty much up to you and acting on the top five goals that have 3 months of stability is just an example of what you could do. This is basically a form of journaling and gathering data about yourself to better inform your decisions.

Precursor Method

This method is based on a method that was falsely attributed to Warren Buffet. That method said to write down your top 25 goals, then do the top five and avoid the other 20. It said the other 20 take away energy from the top goals.

According to The 5/25 Rule: How to Apply It [+ Example], you might choose these top five goals:

1. Revamp the social media campaigns
2. Launch an email newsletter to customers
3. Recruit, hire, and onboard an analytics specialist
4. Redesign the company website and branding
5. Revamp the employee training program

After choosing those 5 goals , you're told to avoid other goals like "Attend one marketing conference a year", "Hire a summer intern", "Plan a successful holiday party for staff", and "Learn a new language". That's weird to me because you could do all of them. That's not that much stuff.

If they mean only doing 5 goals at a time, it's still weird because you'll quickly run out of slots if you're doing some goals gradually. Like if you're spending an hour a week on language learning, that seems completely reasonable. But with 5 things like that in your life, that'd use up all 5 of your goals in only 5 hours per week!

So my changes to the method are to focus more on big goals and to take into account the stability of the goals over time. And I made it more about journaling and information gathering rather than about harshly avoiding everything that isn't a high priority. I also acknowledge that I can't tell you exactly what numbers or details to use; that's flexible; there's nothing inherently great about the number 5.

Details

The original self-help advice didn’t consider people who keep changing their goals (which is less of a concern when the goals are fairly small work tasks). Frequently changing goals is a common problem. People often come up with some new goal and while they’re doing it they think it’s important and will last for years, but then they switch goals after a few days, weeks or months. And they do that over and over. If you make a list every month, and you’re changing goals often, at least you’ll see that you’re changing your goals. You’ll have written data to show you that you haven’t yet figured out some goals you care about in a stable way that will last over time.

My method doesn't offer a quick win. It'll take at least two months to get started (you can do your third list two months after you start because the first list is done after zero months). If you don't have stable goals, then my method becomes only a journaling method instead of a productivity method. That's OK. It's useful track your goals and see how stable or unstable they are. Being aware of what's going on may help contribute to you coming up with a good idea about what to do.

This advice requires writing down notable goals, not “eat meals so I don’t starve to death”. If you write everything important in life, you’ll need to pursue more than five things. You can just write down substantial achievements you’re aiming for or whole topics to work on. In other words, write down aspirational goals not background goals nor micro goals. Or write down more types of goals but label them. Or make multiple lists. How to format your journaling is up to a fair amount of personal taste.

If a goal is unstable, be cautious before spending much money on it, or making investments in it that are meant to pay off in the distant future. It'd really suck if you did the bad parts (in your opinion) that you thought would help with later good parts, then you quit right after that. Or it'd suck to spend a lot of money then quit. If an interest might be unstable, try to get some immediate enjoyment and benefit instead of relying on benefitting later. Starting with parts you don't like could also cause you to dislike the activity and quit.

Also, trying to work towards being one in a million skill level at twenty separate things is a way to never be get that far at anything. Getting that far is unreliable even for just one thing that you focus on. Instead of using words like "great" and "good", it may be worth putting some numerical thought into your goals like if you want to be top 10%, top 1% or top 0.0001% at something. Try to be honest with yourself and monitor that your actions fit your goals in a reasonable way. Maybe in 20 years you could be top 10% at 20 separate things but maybe being top 1% at 20 separate things would be too hard. But top 1% at 20 related things is way easier, like if you reach top 1% skill level at a board game, maybe you could also reach it at 19 more board games, and that'd be way easier than reaching top 1% skill at a bunch of separate things that don't overlap much like farming, chemistry, Mandarin, archaeology, architecture, programming, cooking, pottery, etc.

Don’t spend a month on something new – and be so busy you don’t make progress on your main goals – and then next month switch to a new thing that gets its own month, and repeat. If you want to be a philosopher but make zero progress on it this month because you're so into photography, and make zero progress on it next month because you're learning Japanese, and zero progress the next month after that because you decided to work on a no-hit run of Dark Souls, which you never finish because the next month after that you're trying to cook perfect stews, that is a bad system. Those activities could all be fine if they're what you want to do, but if things keep not going according to plan and keep distracting from some other goal you want to do, then you have a problem. People can keep that up for years and never make advanced progress on anything, which is fine if you just want to try a bunch of things but bad if you wanted to get really good at something and you let each new thing get the way of it. If you spent half your free time on your new hobby for the month and half on a long term goal, that'd work better. If you get really emotionally caught up in new things to the exclusion of everything else, and then you abruptly switch, and you keep doing that ... that's OK if you're happy with that but it's bad if that's not what you want your life to look like. (If you're doing that but aren't happy with it, consider why you're not happy with it. You could be right or could be wrong. You could have toxic attitudes to greatness.)

