Methodology Matters > 50%
From Discord:
Freeze:
>>>> I can be myself and be stupid/flawed/have bad ideas/questions/thoughts and still be accepted [at FI]
TheRat:
>>> no. There are a lot of ideas here that are not accepted, and I've presented in a flawed way that have been attacked, but not the idea, my ability to present the idea. There are many great things about the FI community, but acceptance is not one of them. As an example take a look at the last email exchange I had on FI email. The criticism was not at my idea but instead at how it was presented and it was more of an accusation than a criticism. The idea itself was never touched.
Rat posted something like: I think X means Y.
Anon replied saying that X is too vague to mean Y. Rather than meaning Y, X is ambiguous.
That is contradicting Rat. It’s disagreeing with, and criticizing, Rat’s interpretation. The idea that X means Y was touched.
Rat apparently didn’t understand. He could have replied asking for clarification or expressing the problem he had. Rat could have responded with tolerance and patience. Rat would have remembered what Popper said about culture clash. Rat could have tried to explain to anon why he’s discussing wrong. Rat could have figured that he’s a beginner and he’s probably misunderstood something, playing the odds it’s probably his own fault. Instead, Rat seems to have gotten angry and lashed out at anon (please don’t do that on FI). [1]
Anon *also* discussed methodological errors made by Rat. I guess Rat is uninterested in methods of thinking? I don’t know how he expects anon to know that. He didn’t say so. By default, people who post to FI are assumed to be interested in epistemology. And Rat has a CR-based name which signals his interest in epistemology.
>>> It is certainly a pattern that can happen here. I am not saying this as a way to shit on FI or anything, but as an honest portrayal of what you should expect. You may be eager to talk about topic X but you end up talking about topic Z endlessly and never touch X. I am not sure if this is a net positive or not yet, I am keeping an open mind to see if so. Other than this, the discussions are great, serious and interesting.
If you want to talk about X but not Z, you should say so. Or ask how to accomplish it. You have to communicate about what you want instead of expecting other people to somehow know what you want without being told.
Freeze:
>> Is that like meta-criticism? where your communication is being criticized
TheRat:
> That might be the way to label it. It certainly has its place, I am just not sure how crucial it is to focus on it. I am fairly sure curi disagrees strongly with me on this one.
I claim that more than 50% of mistakes people make are in their methods.
Suppose your method for dealing with a particular problem is “I will do steps X, Y and Z to reach a conclusion, C.” And say that your C is an error.
Now consider where the error occurred. Was it in the method? That means even if you did X, Y and Z correctly, you’d still get a wrong conclusion. The set of steps wasn’t capable of reaching the right conclusion.
Or was it a non-methodological error? That means steps would have worked, but you screwed up one or more of the steps?
Often it’s both. The steps would not have worked *and* you did a step incorrectly.
Often the steps are ambiguous enough that one can’t even reach a specific conclusion. That’s a methodology error.
This is closely related to DD’s claim (that I agree with) that there is more knowledge in the structure or organization of ideas than in the non-structure part (which could be called denotation, topical content, or payload). If you want to understand *why* it’s over 50%, learning the "knowledge structure” material would be a good place to start.
A quick indication of why methods matter so much is that they are *recurring sources of error*. We *reuse* methods. A bad method, left alone, can create an error every time it’s used. And epistemological methods, dealing with matters like how to judge or evaluate ideas, are used in every field of human action. Methods for communication are also in very widespread use. Some non-method topics are important too, but many are less important. So you often see people using really general purpose methods (some of the most important ones) on minor subjects like how to cook waffles. So mistakes about waffles aren’t going to affect much of life, but mistakes about how to think about waffles will often be due to mistakes about how to think about anything.
So I have two comments about meta-criticism.
First, it’s crucially important that criticism be unbounded. Limiting criticism is how progress gets stuck, errors get entrenched, and the beginning of infinity is prevented.
Second, meta-criticism – criticism that relates to methods or structure – merits more than 50% of our attention because it deals with where more than 50% of errors are. (And in our current culture, for the topics FI typically deals with, the percentage of methodology errors is quite high, like well over 90%. There is systematic anti-methodology and anti-philosophy bias in our culture.)
Rat earlier said "You may be eager to talk about topic X [...]”. But if your methods of thinking about topic X are inadequate an ineffective, then improving your methods is the fastest and best way to make progress on topic X. The alternative is to lower your quality standards down to what your current methods are capable of. But what quality standards to have is not an arbitrary choice, there are objective issues involved like what ideas are good enough to actually work. Also, one is welcome to point out why particular errors are irrelevant for accomplishing a particular goal – why you think it’ll work fine despite that error. But if you don’t think about methodology – the topic in general or the particular methods you’re using for dealing with X – than you have no way of knowing whether the flaws in your methods will or won’t prevent you from accomplishing your goals WRT X.
---
[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/fallible-ideas/C-w8VTF5ox4/7IIyqSwPAgAJ
> I am also a Virgo, what else you got?
