Why aren't you doing any FI learning activities here? Do you disagree about something? If so, you could share your criticism. Do you not understand something? If so, you could share your question.
Notified 1 person
heroLFG (Gavin Palmer)
I spent about 4 hours on this project. I'm not sure if you think it is too difficult which is my perception of your criticism of my project to teach my son how to play chess. I don't understand why you think teaching my son chess is too hard.
I like challenging projects which are win-win projects which can help me and help others.
If I found I project which you agreed was not too difficult, then I would be more willing to share more and try new things.
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Elliot
heroLFG
I've been trying to explain how to organize projects using steps so that people can gain conscious control over their lives. Making things consciously-controlled allows rational improvement instead of living by intuition and static memes. I've also talked about how and why to practice.
You have not engaged with this. You haven't discussed or practiced the FI steps nor some set of explicit alternative steps. You've done zero projects using FI's steps. When you talk about a project like teaching chess, you're using intuition or other steps that aren't the FI ones. That is of course your right; it's your life and your choice. But it isn't connected to this group's purpose. That suggests some kind of disagreement, disconnect, perspective difference, or something along those lines. We aren't on the same page.
If you want to learn about conscious, rational steps to organize projects, that process should involve some discussions and questions about the steps as well as practice. The practice should start with projects that are easy so the focus can be on the steps themselves rather than the contents of the project. If you learn the steps enough to use them successfully several times, then you could try them out on a more challenging project and see if you're still able to use them in that harder situation, if they're helpful, etc.
I don't understand why you think teaching my son chess is too hard.
Here are some reasons teaching chess is a hard project:
The failure rate is high (well over 50%). Teaching chess to kids has been tried many, many times. The typical outcome is the child ends up bad at chess, dislikes it, and did not learn useful skills that help them with other topics.
Tons of those failures are from professional chess teachers with many years of experience teaching children.
The relevant literature is big.
The project involves two people. People are very complicated. They're usually by far the most complicated things involved in your projects. Going from one person to two roughly doubles the total complexity of the stuff involved in the project. And it adds interactions between two very complex entities.
Parenting is a big, complicated, hard topic.
Projects involving learning new things tend to be hard compared to projects that don't.
In a regular learning project, you try to make your own learning process work well. When you try to help with someone else's learning process, you have less information about it and less control over it, which makes things harder.
Chess is a hard game.
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heroLFG (Gavin Palmer)
I think there is a perspective difference. I don't understand why I need to participate the way you want people to participate because I have a lot of success doing projects and planning things out in my head without showing my work.
I don't think I agree with your evaluation of your success at past projects. You have not presented some projects, and your evaluations, for critical review by others to convince anyone you have had all this success you think you've had.
Notified 1 person
ingracke
heroLFG
I think there is a perspective difference. I don't understand why I need to participate the way you want people to participate because I have a lot of success doing projects and planning things out in my head without showing my work.
I have been thinking about this thread recently because I think it is a problem that I think comes up a lot here, and that is related to some other posts I recently wrote on basecamp: one to Dface about the kinds of competence FI is aiming for, and how people can be competent people who contribute to society without that type of knowledge, and one to Anne about why people perceive FI as a "mean" place.
I agree that you have competence and have done successful projects in your real life. (Those loft beds look good – I've had my own issues with figuring out bedrooms with limited space, so especially appreciate your solution.)
But I think it is possible to have that kind of success without actually having the kind of success that Elliot means, with thinking and philosophy. So showing those kinds of completed projects doesn't prove success with the kind of philosophical thinking Elliot is talking about.
Another thing I have been thinking about is mindfulness meditation, and I think there is an analogy here. I am not sure if you are familiar, but mindfulness meditation is partly about becoming more aware and conscious of your thoughts. It is about being able to step back and view your thoughts on a more meta level, being able to examine them, understand them, etc.
So if I were to recommend mindfulness meditation to someone, and their response was that they have already had plenty of success with thinking, so they don't need to do my basic "learn to think" exercises, that would kind of miss the point. I'm not saying they don't have success at thinking, I'm saying they could gain more control & understanding of their thinking processes if they examined them in a more thorough way, starting with the basics (like, just paying attention to their breath).
And I think that is sort of what Elliot is trying to get people to do on FI: slow down and examine your thoughts in a more thorough way. Start with very small things, and then eventually built that process up to do it with larger things.
I'm not sure if this makes sense to you or helps. But I thought it was worth trying, since I think there just may be a misunderstanding here.
Notified 3 people
heroLFG (Gavin Palmer)
ingracke
Thank you for responding. I really appreciate people's attention. I tend to pay attention to people who pay attention to me and ignore people who ignore me.
I really like how I got an email and a notification on my phone when you mentioned me. I don't get notifications about responses if I use the FI website. I am very interested in using technology to help with organizing people at scale.
I know that I can understand anything that can be understood so long as I have a reason to understand it. I don't like wasting my time trying to understand things if I don't know why I should understand things. I don't want to waste my time and attention.