Also, people commonly decide to do their top goals later instead of first. This happens on a one day timeframe because they want to be at their best when working on their top goals. They want to read about the most important topics when they’re fully awake, practice those topics when in a good mood with no distractions, etc. They try to take their top goals seriously by allocating their best most productive time to those goals. But they don’t have enough of their best time, so their top goals get neglected. To reach an advanced level at something, it really helps to take some imperfect time, when you’re somewhat tired or distracted, and use it on your top goals.

People also commonly put off top goals until later on a large timescale. They plan to do university first, or get their career going and get several promotions, or get married and have kids, or all of those things. Then they're 40 and they have new goals and they never tried for their old goals or they just did them a little as a hobby.

A point of the top five goals method is to admit to yourself that some things are less important to you and stop using too much resources (including time, energy, attention and money) on them. A point is to do some prioritizing: to make some intentional decisions not to pursue some things which will cut down on distractions and help you achieve your top goals better. Considering trying to work on one of your top goals every day that you work on anything besides paid work (rest days, sick days, holidays, vacations, etc. are allowed).

You can rest. You can be busy with your job. You don’t have to try to make progress all the time. But monitor whether you're actually getting to your top goal(s) a satisfactory amount. You may need to find some easier ways to work on them or else you may find you make most of your progress on other, easier stuff.

Also, don't consistently overbook your schedule and plan to do more things than you're actually able to do. If that's happening, pay attention to how long things take and work on scheduling more realistically or conservatively.

Conscious and Subconscious Goals

Valuing a goal in a long term way often requires (consciously) thinking about what’s important and why, not just trying things until you happen to stick with some of them (because you subconsciously like them). It's important to have your conscious and subconscious be in agreement. They both matter.

A common way people show they’re bad with long term goals is cheating on their spouse. Some people are unhappy for a long time and purposefully go looking for someone else. But others are happy enough in their marriage and cheat with someone they just met, just for short term fun, because they’re short-sighted, and then they quickly regret it. They didn’t ever effectively integrate the value of their marriage into their thinking and decision making. It never became intuitive to them. They’d have to stop and think to remember it matters. They’d have to remind themselves about upsides of their marriage. But sometimes they don’t stop, think and remind themselves.

It helps to do some introspective thinking sometimes. Try to understand what you consciously and subconsciously like and look for ways those are the same or different. Try to understand what you consciously believe but don't find intuitive, or vice versa (intuition mostly comes from your subconscious). If you lack intuition for something, more time thinking about it and practicing can help. If you lack conscious reasons, more research and analysis can help. And when your conscious and subconscious disagree, either one could be correct and either one could be incorrect, so try to explore with an open mind instead of jumping to conclusions about which side of the conflict to take.

For more information about how I think about intuition and the conscious and subconscious, see:

• Don’t Suppress Your Intuition
• Intuition and Rationality
• Intuition and Rational Debate
• Intuition Is Part of Rational Living

Greatness

You don't have to try to be really great at anything. You don't have to be better than almost every else who works on it. Pursuing that has upsides and downsides. I have high goals with philosophy and I seem to attract some people who want to be really great at intellectual pursuits. My mentor David Deutsch had toxic attitudes to greatness, and I think I echoed some of those, more so in the past. It's OK to just be good at things! It's even OK to do some things you're bad at, and never get good at, if you like them! You shouldn't feel pressured into aiming at greatness. You can live a relaxed life and enjoy yourself while just not hurting others.

Long Term Goals Affect Short Term Decisions

Knowing your goals affects activities now. If I read an economics book and I plan to read 100 more in the next couple years, and be really thorough, I'll choose one book and way of reading it. If I plan to read only 0-3 more economics books in the next couple years, I may choose a different book and read it in a different way. I may choose a more general overview. Or I may choose a book I particularly enjoy instead of making sure to read books from opposing schools of thoughts.

If economics is just a hobby, I'm not going to have time to read all the important books from all the schools of thought, and I need to accept that I didn't thoroughly investigate everything and know my limits. I'll just have to be aware that I didn't personally check everything in the field and that the summaries I saw are not fully trustworthy. Hopefully being open to debate with people who read books that I didn't read will help fill in the gaps if I missed anything important, but that isn't reliable because too little productive debate takes place in our society.

And if I were reading a book in pursuit of the goal of being a top economist, I might want to take a lot of detailed notes and aim to write several essays about it. If I were reading it as a hobby, I might not take many notes and write one essay only if inspiration strikes because writing no economics essays is fine too.

