Postmortem: plagiarism in one of my posts

# Summary:

I did some thinking on my plagiarism in a previous blog post and my process that resulted in it. I also made a new process designed to make progress.

# Context:

I wrote a blog post that was criticized for plagiarism. I want to study this, including my processes that led to it.

# Goals:

• Figure out how I plagiarized.
• Figure out what I could have done that would have had a better chance at succeeding.

# Action Plan:

• Explain my process of writing the blog post.
• Explain what I could have done instead that would have had a better chance at succeeding.

# Work:

The blog post was a continuation of something I had written on FI email list. In this FI email, I didn't credit anybody as the originator of the ideas I used. Was it plagiarism?

1. Compare and contrast my FI email with my blog post. 
1. Similarities:
1. Both have roughly the same content. 
2. Differences:
1. There are a few things in the blog post that aren't in the FI email.
2. Suppose the new things in the blog post are the problem (stuff I should have credited but didn't). If so, why wouldn't the old things need credited too? I think they would also need credited.
3. The context of the discussion place might matter. My FI email was written on FI email list and my blog post was written on my blog. Maybe writing this content on FI email list means that it's already credited to FI, since it was written on FI email list.
4. Maybe the context of the discussion matters. My FI email was a reply to an email by Elliot Temple. In my blog post, I did not mention Elliot's email. But I did mention my FI email, and if someone clicked that, they would see Elliot's email.

I think 1.2.3 is the deciding factor differentiating between my FI email and my blog post, making one of them plagiarism and the other not.

My process that resulted in plagiarism:

When I wrote the blog post, I was using a guide but without writing out my work (not in public and not in private). I think that's fine in general but that I should not be doing that for particular parts of the work that I know I'm not good enough to self-judge. 

Plagiarism is one of the things that I know I'm not good enough to self-judge (at least not without using an organized method like using a guide as a reference), so that's something I should be writing out my work for. If I had written out my work, I would have had a better chance of doing it right. 

And if I had gotten it wrong anyway, then I could have made my private work public to get criticism on it (and I can't do that now cuz I didn't write out my work and I don't recall my thoughts about it much).

# Session analysis:

I think I did well thinking through (and documenting my thinking) about my plagiarism and my process that resulted in plagiarism. I made some progress.

# Next steps:

Going forward, until I decide otherwise, write out (public or private) my work to avoid plagiarism.

# Footnotes:

none

Improving my guide for making blog posts using my latest speedrunning session as a guide

# Summary:

I did some work on improving my guide for making blog posts by incorporating what I learned during my last speedrunning session.

# Context:

I've been using my work in some fields to help improve my work in other fields. I made another big improvement to my learning processes with my latest speedrunning session. Now I want to explore what I can reuse for other fields, starting with making blog posts. Later I'll work on improving my guides for programming and grammar analysis.

# Goals:

• Learning goals:
• Improve learning processes (i.e. improve templates):
• of creating the blog post.
• of creating the blog post sections:
• summary
• context
• goals
• action plan
• work
• session analysis
• next steps
• footnotes
• Activity goals:
• Explore making a new guide for making blog posts incorporating the learning processes adopted in last speedrunning session.
• State audience.
• Don't misrepresent the state of my knowledge of the ideas I'm writing about.
• Don't plagiarize.

# Action Plan:

• Pre-activity phase:
• State audience clearly enough to use as a model to make predictions about whether or not the audience will understand my statements.
• Review last speedrunning session.
• Review latest guide for making blog posts.
• Activity phase:
• For each new non-activity idea from the last speedrunning session, consider how it can apply to making blog posts and document that.
• Post-activity phase:
• Check that I've not misrepresented the state of my knowledge of the ideas I'm writing about.
• If fail, create footnotes for corrections.
• Check that I've not plagiarized. 
• If fail, create footnotes for corrections.

