Yes/no philosophy - session #1

The is an initial exploration post. I intend to write out some thoughts I've been having over the past few days about yes/no philosophy. 

These thoughts came up when I was watching the last few tutoring sessions between Elliot and Max. The one I'm watching right now is this one.

In the tutoring sessions, a lot of the focus was about explaining a common error people make, which is judging ideas by weights. I was surprised that so much focus was put on that.

A part of yes/no philosophy that I think is especially great is the organization of the decision-making process. (I vaguely recall Elliot touching on this in one of the tutoring sessions that I talked about above, but I don't have a vivid memory of something he said about it. I also don't recall what the yes/no education product says about it. I'm guessing it says a bunch about it.)

I think that one major problem that yes/no philosophy solves is this: people are often confused (usually not even aware they are confused) about the current state and the history of states of a discussion (which could be just one person thinking by himself). Things like:

• has a solution been found? the yes/no chart shows that. 
• it's easy to see whether or not an option is the solution. 
• all you have to do is determine if there is exactly one option that has all yes's for the evaluations on whether or not the options survived the criticisms.
• which ideas connect to which other ideas and how? the yes/no chart shows that:
• there's the goal. and the options are intended to achieve the goal.
• there are the criticisms of the options. they explain why some options fail to achieve the goal.
• should we try to figure out whether or not a criticism of one of the options applies to any of the other options? the yes/no chart makes that easy to see. 
• if you don't do this work, then you'll have a bunch of blank fields in the yes/no chart, and you shouldn't have any blank fields. 
• Each field should be evaluated as a yes or a no. That means that every option must be evaluated against each criticism.
• when a new option is added to the chart, it's easy to remember to evaluate it against the criticisms in the chart. This is because as soon as you create a new option, you get a bunch of blank fields, which are place holders for the evaluations of the options against the criticisms. 
• when a goal is changed, it's easy to see that with the yes/no chart.
• When you change goals, it's best to keep the old chart and make a new one with the new goal.
• We can carry over the criticisms to the new chart. We would have to rethink the criticisms a bit because the goal changed a bit. One or more will change and the rest won't change.
• I recommend making sure that all fields are blank. This way you remind yourself to evaluate each option against each criticism. I don't recall if this is explained in yes/no philosophy.
• explanations, assumptions, and questions (together with their answers if they exist) regarding the goal, the options, and the criticisms can be documented as footnotes listed under the yes/no chart. I highly recommend doing this. I don't recall if this is explained in yes/no philosophy.

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That's it for now.

I think I did well explaining my thoughts. I left out a bunch of details.

I checked to see that I didn't misrepresent the state of my knowledge of the above ideas. I think I did well.

I checked to see that I didn't misrepresent the originator of the above ideas. I think I did well on that too.