So I don’t understand why you would continue to insist that nothing (or almost nothing) useful comes out of mainstream philosophy
You still haven’t given an actual use case for your sense of “useful”, only historical priority (the qualifier “come out” is telling, for example), and haven’t connected your discussion that involves the word “useful” to the use case Eliezer assumes (even where you answered that side of the discussion without using the word, by agreeing that particular use cases for mainstream philosophy are a loss). It’s an argument about definition of “useful”, or something hiding behind this equivocation.
I suggest tabooing “useful”, when applied to literature (as opposed to activity with stated purpose) on your side.
Eliezer and I, over the course of our long discussion, have come to some understanding of what would constitute useful. Though, Philosophy_Tutor suggested that Eliezer taboo his sense of “useful” before trying to declare every item on my list as useless.
Whether or not I can provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for “useful”, I’ve repeatedly pointed out that:
Several works from mainstream philosophy do the same things he has spent a great deal of time doing and advocating on Less Wrong, so if he thinks those works are useless then it would appear he thinks much of what he has done on Less Wrong is uesless.
Quite a few works from mainstream philosophy have been used by him, so presumably he finds them useful.
I can’t believe how difficult it is to convince some people that some useful things come out of mainstream philosophy. To me, it’s a trivial point. Those resisting this truth keep trying to change the subject and make it about how philosophy is a diseased subject (agreed!), how we shouldn’t read Quine (agreed!), how other subjects are more important and useful (agreed!), and so on.
I can’t believe how difficult it is to convince some people that some useful things come out of mainstream philosophy. To me, it’s a trivial point.
If it’s not immediately obvious how an argument connects to a specific implementable policy or empirical fact, default is to covertly interpret it as being about status.
Since there are both good and bad things about philosophy, we can choose to emphasize the good (which accords philosophers and those who read them higher status) or emphasize the bad (which accords people who do their own work and ignore mainstream philosophy higher status).
If there are no consequences to this choice, it’s more pleasant to dwell upon the bad: after all, the worse mainstream philosophy does, the more useful and original this makes our community; the better mainstream philosophy does, the more it suggests our community is a relatively minor phenomenon within a broader movement of other people with more resources and prestige than ourselves (and the more those of us whose time is worth less than Eliezer’s should be reading philosophy journals instead of doing something less mind-numbing).
I think this community is smart enough to avoid many such biases if given a real question with a truth-value, but given a vague open question like “Yay philosophy—yes or no?” of course we’re going to take the side that makes us feel better.
I think the solution is to present specific insights of Quinean philosophy in more depth, which you already seem like you’re planning to do.
Maybe my original post gave the wrong impression of “which side I’m on.” (Yay philosophy or no?) Like Quine and Yudkowsky, I’ve generally considered myself an “anti-philosophy philosopher.”
But you’re right that such vague questions and categorizations are not really the point. The solution is to present specific useful insights of mainstream philosophy, and let the LW community make use of them. I’ve done that in brief, here, and am working on posts to elaborate some of those items in more detail.
What disappoints me is the double standard being used (by some) for what counts as “useful” when presented in AI books or on Less Wrong, versus what counts as “useful” when it happens to come from mainstream philosophy.
There are use cases (plans) that distinguish LW from mainstream philosophy that make philosophy less useful for those plans. There are other use cases where philosophy would be more useful. Making an overall judgment would depend on which use cases are important.
The concept of “useful” that leads to a classification which marks philosophy “not useful” might be one you don’t endorse, but we already discussed a few examples that show that such concepts can be natural, even if you’d prefer not to identify them with “usefulness”.
A double standard would filter evidence differently when considering the things it’s double-standard about. If we are talking about particular use cases, I don’t think there was significant distortion of attention paid for either case. A point where evidence could be filtered in favor of LW would be focus on particular use cases, but that charge depends on the importance of those use cases and their alternatives to the people selecting them. So far, you didn’t give such a selection that favors philosophy, and in fact you’ve agreed on the status of the use cases named by others.
