I regard the Sequences as a huge great slab of pretty decent popular philosophy. They don’t really tread much ground that isn’t covered in modern philosophy somewhere: for me personally, I don’t think the sequences influenced my thinking much on anything except MWI and the import of Bayes’ theorem; I had already independently come to/found most of the ideas Eliezer puts forward. But then again, I hadn’t ever studied philosophy of physics or probability before, so I don’t know whether the same would have happened in those areas as well.
The novel stuff in the sequences seems to be:
The MWI stuff
The focus on probabilistic reasoning and Bayesianism
The decision theory/AI stuff
The cohesiveness of it.
I think the last point is the most important: the particular cluster of LW philosophical positions occupies a quite natural position, but it hasn’t had a good systematic champion yet. I’m thinking of someone who could write LW’s Language, Truth and Logic. The Sequences go some way towards that (indeed, they are similar in a number of ways: Ayer wrote LTL in one go straight through, as the Sequences were, being a set of blog posts).
So I’ll be interested to read Eliezer’s book; but I suspect that it won’t quite make it to “towering classic” in my books, probably due to lack of integration with modern philosophy. We should learn from the mistakes of philosophers!
EDIT: To avoid joining the profession-of-faith-club: I have plenty of significant points of disagreement as well! For example, Eliezer’s metaethics is both wrong and deeply confused.
We should learn from the mistakes of philosophers!
But there are so many, and so little time!
I also found most of Eliezer’s posts pretty obvious, also having read towering stacks of philosophy before-hand. But the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher for Eliezer than for most philosophers, or for philosophy in general.
I regard the Sequences as a huge great slab of pretty decent popular philosophy. They don’t really tread much ground that isn’t covered in modern philosophy somewhere: for me personally, I don’t think the sequences influenced my thinking much on anything except MWI and the import of Bayes’ theorem; I had already independently come to/found most of the ideas Eliezer puts forward. But then again, I hadn’t ever studied philosophy of physics or probability before, so I don’t know whether the same would have happened in those areas as well.
The novel stuff in the sequences seems to be:
The MWI stuff
The focus on probabilistic reasoning and Bayesianism
The decision theory/AI stuff
The cohesiveness of it.
I think the last point is the most important: the particular cluster of LW philosophical positions occupies a quite natural position, but it hasn’t had a good systematic champion yet. I’m thinking of someone who could write LW’s Language, Truth and Logic. The Sequences go some way towards that (indeed, they are similar in a number of ways: Ayer wrote LTL in one go straight through, as the Sequences were, being a set of blog posts).
So I’ll be interested to read Eliezer’s book; but I suspect that it won’t quite make it to “towering classic” in my books, probably due to lack of integration with modern philosophy. We should learn from the mistakes of philosophers!
EDIT: To avoid joining the profession-of-faith-club: I have plenty of significant points of disagreement as well! For example, Eliezer’s metaethics is both wrong and deeply confused.
But there are so many, and so little time!
I also found most of Eliezer’s posts pretty obvious, also having read towering stacks of philosophy before-hand. But the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher for Eliezer than for most philosophers, or for philosophy in general.