This seems to be saying that Quinean philosophy reached (correct) conclusions similar to Less Wrong, and that since it came first it probably influenced LW, directly or indirectly, and therefore, we should study Quinean philosophy. But this does not follow; if LW and Quine say the same things, and either LW is better written or we’ve already read it, then this is a reason not to read Quine, because of the duplication. The implied argument seems to be: Quine said these things first ⇒ Quine deserves prestige ⇒ We should read Quine. But prestige alone is not a sufficient reason to read anything.
No, I advise against reading Quine. I only said above that rationalists should not ignore mainstream (Quinean) philosophy. That’s a much weaker claim than the one you’ve attributed to me. Much of LW is better-written and more informed of the latest science than some of the best Quinean philosophy being written today.
What I’m claiming is that Quinean philosophy has made, and continues to make, useful contributions, and thus shouldn’t be ignored. I have some examples of useful contributions from Quinean philosophy here.
Necro-post, but I have to say I think a lot of people might have been/be talking past each other here. The question isn’t whether mainstream philosophy has useful insights to offer, the question is whether studying mainstream philosophy, i.e. “not ignoring it”, as you put it, is the best possible use of one’s time, as opposed to studying, say, AI research. There are opportunity costs for everything you do, and frankly, I’d say reading philosophy has (for me) too high of an opportunity cost and too low of an expected benefit to justify doing so. I don’t think I’d be mistaken in saying that this is probably true for many other LW readers as well.
I don’t advocate reading Quine directly, but rather Quinean philosophy. For example Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, which reads like a series of Less Wrong blog posts, but covers lots of material not yet covered on Less Wrong. (I made a dent in this by transposing its coverage of statistical prediction rules into a Less Wrong post.)
And I don’t advocate it for everyone. Doing research in philosophy is my specialty, but I don’t think Eliezer should waste his time poring through philosophy journals for useful insights. Nor should most people. But then, most people won’t benefit from reading through books on algorithmic learning theory, either. That’s why we have divisions of labor and expertise. The thing I’m arguing against is Eliezer’s suggestion that people shouldn’t read philosophy at all outside of Less Wrong and AI books.
This seems to be saying that Quinean philosophy reached (correct) conclusions similar to Less Wrong, and that since it came first it probably influenced LW, directly or indirectly, and therefore, we should study Quinean philosophy. But this does not follow; if LW and Quine say the same things, and either LW is better written or we’ve already read it, then this is a reason not to read Quine, because of the duplication. The implied argument seems to be: Quine said these things first ⇒ Quine deserves prestige ⇒ We should read Quine. But prestige alone is not a sufficient reason to read anything.
No, I advise against reading Quine. I only said above that rationalists should not ignore mainstream (Quinean) philosophy. That’s a much weaker claim than the one you’ve attributed to me. Much of LW is better-written and more informed of the latest science than some of the best Quinean philosophy being written today.
What I’m claiming is that Quinean philosophy has made, and continues to make, useful contributions, and thus shouldn’t be ignored. I have some examples of useful contributions from Quinean philosophy here.
Necro-post, but I have to say I think a lot of people might have been/be talking past each other here. The question isn’t whether mainstream philosophy has useful insights to offer, the question is whether studying mainstream philosophy, i.e. “not ignoring it”, as you put it, is the best possible use of one’s time, as opposed to studying, say, AI research. There are opportunity costs for everything you do, and frankly, I’d say reading philosophy has (for me) too high of an opportunity cost and too low of an expected benefit to justify doing so. I don’t think I’d be mistaken in saying that this is probably true for many other LW readers as well.
I’m reminded of Caliph Omar’s apocryphal comments about the Library of Alexandria.
Perhaps the argument is more like this:
Quine said many things that we agree with
Some of these are non-obvious, its possible that we wouldn’t all have come up with them had we not had this community
Since we have not explicitly mentioned Quine before it is unlikely that we have already heard everything he came up with
Therefore reading Quine may reveal other useful, non-obvious insights, which we might take a long time to come up with on own
Therefore we should read Quine.
I don’t advocate reading Quine directly, but rather Quinean philosophy. For example Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, which reads like a series of Less Wrong blog posts, but covers lots of material not yet covered on Less Wrong. (I made a dent in this by transposing its coverage of statistical prediction rules into a Less Wrong post.)
And I don’t advocate it for everyone. Doing research in philosophy is my specialty, but I don’t think Eliezer should waste his time poring through philosophy journals for useful insights. Nor should most people. But then, most people won’t benefit from reading through books on algorithmic learning theory, either. That’s why we have divisions of labor and expertise. The thing I’m arguing against is Eliezer’s suggestion that people shouldn’t read philosophy at all outside of Less Wrong and AI books.