This is a discussion topic for Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum (a pseudonym, Ayn Rand's birth name). Other people are welcome to make comments. Alisa has agreed not to post under other names in this topic.
This is a discussion topic for Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum (a pseudonym, Ayn Rand's birth name). Other people are welcome to make comments. Alisa has agreed not to post under other names in this topic.
Henry Hazlitt's Thinking as a Science, from 1916, is short and has good, practical advice about how to think. I particularly recommend chapters 1 (advocating thinking), 5 (about prejudice) and 7 (about reading). The book is free. Go read chapter 1 (11 pages) right now and see what you think. And Anonymous posted some great book quotes.
My comments on a few passages (these are not representative of the book; emphasis added):
The secret of practice is to learn thoroughly one thing at a time.
As already stated, we act according to habit. The only way to break an old habit or to form a new one is to give our whole attention to the process. The new action will soon require less and less attention, until finally we shall do it automatically, without thought—in short, we shall have formed another habit. This accomplished we can turn to still others.
This is something I've been advocating heavily for years. People learn to do something correctly, once, and then think they've learned it and they're done. But that's just the first step. For skills you'll use often, you have to practice until you can do it cheaply, easily and reliably. E.g. I need to be able to type using almost zero conscious attention so that I can focus my attention on the ideas I'm writing. I need to think in an objective – not biased – way pretty much automatically so that I can get on to considering the topic; people who need to use a bunch of mental focus just to avoid bias are handicapped because they have less attention left for the actual topic (and what often happens is, at some point, they focus their attention on the topic and then their habitual bias starts happening).
When I look back into the past, I find nations, sects, philosophers, cherishing beliefs in science, morals, politics, and religion, which we decisively reject. Yet they held them with a faith quite as strong as ours; nay—stronger, if their intolerance of dissent is any criterion.
Intolerance of dissent is not a criterion of strong belief in being correct. It's an indicator of the opposite: lack of confidence in the truth of one's claims. Why suppress dissent when you can win the argument?
If you think a heretic won't convince anyone, you laugh at him and don't care much. If you know the heresy is a threat to your claims, then you try to suppress it.
As William Godwin pointed out, this applies to parenting too. Parents persuade their children with reasoning when they can. Parents resort to using force against their children only when their own rational words fail them.
The practice of Gibbon remains to be considered: “After glancing my eye over the design and order of a new book, I suspended the perusal until I had finished the task of self-examination; till I had revolved in a solitary walk all that I knew or believed, or had thought on the subject of the whole work, or of some particular chapter. I was then qualified to discern how much the author added to my original stock, and I was sometimes satisfied by the agreement, sometimes armed by the opposition of our ideas.”[5]
The trouble with this method is that it is not critical enough; that is, critical in the proper sense. It almost amounts to making sure what your prejudices are, and then taking care to use them as spectacles through which to read. We always do judge a book more or less by our previous prejudices and opinions. We cannot help it. But our justification lies in the manner we have obtained these opinions; whether we have infected them from our environment, or have held them because we wanted them to be true, or have arrived at them from substantial evidence and sound reasoning. If Gibbon had taken a critical attitude toward his former knowledge and opinions to make sure they were correct, and had then applied them to his reading, his course would have been more justifiable and profitable.
In certain subjects, however, Gibbon’s is the only method which can with profit be used. In the study of geography, grammar, a foreign language, or the facts of history, it is well, before reading, simply to review what we already know. Here we cannot be critical because there is really nothing to reason about. Whether George Washington ought to have crossed the Delaware, whether “shall” and “will” ought to be used as they are in English, whether the verb “avoir” ought to be parsed as it is, or whether Hoboken ought to be in New Jersey, are questions which might reasonably be asked, but which would be needless, because for the purposes we would most likely have in mind in reading such facts it would be sufficient to know that these things are so. We might include mathematics among the subjects to be treated in this fashion. Though it is a rational science, there is such unanimity regarding its propositions that the critical attitude is almost a waste of mental energy. In mathematics, to understand is to agree.
The first quoted paragraph is for context. I like the second. But the third is mistaken about math. Mathematicians make plenty of mistakes and have debates and disagreements about what's mistaken. See The Fabric of Reality chapter 10 for arguments on the fallibility of math.
Infinity is an example a contentious mathematical topic. Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger denies the existence even of very large integers.
Grammar and history are more controversial topics than math. In my own reading, I've often found rival schools of thought about the interpretation of historical thinkers like Burke or Godwin. The issue arises even for recent history, e.g. there are debates about what Rand's or Popper's personality was like. These debates extend to what certain facts are. Historians debate facts like who wrote a particular book, article or play. They also debate e.g. what information political leaders had at times they made certain decisions, or whether they committed certain crimes or not.
