One trouble with scholarship is that you risk shifting the discussion from how good your ideas are, to how good your scholarship is. An anecdote backing this opinion:
You wrote:
Suppose you were about to argue, with Jeremy Bentham, that all intentional human action aims at pleasure. Doing some research on the neuroscience of intentional action would help you avoid that mistake. As it turns out, it’s just not true that all intentional human action aims at pleasure. Pleasure is only one goal among many.
Why did you insert that clause “with Jeremy Bentham”? It adds nothing to your point, but it does show off your scholarship. And what is wrong with that? Well, (and here is the anecdote), when I read that I immediately thought to myself “I’ll bet what Bentham meant by ‘pleasure’ is not the same as what the neuroscience researchers meant by ‘pleasure’”. And I became motivated to find out by researching Bentham. Which is completely irrelevant to the point you were trying to make!
In other words, if you are not careful, scholarship can become a shiny distraction.
For my part, I took the “with Jeremy Bentham” clause to be a concise way of saying “Incidentally, this isn’t a strawman example intended to artificially support my point; this is a real example of a significant player who made this particular error.”
Relatedly, if you had done that research and came back and objected to Luke that his example of Bentham was a bad example, because Bentham is not actually arguing what Luke summarizes him as arguing, I would judge that as doing research that improved the quality of the article.
And relatedly to that, if you were deciding ahead of time whether to do the research, and you estimated that reaching that conclusion was a likely outcome (which it sounds like you did), I would judge that deciding to do it was a sensible decision if you wanted to improve the quality of the article.
Now, whether improving the quality of the article is itself worth doing or not is of course a separate question, but if it isn’t, then your comment is itself a shiny distraction (as is mine, and indeed most of my activity on this site, and elsewhere), and we’re no longer talking about any special property of scholarship.
After all, sitting around working out solutions from first principles can also be a shiny distraction.
For the record, here are some of my thoughts explaining why I focus on so much scholarship, in no particular order.
First, research is something I’m good at. I’ve spent a lot of time doing it, and I can do it fairly efficiently. I’ve developed heuristics for determining very quickly whether something is likely to be useful to my project or not. I know how to figure out which terms are used to describe the concepts of a field that is new to me, and bring myself up to speed very quickly by finding survey articles and review articles and Handbook chapters and so on. Also, I have a pretty strong work ethic and some limited mastery over procrastination—both of which are required for long “literature slogs.” So research is a comparative advantage of mine as compared to, say, making cutting-edge advances in AI or decision theory or statistics or neuroscience.
Second, I know that I almost always prefer well-researched writing to poorly-researched writing. I prefer when people name-drop the people or concepts or articles relevant to the topic they are discussing, whether or not they were partially motivated to do so by a desire for prestige. Why? Because then if I don’t understand something, I can google those names and concepts and articles and answer my own questions without having to bother the original author. Lots of times, the author doesn’t have time to respond, or else he or she can’t remember where they got that original idea, or what the name of that fascinating discovery was, and so on. And then it takes a really long time to track it down. Because I always prefer names and concept names and article references in articles I read, I try to provide such things in articles that I write.
Also, it saves me time. Including names and concepts and articles related to the article saves me from having to answer the same question from 20 people about “What’s the name of the study that demonstrated X?” I can say instead, “Check the footnote” or “Google ‘Bentham’.”
Probably, there is unconscious motivation to include more footnotes and names and concept titles because doing so will cause some people to take me seriously. We’re signaling creatures, after all. Sometimes, the motivation even slips into my conscious mind and I notice it. Usually, I acknowledge that motivation, and then decide to include the extra footnote anyway. Why? Because whatever my motivation for including it, at the end of the day the consequences are good: more people can look up the ideas I’m writing about on their own without bothering me, I can find the source of that idea later if I forget, and so on. I’m a consequentialist, not a Kantian. I don’t think acts are good because they come from a pure, unadulterated, unselfish will. I think acts are good when they produce good consequences.
And then of course I do research because of the other benefits listed in the original post above: I’m talking the same language as everybody else instead of pointlessly making up new terms, I’m avoiding making certain kinds of mistakes, and so on.