So, apart from your intuition that “useful” is an applicable label, not much about the rules of reasoning and motivation about your claim was given. Why is it interesting to discuss whether mainstream philosophy is “useful” in the sense you mean this concept? If we are to discuss it, what kinds of arguments would tell us more about this fact? Can you find effective arguments about other people’s concepts of usefulness, given that the intuitive appeals made so far failed? How is your choice of concept of “usefulness” related to other people’s concepts, apart from the use of the same label? (Words/concepts can be wrong, but to argue that a word is wrong with a person who doesn’t see it so would require a more specific argument or reasoning heuristic.)
Since there seems to be no known easy way of making progress on discussing each other’s concepts, and the motivation seems to be solely to salve intuition, I think there is no ground for further object-level argument.
Why is it interesting to discuss whether mainstream philosophy is “useful” in the sense you mean this concept?
I love to read and write interesting things—which is why I take to heart Eliezer’s constant warning to be wary of things that are fun to argue.
But interestingness was not the point of my post. Utility to FAI and other Less Wrong projects was the point. My point was that mainstream philosophy sometimes offers things of utility to Less Wrong. And I gave a long list of examples. Some of them are things (from mainstream philosophy) that Eliezer and Less Wrong are already making profitable use of. Others are things that Less Wrong had not mentioned before I arrived, but are doing very much the same sorts of things that Less Wrong values—for example dissolution-to-algorithm and strategies for overcoming biases. Had these things been written up as Less Wrong posts, it seems they’d have been well-received. And in cases where they have been written up as LessWrongposts, they have been well-received. My continuing discussion in this thread has been to suggest that therefore, some useful things do come from mainstream philosophy, and need not be ignored simply because of the genre or industry they come from.
By “useful” I just mean “possessing utility toward some goal.” By “useful to Less Wrong”, then, I mean “possessing utility toward a goal of Less Wrong’s/Eliezer’s.” For example, both reflective equilibrium and Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment possess that kind of utility. That’s a very rough sketch, anyway.
But no, I don’t have time to write up a 30-page conceptual analysis of what it means for something to be “useful.”
But I think I still don’t understand what you mean. Maybe an example would help. A good one would be this: Is there a sense in which reflective equilibrium (a theory or process that happens to come from mainstream philosophy) is not useful to Eliezer, despite the fact that it plays a central role in CEV, his plan to save humanity from unfriendly AI?
Another one would be this: Is there a sense in which Eliezer’s writing on how to be aware of and counteract common cognitive biases is useful, but the nearly identical content in Bishop & Trout’s Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (which happens to come from mainstream philosophy) is not useful?
I think this community is smart enough to avoid many such biases if given a real question with a truth-value, but given a vague open question like “Yay philosophy—yes or no?” of course we’re going to take the side that makes us feel better.
Isn’t the smart move there not to play? What would make that the LW move?
If it’s not immediately obvious how an argument connects to a specific implementable policy or empirical fact, default is to covertly interpret it as being about status.
Sounds plausible, and if true, a useful observation.
A lot of the “nay philosophy” end up doing philosophy, even while they continue to say “nay philosophy”. So I have a hard time taking the opinion at face value.
Moreover it’s not like there is one kind of thinking, philosophy, and another kind of thinking, non-philosophy. Any kind of evidence or argument could in principle be employed by someone calling himself a philosopher—or, inversely, by someone calling himself a non-philosopher. If you suddenly have a bright idea and start developing it into an essay, I submit that you don’t necessarily know whether, once the idea has fully bloomed, it will be considered philosophy or non-philosophy.
I don’t know whether it’s true that science used to be considered a subtopic of philosophy (“natural philosophy”), but it seems entirely plausible that it was all philosophy but that at some point there was a terminological exodus, when physicists stopped calling themselves philosophers. In that older, more inclusive sense, then anyone who says “nay philosophy” is also saying “nay science”. Keeping that in mind, what we now call “philosophy” might instead be called, “what’s left of philosophy after the great terminological exodus”.
