When I look at metaphilosophy, the main places I go looking are places with large confusion deltas. Where, who, and why did someone become dramatically less philosophically confused about something, turning unfalsifiable questions into technical problems. Kuhn was too caught up in the social dynamics to want to do this from the perspective of pure ideas. A few things to point to.
Wittgenstein noticed that many philosophical problems attempt to intervene at the wrong level of abstraction and posited that awareness of abstraction as a mental event might help
Korzybski noticed that many philosophical problems attempt to intervene at the wrong level of abstraction and posited that awareness of abstraction as a mental event might help
David Marr noticed that many philosophical and technical problems attempt to intervene at the wrong level of you get the idea
Hassabis cites Marr as of help in deconfusing AI problems
Eliezer’s Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation doesn’t use the term compression and seems the worse for it, using many many words to describe things that compression would render easier to reason about afaict.
Hanson in the Elephant in the Brain posits that if we mysteriously don’t make progress on something that seems crucial, maybe we have strong motivations for not making progress on it.
Question: what happens to people when they gain consciousness of abstraction? My first pass attempt at an answer is that they become a lot less interested in philosophy.
Question: if someone had quietly made progress on metaphilosophy how would we know? First guess is that we would only know if their solution scaled well, or caused something to scale well.
When I look at metaphilosophy, the main places I go looking are places with large confusion deltas. Where, who, and why did someone become dramatically less philosophically confused about something, turning unfalsifiable questions into technical problems. Kuhn was too caught up in the social dynamics to want to do this from the perspective of pure ideas. A few things to point to.
Wittgenstein noticed that many philosophical problems attempt to intervene at the wrong level of abstraction and posited that awareness of abstraction as a mental event might help
Korzybski noticed that many philosophical problems attempt to intervene at the wrong level of abstraction and posited that awareness of abstraction as a mental event might help
David Marr noticed that many philosophical and technical problems attempt to intervene at the wrong level of you get the idea
Hassabis cites Marr as of help in deconfusing AI problems
Eliezer’s Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation doesn’t use the term compression and seems the worse for it, using many many words to describe things that compression would render easier to reason about afaict.
Hanson in the Elephant in the Brain posits that if we mysteriously don’t make progress on something that seems crucial, maybe we have strong motivations for not making progress on it.
Question: what happens to people when they gain consciousness of abstraction? My first pass attempt at an answer is that they become a lot less interested in philosophy.
Question: if someone had quietly made progress on metaphilosophy how would we know? First guess is that we would only know if their solution scaled well, or caused something to scale well.
Also I wrote this a while back https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/caSv2sqB2bgMybvr9/exploring-tacit-linked-premises-with-gpt