Multitasking

If you're actively working on 25 goals at once, I doubt that's going to work well. A point of this method is to limit your multitasking some. Even if you are a generalist who learns a decent amount about lots of things, and you end up studying over 250 topics in your life, you can't do them all at once, so some focus is still useful.

If you want to get good at things, doing each topic for a month will work better than e.g. spending one day on each topic and rotating through 250 topics 30 times each. It's fine to go back to previous topics sometimes, but it's also important that your work on a topic doesn't get spread out too much, unless you're just doing it for fun and don't mind forgetting a lot. If you work on 250 things at once, then it'll be common that after working on something for a while you get distracted for a long time by the 249 other things.

Imperfect Method

As I said in the first paragraph, the top five goals method is imperfect. You can apply it loosely. You can modify it. If you don't have consistent goals every month, that's OK; it's good to know that. If the method mostly turns into journaling and having some data about your goals over time, that's fine; maybe that's good and the most useful part of it.

If you don't like the top five goals method, don't do it. It's just an idea. I thought the original method was flawed but worth existing and potentially useful for some people, and I thought I had a modification with some clear benefits. My version has some downsides too, like a lot of people want a method that they can use right now, whereas my method just involves journaling for at least two months before you actually do much. I think journaling is good but if you will drop anything that doesn't provide a quick win, then my method won't work for you unless the journaling part alone ends up providing a quick win.

With self-help advice in general, authors, no matter how smart and wise, can't customize their advice so that it'll work for every reader they've never met. You should expect that well under 50% of self-help advice will make sense to you and fit your context well. You should approach self-help advice prepared to not do most of it. It's not all going to work for you, and you need to pick and choose what you think will work for you. You need to help yourself by selecting the parts that will work in your life using your own understanding of them.

There are lots of productivity methods. If you don't like this one, you can use some other method. You don't need this specific method in order to be productive. There's nothing super special or important or logically necessary about it. That's how self-help, life hacks, life pro tips, etc., work in general. Some people find them helpful, and if you don't, you can skip that one, and you should expect to skip over the majority of them.

I wrote this essay because I thought my modification to an existing method was interesting. I didn't think the method should be used by everyone or that it's super great or super important. I thought that goal stability over time is an interesting issue. I also think journaling about your goals monthly, even with no other steps, could help some people. Just record the information, look at it, think about it a little, and then do whatever you think is a good idea, and that simple method could work well for some people (and poorly for others who do better with more concrete guidance).

If you think this method sounds really super great, even though you're reading the "imperfect method" section of the essay, please try to think critically about it before reading the final section. I think the method is decent not great.

Final Comment

Here's another issue with this method. If you didn't think of this issue, I hope you can accept that you're probably missing some other issues too.

It's common that a goal sounds great to people until after they try it. If you just plan to do it, it could be in your top five for months or years, but then once you try it you pretty quickly decide it's not for you.

If you don't have experience with something, instead of making a big goal about it, maybe you should make a small goal about trying it out a bit. And even if you've done some trials, pursuing it as a big goal may be different than trying it out. It's important to have some flexibility after you decide on a stable big goal, both early on (when you're more likely to change your mind) and forever (unexpected issues can come up later too).

I watched a TikTok video by alimcforever that particularly impressed me. It's also on YouTube. It only has 8129 likes on TikTok and 164 likes on YouTube, which is an example of how merit doesn't reliably rise to the top. The content of the video actually helps with understanding what prevents merit from rising to the top.

The video divides the concept of small talk into two separate concepts, small talk and low talk. In this new terminology, small talk is innocuous, harmless, low pressure, low stakes, natural, organic, opt-in, and not something people typically hate. When people say "I hate small talk" they mostly actually hate low talk. Small talk can build comfort, warmth and rapport.

Low talk is socially obligatory conversation disguised as politeness. It can transmit expectations, social cues, microcorrections and microagressions. It can subtly ask for information about people's lives which can be checked for conformity. Issues that come up include what you do on the weekend, where you live, your appearance and clothes, appearing tired, low energy or unfriendly, what TV you watch or what music you like. These allow for social surveillance and subtle pressure towards conformity without overt confrontation. Low talk comes up frequently in workplaces, including immediately before and after meetings when it can be hard for people to avoid it. Anything that nudges people to do performative responses is problematic.

The examples of small talk and low talk in the video are good, and better than I can give, and the video has more explanation I haven't covered, so watch the video. I'll quote examples which may serve as reminders if reviewing this in the future, but I think they're more understandable in the context of the video:

Small talk:

[I saw a nice dog]

[I tried a weird sandwich]

[I] saw a fox today

Low talk:

you've got your hair different today

you're very quiet today

that's not like you

I suppose you don't do dairy anymore do you?

does anybody have any good gossip?

