Preparing for monthly review and quarterly plan change - 2020-09-13

I've been thinking about my upcoming monthly review and also my upcoming quarterly plan change. (This thinking has resulted in various single-issue blog posts like this one.) 

Today I started preparing for a blog post about it. While doing that I decided that this activity is too big to do in one session. So I'm breaking it up into multiple sessions. This post is the first one in the series.

Regarding monthly review, I have this in my current learning plan:

• Consider big picture
• What were my goals?
• What was my progress?
• Am I satisfied?
• What progress has been exposed to criticism successfully?
• What progress has been exposed to what objective tests to check for errors?
• What are my new goals?
• What topics am I working on? Why?

"What were my goals?" My goal was to learn rationality. But in a recent blog post I noticed that that is too vague. I said:

So what's my goal for my speedrunning activities? Learn rationality. But that's not detailed enough. I guess Elliot and I both think that there is a time factor. Surely the idea is to learn rationality in a reasonable amount of time. Like I could imagine someone slowly learning rationality such that over 20 years he barely makes any progress. I don't want that. I want something much more than that. I want to optimize that. I want to learn as much as I can learn within the limits of my time spent on philosophy and my current knowledge (while learning ways to increase my time spent on philosophy, and of course improving my knowledge such that I can further learn rationality).

So I think my goal should be updated to account for this. 

My goal could be something like: 

• Learn rationality such that my philosophy time is spent in the most effective way I know how, whereby philosophy time is assigned by priority. 

"What was my progress?" I've made huge progress. 

• Quantity: I now write blog posts far more than I did before starting this learning plan. Like 50 to 70 per month compared to some months having 0 posts.
• Quality: The quality of my blog posts is far far far better than in the past. I've been able to incorporate much of my new FI thinking (past 10 years) into my process of making blog posts. 
• I think the biggest win was this: comparing now to the past, I now view learning with the help of other people very differently than previously. Other people can only serve a support role. This is something I knew in abstract but I don't think I successfully incorporated that thinking into my actions until recently. So like in the past, I might get a reply from Elliot and then all my thinking regarding learning goes out the window and now I'm just focussed on what Elliot said, out of context of the broader goal of me learning stuff, out of context of the framework of me driving my learning and how Elliot's ideas (or anybody's external ideas) fit into that. 
• Specific activities added to my activity line up: Since I started my learning plan, I've changed some things about how I spend my time. 
• I now watch a lot more of Elliot's screencasts (finished all Tutoring Max series, now working to finish Tutoring InternetRules series). 
• I've read a book (The Choice) and enjoyed the reading, the posting about the book, and the posting about my book-reading process. 
• I want to make these activities be a part of my daily life, and since I've added them, I have successfully done them daily (not counting a few days lost in reading books because I'm currently focussed on figuring out what to do regarding the previous book -- see blog post about that). 

That's it for now.

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Things still to talk about:

• I found a bad idea I said and published a retraction. Was good practice.
• Potential problem re prioritizing my time and that resulting in not doing enough speedrunning gameplay practice.
• Potential problem where I haven't incorporated "improve parenting skills" as a subgoal of "learn rationality".
• Potential