Was this directed at me, particularly? I fully agree with your reasons. I am a big fan of your scholarship. Not a fan of your lists of sexy scientists, but, HEY! ‘De gustibus …’ and all that. And by local standards, I almost qualify as a fan of analytic philosophy.
I don’t deny teasing you about unnecessarily name-dropping Bentham, but the name dropping wasn’t my point. My point was that by mentioning Bentham you tempted me to quibble in a non-productive way. I wasn’t saying that you were distracted by something shiny. I was saying that, in this one particular case, your scholarship was a shiny distraction to me.
Keep up the good work, Luke. I think you set a record on speed at getting to 10,000 karma points. You received all those upvotes because people here appreciate what you are doing. Hell, you probably received 1000 karma just on this post and comments. But, if you have to have 1000 points plus a ‘thank you’ from Eliezer, then … I think I probably feel sorry for your girl friend.
ETA: Whoops. Forgot which post we are on. It was your previous posting “Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy” which gained you 1000 points but no “thank you” from the big guy.
It wasn’t particularly addressed to you, but I figured it was most relevant to your comment. Thanks for your clarifications and compliments.
I’m not anticipating a ‘thank you’ from Eliezer for my bringing genuinely useful things from mainstream philosophy to the attention of Less Wrong, no. But that won’t stop me from continuing to do so. :)
For the benefit of those who don’t click the ‘lists of sexy scientists’ link above: That was taken down quite a while ago when I had a change of opinion about the matter.
One interesting thing I want to point out about this thread is the interesting distinction between making use of scholarship, which is what seems to be usually referred to on this site when you guys talk about scholarship as a value; and doing scholarship. Obviously, in order to make use of scholarship, the scholarship must already exist.
The way you reduce scholarship to being merely a way of impressing other people belies, I think, a misunderstanding of what scholarship is, or at least what it should be. To me, scholarship should be the best means for any given inquirer to get to the answer, as simply and easily as possible.
Of course, scholarship can be good or bad, and I like to think that doing scholarship is something that rationalists ought to do. If you’re pursuing a line of inquiry, and run into a dead end, it makes absolute sense to post a sign at the beginning of that road you’ve already taken that says “Dead End”—and here’s why.
It makes sense to cite Jeremy Bentham because he was the first one who pursued that line of inquiry. Of course, as it happens, people generally find it difficult to critique their own, established views, so it took someone else to post the “Dead End” sign for him. But citing the intellectuals is an important part of the map of scholarship that creates a common language for the rest of us to find our way, and not follow dead ends.
But I’m not speaking strictly of Academia. Wikipedia is as much a work of scholarship as the official journals, in my view. Of course, if it’s bad scholarship, a bad map, it will inevitably lead people down bad paths. Lets hope that people take the time to improve it.
Naming Jeremy Bentham shows off scholarship? I doubt that works on Less Wrong. Everybody knows who Bentham is. I just named Bentham to give an example.
But I agree with your overall point, so I’ll add it to the list! Thanks.
I don’t understand this. Everybody knows who George W. Bush is, but having a character in a dialogue speak with him wouldn’t impress. Likewise for a character speaking with Newton about mechanics, and Newton is far better known than Bentham and doesn’t have a generally negative reputation like Bush.
How is the ” ‘everybody knows’ conveys prestige” supposed to work?
I wasn’t sure whether Eliezer’s point was that people do in fact all know who Bentham is, or that many people do NOT in fact, but saying “everyone knows who he is” is the sort of thing you say that signals scholarship.
I agree that it signals scholarship, but I think the most natural reading is that the “association” Eliezer had in mind would be the original association.
The claim “everybody knows” isolates those who do not know from those that do. Knowing Bentham is an arbitrary and mostly useless method of grouping people. In other words statements like “everybody knows” helps to create meaningless divisions in groups.
But in context he was defending himself for having mentioned Bentham, and it was an appropriate argument in that context. He had just previously been accused of showing off scholarship, and his defense (appropriate to the charge) was that it does not require scholarship to know who Bentham is. He wasn’t trying to set up groups.
