To have a productive discussion, you need a method of discussing. What is step 1 in a discussion? What is step 2? What is step 3?

If you don't know, or don't have it in writing, why would you think you're ready for an intellectual discussion? That means you will follow a unknown or unclear method. In that case, if the method has any flaws, then you will have a hard time in the discussion (due to using a flawed method) and have a hard time understanding why the discussion isn't working well.

If your discussion method hasn't been analyzed with conscious, critical thinking, you should expect it to have lots of flaws. And if it isn't specified in writing, you should expect to change it mid-discussion according to your biases.

Suppose you try to have a discussion with someone and you use one method (one approch to how to discuss – what to say, when, how to organize it, etc.) and he uses a different method. What happens? Chaos. Your step 1 and his step 1 don't match. Your step 2 and his step 2 don't match. From your perspective, he keeps doing the wrong things. From his perspective, you keep doing the wrong things.

So it's important to communicate about your discussion method and take an interest in the discussion methods of others.

If you can't self-evaluate what you're doing, it's too hard and you're overreaching. You're lost, confused, and making tons of errors with no effective way to recognize them. Stop and work on something that you can already self-evaluate with high success rate and confidence, or something incrementally one step beyond that.

To have a productive discussion, you need a goal. What outcomes would qualify as success? If you don't know what you're aiming for, achieving success is unrealistic.

And you ought to have some idea of the other person's goals so you can aim for mutual success.

Part of having a goal is recognizing what outcomes would not be success. You have to specify what would be a failure and risk having a failure happen that you acutally recognize/acknowledge/admit.

And part of achieving goals is having some idea about how to achieve them – a plan.

As Karl Popper taught us, there's more than one way to approach the truth.

This doesn't prevent topics from having prerequisites (you need to learn X before Z – Z builds on X). It sometimes gives you options about prerequisites (you could use X or Y as a prerequisite for Z, there are two known approaches to Z, one using X and one using Y.)

Prerequisites relate to different ways to organize knowledge. There are options for that but for many issues only a small number of known options are good, effective and efficient. One day we might learn some new, good approaches to a topic. At that point you could perhaps use W as a prerequisite for Z instead of X or Y. But today people don't know about that option.

Look at currently existing approaches to a topic, look at their prerequisites, choose one of the approaches, and learn the prerequisites for it. Don't try to skip prerequisites on the basis that there's more than one valid approach to a topic.

What some people do is basically say "There is an approach where X isn't needed, so I won't learn X, and there is also an approach where Y isn't needed, so I won't learn Y." You need to pick some particular approach, see what knowledge is needed for it, and get the knowledge.

People often refuse on the basis that some alleged prerequisites are unnecessary. That people sometimes make mistakes in identifying prerequisites doesn't invalidate the whole concept. If you like, give specific arguments about why something is or isn't a prerequisite to a specific topic using a specific approach to that topic.

How can you figure out prerequisites you need? Look at your project plan. What steps are you planning to do? For each step, consider what skills and resources you need to accomplish it. Don't rely on getting lucky. Be reasonable.

For example, if a step is to build a log cabin, you should know how to do that. That means e.g. knowing cabin design and some woodworking skills. You'll also want a chainsaw and nearby trees. If a step is to trap wild animals and sell the furs, you should know what sort of traps to use, what animals are in the area, how to set the traps up, how often to check them, etc. If your plan is to spread ideas, you should know what the ideas say and why, why the ideas are superior to alternative ideas, and the answers to attempted criticisms of the ideas you're spreading.

What if you plan to learn as you go along? Knowing how to set a trap is a prerequisite for setting a trap. But you could do it in an earlier project step instead of before the project starts. That's often unwise because learning doesn't always go smoothly and it's hard to plan projects based around skills you don't yet understand (will you even like doing it?). Anyway, putting prerequisites earlier in the same project doesn't invalidate the concept of prerequisites.

It's also possible to divide a step into sub-steps and mix in learning prerequisites. You can split building a cabin into 20 steps, then watch a YouTube tutorial about the first of those steps, then do it, then watch a YouTube tutorial about the second of those steps, then do it, and so on. This is generally only a good idea with pretty simple, easy projects where success isn't very hard to come by and delays aren't a big deal (it especially works well with practice projects where learning is the main goal).

Learning to think rationally precedes learning to have rational discussions.

Discussion basically uses two skills: thinking and dealing with other people.

Language is part of thinking well. It'd be useful even if you were stuck on a desert island alone for the rest of your life. You should have practice and success using language in your thinking before trying to use language in discussions.

Looking at many sides of an issue is part of thinking well. You should be doing that alone. So discussion shouldn't be a big change where things go from one-sided to two-sided (or more). Discussion should involve people doing the many-sided thinking they would have done alone.