# Work:

Pre-activity phase:

1. Audience: people familiar with FI.
2. What new learning things did I implement in my last speedrunning session?
1. Introduced a new section called summary.
1. Write as much of this section as possible before performing the activity.
2. Re the goals section, include meta-goals about learning, not just goals directly about the activity. Here's what I did for that in my last speedrunning session.
1. Improve learning processes (i.e. improve templates):
1. of creating the blog post.
2. of creating the blog post sections:
1. summary
2. context
3. goals
4. action plan
5. work
6. session analysis
7. next steps
8. footnotes
3. Re the action plan and work sections, use this categorization scheme:
1. Pre-activity phase (aka pre-gameplay phase)
2. Activity phase (aka gameplay phase)
3. Post-activity phase (aka post-gameplay phase)
4. Note: I think all of the above applies to making blog posts (and to programming and grammar analysis).
3. Now I'll review my current guide for making blog posts (linked above) and try to incorporate the new ideas listed above.

Activity phase:

Guide for making blog posts:

1. Load template
1. summary
2. context
3. goals
1. learning goals
2. activity goals
1. state audience clearly enough to use as a model to make predictions about whether or not the audience will understand my statements
2. don't misrepresent the state of my knowledge of the ideas I'm writing about
3. don't plagiarize 
4. action plan
1. pre-activity phase
1. load the following guides:
1. Guide for making blog posts
2. Guide for thinking/discussion (my idea tree on discussion methods)
2. activity phase
3. post-activity phase
5. work
1. pre-activity phase
2. activity phase
3. post-activity phase
6. session analysis
7. next steps
8. footnotes
2. Copy/paste my initial relatively less organized exploration (usually saved in my personal notes).
3. Document as much as possible before doing step 1.5 (work).
4. Do step 1.5 (work).
5. Do step 1.6 (session analysis)
6. Do step 1.7 (next steps) 
7. Do step 1.8 (footnotes)
8. Finish step 1.1 (summary)

Post-activity phase:

• Check that I didn't misrepresent the state of my knowledge. 
• Pass. No footnotes required.
• Check that I didn't plagiarize. 
• I don't know how to check this very well. I don't have an organized process for determining this. I think in this case I did not plagiarize but I'm not confident that I could do this for more complicated cases. In this case, I didn't link to anybody else's writing nor did I credit anybody that I got ideas from, but I don't think I need to because I think I didn't write any ideas originated by anyone else except for stuff that is widespread in our culture.
• Pass. No footnotes required.

# Session analysis:

I think I achieved all of my stated goals.

# Next steps:

1. Update my guide on making blog posts.
2. Do the same process for my guide for programming (I saved this as a new personal note as a reminder).
3. Do the same process for my guide for grammar analysis (I saved this as a new personal note as a reminder).

# Footnotes:

none

Connecting concepts: paths-forward and FI learning plan

# Context:

I thought of a connection between paths forward and FI learning plan.

I thought of this because minutes earlier I had made a series of connections between my ideas leading to one that said "Another big source of material [to make new connections] is other people’s material, FI email list, FI discord, curi blog, and other material posted to FI like books by Goldratt." I think that's when I thought of paths forward. I don't have a link yet because I haven't made a blog post yet -- it's only in my personal notes at this point.

# Goals:

• explore the connection between paths forward and FI learning plan.
• don't misrepresent the state of my knowledge regarding the ideas (i.e. don't lie or be ambiguous such as to easily result in misleading people about the standards to which I know what I know).
• don't misrepresent the originator of the ideas (i.e. don't plagiarize).

# Action Plan:

• record what I already explored in my personal notes
• load guides
• which ones?
• process of creating blog posts. [2] 
• discussion methods idea tree. 
• explore the ideas more

# Work:

I'm referencing the following guides:

• The two links above
• Creating my process of creating blog posts
• My idea tree on discussion methods version 1.6

Following is the initial exploration that I had written in my personal notes: It's a list of notes I took quickly without spending any conscious effort to make it understandable to anyone but me: [1]

connect paths-forward to FI learning plan

strength of path forward comes in degrees:

- weakest path forward example

- strongest path forward example (known to me)

new idea: new sheet that logs other people's criticisms/suggestions/questions/etc.

