🔭 Alex is Learning (To Think)

04. Path to becoming Socratic (AKA, what I don't know yet)

Jul 16, 20254 min read

Stuff I don’t remember/don’t know, yet

  • Looking at my notes in the margins, and anywhere where I’ve e.g. done a big exclamation mark
    • That’s right, teenage me, I’m not afraid to scribble all over a book

Flicking through the book to surface things that I didn’t know that I don’t know:

1. On the profundity/rationale/theory of change

Popularity

  • John Stuart Mill quotes re: Socrates
  • Author’s thoughts on why the Socratic method isn’t popular

Confusion

  • Stuff about confusion being a key focus
    • Mill: “The Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for correcting the errors, and clearing up the confusions incident to the intellectus sibi permissus, the understanding which has made up all its bundles of associations under the guidance of popular phraseology” (page 19)
    • Intellectus sibi permissus means “the mind left to itself”
    • Commonplace as being the key enemy, rather than Sophistry
  • The key importance of intellectual consistency
    • “To Socrates, this is everything”

Ignorance and midwifery

  • Chapter about ignorance
    • Also, Buddhist moha
    • Conceits, like weeds, that block the growth of anything better
    • Irony
    • Ignorance of ignorance (double ignorance)

“Socratic philosophy starts with a love of truth, but as a matter of action its first task is negative: shaking off the delusion of wisdom”

  • Midwifery
    • Joe Hudson using VIEW to be the ideal midwife?
  • Ignoti nulla cupido - this is a very profound thing to deeply grok!!!! (page 140)
    • You are the cattle
    • The allegory of the cave
    • “Ogle the powers of those who see farther than we do”
      • Forecasters, people with real values/concrete missions
    • “…it is the master mistake that makes all other mistakes more likely, over a lifetime and by the hour. The Socratic method is a way to correct it” - page 147, re: the invisibleness of idiocy

”The Socratic Function”/theory of change

  • Profundity of adversarial thinking (page 49)
  • The importance of (the claim of) ignorance
  • What the author writes about “The Socratic Function”
  • What is elenctic thinking?
    • Purgative elenchus
    • Defensive elenchus
    • Gathering knowledge via elenchus (Popper)
      • “Production of cumulative consistency”
      • First principles, strong priors, evolutionary epistemology
    • Performing surgery on yourself, heroic state
    • Ridiculousness audit
  • Care of the psyche, the soul, vs confusion
  • Why Socrates was obsessed with definitions (page 83)

2. Technique/“how to”

  • The use of concrete examples
  • Systole, systolic
  • Diastole, diastolic
  • Platonic collection and division, diairesis, dialecticians
  • Chapter on analogies
    • Also, the epagoge
  • Chapter → Socratic Rules for Dialogue
    • Seeking the truth (dialectic vs eristic)
    • People, not just claims
    • The priority of reason
    • Candor
    • The one-witness principle
    • Charity (steelman)
    • Offense
  • Chapter on how to make first half of the elenchus
  • Chapter on how to make the second half of the elenchus

Profundity of questions

  • More on the profundity of questions (“We’re at our keenest when we work on a question”)
    • (Chapter 5)
    • Counters the bad habit of a love of holding opinions
    • Turns you into a scientist

Aporia

  • Even in a state of aporia, some things remain obvious (“I still know that I have only 2 hands”)
  • Aporetic cleansing
  • Aporetic cleansing before learning
  • The aporetic spur (so good!!!)
    • A salient, bedevilling open loop
    • Vs if you have double ignorance, certainty, then no curiosity, no open loop. Hedgehog (vs fog)
  • Aporia, the ineffable, the Dao etc (page 134)
  • False aporia is still useful

3. Socratic ethics

  • Socratic ethics
    • Eudaimonia is the final goal
    • “Happiness” is a good translation, if you understand the Greek version of this
    • Socratic equation
      • Happiness = virtue = knowledge
    • The impossibility of akrasia
    • Lack of need for willpower re: e.g. “resisting” heroin
    • Everyone desires good things, no one willingly does wrong
      • “They’re in the grip of mistakes and bad understandings” (and so are you!!!)

4. Misc

  • What does the word “transliterated” mean?
  • Gather the various metaphors where I’ve scribbled “great metaphor!” in the margins
  • Enneagram 3 and Socratic method (e.g. identity/image consciousness)
  • Chapter on Socrates and the Stoics, and chapter on Socrates and the Skeptics → don’t care about this atm
  • Properly grok the different things that rhyme with the Socratic method and why (e.g., AoA’s VIEW, and each of the 4 parts)

🚨 Ok, now what? 🚨

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