How soon do people who comment upon something here know the answer at once? For example, the valuable advice on statistics I received several times seems to be generated by pattern-recognition (at least at my level of understanding). I myself often have to spend more time framing my comments than actually recognizing what I want to express (not that I always succeed, but there’s an internal mean-o-meter which says, this is it.) OTOH, much of the material I simply don’t understand, not having sufficient prerequisite knowledge; the polls are aimed at the areas with which you personally interact.
I mostly know what I am going to say
[pollid:1014]
The posts to which I don’t have an immediate answer
[pollid:1015]
Please add your comments on which topics you have to ‘slow down’ - anonymously, if you wish.
Edit to add: My answer undergoes changes before I submit it;
A lot of my comments here are correcting/supplementing/answering someone else’s comment. Reflecting on how I think the typical sequence goes, it might be something like
as I read a comment, get a sensation of “this seems prima facie wrong” or “that sounds misleading” or whatever
finish reading, then re-read to check I’m not misunderstanding (and sometimes it turns out I have misunderstood)
translate my gut feeling of wrongness into concrete criticism(s)
rephrase & rephrase & rephrase & rephrase what I’ve written to try to minimize ambiguity and maybe adjust the politeness level
and so it’s hard to say how long it takes me to “mostly know what I am going to say”. I often have a vague outline of what I ought to say within 10 or 20 seconds of noticing my feeling that Something’s Wrong, but it can easily take me 10 or 20 minutes to actually decide what I’m going to say. For instance, when I read this comment, I immediately thought, “I don’t think that can be right; Russia’s a violent country and some wars are small”, but it took me a while (maybe an hour?) to put that into specific words, and decide which sources to link.
Edit to add: I agree that pattern recognition plays an important part in this. A big part of expertise, I reckon, is just planting hundreds & hundreds of pattern-recognition rules into your brain so when you see certain errors or fallacies you intuitively recognize them without conscious effort.
I am somewhat afraid then, that reading about fallacies won’t change my ability to recognize them significantly. Perhaps ‘rationality training’ should really focus on the editing part, not on the recognizing part. I’ll add another question.
Depends how your mind works, I guess. I read about fallacies when I was young and I feel like that helped me recognize them, even without much deliberate practice in recognizing them (but I surely had a lot of accidental & semi-accidental practice).
Recognition is probably more important than the editing part, because the editing part isn’t much use without having the “Aha! That’s probably a fallacy!” recognitions to edit, and because you might be able to do a good job of intuitively recognizing fallacies even if you can’t communicate them to other people cleanly & unambiguously.
How soon do people who comment upon something here know the answer at once? For example, the valuable advice on statistics I received several times seems to be generated by pattern-recognition (at least at my level of understanding). I myself often have to spend more time framing my comments than actually recognizing what I want to express (not that I always succeed, but there’s an internal mean-o-meter which says, this is it.) OTOH, much of the material I simply don’t understand, not having sufficient prerequisite knowledge; the polls are aimed at the areas with which you personally interact.
I mostly know what I am going to say [pollid:1014]
The posts to which I don’t have an immediate answer [pollid:1015]
Please add your comments on which topics you have to ‘slow down’ - anonymously, if you wish.
Edit to add: My answer undergoes changes before I submit it;
[pollid:1016]
[pollid:1017]
A lot of my comments here are correcting/supplementing/answering someone else’s comment. Reflecting on how I think the typical sequence goes, it might be something like
as I read a comment, get a sensation of “this seems prima facie wrong” or “that sounds misleading” or whatever
finish reading, then re-read to check I’m not misunderstanding (and sometimes it turns out I have misunderstood)
translate my gut feeling of wrongness into concrete criticism(s)
rephrase & rephrase & rephrase & rephrase what I’ve written to try to minimize ambiguity and maybe adjust the politeness level
and so it’s hard to say how long it takes me to “mostly know what I am going to say”. I often have a vague outline of what I ought to say within 10 or 20 seconds of noticing my feeling that Something’s Wrong, but it can easily take me 10 or 20 minutes to actually decide what I’m going to say. For instance, when I read this comment, I immediately thought, “I don’t think that can be right; Russia’s a violent country and some wars are small”, but it took me a while (maybe an hour?) to put that into specific words, and decide which sources to link.
Edit to add: I agree that pattern recognition plays an important part in this. A big part of expertise, I reckon, is just planting hundreds & hundreds of pattern-recognition rules into your brain so when you see certain errors or fallacies you intuitively recognize them without conscious effort.
I am somewhat afraid then, that reading about fallacies won’t change my ability to recognize them significantly. Perhaps ‘rationality training’ should really focus on the editing part, not on the recognizing part. I’ll add another question.
Depends how your mind works, I guess. I read about fallacies when I was young and I feel like that helped me recognize them, even without much deliberate practice in recognizing them (but I surely had a lot of accidental & semi-accidental practice).
Recognition is probably more important than the editing part, because the editing part isn’t much use without having the “Aha! That’s probably a fallacy!” recognitions to edit, and because you might be able to do a good job of intuitively recognizing fallacies even if you can’t communicate them to other people cleanly & unambiguously.