I wrote a recent article on grammar. While researching it, I discovered controversies like whether constituency or dependency is a better way to model grammatical relationships, debates about different ways to interpret words, and even a disagreement about whether verbs are primary in sentences or, alternatively, subject and verb are equally important. And there are a bunch of different lists of standard sentence patterns, most of which are bad because they have a subject+verb+adverb pattern (unlimited adverbs can be added to every pattern, including that one, so it doesn't make sense to have an extra pattern just to include an adverb).
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If I and others don't respond to you, you can try again (saying something similar or something new), ask why, ask what you can do better, or read some of these posts about how to discuss well. Talking about what your goals are, and why you want my attention personally or my community's attention (instead of just wanting discussion with anyone smart), can help. If you think I'm mistaken about something important, see my Debate Policy.
Read my new article: English Language, Analysis & Grammar.
Discuss it, and grammar in general, below.
I've also released 14 hours of related video for sale.
"Subjective" means "related to the subject". E.g. "subjective thinking" means thinking that would reach a different result with a different subject.
Note: The subject means the person or thing that does the action. The object means the person or thing that receives the action. Subject is actor, object is acted on. Those terms are used in grammar a lot. I wrote this post because I thought applying the grammar ideas to the subjectivity issue is clarifying.
Joe reaches one conclusion, e.g. "I like steak." while Sue reaches another, e.g. "Steak is OK but I prefer shrimp.". The subject in both sentences is "I", but the first time that means Joe and the second time Sue. So the subject changed and the preferred food changed. Preferred food depends on subject.
Objective thinking means thinking that depends on the object. If "steak" is the object of the verb "like", then objective thinking would try to give an answer without even knowing what the subject is. It doesn't matter who is doing the liking (the subject), what matters is what is being liked (the object).
Those are just historical roots. Today, subjective means: arbitrary, whim-worshipping, refusing to deal with reality, illogical, and more. It's associated with people claiming stuff is a matter of personal taste in order to ignore criticism. "You can't judge me negatively, I'm the subject and you don't know enough about me. You only know about the object but not the subject, so shut up. Everyone can live in their own world where they are the subject and they can do no wrong."
Meanwhile, objective has come to mean unbiased thinking that looks at the whole picture and does rational analysis. Instead of pretending you can reach any bullshit conclusion just because you're the subject, objective thinkers try to understand the facts about the object in reality so they can reach a true conclusion. Truth is objective, not subjective. What's true doesn't depend on who is speaking.
Grammatically, you can also talk about verbs with an object but no subject, e.g. "Eating steak is fun." There, the verb "eating" has no subject and is just talking about the general concept of any subject doing eating, rather than connecting the statement to a particular subject. (The grammatical subject of that sentence is "eating steak" itself, which is the subject of the verb "is" and which is.) That's an impersonal statement because it lacks a human subject. That means only objective analysis makes sense.
Yet, for some issues, what is true does depend on who is speaking. E.g. "I like steak." is true for some subjects and not others. Some people like steak and others don't.
This is an aspect of a broader issue: truth is contextual. A statement like "The box on the left is brown." Is that true? Well it depends what box is on the left. That box is the grammatical subject of the sentence, but it's not a person with "subjective" tastes or personal preferences. The situation: time, location, stuff at that location, etc. is the context.
People's tastes are context too. Joe liking steak is context just the same as what boxes are in the room is context.
If people would say "Truth is contextual.", it wouldn't cause problems. "Contextual" doesn't have all the anti-reality and anti-reason associations that the word "subjective" does.
Also, subjects exist in objective reality. Joe exists in the objective world, along with his preference for steak. Just like the box on the left exists in the objective world and has a color. And no one is confused with the box, they get that whether the left box is brown depends on what boxes are present and what their colors are and those are all factual matters about the real world.
It's mostly just when the subject is a human being that people start claiming stuff is "subjective". They know their personal feelings have no control over the reality of boxes and colors, but they believe their personal feelings can mean "What's right for me isn't right for you and no one is wrong." Which is true to some limited extent, e.g. Joe can be a physicist and Sue a chemist and neither person is wrong. But that's not because choice of career is an arbitrary choice. People often pick the wrong career and end up unhappy and unsuccessful. It's just that context matters. If Joe has skills and interests related to physics, then a physics career can fit him well. If Sue is in a totally different situation (context), then a different career may fit her. The actual facts of Sue's situation are relevant for Sue's career and can be evaluated in an unbiased way. Talking about Sue is like talking about the objects in one room, and talking about Joe is like talking about the objects in a different room, so it's no surprise that in one case there could be a brown box on the left and in another case there isn't. None of that is "subjective" in the way people mean it today, although it is "subjective" in the sense of dependent on the subject (actor) or, more broadly, dependent on the context.
race realism and race-related IQ ideas are partially true. a fair amount of what they say is approximately reasonable. certainly not all the claims are correct. and there's one big but.
race and genes do not determine IQ or character traits. culture does. the reason race correlates with IQ is because race correlates with culture which correlates with IQ. people of the same race tend to share more of the same culture than people of different races. so, the actual causes are ideas.
