Sunday, June 21, 2020

Connecting concepts: integration, knowledge creation, self-evaluation, libraries of criticism, overreaching, fallibility

I previously wrote 3 blog posts connecting some concepts and this blog post is purposed for connecting all of those concepts plus one additional one. The concepts are: integration, knowledge-creation, self-evaluation, libraries of criticism, overreaching, fallibility.

Here are those 3 blog posts: 1st, 2nd, 3rd.

Brainstorming:
  • What do the concepts mean? 
    • Knowledge-creation: Knowledge-creation is about how learning works, how problem-solving works, how decision-making works, etc.
    • Self-evaluation: Self-evaluation means evaluating ideas yourself.
    • Overreaching: Overreaching means your error-correction rate is being overwhelmed by your error-producing rate.
    • Integration: Integration means building up relatively complex ideas from relatively simpler ideas.
    • Fallibility: Fallibility says people can make mistakes and that it's super common.
    • Libraries of criticism: A library of criticism is a set of criticisms that you know that you can use to refute some ideas.
  • How are the concepts connected?
    • Knowledge-creation and fallibility: Knowledge-creation depends on fallibility. If I have a policy for dealing with ideas that does not account for the possibility that an idea is wrong, then I'm failing to create knowledge.
    • Knowledge-creation and integration: Knowledge-creation requires integration. Integration allows you to use principles in your thinking. Thinking without using principles as a guide doesn't work.
    • Knowledge-creation, self-evaluation, and fallibility: Knowledge-creation requires self-evaluation. I can't rely on other people to evaluate my ideas.
      • Why can't I rely on other people to evaluate my ideas for me? Two reasons:
        • Reason: That person could be wrong, due to fallibility, and since I don't know how to self-evaluate, I won't be able to know if that person's idea is wrong or not.
        • Reason: Even if that person's idea is right, the expected result is that I won't understand it and won't even know that I failed to understand it. So if I thought I understood it and followed it, and if I didn't actually understanding it, then I will have adopted an idea that wasn't the idea that I was given. So I'd be effectively following an idea by blind faith.
    • Knowledge-creation and overreaching: If you're overreaching, you're failing to create knowledge. Why? Because you're making more mistakes than you're correcting, leaving tons of uncorrected mistakes.
    • Overreaching and fallibility: When I am overreaching, that means I'm not accounting for fallibility.
    • Overreaching and integration:
      • If you're overreaching, you won't be able to integrate your ideas well.
      • The more you integrate your ideas, the more universal your ideas/skills/policies will be, allowing you to do more complex things without overreaching.
    • Self-evaluation and overreaching: 
      • If you're unable to adequately self-evaluate some ideas, then dealing with those ideas (using them in your thinking or discussion) is overreaching.
      • The more you improve your self-evaluation processes, the more complex ideas you can deal with without overreaching.
    • Self-evaluation and integration: If you are unable to self-evaluate some ideas, you won't be able to integrate them well.
    • Knowledge-creation and library of criticism: Knowledge-creation requires criticism and it works better when you reuse already known criticisms. The already known criticisms are libraries of criticism.
    • Self-evaluation and libraries of criticism: In order to adequately self-evaluate some ideas, you'd have to have an appropriate library of criticism for those ideas.
    • Overreaching and libraries of criticism: If you're doing an activity and it's overreaching for you, that means you haven't built up an appropriate library of criticism for that activity. 
    • Fallibility and libraries of criticism: If you're not trying to create libraries of criticism, then you're not accounting for fallibility.
    • Integration and fallibility: Integrating ideas helps you account for fallibility because it makes it easier to recognize contradictions between ideas (which are a type of mistake).
    • Integration and libraries of criticism: 
      • Having appropriate libraries of criticism for some ideas allows you to integrate them well. 
      • Even the process of integration requires an appropriate library of criticism for that activity.

Process I used as a guide to make the content above

Note: I used my general process of writing blog posts as a guide to create the following process:
  1. Document the goals with clear success/failure criteria
    1. Goal: State audience. Be specific enough that I could use the model to make predictions about whether the audience will understand my statements.
      1. For this blog post, the audience is me and some FI veterans that might read this and provide me criticism.
    2. Goal: Avoid misrepresenting other people's ideas (in content and credit)
    3. Goal: connect the following concepts -- integration, knowledge creation, self-evaluation, library of criticism, overreaching
      1. Reread Elliot's Using Questions in Thinking once before writing the content and once afterwards to check for things I forgot, and edit if necessary.
  2. Write the content.
    1. After writing the body
      1. make a good summary
      2. make a good title
  3. Analyze whether or not I met the goals.

Analysis
  • Did I adequately define the audience? Yes. I'm able to use my audience model to self-evaluate whether or not my audience will understand my statements.
  • Did I avoid misrepresenting other people's ideas both in content and credit?
    • Content: Yes. I indicated that I'm only brainstorming, which implies that I'm not claiming that my versions of the original ideas are fully compatible with the original ideas.
    • Credit: Yes. I provided links to the original ideas that I worked with, which clearly indicates to my audience that my ideas are versions of originals. So I'm giving credit to the author(s) of the originals.
  • Did I connect all of the ideas that I intended to connect? Yes. I made a spreadsheet to connect every two-idea combination of the original ideas, and I made sure that my blog post includes every two-idea combination. Using this process helped me find 2 combinations that I missed, and then I corrected that.
  • Did I make a good summary? Yes. I wrote the first summary early in my process of writing the main content (not at the beginning), and then I edited it a couple of times during the process of writing the main content.
  • Did I make a good title? Yes. I wrote it before my process of writing the main content, and also before documenting the process that I would follow for making and analyzing the main content. Then I edited the title a couple of times during the process of writing the main content.


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