Needing prerequisites for projects doesn't usually mean more school.

Schools broadly fail to teach much. They don't work anyway. And they teach a lot of the wrong things.

Let's take an example. You want to write a novel. What are some of the prerequisites?

You'll need to be literate and able to type (already done, no worries). You should be better at grammar. You also need to know about plotting, character development, and what existing novels are like (what are some good things that your novel should have? what are some flaws in prior novels that you want to improve on?). You'll also need some project management skills. You're going to spend maybe a year writing the novel (or maybe five years while working a day job?). How do you schedule and budget your time? How do you organize your efforts over many different days and months, so it all comes together into a completed project? How do you finish the project instead of stopping in the middle? How can you know in advance what projects you'll still want to do six months from now? I suggest you start with smaller projects and shorter writing before a whole novel.

So anyway, do you need school to learn grammar? You already went to school and still get lots of commas wrong! Lots of schools don't even bother trying to teach grammar. When they do teach it, it's often a bunch of memorizing arbitrary-seeming rules and teaching to the test (just like how they screw up teaching math).

It is important for a novelist to know how commas work. But the default, standard approach to learning that should be using books and the internet. Look there first before looking for a course let alone going back to school. Try to educate yourself and consider getting education from others (which usually doesn't work well at all) as a second option if self-education isn't working. (BTW, if you can't educate yourself, I don't know why you think some teacher is going to fix your problem for you and somehow make your learning work well.)

Also, schools pretty much don't even teach novel writing skills or project management skills until college. 13 years of K-12 education isn't enough to fit it in, apparently. Novel writing isn't a skill everyone needs so it makes sense not to teach it to everyone, but do people really need to wait until age 18 to start learning it?

And with project management the assumption seems to be that you don't need to know it because there will be a boss who knows it and you'll just follow orders. That's the life they are preparing you for by only even trying to teach project management at business school for people preparing to be bosses. And keep all your hobby projects small and short since you never learned how to manage a larger project! Project management is something pretty much everyone should know a bit about, but it's left out of general education at schools!

Project management is important for projects you do alone. Some people maybe think it's just for team projects. But by yourself it's still useful to have some idea of what tasks go into a project, estimate how long they'll take, estimate resource costs per task (e.g. how much money you'll have to spend), etc. Then you can look at your schedule and budget and see how long it'll take to get the project finished. And then you can consider: is it worth it compared to alternative projects?

A project merely means doing multiple activities/tasks over time which are meant to work together to achieve one or more goals. That's something people do alone or in informal, non-business settings. And it's something that can go wrong. There are plenty of ways to be disorganized and screw it up. So people have developed ways to better plan, evaluate and organize projects. But most people aren't taught them in school and don't go find out for themselves either, which makes their projects unnecessarily difficult and risky.

(In my opinion, the best project management author is Eliyahu Goldratt.)

School success does not imply being smart, wise or knowledgeable.

Failing your school classes or hating school does not imply lacking brainpower or lacking learning capacity.

Hating school doesn't mean you hate learning.

Enjoying school of getting A's does not mean you like learning or understand the topics covered in your classes.

These things aren't significant hints or clues. There isn't a strong correlation. You can't judge people by their relationship to school.

On the high end, if you're really great, that clashes with the conformity and obedience that school asks for. But being great can make up for it. If learning the material is easy for you, that advantage can lead to school success even if, e.g., you don't respect your teachers. It doesn't have to lead to good grades but it can; the result can go either way.

On the low end, if you're bad at thinking, that can lead to pretty good grades if you just do as you're told, make a visible effort, and have low starting points to improve from (teachers often give good grades for improvement instead of just for actual results).

If you fail a bunch of classes, it could be because you disliked them (with cause) and skipped classes or didn't pay attention. This can happen if you're smart or dumb or in the middle. There's stuff to dislike about class for everyone.

If you get bad grades, it could be because you saw how pointless it was to memorize things for a test and still not understand them. Maybe you didn't learn the material but at least you knew you didn't understand. Most people who pass don't understand the topics either, they're just e.g. more willing to pretend their confusions are successful learning.

If you get pretty good grades, you could be a stupid, obedient conformist. Or you could have seen lots of flaws in the system but been under extreme pressure from your parents to find a way to get pretty good grades anyway. Or many other things.

Don't judge people by how they did in school.

And especially don't judge yourself by how you did in school.

It's very hard for people to learn by interacting with other people directly. Two major reasons:

1. Interaction triggers people to behave and interpret socially. They put most of their effort into social hierarchy stuff instead of learning.
2. People are complex and flawed. It's a lot to deal with in addition to the subject itself (the subject is e.g. philosophy or physics concepts). People have to deal with miscommunication, scheduling, mutual benefit, different background knowledge, being able to think about other points of view, etc.