And I think he’s right. It does not require scholarship to know who Bentham is. By scholarship he mean something specific, expressed here:
Scholarship is excellent, but it is also expensive. It takes a long time to catch up to the state of the art, even for a narrow subject.
I recently read 90% of the literature on machine ethics, a recent and small field of inquiry, and it took me about 40 hours to find all the literature, acquire it, and read (or skim) through.
It does not require reading through 90%, or even 50%, or even 10% of the literature on utilitarianism to know who Bentham is. I know who Bentham is and I haven’t read more than probably a thousandth of one percent of the literature on utilitarianism.
I did not claim he was trying to. Nor do I think he was.
And I think he’s right. It does not require scholarship to know who Bentham is. By scholarship he mean something specific, expressed here:
...
It does not require reading through 90%, or even 50%, or even 10% of the literature on utilitarianism to know who Bentham is. I know who Bentham is and I haven’t read more than probably a thousandth of one percent of the literature on utilitarianism.
I did not mention scholarship in my post so I can not tell what point of mine you are responding to.
I can not tell what point of mine you are responding to.
You were criticizing his use of “everybody knows”, and your attack did not take into account the context. You just took the phrase in isolation and talked about it. I was defending his use of the phrase as having been appropriate in the context in which he used it.
I was commenting on a phase in abstract sense and how it can often have certain effects and hence why some people interpret it as signally scholarship and implying prestige.
I took the phrase in isolation because I was only commenting on the phrase and not the context. Nothing was supposed to reflect directly on the person who made the original comment.
If you have a method of altering my original statement to communicate that more explicitly please share.
I know who Bentham is. Anyone familiar with utilitarianism should know who Bentham is, in my opinion. That doesn’t mean I know much about his thought, nor have I read any of his works.
Neither do I. I may have heard the name in my (French) high school philosophy classes, but unlike those of Locke, Hobbes, Hume or John Stuart Mill (the other philsophers of roughly that place/period I can think of), it didn’t stick.
For the record I have no idea who Jeremy Bentham. I would guess their are many others who will not make post like this who also would not know who Jeremy Bentham is off the top of their head.
One trouble with scholarship is that you risk shifting the discussion from how good your ideas are, to how good your scholarship is. An anecdote backing this opinion:
You wrote:
Why did you insert that clause “with Jeremy Bentham”? It adds nothing to your point, but it does show off your scholarship. And what is wrong with that? Well, (and here is the anecdote), when I read that I immediately thought to myself “I’ll bet what Bentham meant by ‘pleasure’ is not the same as what the neuroscience researchers meant by ‘pleasure’”. And I became motivated to find out by researching Bentham. Which is completely irrelevant to the point you were trying to make!
In other words, if you are not careful, scholarship can become a shiny distraction.
For my part, I took the “with Jeremy Bentham” clause to be a concise way of saying “Incidentally, this isn’t a strawman example intended to artificially support my point; this is a real example of a significant player who made this particular error.”
Relatedly, if you had done that research and came back and objected to Luke that his example of Bentham was a bad example, because Bentham is not actually arguing what Luke summarizes him as arguing, I would judge that as doing research that improved the quality of the article.
And relatedly to that, if you were deciding ahead of time whether to do the research, and you estimated that reaching that conclusion was a likely outcome (which it sounds like you did), I would judge that deciding to do it was a sensible decision if you wanted to improve the quality of the article.
Now, whether improving the quality of the article is itself worth doing or not is of course a separate question, but if it isn’t, then your comment is itself a shiny distraction (as is mine, and indeed most of my activity on this site, and elsewhere), and we’re no longer talking about any special property of scholarship.
After all, sitting around working out solutions from first principles can also be a shiny distraction.
For the record, here are some of my thoughts explaining why I focus on so much scholarship, in no particular order.
First, research is something I’m good at. I’ve spent a lot of time doing it, and I can do it fairly efficiently. I’ve developed heuristics for determining very quickly whether something is likely to be useful to my project or not. I know how to figure out which terms are used to describe the concepts of a field that is new to me, and bring myself up to speed very quickly by finding survey articles and review articles and Handbook chapters and so on. Also, I have a pretty strong work ethic and some limited mastery over procrastination—both of which are required for long “literature slogs.” So research is a comparative advantage of mine as compared to, say, making cutting-edge advances in AI or decision theory or statistics or neuroscience.