British low talk class sorting:

where did you find that jacket?

do you live around here?

I thought this low talk concept was important and useful, and helped me understand some common conversational patterns better. I really appreciate insightful commentary on subtle conformity enforcement, social status hierarchy behaviors, and the hidden meanings behind social interactions. I haven't found a lot of high quality analysis (in my opinion) on these topics even though they affect people's daily lives.

The video doesn't discuss boring, repetitive talk like "It's sure rainy today." Ten different people can talk to you about the weather on one day, and also the same comments can repeat on every day with similar weather. People in some jobs keep hearing repetitive jokes from many different customers. This can cause performative responses and feel obligatory. It can get into some problematic social dynamics, e.g. you could potentially be identified as a non-conformist if you say you like the rain, though I think liking or disliking the rain are often both acceptable. Your answer could be judged as low energy and bored sounding or warm and friendly. Silence could be taken negatively. I don't know how alimcforever would analyze this: I see some of the low talk issues but it also seems less bad than the examples she gave.

In the TikTok comments, someone said:

this is FASCINATING! i'd love to write about this- do you have any other resources? (by yourself, or recommendations? i will cite you of course!)

alimcforever responded:

I didn't get this from a paper. I got it from a decade of sitting in Teams calls trying not to scream. I just made up the term 'low talk' today to describe my the difference but go hard and steal it for your research if you want. A book I'd recommend is David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs

I'd previously seen alimcforever doing leftwing history explainer videos which contradict various mainstream narratives. I found them interesting and important if true, but in general I don't know who is correct about which historical facts. I don't strongly trust or distrust mainstream history sources and I believe a lot of research is needed to reach a conclusion on each issue, especially when the issues are politicized. That research is generally too much work and not a top priority for me. If anyone wants to research some of her history claims and share their results on my forum, I'd be interested.

If you want to improve at philosophy, it's important to work on it on a regular basis. It generally takes a long time to get big results.

How do you work on it? Read, write about what you read, write about your thoughts, write for sharing with others (e.g. forum posts, essays), do intentional practice sessions, work on underlying skills (e.g. grammar, math, logic, trees). These steps aren't especially complicated or hard to figure out. They're well known.

Many people would improve significantly if they did this for an hour a day for a year. Even 15 minutes per day for a year would lead to progress.

It's important to do all of the major learning actions frequently, not skip some. If you read but never write, it's common to make less progress. If you read and write but never do practice sessions and you consider all prerequisites boring even though you're not great at them, that can be significantly less effective.

Many people have issues with working on something consistently over time. Their life is chaotic. They get distracted by a series of crises. Their goals and motivations change frequently. They get interested in something else and switch. If you want to be an expert at something, you need to have a stable interest over time and keep working on it.

You don't need to be a dedicated expert at anything. You can be a generalist not a specialist. You can learn about a variety of things. Maybe you can learn more than most people about a topic in a month but not try to compete with people who spend many years on that topic.

Some people like to participate in philosophical discussions and online arguments but don't like to study philosophy. They are different activities, which can be related and connected, but don't have to be.

What can I do as an async tutor?

My main goal is to help people with learning philosophy. I can give guidance on productive philosophical activities and review work for errors. I can answer questions. I can converse with people, guide discussions between others, design practice activities, recommend readings, ask questions, and identify weaknesses people can work on. I can help with building up underlying skills that are relevant to philosophy.

People could (for example) read Eli Goldratt books without me, if they wanted to, and make some progress. With my help, they could avoid some mistakes, get some corrections, get some pointers in the right direction, get some questions answered, and get better results faster. I can explain Goldratt's ideas or point out connections between them and other ideas. My goal and role is to make things better and more effective, not to take someone who doesn't want to read Goldratt, or couldn't handle it at all on their own, and change their personality or lifestyle.

I don't make people do philosophy activities. I can't reliably fix motivation or procrastination. I can't choose other people's goals for them. I can give some reasons that philosophical goals are appealing and some candidate goals, which people may find persuasive or not. I can talk about what I like about philosophy. I can give some tips on scheduling and other related issues, e.g. I can recommend getting plenty of sleep. I can suggest trying a variety of self-help books until one works well for you. I can give some thoughts on solving some specific problems in one's life that are getting in the way. But it's really up to each person what they want to do with their lives, what goals they have, what interests them, what they spend time on.

I made my async tutoring self-paced, with procrastination and motivation excluded as topics that I deal with much. I don't have great, super-effective solutions there (and I don't think anyone else does either). I know more about philosophy than psychology. And your preferences aren't necessarily problems to be solved. If you prefer knitting or baseball, maybe you should do that.