• and a form that allows people to add stuff to my list.
• maybe this is too much. I could instead tell people to talk to me [[[where?]]]
• and I could automate the task of importing a post from [place defined above] so that it enters my sheet and notifies me about it with an email.
• the system would alert me that there's a new post and prompt me to run the importToLog function. 
• where would the sheet be? in my learning plan log, or a new spreadsheet? 
• I guess a new spreadsheet. 
• bonus: then I could learn how to automate tasks that involve more than 1 spreadsheet.

Now I'll try to expand on this stuff. 

What is an example of the weakest path forward? I did a search in the paths forward essay (linked above) and didn't find the word "weak". So I started skimming and I found "bad path forward" and "good path forward". I skimmed some more looking for something I vaguely remember about the degree of strength of a good path forward (my paraphrase). I haven't found it yet. Maybe it's in another essay or blog post about paths forward. 

I think it's useful to think of a path forward as having a degree of strength. And I think it makes sense to talk about one or more thresholds. I think that's what Elliot was doing when he defined "bad path forward" vs "good path forward". I think the degree of strength of a path forward beyond a threshold makes the path forward "good", or else "bad".

I think another useful threshold can factor in one's knowledge. For example, I've been implementing a learning plan that I created guided by (among other things) the FI learning plan blog post linked above and Elliot's suggestions/criticisms in his FI emails engaging with my semiweekly summary posts about my work on my learning plan. I used Elliot's suggestions/criticisms to improve my process of making my semiweekly summary posts, which effectively strengthened the paths forward for my ideas. 

This means that I now make paths forward for my ideas that meet the standard of my current state of knowledge (summarized in the blog post linked in last paragraph).

Disclaimer: I have not checked these ideas with FI. This blog post is partly intended to do that.

# Analysis:

• I think I did some good work exploring the connection between paths forward and FI learning plan.
• I think I correctly stated the state of my knowledge of the ideas I explained.
• I think I correctly credited the originator regarding the ideas I used.

# Next steps:

Prioritize this post on my next semiweekly summary post.

# Footnotes:

[1] note to audience: I wrote part of the summary for this blog post -- the one that goes in my semiweekly summary posts -- right after having written the initial exploration. I wrote the rest of it after finishing the blog post.

[2] note to self: new connection: this step is analogous to getting my ideas to testable condition. define testable -- can successfully get external criticism and I can successfully determine success/fail on the ensuing discussion about the external criticism. not sure. explore more. make a blog post dedicated just to this. (I saved this to a personal note as a reminder.)

Process for grammar analysis

# Context:

I've been trying to learn how to do grammar analysis. I've also made it a goal to make my process for grammar analysis. I think I'm ready to do that now. But for now I'll only think about simple sentences (sentences with only one clause).

# Goals:

• Make a process/algorithm for doing grammar analysis for one-clause sentences.

# Action Plan:

• Load the following (keep in mind):
• English Language, Analysis & Grammar
• Learning how to self-evaluate grammar
• Connecting concepts: process guides for my intellectual work and algorithms
• Grammar: analyze "He was eating and talking."
• Write the process incorporating the ideas linked above.

# Work:

So here's my process for grammar analysis of a one-clause sentence.

1. Load my latest guides:
1. For making blog posts
2. For doing grammar analysis
2. Outline the sentence with angle brackets, curly brackets, and square brackets as explained in the first link above.
1. If the outline is too complex, make additional versions with some details omitted. 
2. Decide what the main verb(s) is/are. Consider more than one option.
1. Make an outline (that can be dropped into MindNode tree-making software) for each option.
1. Compare and contrast the options and try to find one that beats the others on all metrics (criticisms) OR two equivalent options.
1. Consider the meaning of the sentence.
2. Consider which tree is easier to understand.
3. If failed to find one option that beats all others or failed to conclude that two options are equivalent, then
1. If this is the first time here, then go back to step 2.2 and repeat.
2. If this is my second time here, then 
1. Find other FI people's grammar analyses of the same sentence and compare and contrast their analyses to mine.
1. If found any, go back through all the steps from step 2.2 to redo all my thinking, incorporating the new ideas.
3. Else, break out of this loop and seek external criticism (showing all the above work).

# Analysis:

I think I made a ton of improvement compared to my previous disorganized process of doing grammar analysis.

# Next steps:

Continue practicing grammar analysis of one-clause sentences, and improving my process with each practice iteration.

