As someone slightly annoyed by epistemic status, I felt that your argument in favor of them was pretty convincing.
For the discussion of replacing guilt and standards, the “Confidence all the way up” post also seems relevant.
My main point here is that improving babble doesn’t mean reducing prune. Alkjash sometimes speaks as if it’s just a matter of opening the floodgates. Sometimes people do need to just relax, turn off their prune, and open the floodgates. But if you try to do this in general, you might have initial success but then experience backlash, since you may have failed to address the underlying reasons why you had closed the gates to begin with.
I think that depends on your personality, and where you’re at in your life. By default, I’m very good at babble (intuition you would say), but my prune was initially weak. Every maths teacher I had before the age of 20 was basically “you got good intuition, but you need to stop following the first idea that comes to your mind”. So I need to improve my prune. But I know others who have trouble babbling. Maybe that was the case for Alkjash.
Last thing: every time I read about babble and prune, I think about this quote from Goro Shimura, on his friend the mathematician Yutaka Taniyama:
Taniyama was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes, but he made mistakes in a good direction, and so eventually, he got right answers, and I tried to imitate him, but I found out that it is very difficult to make good mistakes.
Right, good point. I was assuming that most people do have some kind of need for more babble, and primarily arguing that even then just opening the floodgates is a rather course approach which may not work. But the law of equal and opposite advice applies.
Nice post!
As someone slightly annoyed by epistemic status, I felt that your argument in favor of them was pretty convincing.
For the discussion of replacing guilt and standards, the “Confidence all the way up” post also seems relevant.
I think that depends on your personality, and where you’re at in your life. By default, I’m very good at babble (intuition you would say), but my prune was initially weak. Every maths teacher I had before the age of 20 was basically “you got good intuition, but you need to stop following the first idea that comes to your mind”. So I need to improve my prune. But I know others who have trouble babbling. Maybe that was the case for Alkjash.
Last thing: every time I read about babble and prune, I think about this quote from Goro Shimura, on his friend the mathematician Yutaka Taniyama:
Right, good point. I was assuming that most people do have some kind of need for more babble, and primarily arguing that even then just opening the floodgates is a rather course approach which may not work. But the law of equal and opposite advice applies.