Not spending time on philosophy (or another goal) can mean a lot of things. Maybe you're really busy. Maybe you don't enjoy it. Maybe it's not the right goal for you. Maybe you're a perfectionist who's paralyzed by fear of making any mistakes so you don't do anything (even though inaction and perfectionism are themselves mistakes). Maybe you're chronically ill, exhausted, or have lots of bad habits. Maybe things will be different later or maybe they won't.

If you think you should like philosophy, but don't, I don't recommend trying to do it due to feeling external pressure from me or other sources. Please don't think I am pressuring you every time I speak positively about philosophy or criticize something. People also speak positively about all sorts of other topics, like playing the piano or cooking healthy food, and they criticize alternatives, and that's OK and shouldn't pressure you. When I write essays, I'm sharing my opinion and hoping my ideas are helpful on a fully voluntary basis; I'm not trying to and don't want to control your life.

I often share ideas which you can figure out how to use in your life, or not use, as you please. You can also have impersonal thoughts and discussions about my ideas, or not, as you choose. Ideas you read in essays are never perfect, never 100% complete, and are somewhat generic or impersonal. Even when essays include action plans, customization for your personal circumstances is important for getting good results.

Even if I'm your async tutor, detailed help with your psychology or motivations is out of scope, and my tutoring is more focused on more impersonal topics like philosophy, English, math, economics, science, etc. I'm willing to make some comments on psychology or self-help as abstract topics but that isn't detailed personal advice and async tutoring isn't therapy or life coaching.

Note: It's OK for students to bring up personal issues including about motivation. If there are relevant problems, I do want to have some idea of what's going on, even if I don't provide a full solution. I'm trying to set expectations, not give students something to worry about; as the paid tutor, staying on topic is my job not students' job.

I can help people in a more personalized way if we do regular calls instead of just async tutoring, but ultimately, as Karl Popper explained, people do their own learning. People have to create their own knowledge in their own heads with their own conjectures and refutations. People have to think for themselves to understand what others say or what knowledge is in a book. Teachers and authors are helpers who can be quite helpful but play a secondary role, not the primary role.

Rootclaim does judged debates with $100,000 wagers and likes Bayesian probability math. They lost their first debate about whether COVID came from a lab leak (their view) or from animal-to-human transmission. They paid but didn't change their minds, challenged the guy to a rematch with another $100,000 wager and a different debate format (he declined), and are still challenging the public to debate it for $100,000. They did a live debate but now think they should have done a text debate with a tree structure (done as nested bullet points), mid-debate feedback from judges, and word count limits.

Judged debates are interesting to me because I kind of like the idea but I don't think they work well when basic premises are being debated. For example, I don't see how to get fair judges for a debate about Popperian vs. Bayesian epistemology. If a lot of basic premises are shared between all debaters and all judges, then judged debates can work OK. If people agree on epistemology and are just debating a political topic, then judged debates can work better. The topics Rootclaim is interested in debating seem reasonably suitable for judged debates, but the philosophical premises I disagree with Rootclaim about do not.

I like the idea of debates with wagers but I think $100,000 is too large in general. That size excludes most people. Wouldn't it be better to have a lot more debates with lower stakes instead of just one high stakes debate so far? I'd be happy to have some $100 debates with people. But without judges, how do you decide who wins? You can use an honor system. If either side concedes, they pay. If someone unilaterally leaves the debate, they have to write a concluding statement and answer some followup questions, or they pay. If someone breaks a clear, objective debate rule, they pay. In many cases, neither side will pay, but I think that's OK, especially since the stakes aren't that high anyway. I see many advantages to this instead of $0 debates (and some disadvantages too).

Is an honor system effective? I think it's moderately effective when the stakes aren't too high and people have a reputation: a lot of fans, a lot of karma points, a long posting history, paying clients, academic credentials, etc. I don't think an honor system is very effective with fresh anonymous accounts, or amateurs with no track record or reputation using their real names, but that isn't necessarily important. I think it can be reasonable to offer a one-sided bounty for debates: if anyone can beat me in a debate, I'll pay them. If that's reasonable, then it also seems OK to have wagers where you're not confident the other person will actually pay if they lose.

Rootclaim posted an article titled Every Logical Argument You Ever Made Was Wrong. The article contains some decent points about how many premises are false. It concludes that we should give up on using deductive logic and focus on probabilities instead. I disagree. Logic being difficult to use effectively does not imply that we should give up on it. Maybe some people are using it well even if most aren't. Maybe many people are using it well sometimes; no comprehensive study was attempted; just a few examples were criticized which don't fairly represent all types of real world usage. Maybe no one is using logic well currently but we should try to solve that problem instead of rejecting logic.