An impasse is a reason (from the speaker’s pov (point of view)) that the discussion isn’t working.

Impasses take logical priority over continuing the discussion. It doesn’t make sense to keep talking about the original topic when someone thinks that isn’t working.

An impasse chain is an impasse about a discussion of an impasse. The first impasse, about the original topic, is impasse 1. If discussion of impasse 1 reaches an impasse, that’s impasse 2. If discussion of impasse 2 reaches an impasse, that’s impasse 3. And so on.

A chain of impasses is different than multiple separate impasses. In a chain, each link is attached to the previous link. By contrast, multiple separate impasses would be if someone gives several reasons that the original discussion isn’t working. Each of those impasses is about the original discussion, rather than being linked to each other.

When there is a chain of impasses, the most recent (highest number) impasse takes priority over the previous impasses. Impasse 2 is a reason, from the speaker’s pov, that discussion of impasse 1 isn’t working. Responding about impasse 1 at that point doesn’t make sense from his pov. It comes off as trying to ignore him and his pov.

Sometimes people try to solve a problem without saying what they’re doing. Instead of discussing an impasse, they try to continue the prior discussion but make changes to fix the problem. But they don’t acknowledge the problem existed, say what they’re doing to fix it, ask if that is acceptable from the other person’s pov, etc. From the pov of the person who brought up the impasse, this looks like being ignored because the person doesn’t communicate about the impasse and tries to continue the original topic. The behavior looks very similar to a person who thinks the impasse is stupid and wants to ignore it for that reason. And usually when people try to silently solve the problem, they don’t actually know enough about it (since they asked no clarifying questions) in order to get it right on the first try (even if they weren’t confusing the other person by not explaining what they were doing, usually their first guess at a solution to the impasse won’t work).

This non-communicated-problem-solving-attempt problem is visible when people respond at the wrong level of discussion. Call the original topic level 0, the first impasse level 1, the second impasse level 2, the third impasse level 3, and so on. If level 3 has been reached and then someone responds to level 2, 1 or 0, then they’re not addressing the current impasse. They either are ignoring the problem or trying to solve it without explaining what they’re doing. Similarly, if the current level is 1, and someone responds at level 0, they’re making this error.

The above is already explained, in different words with more explanation, in my article Debates and Impasse Chains.

What constitutes "skipping steps" or "making assumptions" depends on context and perspective. We can't allocate conscious attention to all of reality – reality is too big, complex and varied.

To interact productively, people need some common ground – some shared knowledge and perspective – which specifies what sorts of assumptions are inappropriate to make. Shared culture is crucial for this.

Existing cultural defaults are adequate for working as a cashier. But our culture doesn't prepare people well for intellectual discussions. It's maybe pretty close to adequate for intellectual discussions, but some adjustments are needed.

As a starting point, for intellectual discussion, people should assume less than they normally do. Don't skip over some things you'd normally assume and then see which ones are or aren't an issue. But people are bad at assuming less, bad at judging which of their assumptions are riskier, and bad at updating their future behavior according to information gathered like this.

A good, generic strategy is to come up with some goals, then come up with some measurable criteria to judge success or failure for each goal. This helps you recognize problems, mistakes and inadequate plans (plans that somewhat work but not enough to reach the goal measurements).

Measurable criteria help with dishonesty and bias. Instead of moving the goalposts when you get there, or rationalizing how great you did, you clearly know in advance what the goal is (and write the goal and criteria down, often where other people can see it).

If your goal is "learn some stuff about physics" then it's hard to judge how well you're doing. It's pretty easy to fool yourself into thinking you succeeded when you didn't learn much. Or you could learn a fair amount but miss an opportunity to learn way more.

If you have measurable criteria, you can check whether you succeed at them. E.g.:

• spend 3 hours a week minimum on learning physics; miss zero weeks this year. (only solo learning counts for this time, not talking with people)
• post at least one physics question per week on stack exchange (at least 40 weeks this year).
• fully read the following physics books this year: X, Y, Z.
• do all practice problems in books X and W this year.
• at end of year, be able to get passing scores on the physics tests i found online (A, B and C).

This criteria aren't perfect. They don't measure everything I care about regarding my goal. I could succeed at these criteria and still have missed some opportunities.

But they have major advantages. They give me some clear guidelines. It'll be hard to lie to myself that I did one of these criteria when I didn't. They're easy to evaluate as either success or failure. Did I do it or not? I'm realistically going to be able to give a clear, correct answer, even if I'm pretty dumb and biased.

(What if I stop keeping track of time spent on physics, so I can't say if I succeeded? What if I don't keep track of what sections of what books I've read? You can take it as implied that that's a failure. Part of the goal is to keep track. Or you could write it into the goals that keeping track is a requirement.)