Second, I know that I almost always prefer well-researched writing to poorly-researched writing. I prefer when people name-drop the people or concepts or articles relevant to the topic they are discussing, whether or not they were partially motivated to do so by a desire for prestige. Why? Because then if I don’t understand something, I can google those names and concepts and articles and answer my own questions without having to bother the original author. Lots of times, the author doesn’t have time to respond, or else he or she can’t remember where they got that original idea, or what the name of that fascinating discovery was, and so on. And then it takes a really long time to track it down. Because I always prefer names and concept names and article references in articles I read, I try to provide such things in articles that I write.
Also, it saves me time. Including names and concepts and articles related to the article saves me from having to answer the same question from 20 people about “What’s the name of the study that demonstrated X?” I can say instead, “Check the footnote” or “Google ‘Bentham’.”
Probably, there is unconscious motivation to include more footnotes and names and concept titles because doing so will cause some people to take me seriously. We’re signaling creatures, after all. Sometimes, the motivation even slips into my conscious mind and I notice it. Usually, I acknowledge that motivation, and then decide to include the extra footnote anyway. Why? Because whatever my motivation for including it, at the end of the day the consequences are good: more people can look up the ideas I’m writing about on their own without bothering me, I can find the source of that idea later if I forget, and so on. I’m a consequentialist, not a Kantian. I don’t think acts are good because they come from a pure, unadulterated, unselfish will. I think acts are good when they produce good consequences.
And then of course I do research because of the other benefits listed in the original post above: I’m talking the same language as everybody else instead of pointlessly making up new terms, I’m avoiding making certain kinds of mistakes, and so on.
Thoughts?
Was this directed at me, particularly? I fully agree with your reasons. I am a big fan of your scholarship. Not a fan of your lists of sexy scientists, but, HEY! ‘De gustibus …’ and all that. And by local standards, I almost qualify as a fan of analytic philosophy.
I don’t deny teasing you about unnecessarily name-dropping Bentham, but the name dropping wasn’t my point. My point was that by mentioning Bentham you tempted me to quibble in a non-productive way. I wasn’t saying that you were distracted by something shiny. I was saying that, in this one particular case, your scholarship was a shiny distraction to me.
Keep up the good work, Luke. I think you set a record on speed at getting to 10,000 karma points. You received all those upvotes because people here appreciate what you are doing. Hell, you probably received 1000 karma just on this post and comments. But, if you have to have 1000 points plus a ‘thank you’ from Eliezer, then … I think I probably feel sorry for your girl friend.
ETA: Whoops. Forgot which post we are on. It was your previous posting “Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy” which gained you 1000 points but no “thank you” from the big guy.
It wasn’t particularly addressed to you, but I figured it was most relevant to your comment. Thanks for your clarifications and compliments.
I’m not anticipating a ‘thank you’ from Eliezer for my bringing genuinely useful things from mainstream philosophy to the attention of Less Wrong, no. But that won’t stop me from continuing to do so. :)
For the benefit of those who don’t click the ‘lists of sexy scientists’ link above: That was taken down quite a while ago when I had a change of opinion about the matter.
I certainly appreciate your heavily footnoted and referenced articles.
One interesting thing I want to point out about this thread is the interesting distinction between making use of scholarship, which is what seems to be usually referred to on this site when you guys talk about scholarship as a value; and doing scholarship. Obviously, in order to make use of scholarship, the scholarship must already exist.
The way you reduce scholarship to being merely a way of impressing other people belies, I think, a misunderstanding of what scholarship is, or at least what it should be. To me, scholarship should be the best means for any given inquirer to get to the answer, as simply and easily as possible.
Of course, scholarship can be good or bad, and I like to think that doing scholarship is something that rationalists ought to do. If you’re pursuing a line of inquiry, and run into a dead end, it makes absolute sense to post a sign at the beginning of that road you’ve already taken that says “Dead End”—and here’s why.