Although I haven't investigated, I'm doubtful that the math underlying their probability work avoids all uses of deductive logic anywhere in it or its premises. Rigorous math tends to be closely connected with logic.

In the comment section of the article, Jon wrote:

This essay is wildly wrong. When premises are untrue, the argument is unsound, not invalid. Validity refers to the formal relationship between terms, and is always defined hypothetically, “…if the premises are true…” Unsound arguments can be formally valid, but have untrue or questionable premises. For example, “Spot is a dog. All dogs have fleas. Spot has fleas” is formally valid, but likely unsound, because the premise “All dogs have fleas” is probably false.

Rebecca, who appears to be affiliated with Rootclaim, replied:

Thanks for commenting, Jon.

As you can tell, we don’t care much for logical reasoning, so we don’t really bother with the formal terms. Please interpret words using their normal spoken meaning.

I think this attitude is really bad. How did they decide that logical reasoning is bad if they never learned much about it and don't know the basic terminology? Shouldn't they have expertise at logic before evaluating and dismissing it?

• What is a philosopher?
• Why be a philosopher?
• What skills are needed?
• What are the goals of philosophy?
• How do you tell good philosophy from bad philosophy?
• Is philosophy for everyone?

Regarding whether philosophy is for everyone: it could be in a better world. It used to be that only a few people learned math, but now in USA we try to teach arithmetic to everyone in elementary school. We’re not very good at teaching it, but a lot of people become competent at it. Not many people become specialist mathematicians who learn really advanced math. Philosophy could be the same way: ~everyone learns the basics, but only a few people become experts on more advanced parts of the field. Like we’re trying to make ~everyone literate but only a few people write books, are grammar experts, or are great at analyzing and understanding text (which gets into philosophy skill too).

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Philosophy is the field which takes on big, fundamental, timeless, impersonal and abstract questions which aren’t covered by the hard sciences. To some extent, philosophy covers anything which isn’t parochial and isn’t covered by another field. Philosophy also has some specific topics it has claimed like epistemology (the study of knowledge), rationality, morality, metaphysics, ontology, scientific method, political philosophy and some stuff related to logic, aesthetics and theology (but logic, art and religion are major topics outside of philosophy, too).

The origin of the universe is a big question, but the “big bang” theory is part of physics not philosophy. Philosophers don’t do a lot of measuring or experimenting like scientists. (In the past, there wasn’t a clear distinction between philosophers and scientists, and “natural philosophy” meant things like physics, chemistry and biology.)

Philosophy is also used in all other fields because it provides part of the foundations of all other fields. Philosophical ideas can be applied to help with other fields. Philosophy includes topics like how to think rationally or how learning works (conceptually; various specific learning or teaching methods can be outside of philosophy), so that’s useful in every field.

Philosophy generally doesn’t deal with the details of psychology or current events. It sticks to more general principles like political philosophy deals with broad, timeless questions of how society can and should be organized. Economics is relevant there but is its own separate field.

On average, philosophers are more willing to be unconventional and potentially offensive, in pursuit of truth, than other people.

Debate and rhetoric are partly separate fields from philosophy. Debate clubs with score systems do things that aren’t very philosophical or rational. But how to actually debate issues to a conclusion is a philosophical matter (as opposed to how to bicker with others in ways our culture current considers effective or persuasive).

Philosophy deals with some very hard questions which is one of the reasons it’s not very popular. People often get pretty stuck and come up with several plausible answers and debate those answers for centuries without reaching conclusions. Philosophy has been overshadowed by science because scientists, in the last few centuries, have made a bunch of clear, objective progress. They’ve settled a bunch of disagreements using experiments and more conclusive modes of debate. Also, successful technologies have been pretty convincing. You generally can’t build a machine to demonstrate that your philosophy theory is correct as you can with many scientific theories. And machines can provide a lot of practical benefit to people. Electricity and motors come from science. You can see that light bulbs work and they’re very useful. Whoever invents or manufactures light bulbs must genuinely know something since they do work. People don't go around claiming that light bulbs are impossible; they aren't controversial; while there must have been skeptics about whether light bulbs would work before they were invented, the issue has now been settled.

Philosophy is pretty fractured with varied opinions. Even when many people appear to agree on something, like induction or justified, true belief (JTB), it’s often not really much agreement. There are many different views on induction or JTB. Advocates of these ideas continue to debate amongst themselves. They haven’t settled the issues and moved on to more advanced issues. Physicists and chemists have a bunch of ideas which weren’t known 500 years ago but which are pretty uncontroversial today, which they can build on instead of continuing to debate the same old topics.

