I would of thought the latter but I now think you’re honest given the earlier conversation involving ‘crazy’ anthropic reasoning of mine which turned out to be favoured by much everyone at SI as well, contrary to your claims.
When did I claim no one at SI held your views? That would’ve been hard since you refused to use standard terminology like SIA or SSA which I could then go ‘ah yes, that’s Bostrom’s current view’.
If you had some omniscient Omega that had a web interface where you could enter “Pick an 1 in a million—quality philosopher” and it would reply “Eliezer Yudkowsky” and that’s how you came around Yudkowsky, then it would have been analogous to that random.org example.
...Prior for the comic is low. You update it away if the choice of comic is very well correlating with what you consider the “best”. If you were just shown various clip art at random you’d have a lot of trouble guessing the most popular one, because your eye for popularity certainly won’t provide enough evidence.
No, that’s not the analogy. The analogy is that there are at least 2 ways in which we are long past a prior of 1 in a million and don’t have judgments which are equivalent to random choice, and those were illustrating them: the first is one’s own ability to recognize some level of quality in a philosopher, and the second is about looking at a non-random selection at the end of a process with some selection for quality.
Are you making a point that popularity of a philosopher among non philosophers is very correlated to their philosophical ability?
Even a small correlation is enough to move the needle.
What’s about lack of recognition by other philosophers, how is that correlated with philosophical ability? What’s about Jesus, a dead philosopher who’s quite damn popular?
So you cite, in a statistical claim throwing around numbers like 1 in a million, a single example? And I wonder how many people really consider Jesus a philosopher, as opposed to an excuse like GWB to signal their religion and cover up that they don’t actually have any preferences as to secular philosophers...
But yeah, popularity is a meaningful index! Go down the list of great philosophers and you’ll find they are popular and even appear in pop culture; Zeno, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Descartes, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein to name a few off the top of my head are all widely read by laymen and appear in popular culture, and were often world-famous in their own lifetime. Of course it’s not a perfect correlation—not all great philosophers will find popularity after their death among non-philosophers (Plotinus or Spinoza or Hume may have been the greatest philosophers of their time but only philosophers read them these days) - but think of how many minor or poor philosophers from those respective time periods remain obscure… Very few of them succeed like Ayn Rand in being a poor philosopher and also popular.
When did I claim no one at SI held your views? That would’ve been hard since you refused to use standard terminology like SIA or SSA which I could then go ‘ah yes, that’s Bostrom’s current view’.
No, that’s not the analogy. The analogy is that there are at least 2 ways in which we are long past a prior of 1 in a million and don’t have judgments which are equivalent to random choice, and those were illustrating them: the first is one’s own ability to recognize some level of quality in a philosopher, and the second is about looking at a non-random selection at the end of a process with some selection for quality.
Even a small correlation is enough to move the needle.
So you cite, in a statistical claim throwing around numbers like 1 in a million, a single example? And I wonder how many people really consider Jesus a philosopher, as opposed to an excuse like GWB to signal their religion and cover up that they don’t actually have any preferences as to secular philosophers...
But yeah, popularity is a meaningful index! Go down the list of great philosophers and you’ll find they are popular and even appear in pop culture; Zeno, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Descartes, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein to name a few off the top of my head are all widely read by laymen and appear in popular culture, and were often world-famous in their own lifetime. Of course it’s not a perfect correlation—not all great philosophers will find popularity after their death among non-philosophers (Plotinus or Spinoza or Hume may have been the greatest philosophers of their time but only philosophers read them these days) - but think of how many minor or poor philosophers from those respective time periods remain obscure… Very few of them succeed like Ayn Rand in being a poor philosopher and also popular.