Brainstorming ideas for organizing my semiweekly summaries of my blog posts

# Context:

After reading this FI email with recommendations for organizing my semiweekly summaries of my blog posts, I made edits to my process. But then I thought I need to put in a lot more effort, which is the purpose of this post. I thought of this while driving and I wrote down some ideas into a new personal note as soon as I stopped driving. I included that personal note at the bottom of this email.

# Goals: 

• Brainstorm a bunch of ideas on how to organize my semiweekly summaries of my blog posts.
• Including ideas about the purpose(s) of organizing them.

# Action Plan:

• Brainstorm list of ideas (starting with the purpose(s) of organization):
• use the following as guides:
• personal note (listed at the end of this post)
• Process for making blog posts
• skim through my blog posts and try to come up with categorization schemes

# Work:

• Question: For what purpose(s) should I organize my blog posts in my semiweekly summary posts?
• Helps me engage with my audience.
• Helps them know what I'm looking for.
• what else? (I'm looking for ideas from other people)
• Question: What ways of organizing my blog posts would help my audience engage with me
• Question: What sorts of engagement am I looking for?
• I want recommendations and criticism in general. Specifically I'm looking for these types:
• Criticism/questions designed to help me understand that I'm overreaching/failing to self-evaluate, and recommendations on what to do instead.
• Criticism/questions designed to help me understanding that I plagiarized somebody's intellectual work, and recommendations on what to do instead.
• Criticism/questions designed to help me improve my programming work, and recommendations on what to do instead.
• links to existing explanations and examples
• your custom explanations and examples
• Criticism/questions designed to help guide me towards new programming ideas/functionality that you think might work towards my programming goals, and recommendations to that effect.
• Criticism/questions designed to help guide me towards new programming goals and recommendations to that effect.
• Criticism/questions/recommendations designed to help guide me towards improvements to my connecting concepts series.
• Criticism/questions/recommendations designed to help guide me towards improvements to this blog post.

# Analysis:

• I think I did great. I brainstormed a lot of ideas. This is a great start.

# Next steps:

• Make this blog post the most important one on the next semiweek blog post. (I saved this to my personal notes as a reminder.)

# Personal note:

Make blog post brainstorming organization of my semi week summary blog posts 

Use elliots ideas from his FI email as a guide 

What’s the purpose of elliots recommendations? 

Produce guide for audience on how to engage with my posts 

What else?

Type of criticism 

Overreaching/self-evaluation 

Plagiarism 

Recommendations on my programming work. Links. Explanations. Other possible pursuits that you think I might like and why. 

Criticism of my connecting concepts series 

Creating my process of creating blog posts

These updates are in order of newest to oldest.

------

# 6/30/2020

Here's my latest guide for making blog posts, which I created here:

1. Copy/paste the following template:
1. # Summary
2. # Context
3. # Goals
1. Learning goals
2. Activity goals
1. State audience clearly enough to use as a model to make predictions about whether or not the audience will understand my statements
2. Don't misrepresent the state of my knowledge of the ideas I'm writing about
3. Don't plagiarize 
4. # Action plan
1. Pre-activity phase
1. Load the following guides:
1. Guide for making blog posts
2. Guide for thinking/discussion (my idea tree on discussion methods)
2. Activity phase
3. Post-activity phase
5. # Work
1. Pre-activity phase
2. Activity phase
3. Post-activity phase
6. # Session analysis
7. # Next steps
8. # Footnotes
2. If I wrote some initial exploration, copy/paste that (usually saved in my personal notes).
3. Document as much as possible before doing step 1.5 (work).
4. Do section 1.5 (work).
5. Do section 1.6 (session analysis)
6. Do section 1.7 (next steps) 
7. Do section 1.8 (footnotes)
8. Finish section 1.1 (summary)

------

# 6/21/2020

While writing this blog post, I created and followed this process (which I found very helpful):

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.

