Writing it out/ explaining X to a friend who is either more knowledgeable about X (so you can confirm/deny what you know) or doesn’t know about X (so you can see if after your explanation they are grasping what you are saying and see if it matches what’s in your head) seem to be the first two options for corroborating information in our heads.
Do you have any other recommendations to straighten things out? I’d love to hear more about this—I hadn’t really considered this outside inferential distances before you brought this up.
In general it’s important to have feedback loops. That can mean talking with other people. It can also mean actually using the ideas in a way that exposes them to empirical reality. You can make predictions based on your theories and see whether those come true.
Quite often we also think that concepts in our head are clear when they aren’t. It’s very easy to delude yourself.
Yeah—I can see why that can be the case.
Writing it out/ explaining X to a friend who is either more knowledgeable about X (so you can confirm/deny what you know) or doesn’t know about X (so you can see if after your explanation they are grasping what you are saying and see if it matches what’s in your head) seem to be the first two options for corroborating information in our heads.
Do you have any other recommendations to straighten things out? I’d love to hear more about this—I hadn’t really considered this outside inferential distances before you brought this up.
In general it’s important to have feedback loops. That can mean talking with other people. It can also mean actually using the ideas in a way that exposes them to empirical reality. You can make predictions based on your theories and see whether those come true.