Can you give some pointers to “philosophy” as a community? It feels like a type mismatch to compare a bunch of message boards and blogs (‘rationalist community’) to an academic pursuit (‘philosophy’).
I wonder if this post and thread is conflating multiple meanings of “truth-seeking” in a way that causes confusion. My version of rationality is about truth-seeking in terms of my beliefs about the world, and my processes (including hidden ones) for selecting the best model for any given decision. Influence over future experiences is the truth I’m seeking.
Academics (including scientists and philosophers) are “truth-seeking” in a much more theoretical sense, looking for consistent descriptions of parts of the world (or sometimes other imagined worlds), and in getting agreement (or at least publication references) on such.
Each observes and learns from the other, of course, but they’re not really all that similar. I think of rationality as engineering more than science.
Some but not all academics also seek truth in terms of their own beliefs about the world, and their own processes (including hidden ones) for selecting the best model for any given decision. From a Hansonian perspective, that’s at least what scientists and philosophers are telling themselves. Yet from a Hansonian perspective, that’s what everyone is telling themselves about their ability to seek truth, especially if a lot of their ego is bound up in ‘truth-seeking’, including rationalists. So the Hansonian argument here would appear to be a perfectly symmetrical one.
I don’t have a survey on hand for what proportion of academia seek truth both in a theoretical sense, and a more pragmatic sense like rationalists aspire to do. Yet “academia”, considered as a population, it much larger than the rationality community, or a lot of other intellectual communities. So, even if the relative proportion of academics who could be considered a “truth-seeking community” in the eyes of rationalists is small, the absolute/total amount of academics who would be considered part of a “genuine truth-seeking community” in those same eyes would be large enough to take seriously.
To be fair, the friends I have in mind who are more academically minded, and are critical of the rationality community and LessWrong, are also critical of much of academia as well. For them it’s about aspiring to a greater and evermore critical intellectualism than it is sticking to academic norms. Philosophy tends to be a field in academia that tends to be more like this than most other academic fields, because philosophy has a tradition of being the most willing to criticize the epistemic practices of other academic fields. Again, this is a primary application of philosophy. There are different branches and specializations in philosophy, like the philosophies of: physics; biology; economics; art (i.e., aesthetics); psychology; politics; morality (i.e., ethics); and more.
The practice of philosophy at it’s most elementary level is a practice of ‘going meta’, which is an art many rationalists seek to master. So I think truth-seekers in philosophy, and in academia more broadly, are the ones rationalists should seek to interact with more, even if finding academics like that is hard. Of course, the most common way rationalists could find academics like that, is to look to academics already in the rationality community like that (there are plenty), and ask them if they know other people/communities they enjoy interacting with for reasons similar to why they enjoy interacting with rationalists.
There is more I could say on the subject of how learning from philosophy, academia, and other communities in a more charitable way could benefit the rationality community. They’re really only applicable if you either are part of an in-person/‘irl’ local rationalist community; or if you’re intellectually and emotionally open to criticisms and recommendations for improvement to the culture of the rationality community. If one or both of those conditions apply to you, I can go on.
Can you give some pointers to “philosophy” as a community? It feels like a type mismatch to compare a bunch of message boards and blogs (‘rationalist community’) to an academic pursuit (‘philosophy’).
I wonder if this post and thread is conflating multiple meanings of “truth-seeking” in a way that causes confusion. My version of rationality is about truth-seeking in terms of my beliefs about the world, and my processes (including hidden ones) for selecting the best model for any given decision. Influence over future experiences is the truth I’m seeking.
Academics (including scientists and philosophers) are “truth-seeking” in a much more theoretical sense, looking for consistent descriptions of parts of the world (or sometimes other imagined worlds), and in getting agreement (or at least publication references) on such.
Each observes and learns from the other, of course, but they’re not really all that similar. I think of rationality as engineering more than science.
Some but not all academics also seek truth in terms of their own beliefs about the world, and their own processes (including hidden ones) for selecting the best model for any given decision. From a Hansonian perspective, that’s at least what scientists and philosophers are telling themselves. Yet from a Hansonian perspective, that’s what everyone is telling themselves about their ability to seek truth, especially if a lot of their ego is bound up in ‘truth-seeking’, including rationalists. So the Hansonian argument here would appear to be a perfectly symmetrical one.
I don’t have a survey on hand for what proportion of academia seek truth both in a theoretical sense, and a more pragmatic sense like rationalists aspire to do. Yet “academia”, considered as a population, it much larger than the rationality community, or a lot of other intellectual communities. So, even if the relative proportion of academics who could be considered a “truth-seeking community” in the eyes of rationalists is small, the absolute/total amount of academics who would be considered part of a “genuine truth-seeking community” in those same eyes would be large enough to take seriously.
To be fair, the friends I have in mind who are more academically minded, and are critical of the rationality community and LessWrong, are also critical of much of academia as well. For them it’s about aspiring to a greater and evermore critical intellectualism than it is sticking to academic norms. Philosophy tends to be a field in academia that tends to be more like this than most other academic fields, because philosophy has a tradition of being the most willing to criticize the epistemic practices of other academic fields. Again, this is a primary application of philosophy. There are different branches and specializations in philosophy, like the philosophies of: physics; biology; economics; art (i.e., aesthetics); psychology; politics; morality (i.e., ethics); and more.
The practice of philosophy at it’s most elementary level is a practice of ‘going meta’, which is an art many rationalists seek to master. So I think truth-seekers in philosophy, and in academia more broadly, are the ones rationalists should seek to interact with more, even if finding academics like that is hard. Of course, the most common way rationalists could find academics like that, is to look to academics already in the rationality community like that (there are plenty), and ask them if they know other people/communities they enjoy interacting with for reasons similar to why they enjoy interacting with rationalists.
There is more I could say on the subject of how learning from philosophy, academia, and other communities in a more charitable way could benefit the rationality community. They’re really only applicable if you either are part of an in-person/‘irl’ local rationalist community; or if you’re intellectually and emotionally open to criticisms and recommendations for improvement to the culture of the rationality community. If one or both of those conditions apply to you, I can go on.