the methods psychologists and geneticists use would identify an infant-smiling gene as an IQ gene if parents are nicer to smiling infants and better-treated infants end up smarter, even though it's really not. their methods would also identify a height gene as a basketball success gene, except they try to be careful not to look like idiots so they won't make that particular claim.
ppl tend to dismiss it as implausible that parents would treat children significantly differently in reaction to minor genetic traits, but i think it's extremely plausible and fits observations of actual parents.
people routinely think their infant has a "personality", which they seem to largely make up, in their imagination, based on small traits that don't mean much. hell, people think their cat has a personality.
people in general are unaware of lots of what they do and why. parents are unaware of lots of how they treat children, e.g. much of the gender-based treatment they do.
parents are also bad at observing children's learning processes and recognizing when the child is learning something, what he's learning, how he's learning it, and what parental actions affect the learning.
if you think parents and teachers are largely clueless about what's going on with young children, it makes sense there could be a ton of cultural transmission that they don't realize. if you think parents and teachers have a pretty complete understanding of what's going on, then it makes sense to think genes play a large role, since you will doubt they would have missed much in the way of cultural transmission.
we can all agree that children grow up with lots of traits that their parents didn't intentionally try to teach them. if you think "It's rare for a child to learn something without a teacher (e.g. parent, book, movie) which is intentionally trying to teach it.", then you're gonna think lots of traits come from genes. Where else would they come from? but if you think lots of teaching happens without conscious intention by the teacher, then you don't need to attribute it to genes.
see also: IQ (3 blog posts by me) and Yet More on the Heritability and Malleability of IQ (explains how the word "heritable" is used misleading. in technical jargon, it just means there's a correlation.)
This topic is for discussing Super Mario Odyssey (for Nintendo Switch).
Speedrunning this game is a good way to learn for people who have a hard time learning (~everyone) and who already like video games.
Single player games are best because you don't have to deal with other people. Other people are complicated and dealing with them is a big issue which distracts from the gameplay.
Single player games are mostly too easy. They don't challenge you enough. Speedrunning solves that problem by giving you a goal to work towards where taking on extra challenges gets you better results.
Mario Odyssey is a popular, modern game (in general and specifically for speedrunning) which is highly accessible (both for regular play and speedrunning). It has video guides for speedrunning, various speedrunners who stream on Twitch, and plenty of walkthroughs for regular play. It can easily be broken up into small parts to learn about one at a time, and you can practice a few minutes at a time and then pause. It's complex enough to have depth without being too complicated. It doesn't have much randomness or AI to deal with. It has some glitches but not a ton, and you don't need to do any until you're a very advanced speedrunner. The any% speedrun is a good length. Those are some reasons it's a good game choice. It's also beneficially if a bunch of philosophy-interested people play the same game so they can discuss it, so don't choose a different game that seems a little more appealing to you, it'd only make sense to play a different game if it was a lot better for you for some reason.
(Mario Odyssey has few downsides. The biggest one is it uses motion controls some. It also takes more work to record videos of console gameplay than Mac or PC gameplay, and you need a Switch.)
By playing Mario Odyssey, you can learn what it's like to get good and something and succeed. You can see how practice works and things that used to be hard become easy. Learn to practice efficiently. Learn to write down notes, to review videos (like other people's speedruns) and get useful help from them, and learn to remember a bunch of information. You can see what correcting errors is like. You can see what getting details right is like and succeed with high quality standards. You can see how to build up your skills. First you learn how to do basic movement. Then you practice until it doesn't take much attention anymore. Then you can learn harder combinations of movement which build on the basic things. Now that the basic things are easy for you, your attention is free to focus on combined sequences.
Speedrunning gives you clear metrics for success and failure, which makes it much easier to learn. Did you reach the location you were trying to jump to or fall down? What does the timer say about what you're doing? One of the main reasons people have trouble learning philosophy, and many other things, is because they don't know when they're doing it right or not. They want to fix their errors, but they don't know which things are errors and which are correct. With speedrunning, you can also compare what you did to videos of what faster runners and figure out specifically how your approach is inferior (so you don't just know that you made an error, you also can get good info about what to do differently).
Overall, doing everything may not be easy, but it's easier than learning philosophy. So if you're having a hard time learning philosophy, like most people, this is an easier place to begin. You can work on your ability to learn, find and fix errors, not get frustrated, be persistent over time, and so on, without the added difficulty of trying to understand hard philosophy ideas at the same time. Practice learning with something easier than philosophy so you aren't doing everything at once. And then, in the future, when you learn philosophy ideas about how to learn, you'll be able apply them to examples from your Mario Odyssey experience. This is something lots of people can do well, it doesn't take a "genius" (philosophy doesn't take a "genius" either but many people think it does).
You have to learn the game before you speedrun it. That's step one. Play it normally first and get used to it. If you start getting bored playing normally, or finish everything, then switch to practicing the speedrun.
Post about politics here.