I think most LWers will agree that philosophy has a lot of useful concepts to contribute (and probably near duplicates of almost all ideas on LW), but the problem is finding the good stuff. It’s pretty obvious that the signal-to-noise ratio is much much better in LW versus “philosoph.” Philosophy does not even mean analytic philosophy. Most people I know who wanted to wet their feet in philosophy, started with Sophie’s World. The very fact that you’re utilizing so much expert knowledge and a bounty system to find LW’s ideas in philosophy is strong evidence against philosophy.
I still think the meta-seq project is awesome. I hope you can publish a bibliography of high quality philosophical material.
re: meta-sequences, thank you! It’s proven a much bigger and more difficult project than I’d naively imagined, insofar as I began realizing that my own readings of the original or secondary texts were not even remotely adequate, and that I needed to have extensive conversations with people closer to the field in order to understand the intellectual context that makes e.g. the subtle differences in Carnapian linguistics vs that of other logical positivists so salient.
The project will likely end up focusing mostly on language and reality (map and territory) for better or worse. I think it’s a big enough cross-section of LW’s intellectual history, and also enough of a conversation-in-progress in philosophy, that it will hopefully shed light on the larger whole.
As for damning philosophy—I think there are some real self-selection effects; Russell has his quote about young men wanting to think “deep thoughts,” that’s reflected in Livengood’s description of Pitt philosophy; Stove’s “What’s Wrong With Our Thinking” touches on some of the cognitive biases that might guide individuals to certain views, and increase the likelihood of their having a prominent reception and legacy. (One can understand, for instance, why we might be inclined and incentivized to battle against reductionism, or determinism, or relativism.) There’s a certain view of philosophy which sees the Sophists as basically getting the broad brushstrokes right, and much of philosophical history that follows them as being an attempt at “cope” and argue against their uncomfortable truths—that e.g. the ethical and ontological relativism the Sophists pushed was too emotionally and morally destructive to Athens, and Plato’s defense of the forms of beauty, or the just, are an attempt to re-stabilize or re-structure a world that had been proven undone. (I understand “relativism” is in some ways the nemesis of LW philosophy, but I believe this is solely because certain late 20th C relativists took the concept too far, and that a more moderate form is implicit in the LW worldview: there is no such “thing” as “the good” out in the world, e.g.) This is a very partial narrative of philosophy, like any other, but it does resonate with why, e.g., neoplatonism was so popular in the Christian Dark Ages—its idea of an “essence” to things like the Good, or the Just, or a Table, or a human being is all very in accord with Christian theology. And the way that Eastern philosophies avoided this reifying ontology, given a very different religious background, seals the deal. Still, I’d like to do quite a bit more research before taking that argument too seriously.
OTOH, I can’t help but think of philosophy as akin to an aesthetic or cultural endeavour—it can take years of consumption and knowledge to have sophisticated taste in jazz, and perhaps philosophy is somewhat the same. Sure, LessWrong has a kind of clarity in its worldview which isn’t mirrored in philosophy, but as Stove points out and Livengood seconds, the main problem here is that we still have no way of successfully arguing against bad arguments. The positivists tried with their description of “nonsense” (non-analytic or non-verifiable) but this carving still fails to adequately argue against most of what LWers would consider “philosofolly,” and at the same time hacks off large quadrants of humanistically meaningful utterances. Thus, so long as people who want to become philosophers and see value in “philosofolly,” and find readers who see value in philosofolly, then what can the more analytic types say? That they do not see the value in it? Its fans will merely say, well, they do, and that the analytic conception of the world is too narrow, too cold-blooded. think the real takeaway is that we don’t have a good enough understanding of language and communication yet to articulate what is good and productive versus what is not, and to ground a criticism of one school against the other. (Or even to verify, on solid epistemic ground, that such arguments are folly, that they are wrong rather than useful.) This is a big problem for the discipline, as it becomes a pitting of intuitions and taste against one another.
Why do you think that “relativism is in some ways the nemesis of LW philosophy” ? (BTW, I hate the way the word is used, “relative” doesn’t mean “equal” !)
An aside: I think “moderate relativism” is somewhat tautologically true, but I also think it’s a very abused and easy-to-abuse idea that shouldn’t be acknowledged with these terms. I think that perhaps saying morality is “value-centric” or “protocol-based” (each referring to a different part of “morality”. By the second part, I mean a social protocol for building consensus and coordination.) is a better choice of words. After all, relativism implies that, e.g., we can’t punish people who do honor killings. This is mostly false, and does not follow from the inherent arbitrariness of morality.
On our inability to fight bad epistemics: I think this is somewhat of an advantage. It seems to me that “traditional rationality” was/is mostly focused on this problem of consensus-truth, but LW abandoned that fort and instead saw that smarter, more rational people could do better for themselves if they stopped fighting the byzantine elements of more normal people. So in LW we speak of the importance of priors and Bayes, which is pretty much a mindkiller for “religious” (broadly conceived) people. A theist will just say that his prior in god is astronomical (which might actually be true) and so the current Bayes factor does not make him not believe. All in all, building an accurate map is a different skillset than making other people accept your map. It might be a good idea to treat them somewhat separately. My own suspicion is that there is something akin to the g factor for being rational, and of course, the g factor itself is highly relevant. So in my mind, I think making normal people “rational” might not even be possible. Sure, (immense) improvement is possible, but I doubt most people will come to “our” ways. For one, epistemic rationality often makes me one worse off by default, especially in more “normal” social settings. I have often contrasted my father’s intelligent irrationality with my own rationality, and he usually comes much ahead.
(Comment on the meta-seq)
I think most LWers will agree that philosophy has a lot of useful concepts to contribute (and probably near duplicates of almost all ideas on LW), but the problem is finding the good stuff. It’s pretty obvious that the signal-to-noise ratio is much much better in LW versus “philosoph.” Philosophy does not even mean analytic philosophy. Most people I know who wanted to wet their feet in philosophy, started with Sophie’s World. The very fact that you’re utilizing so much expert knowledge and a bounty system to find LW’s ideas in philosophy is strong evidence against philosophy.
I still think the meta-seq project is awesome. I hope you can publish a bibliography of high quality philosophical material.
re: meta-sequences, thank you! It’s proven a much bigger and more difficult project than I’d naively imagined, insofar as I began realizing that my own readings of the original or secondary texts were not even remotely adequate, and that I needed to have extensive conversations with people closer to the field in order to understand the intellectual context that makes e.g. the subtle differences in Carnapian linguistics vs that of other logical positivists so salient.
The project will likely end up focusing mostly on language and reality (map and territory) for better or worse. I think it’s a big enough cross-section of LW’s intellectual history, and also enough of a conversation-in-progress in philosophy, that it will hopefully shed light on the larger whole.
As for damning philosophy—I think there are some real self-selection effects; Russell has his quote about young men wanting to think “deep thoughts,” that’s reflected in Livengood’s description of Pitt philosophy; Stove’s “What’s Wrong With Our Thinking” touches on some of the cognitive biases that might guide individuals to certain views, and increase the likelihood of their having a prominent reception and legacy. (One can understand, for instance, why we might be inclined and incentivized to battle against reductionism, or determinism, or relativism.) There’s a certain view of philosophy which sees the Sophists as basically getting the broad brushstrokes right, and much of philosophical history that follows them as being an attempt at “cope” and argue against their uncomfortable truths—that e.g. the ethical and ontological relativism the Sophists pushed was too emotionally and morally destructive to Athens, and Plato’s defense of the forms of beauty, or the just, are an attempt to re-stabilize or re-structure a world that had been proven undone. (I understand “relativism” is in some ways the nemesis of LW philosophy, but I believe this is solely because certain late 20th C relativists took the concept too far, and that a more moderate form is implicit in the LW worldview: there is no such “thing” as “the good” out in the world, e.g.) This is a very partial narrative of philosophy, like any other, but it does resonate with why, e.g., neoplatonism was so popular in the Christian Dark Ages—its idea of an “essence” to things like the Good, or the Just, or a Table, or a human being is all very in accord with Christian theology. And the way that Eastern philosophies avoided this reifying ontology, given a very different religious background, seals the deal. Still, I’d like to do quite a bit more research before taking that argument too seriously.
OTOH, I can’t help but think of philosophy as akin to an aesthetic or cultural endeavour—it can take years of consumption and knowledge to have sophisticated taste in jazz, and perhaps philosophy is somewhat the same. Sure, LessWrong has a kind of clarity in its worldview which isn’t mirrored in philosophy, but as Stove points out and Livengood seconds, the main problem here is that we still have no way of successfully arguing against bad arguments. The positivists tried with their description of “nonsense” (non-analytic or non-verifiable) but this carving still fails to adequately argue against most of what LWers would consider “philosofolly,” and at the same time hacks off large quadrants of humanistically meaningful utterances. Thus, so long as people who want to become philosophers and see value in “philosofolly,” and find readers who see value in philosofolly, then what can the more analytic types say? That they do not see the value in it? Its fans will merely say, well, they do, and that the analytic conception of the world is too narrow, too cold-blooded. think the real takeaway is that we don’t have a good enough understanding of language and communication yet to articulate what is good and productive versus what is not, and to ground a criticism of one school against the other. (Or even to verify, on solid epistemic ground, that such arguments are folly, that they are wrong rather than useful.) This is a big problem for the discipline, as it becomes a pitting of intuitions and taste against one another.
Why do you think that “relativism is in some ways the nemesis of LW philosophy” ?
(BTW, I hate the way the word is used, “relative” doesn’t mean “equal” !)
From what I see, LW actually started out focused on Truth as the core value, but then since the community is pretty smart, it figured out that this way led to relativism and/or nihilism (?) and pretty bad outcomes :
https://samzdat.com/2018/03/07/everything-is-going-according-to-plan/
So, a strategic change of direction has been attempted towards “Winning” as the core value.
Did I get that right ?
Thanks for the long reply.
An aside: I think “moderate relativism” is somewhat tautologically true, but I also think it’s a very abused and easy-to-abuse idea that shouldn’t be acknowledged with these terms. I think that perhaps saying morality is “value-centric” or “protocol-based” (each referring to a different part of “morality”. By the second part, I mean a social protocol for building consensus and coordination.) is a better choice of words. After all, relativism implies that, e.g., we can’t punish people who do honor killings. This is mostly false, and does not follow from the inherent arbitrariness of morality.
On our inability to fight bad epistemics: I think this is somewhat of an advantage. It seems to me that “traditional rationality” was/is mostly focused on this problem of consensus-truth, but LW abandoned that fort and instead saw that smarter, more rational people could do better for themselves if they stopped fighting the byzantine elements of more normal people. So in LW we speak of the importance of priors and Bayes, which is pretty much a mindkiller for “religious” (broadly conceived) people. A theist will just say that his prior in god is astronomical (which might actually be true) and so the current Bayes factor does not make him not believe. All in all, building an accurate map is a different skillset than making other people accept your map. It might be a good idea to treat them somewhat separately. My own suspicion is that there is something akin to the g factor for being rational, and of course, the g factor itself is highly relevant. So in my mind, I think making normal people “rational” might not even be possible. Sure, (immense) improvement is possible, but I doubt most people will come to “our” ways. For one, epistemic rationality often makes me one worse off by default, especially in more “normal” social settings. I have often contrasted my father’s intelligent irrationality with my own rationality, and he usually comes much ahead.