I have an interview with Amazon coming up and they want me to know a lot of data structures and algorithms stuff that has almost never been required in my software engineering work I've been doing since 2008. So I don't see why I need to put in the effort to prepare for the interview. They reached out to me. I like my current job. And they want me to learn things that aren't useful (or I haven't learned why they are useful).
I mention the interview because I have a similar perception of FI activities. I already have a lot of success with the knowledge I have.
I'm a hacker and I'm proud of it. I mean that I take the tools that are available to me and accomplish the goal. I know there could be better tools. But I don't want to search for them. However, I will work with other people who know about other tools and observe the utility of those tools prior to my being motivated to add another tool to the toolbox. (edit: I did do research on lofts and joints when doing those beds, but the research was directly connected to a goal I was interested in)
So the people at FI could actually do video and images of projects which are impressive to me while using tools that I don't have and might want to add to my toolbox.
I like FI because I like criticisms and feedback. I don't appreciate the FI activities. I do like developing relationships with good people and I like recognizing processes and technologies which could be added to my toolbox.
heroLFG (Gavin Palmer)
I like challenging projects which are win-win projects which can help me and help others.
If I found I project which you agreed was not too difficult, then I would be more willing to share more and try new things.
You have not engaged with this. You haven't discussed or practiced the FI steps nor some set of explicit alternative steps. You've done zero projects using FI's steps. When you talk about a project like teaching chess, you're using intuition or other steps that aren't the FI ones. That is of course your right; it's your life and your choice. But it isn't connected to this group's purpose. That suggests some kind of disagreement, disconnect, perspective difference, or something along those lines. We aren't on the same page.
If you want to learn about conscious, rational steps to organize projects, that process should involve some discussions and questions about the steps as well as practice. The practice should start with projects that are easy so the focus can be on the steps themselves rather than the contents of the project. If you learn the steps enough to use them successfully several times, then you could try them out on a more challenging project and see if you're still able to use them in that harder situation, if they're helpful, etc.
Here are some reasons teaching chess is a hard project:
I built these yesterday:
I have been thinking about this thread recently because I think it is a problem that I think comes up a lot here, and that is related to some other posts I recently wrote on basecamp: one to Dface about the kinds of competence FI is aiming for, and how people can be competent people who contribute to society without that type of knowledge, and one to Anne about why people perceive FI as a "mean" place.
I agree that you have competence and have done successful projects in your real life. (Those loft beds look good – I've had my own issues with figuring out bedrooms with limited space, so especially appreciate your solution.)
But I think it is possible to have that kind of success without actually having the kind of success that Elliot means, with thinking and philosophy. So showing those kinds of completed projects doesn't prove success with the kind of philosophical thinking Elliot is talking about.
Another thing I have been thinking about is mindfulness meditation, and I think there is an analogy here. I am not sure if you are familiar, but mindfulness meditation is partly about becoming more aware and conscious of your thoughts. It is about being able to step back and view your thoughts on a more meta level, being able to examine them, understand them, etc.
So if I were to recommend mindfulness meditation to someone, and their response was that they have already had plenty of success with thinking, so they don't need to do my basic "learn to think" exercises, that would kind of miss the point. I'm not saying they don't have success at thinking, I'm saying they could gain more control & understanding of their thinking processes if they examined them in a more thorough way, starting with the basics (like, just paying attention to their breath).
And I think that is sort of what Elliot is trying to get people to do on FI: slow down and examine your thoughts in a more thorough way. Start with very small things, and then eventually built that process up to do it with larger things.
I'm not sure if this makes sense to you or helps. But I thought it was worth trying, since I think there just may be a misunderstanding here.
Thank you for responding. I really appreciate people's attention. I tend to pay attention to people who pay attention to me and ignore people who ignore me.
https://herolfg.com/posts/my-attention/
I really like how I got an email and a notification on my phone when you mentioned me. I don't get notifications about responses if I use the FI website. I am very interested in using technology to help with organizing people at scale.
I know that I can understand anything that can be understood so long as I have a reason to understand it. I don't like wasting my time trying to understand things if I don't know why I should understand things. I don't want to waste my time and attention.
I have an interview with Amazon coming up and they want me to know a lot of data structures and algorithms stuff that has almost never been required in my software engineering work I've been doing since 2008. So I don't see why I need to put in the effort to prepare for the interview. They reached out to me. I like my current job. And they want me to learn things that aren't useful (or I haven't learned why they are useful).
I mention the interview because I have a similar perception of FI activities. I already have a lot of success with the knowledge I have.
I'm a hacker and I'm proud of it. I mean that I take the tools that are available to me and accomplish the goal. I know there could be better tools. But I don't want to search for them. However, I will work with other people who know about other tools and observe the utility of those tools prior to my being motivated to add another tool to the toolbox. (edit: I did do research on lofts and joints when doing those beds, but the research was directly connected to a goal I was interested in)
So the people at FI could actually do video and images of projects which are impressive to me while using tools that I don't have and might want to add to my toolbox.
I like FI because I like criticisms and feedback. I don't appreciate the FI activities. I do like developing relationships with good people and I like recognizing processes and technologies which could be added to my toolbox.