Copy

Essay: Passivity as a Strategic Excuse

(Read this online.)

How much of the "passivity" problems people have – about learning FI and all throughout life elsewhere as well – are that they don't want to do something and don't want to admit that they don't want to? How much is passivity a disguise used to hide disliking things they won't openly challenge?

Using passivity instead of openly challenging stuff is beaten into children. They learn not to say "no" or "I don't want to" to their parents. They learn they are punished less if they "forget" than if they refuse on purpose. They are left alone more if they are passive than if they talk about their reasoning for not doing what the parent wants them to do.

Typical excuses for passivity are being lazy or forgetful. Those are traits which parents and teachers commonly attribute to children who don't do what the parent or teacher wants. Blaming things on a supposed character flaw obscures the intellectual or moral disagreement. (Also, character flaws are a misconception – people don't have an innate character, they have ideas!)

The most standard adult excuse for passivity is being busy. "I'm not passive, I'm actively doing something else!" This doesn't work as well for children because their parents know their whole schedule.

Claiming to be busy is commonly combined with the excuse of privacy to shield what one is busy with from criticism. Privacy is a powerful shield because it's a legitimate, valuable concept – but it can also be used as an anti-criticism tool. It's hard to figure out when privacy is being abused, or expose the abuses, because the person choosing privacy hides the information that would allow evaluating the matter.

Note: Despite people's efforts to prevent judgment, there are often many little hints of irrationality. These are enough for me to notice and judge, but not enough to explain to the person – they don't want to understand, so they won't, plus it takes lots of skill to evaluate the small amount of evidence (because they hid the rest of the evidence). Rather than admit I'm right (they have all the evidence themselves, so they could easily see it if they wanted to), they commonly claim I'm being unreasonable since I didn't have enough information to reach my conclusions (because a person with typical skill at analysis wouldn't be able to do it, not because they actually refute my line of reasoning).

Generic Example

Joe (an adult) doesn't like something about Fallible Ideas knowledge and activities (FI), and doesn't want to say what it is. And/or he likes some other things in life better than FI and wants to hide what they are. Instead of saying why he doesn't pursue FI more (what's bad about it, what else is better), Joe uses the passivity strategy. Joe claims to want to do FI more, get more involved, think, learn, etc, and then just doesn't.

Joe doesn't claim to be lazy or forgetful – some of the standard excuses for passivity which he knows would get criticized. Instead, Joe doesn't offer any explanation for the passivity strategy. Joe says he doesn't know what's going on.

Or, alternatively, Joe says he's busy and that the details are private, and he'd like to discuss it, he just doesn't know how to solve the privacy problem. To especially block progress, Joe might say he doesn't mind having less privacy for himself, but there are other people involved and he couldn't possibly say anything that would reduce their privacy. Never mind that they share far more information with their neighbors, co-workers, second cousins, and Facebook...

Essay: Backbone, Pushback, Standing Up For Your Ideas

(Read this online.)

You need to be sturdy to do well in FI philosophy discussions or anywhere. Don’t be pushed around or controlled by people who weren’t even trying to push you around, because you’re so weak and fragile almost anything can boss you around without even trying or intending to.

Broadly, people give advice, ideas, criticism, etc.

Some advice can help you right now. Some of it, you don’t understand, you don’t get it, it doesn’t work for you right now. You could ask a question or follow up and then maybe get more advice so it does work, but you still might not get it. It’s good to follow up some sometimes, but that’s another topic.

The point is: you must use your own judgment about which ideas work for you. What do you understand? What makes sense to you?

Filter all the ideas/advice/criticism in this way. Sort it into two categories:

Category 1 (self-ownership and integration of the idea): Do you get it, yourself, in your own understanding, well enough to use it? Are you ready to use it as your own idea, that is yours, that you feel ownership of, and you take full responsibility for the outcome? Would you still use it even if the guy who said it changed his mind (but didn’t tell you why), because it’s now the best idea in your own mind? Would you still use it if all the people advocating it got hit by cars and died, so you couldn't get additional advice?

Category 2 (foreign, non-integrated, confused idea): You don’t get it. Maybe you partly get it, but not fully. Not enough to live it without ever reading FI again, with no followup help. You don’t understand it enough to adapt it when problems come up or the situation changes. You have ideas in your mind which conflict with it. It isn’t natural/intuitive/automated for you. It feels like someone else’s idea, not yours. Maybe you could try doing their advice, but it wouldn’t be your own action.

NEVER EVER EVER ACCEPT OR ACT ON CATEGORY 2 IDEAS.

If you only use category 1, you’re easy to help and safe to talk to. People can give you advice, and there's no danger – if it helps, great, and if it doesn't help, nothing happens. But if you use category 2, you are sabotaging progress and you're hard to deal with.

Note: the standard for understanding ideas needs to be your own standard, not my standard. If you're somewhat confused about all your ideas (by my standards), that doesn't mean everything is category 2 for you. If you learn an idea as well as the rest of your ideas, and you can own it as much as the rest, that's category 1.