I believe philosophy is very important today partly because it’s neglected and unsuccessful. There’s lots of room for improvement and more need to improve. Philosophy is more broken than science, so fixing it could provide more benefit.

Scientists use philosophy (“philosophy of science”). If philosophy were improved, then scientists could invent more. Philosophy could also help with political improvements, moral improvements, and people having more rational, effective, unbiased debates.

Scientists use the “scientific method”. How does that work? What thought processes should scientists use and what should they avoid? How can scientists be unbiased? These are philosophical questions. The detailed methods of experiment, like how to use specific tools or chemicals, are scientific matters. But questions like “How do you know when you have enough evidence to reach a conclusion?” are philosophical questions that scientists must deal with. “How can you know anything at all?” is another question that’s relevant to scientists who are trying to gain knowledge.

Scientists all have philosophical ideas. They have opinions on what knowledge is, how it’s acquired, and what makes it reliable, high quality or true. Scientists have opinions on whether we live in an objective reality which actually exists or whether our planet and lives are all one alien’s dream or a simulation on an alien’s computer. If scientists have incorrect ideas about these philosophical issues, then they do a worse job. For example, there are ongoing problems with scientists confusing correlation (which is easier to find and study) with causation. There are widespread confusions about what correlation is, how it does and doesn’t matter, what it means, what it hints at, etc. And correlation is an abstract, philosophical issue about knowledge and how to learn things and seek the truth. It’s covered by philosophy. When scientists study it, they are branching out into doing some philosophy. How correlation works is the kind of thing which has to be (hopefully rationally) debated. You can’t do experiments to figure out the right perspective on correlation.

Sometimes scientists work on philosophy without realizing it. This can go poorly because they don't know what field they're in, don't learn an overview of what's already known about philosophy, and try to use scientific methods that are a poor fit for philosophical jobs. Not having all the biases and misconceptions of typical philosophers could also be a helpful advantage, but so far I haven't seen scientists come in and solve major philosophical problems while mistakenly thinking they're still working within their own field. I have seen scientists write stuff that is over 50% philosophy and then tell me I can't possibly understand it and evaluate it myself because I don't have training as a scientist. They don't realize they're working more in my field than theres, and they're missing more relevant background knowledge than I am. (I've also studied science and math more than most scientists or mathematicians have studied philosophy. While I'm not an expert, I do know a lot of the basics, know a lot of general overview/summary information, and know some specific details. I also have fairly broad knowledge about science covering many topics, for example I know more about physics than most nutritionists and more about nutrition than most physicists. Many scientists working on philosophy know much less about it than I know about science; sometimes they know so little they don't even know which topics are part of philosophy not science.)

Should we gather evidence to support our hypotheses, and then decide they’re true when we have a big enough pile of evidence? That is one methodology. There are alternatives, like believing that some pieces of evidence matter more than others. Or maybe evidence can’t actually be weighed up to see how good a theory is. Maybe evidence has to be interpreted by theories rather than telling us about theories.

Another methodological issue is p-values (probabilistic confidence values for scientific experiments). People claim that if certain statistics show over a 95% chance that their experimental results aren’t due to random chance, then their results are “significant” and any lesser result (e.g. 93%) is “insignificant”. That is confused and contributes to lowering the overall quality and effectiveness of science.

Worse, an experiment might get 98% confidence and be considered significant. But what assumptions does that result rely on? Taking a step back and thinking about the bigger picture is one of the things philosophers do. Many of the assumptions that scientific results are based on are actually philosophical issues, not earlier scientific theories or experiments.

Experiments with 98% confidence have premises like “There were no relevant factors that we didn’t control for.” How do you know that? Maybe there were. Evaluating that issue requires philosophical debate. Trying to come up with relevant stuff that you didn’t even consider is the kind of task philosophers deal with. Philosophy can be hard and many philosophers aren't very effective, but at least philosophers try to do this kind of thing and they are on average better at it than non-philosophers (people who don't study philosophy and aren't trying to be good at philosophy).

Judging which of two scientific theories is better or should be tentatively believed and acted on (or concluding that we don’t yet know an answer) is a philosophical issue. Deciding whether we need more experiments or we should move on is a philosophical issue. Those involved methods of truth seeking and evaluating ideas.

Philosophers deal with arguments and explanations a lot. Those are part of how we seek the truth and try to understand the world. And being good at those techniques is more clearly necessary for philosophical questions (where it's common to make no progress at all without good arguments and explanations) than for scientific or cultural questions (where people figure some stuff out despite being pretty poor at explanation and argument).

What is an argument? What categories of argument are important? E.g. there are positive arguments (supporting ideas) and negative arguments (criticism). There are decisive arguments and indecisive arguments (partial support or weak criticism). How does an argument differ from an explanation? Do all arguments have to be explanations, but some explanations aren’t arguments? What makes some sentences explain an issue while others don't?