Of course “what’s left” is also called “the dregs”. In light of that, what we all “philosophy” might instead be called “the dregs of philosophy”.
I don’t know whether it’s true that science used to be considered a subtopic of philosophy (“natural philosophy”), but it seems entirely plausible that it was all philosophy but that at some point there was a terminological exodus, when physicists stopped calling themselves philosophers.
That is exactly true. The old term for what we nowadays call “natural science” was “natural philosophy.” There are still relics of this old terminology, most notably that in English the title “doctor of philosophy” (or the Latin version thereof) is still used by physicists and other natural scientists. The “terminological exodus” you refer to happened only in the 19th century.
This is still happening, right? I once had a professor who suggested that philosophy is basically the process of creating new fields and removing them from philosophy—thence logic, mathematics, physics, and more recently linguistics.
That’s true, I may have overstated his suggestion—the actual context was “why has philosophy made so little progress over the past several thousand years?” (“Because every time a philosophical question is settled, it stops being a philosophical question.”)
This provides a defense of the claim that luke was attacking earlier on the thread, that
“It’s totally reasonable to expect philosophy to provide several interesting/useful results [in one or a few broad subject areas] and then suddenly stop.”
Possibly, yes, but I’d expect philosophy to stop working on a field only after it’s recognized as its own (non-philosophy) area (if then) - which, for example, morality is not.
Errr… it seems to me that theology in many ways acts like philosophy, with the addition of stuff like exegesis and apologetics… but any particular religion’s theology is distinct from the set of things we’d call “philosophy” as a monolithic institution. This is far from my area of expertise, however!
I’m worried part of this debate is just about status. When someone comes in and says “Hey, you guys should really pay more attention to what x group of people with y credentials says about z” it reminds everyone here, most of whom lack y credentials that society doesn’t recognize them as an authority on z and so they are some how less valuable than group x. So there is an impulse to say that z is obvious, that z doesn’t matter or that having y isn’t really a good indicator of being right about z. That way, people here don’t lose status relative to group x.
Conversely, members of group x probably put money and effort into getting credential y and will be offended by the suggestion that what they know about doesn’t matter, that it is obvious or that their having credential y doesn’t indicate they know anything more than anyone else.
Me, I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy which I value so I’m sure I get a little defensive when philosophy is mocked or criticized around here. But most people here probably fit in the first category. Eliezer, being a human being like everybody else, is likely a little insecure about his lack of a formal education and perhaps particularly apt to deny an academic community status as domain experts in a fields he’s worked in (even though he is certainly right that formal credentials are overvalued).
I think a lot of this argument isn’t really a disagreement over what is valuable and what isn’t- it’s just people emphasizing or de-emphasizing different ideas and writers to make themselves look higher status.
I’ve read Quine and you haven’t so obviously Quine’s insights were huge leaps forward and no progress is possible without standing on his shoulders. Most of what you’ve said here was said earlier and better by other people I’ve read.
...
I haven’t read Quine and you have? Well in that case everything he ever said was obvious and I totally came up with it on my own. What’s actually impressive coming up with these interesting ideas over here based on those obvious ideas Quine thought up. Any philosophers do that? No? That’s what I thought.
These statements have no content they just say “My stuff is better than your stuff”.
I think such debates unavoidably include status motivations. We are status-oriented, signaling creatures. Politics mattered in our ancestral environment.
Of course you know that I never said anything like either of the parody quotes provided. And I’m not trying to stay Quinean philosophy is better than Less Wrong. The claim I’m making is a very weak claim: that some useful stuff comes out of mainstream philosophy, and Less Wrong shouldn’t ignore it when that happens just because the source happens to be mainstream philosophy.
Of course you know that I never said anything like either of the parody quotes provided. And I’m not trying to stay Quinean philosophy is better than Less Wrong. The claim I’m making is a very weak claim: that some useful stuff comes out of mainstream philosophy, and Less Wrong shouldn’t ignore it when that happens just because the source happens to be mainstream philosophy.
Yes. But you’re right so that side had to be a strawman, didn’t it?
Since I hold a pretty strong pro-mainstream philosophy position (relative to others here, perhaps including yourself) I was a little more creative with that parody than in the other. I was attempting to be self-deprecating to soften my criticism (that the reluctance to embrace your position stems from status insecurities) so as to not set of tribal war instincts.
Though on reflection it occurs to me that since I didn’t state my position in that comment or in this thread and have only talked about it in comments (some before you even arrived here at Less Wrong) it’s pretty unlikely that you or anyone else would remember my position on the matter, in which case my attempt at self-deprecation might look like a criticism of you.
Yeah… I’ve apparently missed something important to interpreting you.
For the record, if you hold “a pretty strong pro-mainstream philosophy position” then you definitely are more in favor of mainstream philosophy than I am. :)
I agree that you’ve agreed on many specific things. I suggest that the sense of remaining disagreement is currently confused through refusing to taboo “useful”. You use one definition, he uses a different one, and there is possibly genuine disagreement in there somewhere, but you won’t be able to find it without again switching to more specific discussion.
Also, taboo doesn’t work by giving a definition, instead you explain whatever you wanted without using the concept explicitly (so it’s always a definition in a specific context).
For example:
Quite a few works from mainstream philosophy have been used by him, so presumably he finds them useful.
Instead of debating this point of the definition (and what constitutes “being used”), consider the questions of whether Eliezer agrees that he was influenced (in any sense) by quite a few works from mainstream philosophy (obviously), whether they provided insights that would’ve been unavailable otherwise (probably not), whether they happen to already contain some of the same basic insights found elsewhere (yes), whether they originate them (it depends), etc.
It’s a long list, not as satisfying as the simple “useful/not”, but this is the way to unpack the disagreement. And even if you agree on every fact, his sense of “useful” can disagree with yours.
I’ll wait to see if Eliezer really thinks we aren’t on the same page about the meaning of ‘useful’.
If reflective equilibrium, which plays a central role in Eliezer’s plan (CEV) to save humanity, isn’t useful, then I will be very surprised, and we will seem to be using different definitions of the term “useful.”
Has he repudiated the usefulness of reflective equilibrium (or of the concept, or the term)? I recall that he’s used it himself in some of the more recent summaries of CEV.
You still haven’t given an actual use case for your sense of “useful”, only historical priority (the qualifier “come out” is telling, for example), and haven’t connected your discussion that involves the word “useful” to the use case Eliezer assumes (even where you answered that side of the discussion without using the word, by agreeing that particular use cases for mainstream philosophy are a loss). It’s an argument about definition of “useful”, or something hiding behind this equivocation.
I suggest tabooing “useful”, when applied to literature (as opposed to activity with stated purpose) on your side.
Eliezer and I, over the course of our long discussion, have come to some understanding of what would constitute useful. Though, Philosophy_Tutor suggested that Eliezer taboo his sense of “useful” before trying to declare every item on my list as useless.
Whether or not I can provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for “useful”, I’ve repeatedly pointed out that:
Several works from mainstream philosophy do the same things he has spent a great deal of time doing and advocating on Less Wrong, so if he thinks those works are useless then it would appear he thinks much of what he has done on Less Wrong is uesless.
Quite a few works from mainstream philosophy have been used by him, so presumably he finds them useful.
I can’t believe how difficult it is to convince some people that some useful things come out of mainstream philosophy. To me, it’s a trivial point. Those resisting this truth keep trying to change the subject and make it about how philosophy is a diseased subject (agreed!), how we shouldn’t read Quine (agreed!), how other subjects are more important and useful (agreed!), and so on.
If it’s not immediately obvious how an argument connects to a specific implementable policy or empirical fact, default is to covertly interpret it as being about status.
Since there are both good and bad things about philosophy, we can choose to emphasize the good (which accords philosophers and those who read them higher status) or emphasize the bad (which accords people who do their own work and ignore mainstream philosophy higher status).
If there are no consequences to this choice, it’s more pleasant to dwell upon the bad: after all, the worse mainstream philosophy does, the more useful and original this makes our community; the better mainstream philosophy does, the more it suggests our community is a relatively minor phenomenon within a broader movement of other people with more resources and prestige than ourselves (and the more those of us whose time is worth less than Eliezer’s should be reading philosophy journals instead of doing something less mind-numbing).
I think this community is smart enough to avoid many such biases if given a real question with a truth-value, but given a vague open question like “Yay philosophy—yes or no?” of course we’re going to take the side that makes us feel better.
I think the solution is to present specific insights of Quinean philosophy in more depth, which you already seem like you’re planning to do.
Maybe my original post gave the wrong impression of “which side I’m on.” (Yay philosophy or no?) Like Quine and Yudkowsky, I’ve generally considered myself an “anti-philosophy philosopher.”
But you’re right that such vague questions and categorizations are not really the point. The solution is to present specific useful insights of mainstream philosophy, and let the LW community make use of them. I’ve done that in brief, here, and am working on posts to elaborate some of those items in more detail.
What disappoints me is the double standard being used (by some) for what counts as “useful” when presented in AI books or on Less Wrong, versus what counts as “useful” when it happens to come from mainstream philosophy.
I don’t think there is double standard involved.
There are use cases (plans) that distinguish LW from mainstream philosophy that make philosophy less useful for those plans. There are other use cases where philosophy would be more useful. Making an overall judgment would depend on which use cases are important.
The concept of “useful” that leads to a classification which marks philosophy “not useful” might be one you don’t endorse, but we already discussed a few examples that show that such concepts can be natural, even if you’d prefer not to identify them with “usefulness”.
A double standard would filter evidence differently when considering the things it’s double-standard about. If we are talking about particular use cases, I don’t think there was significant distortion of attention paid for either case. A point where evidence could be filtered in favor of LW would be focus on particular use cases, but that charge depends on the importance of those use cases and their alternatives to the people selecting them. So far, you didn’t give such a selection that favors philosophy, and in fact you’ve agreed on the status of the use cases named by others.
So, apart from your intuition that “useful” is an applicable label, not much about the rules of reasoning and motivation about your claim was given. Why is it interesting to discuss whether mainstream philosophy is “useful” in the sense you mean this concept? If we are to discuss it, what kinds of arguments would tell us more about this fact? Can you find effective arguments about other people’s concepts of usefulness, given that the intuitive appeals made so far failed? How is your choice of concept of “usefulness” related to other people’s concepts, apart from the use of the same label? (Words/concepts can be wrong, but to argue that a word is wrong with a person who doesn’t see it so would require a more specific argument or reasoning heuristic.)
Since there seems to be no known easy way of making progress on discussing each other’s concepts, and the motivation seems to be solely to salve intuition, I think there is no ground for further object-level argument.
I love to read and write interesting things—which is why I take to heart Eliezer’s constant warning to be wary of things that are fun to argue.
But interestingness was not the point of my post. Utility to FAI and other Less Wrong projects was the point. My point was that mainstream philosophy sometimes offers things of utility to Less Wrong. And I gave a long list of examples. Some of them are things (from mainstream philosophy) that Eliezer and Less Wrong are already making profitable use of. Others are things that Less Wrong had not mentioned before I arrived, but are doing very much the same sorts of things that Less Wrong values—for example dissolution-to-algorithm and strategies for overcoming biases. Had these things been written up as Less Wrong posts, it seems they’d have been well-received. And in cases where they have been written up as Less Wrong posts, they have been well-received. My continuing discussion in this thread has been to suggest that therefore, some useful things do come from mainstream philosophy, and need not be ignored simply because of the genre or industry they come from.
By “useful” I just mean “possessing utility toward some goal.” By “useful to Less Wrong”, then, I mean “possessing utility toward a goal of Less Wrong’s/Eliezer’s.” For example, both reflective equilibrium and Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment possess that kind of utility. That’s a very rough sketch, anyway.
But no, I don’t have time to write up a 30-page conceptual analysis of what it means for something to be “useful.”
But I think I still don’t understand what you mean. Maybe an example would help. A good one would be this: Is there a sense in which reflective equilibrium (a theory or process that happens to come from mainstream philosophy) is not useful to Eliezer, despite the fact that it plays a central role in CEV, his plan to save humanity from unfriendly AI?
Another one would be this: Is there a sense in which Eliezer’s writing on how to be aware of and counteract common cognitive biases is useful, but the nearly identical content in Bishop & Trout’s Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (which happens to come from mainstream philosophy) is not useful?
(I edited the grandparent comment substantially since publishing it, so your reply is probably out of date.)
Okay, I updated my reply comment.
Isn’t the smart move there not to play? What would make that the LW move?
Sounds plausible, and if true, a useful observation.
“Yay philosophy—yes or no?” and questions of that ilk seem like an interesting question to actually ask people.
You could, for instance, make a debate team lay out the pro and con positions.
A lot of the “nay philosophy” end up doing philosophy, even while they continue to say “nay philosophy”. So I have a hard time taking the opinion at face value.
Moreover it’s not like there is one kind of thinking, philosophy, and another kind of thinking, non-philosophy. Any kind of evidence or argument could in principle be employed by someone calling himself a philosopher—or, inversely, by someone calling himself a non-philosopher. If you suddenly have a bright idea and start developing it into an essay, I submit that you don’t necessarily know whether, once the idea has fully bloomed, it will be considered philosophy or non-philosophy.
I don’t know whether it’s true that science used to be considered a subtopic of philosophy (“natural philosophy”), but it seems entirely plausible that it was all philosophy but that at some point there was a terminological exodus, when physicists stopped calling themselves philosophers. In that older, more inclusive sense, then anyone who says “nay philosophy” is also saying “nay science”. Keeping that in mind, what we now call “philosophy” might instead be called, “what’s left of philosophy after the great terminological exodus”.
Of course “what’s left” is also called “the dregs”. In light of that, what we all “philosophy” might instead be called “the dregs of philosophy”.
That is exactly true. The old term for what we nowadays call “natural science” was “natural philosophy.” There are still relics of this old terminology, most notably that in English the title “doctor of philosophy” (or the Latin version thereof) is still used by physicists and other natural scientists. The “terminological exodus” you refer to happened only in the 19th century.
This is still happening, right? I once had a professor who suggested that philosophy is basically the process of creating new fields and removing them from philosophy—thence logic, mathematics, physics, and more recently linguistics.
Thats an interesting definition of philosophy, but I think philosophy does far more than that.
That’s true, I may have overstated his suggestion—the actual context was “why has philosophy made so little progress over the past several thousand years?” (“Because every time a philosophical question is settled, it stops being a philosophical question.”)
This provides a defense of the claim that luke was attacking earlier on the thread, that
“It’s totally reasonable to expect philosophy to provide several interesting/useful results [in one or a few broad subject areas] and then suddenly stop.”
Possibly, yes, but I’d expect philosophy to stop working on a field only after it’s recognized as its own (non-philosophy) area (if then) - which, for example, morality is not.
Is theology a branch of philosophy?
Errr… it seems to me that theology in many ways acts like philosophy, with the addition of stuff like exegesis and apologetics… but any particular religion’s theology is distinct from the set of things we’d call “philosophy” as a monolithic institution. This is far from my area of expertise, however!