Note: Trying out an idea, in a limited way, which you do know how to do (you understand enough to do the trial you have in mind) is a different idea than the original idea. The trial could be category 1 if you know how to do it, know what you're trying to learn, know how to evaluate the results. Be careful though. It's easy to "try" an idea while doing it totally wrong!

But…

But there's a problem here I haven't solved. Most people can't use the two categories because the idea of the two categories itself is in category 2 for them, so it'd be self-contradictory to use it.

To do this categorizing, they'd need to have developed the skill of figuring out what they understand or not. They'd need to be able to tell the difference effectively. But most people don't know how.

They could try rejecting stuff which is category 2 and unconventional, because that's an especially risky pairing. Except they can't effectively judge what's unconventional, and also they don't understand why that pairing matters well enough (so the idea of checking for category-2-and-unconventional is itself a category 2 idea for them; it's also an unconventional suggestion...).

Note: these ideas have been discussed at the FI discussion group. Here’s a good post by Alisa and you can find the rest of the discussion at that link.

Leave a Tip?

If you liked these essays, or other newsletter content, please leave a tip! Paypal donation link. I do lots of free writing without a salary, so please support my work if you value it, especially if you haven’t bought any of my paid educational material. Tips are 100% optional, but highly appreciated.

Links

The Lifespan of a Lie explains that “The most famous psychology study of all time [the Stanford Prison Experiment] was a sham.” The article has lots convincing details; the author interviewed people involved and researched relevant documentation of events. The worst part is that people started pointing out major problems early on and the false claims spread anyway.

I wrote an explanation about how learning works. It’s specifically about the interplay of a helper/wise-person/teacher offering some corrections and a learner using the help to generate a much larger number of corrections on his own. Teachers can’t just tell students everything; they can only say a few things and students have to do most of the thinking themselves.

PAS wrote an analysis of what makes a cult.

I liked this Twitter thread analyzing Jordan Peterson. It’s great with some prior familiarity with Jordan Peterson.

I got blocked on Twitter by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an author who is supposedly smart, rational and knowledgeable about Popper. I was blocked for offering helpful corrections for his article; he admitted I was right and told me to get lost instead of wanting more; apparently he hates criticism. (By contrast, happily, Objectivist economist George Reisman appreciated the comments I sent him recently which, similarly, included both criticism and corrections of typos. And recently on Twitter, patio11 and Daniel Greenfield both reacted positively to typo reports.) At the link, you can also find lots of discussion in blog comments.

I interacted with Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer on Twitter. He said he stands by headline, from a years ago, even though I explained that it misquotes Obama. He denied there was any error and then ignored me (and went back to repeatedly responding to hostile people and challenging them to quote even one error). I updated my blog post about it. Sad! I sympathize with Jihad Watch’s work and mission, which I think is largely correct. I think Spencer’s opponents are worse intellectuals and scholars than him, but I wish the world had better thinkers.

Blog comments: I wrote 7 criticisms of a 9 word quote about epistemology. Click through if you’re interested in detailed textual analysis, primarily about clarity. Keep reading the new comments below there for some additional philosophy discussion, and there’s also new philosophy discussion here too.

I enjoyed reading Marooned in Realtime, a far-future sci-fi book by Vernor Vinge.

Politics

Daniel Greenfield’s new article at Frontpage Mag is great: Trump's 5 Rules For Ruling The World . He understands lots about Trump, negotiation, and social dynamics.

Ann Coulter writes about MS-13 causing problems in our schools. Some students require security officers to protect them from death threats. There have been fights, shootings, drugs, rapes, and scared teachers. We should build a wall, end chain migration, reject amnesty, and tighten up our immigration policies. (How about an immigration moratorium for a year while we figure out what the hell we’re doing?) My suggestions are blatantly copied from Trump’s presidential campaign, but he seems to have forgotten…?

Ann Coulter is displeased that the media can’t or won’t use google searches to do even the most basic research.

Daniel Horowitz writes The immorality of the open-borders Left. It explains how amnesty and lack of border security are hurting innocents, Americans and children – while empowering drug cartels, violent gangs and rapists.

Daniel Horowitz explains how to solve the Southern border crisis in: Let’s stop managing this invasion and start blocking it.

Taxes

(Read this online.)

Taxpayer funding has partial overlap with slave labor and with theft. It takes people’s wealth by force, regardless of whether they agree or disagree with what the government is using the wealth for. Therefore taxpayer funding should be used highly conservatively – in limited ways when we really can't figure out an alternative. It should be a last resort, not something used casually. There are worse things one can say about taxes. This is a limited, modest statement that all reasonable people ought to be able to agree with it. But instead we live in a nightmare world where most people seem to think it’s good to use $200,000,000 of taxes on a project just because they expect the value from the project – after successful completion within the budget – to be $220,000,000. Or because the project promotes some value they care deeply about but find it difficult to voluntarily raise $200,000,000 for.


By Elliot Temple. I write philosophical essays and a blog.

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp