You could introduce some of your friends into LessWrong topics by labeling them as “philosophy”. (Start with the articles that don’t explicitly criticize the current state of philosophy, obviously.)
The label seems credible—some of my friends, when I sent them a link to LW, replied that it seems to be a website about philosophy. And when a person already has “studying philosophy” as part of their self-concept, they may be more likely to agree to look at something labeled as “philosophical”.
Perhaps you could just taboo “science” and describe scientists as a weird branch of philosophers—philosophers who try to test their ideas experimentally, because this is what their weird philosophy tells them to do. Now learning about such weird philosophy would be interesting, wouldn’t it?
Tabooing the word “science”seems to be a pretty good idea, along with other scientific jargon. I think many of the idealist and continental philosophy students are not afraid of science exactly, but fear that it somehow makes the human condition worse; more mechanical, and less special.
Well, there’s also the various concerns about research programs — the social institutions of science that direct which knowledge is found. Consider the following argument:
In the 20th century, a lot of research effort and funding was spent on discovering what objective properties of the world might be useful to know in order to blow people up more effectively (atomic physics, e.g.), order them around inhumanely (behaviorism), control their wants and desires (advertising and propaganda), and so forth. There are presumably also objective properties of the world that would be useful to know in order to make peace and prosperity for all — and these also can be empirically investigated; but the goal of discovering them is not as good of a source of funding as those other ones; and so they are by and large not the subject of institutional science.
You could introduce some of your friends into LessWrong topics by labeling them as “philosophy”. (Start with the articles that don’t explicitly criticize the current state of philosophy, obviously.)
The label seems credible—some of my friends, when I sent them a link to LW, replied that it seems to be a website about philosophy. And when a person already has “studying philosophy” as part of their self-concept, they may be more likely to agree to look at something labeled as “philosophical”.
Perhaps you could just taboo “science” and describe scientists as a weird branch of philosophers—philosophers who try to test their ideas experimentally, because this is what their weird philosophy tells them to do. Now learning about such weird philosophy would be interesting, wouldn’t it?
Tabooing the word “science”seems to be a pretty good idea, along with other scientific jargon. I think many of the idealist and continental philosophy students are not afraid of science exactly, but fear that it somehow makes the human condition worse; more mechanical, and less special.
Thanks
Well, there’s also the various concerns about research programs — the social institutions of science that direct which knowledge is found. Consider the following argument:
In the 20th century, a lot of research effort and funding was spent on discovering what objective properties of the world might be useful to know in order to blow people up more effectively (atomic physics, e.g.), order them around inhumanely (behaviorism), control their wants and desires (advertising and propaganda), and so forth. There are presumably also objective properties of the world that would be useful to know in order to make peace and prosperity for all — and these also can be empirically investigated; but the goal of discovering them is not as good of a source of funding as those other ones; and so they are by and large not the subject of institutional science.