I’m worried part of this debate is just about status. When someone comes in and says “Hey, you guys should really pay more attention to what x group of people with y credentials says about z” it reminds everyone here, most of whom lack y credentials that society doesn’t recognize them as an authority on z and so they are some how less valuable than group x. So there is an impulse to say that z is obvious, that z doesn’t matter or that having y isn’t really a good indicator of being right about z. That way, people here don’t lose status relative to group x.
Conversely, members of group x probably put money and effort into getting credential y and will be offended by the suggestion that what they know about doesn’t matter, that it is obvious or that their having credential y doesn’t indicate they know anything more than anyone else.
Me, I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy which I value so I’m sure I get a little defensive when philosophy is mocked or criticized around here. But most people here probably fit in the first category. Eliezer, being a human being like everybody else, is likely a little insecure about his lack of a formal education and perhaps particularly apt to deny an academic community status as domain experts in a fields he’s worked in (even though he is certainly right that formal credentials are overvalued).
I think a lot of this argument isn’t really a disagreement over what is valuable and what isn’t- it’s just people emphasizing or de-emphasizing different ideas and writers to make themselves look higher status.
...
These statements have no content they just say “My stuff is better than your stuff”.
I think such debates unavoidably include status motivations. We are status-oriented, signaling creatures. Politics mattered in our ancestral environment.
Of course you know that I never said anything like either of the parody quotes provided. And I’m not trying to stay Quinean philosophy is better than Less Wrong. The claim I’m making is a very weak claim: that some useful stuff comes out of mainstream philosophy, and Less Wrong shouldn’t ignore it when that happens just because the source happens to be mainstream philosophy.
Yes. But you’re right so that side had to be a strawman, didn’t it?
I’m sorry; what do you mean?
Since I hold a pretty strong pro-mainstream philosophy position (relative to others here, perhaps including yourself) I was a little more creative with that parody than in the other. I was attempting to be self-deprecating to soften my criticism (that the reluctance to embrace your position stems from status insecurities) so as to not set of tribal war instincts.
Though on reflection it occurs to me that since I didn’t state my position in that comment or in this thread and have only talked about it in comments (some before you even arrived here at Less Wrong) it’s pretty unlikely that you or anyone else would remember my position on the matter, in which case my attempt at self-deprecation might look like a criticism of you.
Yeah… I’ve apparently missed something important to interpreting you.
For the record, if you hold “a pretty strong pro-mainstream philosophy position” then you definitely are more in favor of mainstream philosophy than I am. :)
It’s all relative. Surround me with academics and I sound like Eliezer.
But yes, once or twice I’ve even had the gall to suggest that some continental philosophers are valuable.
And for that, two days in the slammer! :)
I agree that you’ve agreed on many specific things. I suggest that the sense of remaining disagreement is currently confused through refusing to taboo “useful”. You use one definition, he uses a different one, and there is possibly genuine disagreement in there somewhere, but you won’t be able to find it without again switching to more specific discussion.
Also, taboo doesn’t work by giving a definition, instead you explain whatever you wanted without using the concept explicitly (so it’s always a definition in a specific context).
For example:
Instead of debating this point of the definition (and what constitutes “being used”), consider the questions of whether Eliezer agrees that he was influenced (in any sense) by quite a few works from mainstream philosophy (obviously), whether they provided insights that would’ve been unavailable otherwise (probably not), whether they happen to already contain some of the same basic insights found elsewhere (yes), whether they originate them (it depends), etc.
It’s a long list, not as satisfying as the simple “useful/not”, but this is the way to unpack the disagreement. And even if you agree on every fact, his sense of “useful” can disagree with yours.
I’ll wait to see if Eliezer really thinks we aren’t on the same page about the meaning of ‘useful’.
If reflective equilibrium, which plays a central role in Eliezer’s plan (CEV) to save humanity, isn’t useful, then I will be very surprised, and we will seem to be using different definitions of the term “useful.”
Has he repudiated the usefulness of reflective equilibrium (or of the concept, or the term)? I recall that he’s used it himself in some of the more recent summaries of CEV.
Are you, in your view, having The Problem with Non-Philosophers again?