It's hard to measure everything we care about, and some goals are harder to make relevant measurements for than others. But measurements are useful and we can often get some benefit from them.

FYI you can find ideas similar to the above in various business management ideas. Regarding business management in general, I favor Theory of Constraints, from Eli Goldratt, who wrote a book actually titled The Goal.

"Get good at rational thinking" is a goal that's hard to measure progress, success or failure at.

With a business, you can measure stuff like sales, revenue, profit, widgets produced, number of widgets the factory throws out due to quality problems, number of late customer orders, price of raw materials required to build a widget, and much more. There are many things to attach numbers to. These measurements don't cover everything important but they help.

Websites can measure visitors per day, time on site, number of links clicked, number of visitors who return on a different day within 30 days, amount of people who sign up if shown marketing page A as opposed to signups for marketing page B, and much more. More intrusively and problematically, it's possible for software to e.g. monitor how much a user scrolls down on a web page and how long they spend with different parts of the page on screen.

But what do you measure when you're learning about rationality?

You can measure the time you spend on studying. You can measure words read and words written. You can measure whether you watched a list of videos and read a list of books. But those measurements don't tell you how well you understood the material. How effective was your learning? How much wiser and rational are you getting? It's hard to measure wisdom or rationality, or to measure anything very similar to them.

What's the solution? We must learn ways to think without measurement. We must get good at judging things in other ways besides measurement.

Measurement is useful and is something our culture is generally pretty good at. But it's certainly possible to think effectively in other ways. Measurement is resistant to bias, dishonesty and irrationality – it helps reduce those problems significantly – but it's not perfect at dealing with those problems and those problems can also be dealt with in other ways.

The main thing that's great about measurement is it's easy to be objective. It deals with facts that we can quantify with numbers. Often we have measuring tools to aid us, e.g. timers, rulers, microscopes, etc.

We measure some things without tools. If I'm loading boxes onto a truck, I can count them one by one as I load them, and I can write down the count at the end (or even update the written count after every box). We count this as a measurement. Similarly, "I read book X" is close enough to the concept of measurement, and easy enough to evaluate, that one can think of it as a measurement or as similar enough. (Note the issue isn't whether you understood the book or paid much attention or gave it much thought. What's easy to judge or measure is whether you went through it page by page and read what it said. There are borderline cases like how many pages can you skip before it doesn't count? But let's not worry about that now.)

Something that's easy to judge, and involves physical objects and facts, is identifying objects or their traits. Is that a cat, yes or no? I look at it and say yes. Is that an apple? I look at it and say no it's a strawberry. Is that object red? I look at it and say yes (I could also measure that using a digital camera, a computer, and some software – and actually we now have software that's pretty good at classifying pictures as various objects like cats or apples). Is it a type of "measurement" to say that object A in my room is a chair and object B is a chair? That's just terminology. It's not especially important what we call it. Regardless, that kind of thing can easily be judged and used in our goals. We're good at doing that without being biased. It's the kind of thing we find hard to get wrong or lie to ourselves about.

What are some things we can't "measure"? Judging whether an action is moral, pious, honest, wise or fair. Saying whether raspberries taste good to me. Judging how good my understanding of Socrates is. Deciding wether capitalism or socialism is better. Considering the best activities to start learning history with. These things require judgment and some involve things that some people consider a "matter of opinion", "subjective" or "arbitrary" (which they often say when they find it hard to be objective, rather than because they have arguments that objective judgment of the matter is impossible). These issues are getting away from facts like how long an object is, whether it's made of wood, what shape it is, how heavy it is, whether it's flat, etc. They're different and trickier.

Look for opportunities to use measurements to help your judgment. And also work on developing good judgment (about anything) and developing ways to prevent, detect and correct bias, dishonesty and irrationality.

How? Many ways. E.g. these articles could help:

• Lying
• Emotions
• Using Intellectual Processes to Combat Bias

Let's talk about a different way.

Assuming you're an adult, there are some things you're already good at judging. There are some areas where you're confident, competent, skilled, etc.

You can find more stuff which is similar or related and work on that. You can try to expand the good judgment you already have by applying it to more things.

Suppose you learn math to pass school tests. You might later find the math you already know is also useful for figuring out whether a system of pulleys will let you lift a large stone. And then later you you find the math you already know can help you analyze video game strategies, e.g. figuring out how much damage you can do in 60 seconds by casting different sequences of spells.

Skills often help with many things that weren't the original purpose you learned them for.

So you can take skills you already have and look for more stuff they can already help with. If the skill is related to judgment, and you find more ways to use it, then you're expanding the scope of what you can skillfully judge.

You can also expand on the skills as you apply them to more areas. E.g. you might find learning a few more mathematical techniques helps you with your pulleys or video games. Similarly, you could learn a few new things to help your judgment skills deal with new areas.