------

# 6/21/2020

More brainstorming:

• For each blog post, write a summary. It will go right below the title. And in the FI post.
• This helps me self-evaluate the post — the goal, analysis of progress towards the goal. 
• Using Questions in Thinking
• Define goals before writing the content of the blog post with clear success/failure criteria purposed for self-evaluation.
• State who the audience is. Be specific enough such that I could use the audience model to make predictions about whether or not they will understand my statements.
• One goal should be to avoid misrepresenting other people's ideas
• both in content and credit (plagiarism)
• Document what I'm going to do, then do it. That means state goals and action plans.
• After writing the blog post, analyze whether or not I met the goals.

------

# 6/19/2020

More brainstorming:

• Add stuff about self-evaluation methods
• Add stuff about what self-evaluation methods I used and the outcome of those methods

------

#6/19/2020

Following my next steps from this blog post, I will start making my process of how I create blog posts. I want this to be something I reference before creating every blog post. 

Here's some brainstorming first:

• Review my process of documenting my speedrunning documentation process. I should be able to find stuff that applies to my process on making blog posts.
• I can review some FI material about various things and see what I should include in my process:
• like how to ask good questions. I remember a curi blog post about that that would be good to keep in mind every time I wrote a blog post.
• I can review old notes of mine that are a bit related to this. 
• I recall one note in particular about summarizing stories which has some ideas that I think should be included for my process of making blog posts. For example, something about considering audience and making it detailed enough. The point of that is this. I should be able to use the audience model to make predictions about whether or not a particular proposal statement of mine will be understood by my audience.
• I want to add things like checking whether or not I'm plagiarizing.
• e.g. If I make a claim of the form: "Elliot didn't say X", then do adequate self-evaluation on that claim.

Documenting my discussion process

After writing this blog post, I thought to document a process that I was thinking about. This would serve to help me improve my process. [why? explain later or explain when someone asks.] [1] [text in brackets are notes to myself that I don't want to deal with right now. I may come back later and edit.]

Context:

I recently have been advising people of the following: do email when talking discussion is going badly.

[new thought: But people push against that. They say things like "we tried text, that didn't work." This is an excuse. It's not a reasoned position where you look at both sides and try to argue them both rather than the common case where each person is only arguing their own side and effectively being biased about the other side.]

[in short: let somebody finish what they say before interrupting with your criticisms.]

The process (with new brainstorming):

[new thought: if you interrupt people with your criticisms before they finish their sentences, and if you do that even when you're not emotional, what do you think is going to happen when you are emotional? you're going to do it even worse.]

the longer version: if you're having trouble discussing in person or over the phone, try this idea. each of you write down what you want to say to the other person. [don't just write bullet points. like full essay. why? because the idea is so that you can read your thoughts without being bothered by having to think about what you're going to fill in. write it so that the other people could read it themselves, without your help clarifying what vague bullet points mean]. take as much time as you want [but don't go too long. maybe a week is a good amount]. [I'm talking about problems that are ongoing.] then when you've both finished, meet again. each person reads their essay in its entirety, before either of them respond to the other person's essay. then, when it's time to respond, maybe you could continue discussing in person without having to go back to writing. but if you do that and you get the same kind of problems as before where you're emotional and not discussing well and you're not understanding each other and not making much progress on coming to mutual understanding and mutual agreement, then you should escalate again. take a break, write down what you want to say, and do the rest of the cycle again. keep repeating the cycle as many times as needed to solve the problem of coming to mutual understanding and mutual agreement [this assumes that you want (or still want) to solve that problem]. you could also both be referencing parts of each other's essays while you're calmly talking about each other's ideas.]

Documenting before an activity is like stretching and warming up before a run

Note: I have updates below...

# 6/17/2020

I've been preparing more and more before I play the game. Today I thought of it like stretching and warming up before a run.

Today I made an improvement to how I document my speedrunning. So I thought to document my speedrunning documentation process. While doing that, I made some improvements to the process. 

Here's my speedrunning documentation process:

1. Document what I'm going to do. Below is an example of what I wrote before even turning on the game to play it.

Studying Metro route #24

Reread my notes for section 6.2 and my notes from last session.

Trial 3 analysis: 

Reread my notes and compare and contrast it against my trial 3.

• 
  

Trial 4 analysis: 

Reread my notes and compare and contrast it against my trial 4.