It makes sense to cite Jeremy Bentham because he was the first one who pursued that line of inquiry. Of course, as it happens, people generally find it difficult to critique their own, established views, so it took someone else to post the “Dead End” sign for him. But citing the intellectuals is an important part of the map of scholarship that creates a common language for the rest of us to find our way, and not follow dead ends.
But I’m not speaking strictly of Academia. Wikipedia is as much a work of scholarship as the official journals, in my view. Of course, if it’s bad scholarship, a bad map, it will inevitably lead people down bad paths. Lets hope that people take the time to improve it.
Naming Jeremy Bentham shows off scholarship? I doubt that works on Less Wrong. Everybody knows who Bentham is. I just named Bentham to give an example.
But I agree with your overall point, so I’ll add it to the list! Thanks.
“Everybody knows who Bentham is”, is precisely the factor that makes association with him prestigious.
I don’t understand this. Everybody knows who George W. Bush is, but having a character in a dialogue speak with him wouldn’t impress. Likewise for a character speaking with Newton about mechanics, and Newton is far better known than Bentham and doesn’t have a generally negative reputation like Bush.
How is the ” ‘everybody knows’ conveys prestige” supposed to work?
I wasn’t sure whether Eliezer’s point was that people do in fact all know who Bentham is, or that many people do NOT in fact, but saying “everyone knows who he is” is the sort of thing you say that signals scholarship.
I agree that it signals scholarship, but I think the most natural reading is that the “association” Eliezer had in mind would be the original association.
The claim “everybody knows” isolates those who do not know from those that do. Knowing Bentham is an arbitrary and mostly useless method of grouping people. In other words statements like “everybody knows” helps to create meaningless divisions in groups.
But in context he was defending himself for having mentioned Bentham, and it was an appropriate argument in that context. He had just previously been accused of showing off scholarship, and his defense (appropriate to the charge) was that it does not require scholarship to know who Bentham is. He wasn’t trying to set up groups.
And I think he’s right. It does not require scholarship to know who Bentham is. By scholarship he mean something specific, expressed here:
It does not require reading through 90%, or even 50%, or even 10% of the literature on utilitarianism to know who Bentham is. I know who Bentham is and I haven’t read more than probably a thousandth of one percent of the literature on utilitarianism.
I did not claim he was trying to. Nor do I think he was.
...
I did not mention scholarship in my post so I can not tell what point of mine you are responding to.
You were criticizing his use of “everybody knows”, and your attack did not take into account the context. You just took the phrase in isolation and talked about it. I was defending his use of the phrase as having been appropriate in the context in which he used it.
I had no intent of attack.
I was commenting on a phase in abstract sense and how it can often have certain effects and hence why some people interpret it as signally scholarship and implying prestige.
I took the phrase in isolation because I was only commenting on the phrase and not the context. Nothing was supposed to reflect directly on the person who made the original comment.
If you have a method of altering my original statement to communicate that more explicitly please share.
I think you’ve clarified it at sufficiently at this point, so no need.
Interesting. Well, this is news to me.
In other words, there’s both showing off by obscurity and showing off by association with well-known names.
I know who Bentham is. Anyone familiar with utilitarianism should know who Bentham is, in my opinion. That doesn’t mean I know much about his thought, nor have I read any of his works.
Not me.
Neither do I. I may have heard the name in my (French) high school philosophy classes, but unlike those of Locke, Hobbes, Hume or John Stuart Mill (the other philsophers of roughly that place/period I can think of), it didn’t stick.
Thanks for piping up. I guess I’m too far down the philosophy wormhole to know which names people do and don’t know. Sorry.
Me either.
I can’t believe people are getting so far up your nose about mentioning Jeremy Bentham.
We’re not, or at least I’m not, just abstractly debating the perils of scholarship.
I have no idea who Jeremy Bentham is—and I’m pretty well scholared… probably just in different fields to you. :)
For the record I have no idea who Jeremy Bentham. I would guess their are many others who will not make post like this who also would not know who Jeremy Bentham is off the top of their head.