I heard an idea on the Rationally Speaking podcast today of “befriending a straw man.” The idea is that rather than putting forth the most charitable interpretation of a poorly articulated thought, or just strawmanning it, you take the poorly articulated idea seriously exactly as stated and see if you can find merit in it that you’d otherwise not have discovered. This seems valuable. I think the idea here is to get out of your mental ruts, and to do that you might need to be exposed to ideas that don’t make obvious sense and really try to treat them as fact.
This “befriend the straw man” idea would imply that it’s most important to consider the aspects of the divination that make the least sense or seem obviously wrong. By contrast, a YouTube video I watched of an old lady giving lessons on constructing hexagrams said to ignore those bits.
So in the end, we’re sort of asking what we think the function of the divination is, and then determining how to interpret it based on that.
I heard an idea on the Rationally Speaking podcast today of “befriending a straw man.” The idea is that rather than putting forth the most charitable interpretation of a poorly articulated thought, or just strawmanning it, you take the poorly articulated idea seriously exactly as stated and see if you can find merit in it that you’d otherwise not have discovered. This seems valuable. I think the idea here is to get out of your mental ruts, and to do that you might need to be exposed to ideas that don’t make obvious sense and really try to treat them as fact.
This “befriend the straw man” idea would imply that it’s most important to consider the aspects of the divination that make the least sense or seem obviously wrong. By contrast, a YouTube video I watched of an old lady giving lessons on constructing hexagrams said to ignore those bits.
So in the end, we’re sort of asking what we think the function of the divination is, and then determining how to interpret it based on that.