Elliot Temple
www.curi.us
Freeze:
>>>> I can be myself and be stupid/flawed/have bad ideas/questions/thoughts and still be accepted [at FI]
TheRat:
>>> no. There are a lot of ideas here that are not accepted, and I've presented in a flawed way that have been attacked, but not the idea, my ability to present the idea. There are many great things about the FI community, but acceptance is not one of them. As an example take a look at the last email exchange I had on FI email. The criticism was not at my idea but instead at how it was presented and it was more of an accusation than a criticism. The idea itself was never touched.
Rat posted something like: I think X means Y.
Anon replied saying that X is too vague to mean Y. Rather than meaning Y, X is ambiguous.
That is contradicting Rat. It’s disagreeing with, and criticizing, Rat’s interpretation. The idea that X means Y was touched.
Rat apparently didn’t understand. He could have replied asking for clarification or expressing the problem he had. Rat could have responded with tolerance and patience. Rat would have remembered what Popper said about culture clash. Rat could have tried to explain to anon why he’s discussing wrong. Rat could have figured that he’s a beginner and he’s probably misunderstood something, playing the odds it’s probably his own fault. Instead, Rat seems to have gotten angry and lashed out at anon (please don’t do that on FI). [1]
Anon *also* discussed methodological errors made by Rat. I guess Rat is uninterested in methods of thinking? I don’t know how he expects anon to know that. He didn’t say so. By default, people who post to FI are assumed to be interested in epistemology. And Rat has a CR-based name which signals his interest in epistemology.
>>> It is certainly a pattern that can happen here. I am not saying this as a way to shit on FI or anything, but as an honest portrayal of what you should expect. You may be eager to talk about topic X but you end up talking about topic Z endlessly and never touch X. I am not sure if this is a net positive or not yet, I am keeping an open mind to see if so. Other than this, the discussions are great, serious and interesting.
If you want to talk about X but not Z, you should say so. Or ask how to accomplish it. You have to communicate about what you want instead of expecting other people to somehow know what you want without being told.
Freeze:
>> Is that like meta-criticism? where your communication is being criticized
TheRat:
> That might be the way to label it. It certainly has its place, I am just not sure how crucial it is to focus on it. I am fairly sure curi disagrees strongly with me on this one.
I claim that more than 50% of mistakes people make are in their methods.
Suppose your method for dealing with a particular problem is “I will do steps X, Y and Z to reach a conclusion, C.” And say that your C is an error.
Now consider where the error occurred. Was it in the method? That means even if you did X, Y and Z correctly, you’d still get a wrong conclusion. The set of steps wasn’t capable of reaching the right conclusion.
Or was it a non-methodological error? That means steps would have worked, but you screwed up one or more of the steps?
Often it’s both. The steps would not have worked *and* you did a step incorrectly.
Often the steps are ambiguous enough that one can’t even reach a specific conclusion. That’s a methodology error.
This is closely related to DD’s claim (that I agree with) that there is more knowledge in the structure or organization of ideas than in the non-structure part (which could be called denotation, topical content, or payload). If you want to understand *why* it’s over 50%, learning the "knowledge structure” material would be a good place to start.
A quick indication of why methods matter so much is that they are *recurring sources of error*. We *reuse* methods. A bad method, left alone, can create an error every time it’s used. And epistemological methods, dealing with matters like how to judge or evaluate ideas, are used in every field of human action. Methods for communication are also in very widespread use. Some non-method topics are important too, but many are less important. So you often see people using really general purpose methods (some of the most important ones) on minor subjects like how to cook waffles. So mistakes about waffles aren’t going to affect much of life, but mistakes about how to think about waffles will often be due to mistakes about how to think about anything.
So I have two comments about meta-criticism.
First, it’s crucially important that criticism be unbounded. Limiting criticism is how progress gets stuck, errors get entrenched, and the beginning of infinity is prevented.
Second, meta-criticism – criticism that relates to methods or structure – merits more than 50% of our attention because it deals with where more than 50% of errors are. (And in our current culture, for the topics FI typically deals with, the percentage of methodology errors is quite high, like well over 90%. There is systematic anti-methodology and anti-philosophy bias in our culture.)
Rat earlier said "You may be eager to talk about topic X [...]”. But if your methods of thinking about topic X are inadequate an ineffective, then improving your methods is the fastest and best way to make progress on topic X. The alternative is to lower your quality standards down to what your current methods are capable of. But what quality standards to have is not an arbitrary choice, there are objective issues involved like what ideas are good enough to actually work. Also, one is welcome to point out why particular errors are irrelevant for accomplishing a particular goal – why you think it’ll work fine despite that error. But if you don’t think about methodology – the topic in general or the particular methods you’re using for dealing with X – than you have no way of knowing whether the flaws in your methods will or won’t prevent you from accomplishing your goals WRT X.
---
[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/fallible-ideas/C-w8VTF5ox4/7IIyqSwPAgAJ
> I am also a Virgo, what else you got?
Elliot Temple
www.curi.us