• 
  

Decide next steps:

2. Do what I planned to do, while documenting each section before doing the next section.

3. Post to Mario Odyssey Discussion

4. Get link from step 3 and save it to my learning plan log.

------ Updates ------

# 6/18/2020

I followed my documentation procedure and I made improvements as I went. Below is what my documentation process looked like after doing trial 5 and before doing trial 6 of my 25th session studying the metro route. (no link because I haven't posted it yet.)

1. Document what I'm going to do. Below is an example:

Studying Metro route #25

Reread my notes for section 6.2 and my notes from previous sessions on section 6.2.

Trial 5 analysis:  

Reread my notes from last session and compare and contrast it against my trial 5.

• Problem: 
• Brainstorm solutions: 

Trial 6 analysis: 

Reread my notes for section 6.2 and compare and contrast it against my trial 6.

• Problem: 
• Brainstorm solutions: 

Decide next steps: 

2. Do what I planned to do, while documenting each section before doing the next section.

3. Post to Mario Odyssey Discussion

4. Get link from step 3 and save it to my learning plan log.

5. Update draft of next semiweek FI email with summary of this activity.

# 6/20/2020

This is my latest process.

1. Document what I'm going to do. Below is what I used for this speedrunning session:

Studying Metro route #[N]

Activity: Doing trials

Instructions and analysis:

Reread my notes from previous session.

Trial [k] analysis:  

Reread my notes from last session and compare and contrast it against my trial [k].

• Problem:  
• Brainstorm solutions:

Trial [k+1] analysis: 

Reread my notes from last session and compare and contrast it against my trial [k+1].

• Problem:  
•  Brainstorm solutions:

Decide next steps: 

 

2. Do what I planned to do, while documenting each section before doing the next section.

3. Post to Mario Odyssey Discussion

4. Get link from step 3 and save it to my learning plan log.

[note that I was able to remove step 5 because now I do that process once per semiweek instead of once per activity.]

Learning how to self-evaluate grammar

These updates are listed from newest to oldest.

------

# 6/27/2020

Here's my latest process of doing grammar analysis (for one-clause sentences).

------

# 6/17/2020

I made an idea tree on my ideas about how to learn grammar: How to learn grammar 1.0.

------

# 6/15/2020

This post is purposed for helping me learn how to self-evaluate grammar.

I think I don't have a good idea about how to do that.

I'm going to brainstorm some ideas on how to learn how to self-evaluate grammar:

• I could review my ideas on self-evaluation that I learned from my speedrunning project and see what makes sense to apply to grammar.
• I could review some grammar posts by other FI people that I think know grammar much better than I do, like Anne B, to see what self-evaluation methods they used.
• With each grammar session where I'm doing grammar practice of sentences
• I could check my understanding against other FI people's grammar posts analyzing the same sentences.
• I could compare and contrast my analysis against their analysis -- identify points we agree on and those we disagree on.
• Where we disagree, I could explain those disagreements and try to work out the correct analysis -- which could be either of our initial positions or a new position that I create. And following my learning plan, I would post my analysis to my blog and then later post links and summaries to FI.
• I would also be trying to improve my self-evaluation methods for grammar.

Now that I've written that, I see that I'm missing a step. I should be posting my self-evaluation methods for grammar to my blog and then to FI. So I'll reorganize the above ideas and add that.

1. Create and continuously update my self-evaluation methods for grammar.
• Regularly review my ideas on self-evaluation that I learned from my speedrunning project and see what makes sense to apply to grammar.
• Regularly review grammar posts by other FI people that I think know grammar much better than I do, like Anne B, to see what self-evaluation methods they used.
• Review and update my self-evaluation methods used in each grammar session (see 2 below).
• Post each update to my blog and then post links of that to FI.
2. With each grammar session (where I'm doing grammar practice of sentences):
• Check my analysis against other FI people's grammar posts analyzing the same sentences.
• Compare and contrast my analysis against their analysis -- identify points we agree on and those we disagree on.
• Where we disagree, I could explain those disagreements and try to work out the correct analysis -- which could be either of our initial positions or a new position that I create. And following my learning plan, I would post my analysis to my blog and then later post links and summaries to FI.