Philosophers also deal with the nature of ideas, e.g. what does it mean for an idea to be fallible or infallible? Tentative or not? Absolute or not? Biased? Meta?

Meta ideas are ideas about other ideas. Philosophers deal with meta ideas a lot, while other fields don’t use them as much. Meta ideas let you take an idea, take a step back, and analyze it or talk about it. They’re crucial for not getting too caught up in details and instead seeing the bigger picture, as philosophers strive to do.

Philosophers don’t look at only the big picture. They’re also somewhat known for detailed debates over the meanings of words and sentences. They can try to get details right so they can be precise. Philosophers focus on conceptual and linguistic details (language is one of the main tools of philosophy). Scientists often focus on other types of details such as doing very precise measurements or cleaning laboratory equipment very thoroughly.

Philosophers try to use their big picture view to figure out which details matter and then pay attention to those. They especially try to pay attention to details that matter to figure out big picture views correctly.

Philosophers often fail. They deal with hard stuff so the failure rate is higher than in most fields. Sometimes they advocate wrong ideas. Sometimes they debate details that aren’t important. Whole philosophical movements or schools of thought have gone wrong (but perhaps so have some whole scientific research projects like string theory).

In general, it’s harder to tell when a philosopher is doing a good job than when someone else is. Philosophical ideas are harder to evaluate. It takes a lot of skill to work with them. But it’s worth trying, even though it’s hard, because they’re important.

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Here are some additional thoughts that partly repeat the above:

Philosophers take on the deepest, hardest questions. As we get better at dealing with some questions, such as natural science, it becomes its own field and stops being part of philosophy. Philosophers don’t deal with settled, solved, uncontroversial easy stuff. They push boundaries. They work on problems that aren’t well defined yet. They work on issues where it’s hard to tell even when you have a correct answer. Many philosophical problems have been debated for millennia or centuries without reaching a clear conclusion.

Are philosophers the deepest, smartest thinkers? No. There’s lots of low quality philosophy work. Also academia tries to commoditize philosophy into specific specialties where people can make steady progress (or just teach and talk about existing ideas while making no progress) doing certain types of less creative research. Academia tries to get philosophers to fit into some predefined types which is contrary to the nature of a philosopher. Philosophers should be seekers of truth who explore widely instead of each philosopher staying under a particular lamp post (with some lamp posts having thousands of philosophers crowded under it).

Philosophers do the most big picture and meta thinking. They think about principles and methods. There’s confusion because many scientists try to understand the scientific method, while many philosophers don’t. But it’s a philosophical topic because you can’t measure it. It has to be debated with abstract reasoning. Scientists often spend some time working as untrained philosophers, and sometimes do better than trained philosophers (the philosophy training in school has upsides and downsides rather than being clearly good), which gives philosophy a bad reputation and confuses people about what philosophy is and isn’t.

Many famous philosophers were wrong, bad, ineffective. Studying them won’t teach you to think effectively. Not many philosophers had very useful things to say about the methods of rationality, how to be less biased, how to reach conclusions in debates, etc. But those things are necessary tools for analyzing all the other philosophical questions.

Philosophy is important but humanity hasn’t done very well at it so far. The ancient greeks did well for the time period, but it’s not clear that we’ve improved much since then. Certainly the progress in science and math has been far, far better.

What do philosophers do?

• hard problems
• bigger picture
• meta
• methods
• principles
• problems not addressed by other fields
• foundations and fundamentals
• asking “Why?” more than other people
• questioning stuff
• timeless ideas
• non-parochial ideas
• questioning intuitions, not being satisfied by intuitions (not just rejecting intuitions either)

Fields of philosophy include epistemology, morality, ontology and political philosophy.

Epistemology is a prerequisite for the others.

Many philosophers try to look at epistemology as vague stuff like “What is the nature of knowledge?” They don’t see philosophy as practical. They aren’t trying to figure out how to be rational, how to be unbiased, how to reach conclusions in debates. You need that stuff to do any kind of philosophy effectively. All fields of philosophy (and all other fields) require some skill at judging ideas. Philosophy requires that skill more because you get fewer practical hints about what works or not because it’s more abstract and deals with questions/goals that are harder to define. You can get by as a barber, dentist or experimental scientist with less knowledge of how to judge ideas than a philosopher needs. Knowledge and skill at rationality helps, particularly when trying to make progress (which many barbers don’t even attempt), but a philosopher is in more trouble without skill at rationality. Or put another way, a barber might get by with mediocre knowledge about judging ideas (not none) while a philosopher needs higher quality knowledge to be effective.