With this comment, I think our disagreement is resolved, at least to my satisfaction.
We agree that philosophy can be useful, and that sometimes it’s desirable to speak the common language. I agree that sometimes it is easier to reinvent the wheel, but sometimes it’s not.
As for whether Less Wrong is a branch of mainstream philosophy, I’m not much interested to argue about that. There are many basic assumptions shared by Quinean philosophy and Yudkowskian philosophy in opposition to most philosophers, even down to some very specific ideas like naturalized epistemology that to my knowledge had not been articulated very well until Quine. And both Yudkowskian philosophy and Quinean naturalism spend an awful lot of time dissolving philosophical debates into cognitive algorithms and challenging intuitionist thinking—so far, those have been the main foci of experimental philosophy, which is very Quinean, and was mostly founded by one of Quine’s students, Stephen Stich. Those are the reasons I presented Yudkowskian philosophy as part of the broadly Quinean movement in philosophy.
On the other hand, I’m happy to take your word for it that you came up with most of this stuff on your own, and only later figured out what the philosophers have been calling it, so in another way Yudkowskian philosophy is thoroughly divorced from mainstream philosophy—maybe even more than, say, Nassim Taleb’s philosophical work.
And once we’ve said all that, I don’t think any question remains about whether Less Wrong is really part of a larger movement in philosophy.
Anyway, thanks for this further clarification. I’ve learned a lot from our discussion. And I’m enjoying your interview with Baez. Cheers.
On the general issue of the origin of various philosophical ideas, I had a thought. Perhaps we take a lot of our tacit knowledge for granted in our thinking about attributions. I suspect that abstract ideas become part of wider culture and then serve as part of the reasoning of other people without them explicitly realizing the role of those abstracts. For example, Karl Popper had a concept of “World 3” which was essentially the world of artifacts that are inherited from generation to generation and become a kind of background for the thinking of each successive generation who inherits that culure. That concept of “unconscious ideas” was also found in a number of other places (and has been of course for as far back as we can remember) and has been incorporated into many theories and explanations of varying usefulness. Some of Freud’s ideas have a similar rough feel to them and his albeit unscientific ideas became highly influential in popular culture and influenced all sorts of things, including some productive psychology programs that emphasize influences outside of explcit awareness. Our thinking is given shape in part by a background that we aren’t explicitly aware of and as a result we can’[t always make accurate attributions of intellectual history except in terms of what has been written down. Some of the influence happens outside of our awareness via various mechanisms of implicit or tacit learning. We know a lot more than we realize we know, we “stand on the shoulders of others” in a somewhat obscure sense as well as the more obvious one.
An important implication of this might be that our reasoning starts from assumptions and conceptual schemes that we don’t really think about because it is “intuitive” and appears to each of us as “commonsense.” However it may be that “commonsense” and “intuition” are forms of ubiquitous expertise that differ somewhat between people. If that is the case, then people reason from different starting points and perhaps can reason to different conclusions even when rigorously logical, and this would seemingly support a perspectivist view where logic is not by itself adequate to reconcile differences in opinion.
If that is the case, then it helps explain why we can’t seem to get rid of some fundamental problems just by clarifying concepts and reasoning from evidence. Those operations are themselves shaped by a background. One of the important roles of philosophy may be to give a voice to some of that background, a voice which may not always be scientific (that is, empirical, testable, effectively communicated through mathematics). So it may not be the philosophers who actually make the ideas available ot us, but the philosophers who make them explicit outside of science.
I’m not saying that contradicts the possibly unique value of naturalistic and reductionistic approaches, systematization, etc., just that if we think of philosophy purely in utilitarian terms as a provider of new theories that feed science, we may miss the point of its role in culture and our tracking and understanding of the genesis of ideas.
With this comment, I think our disagreement is resolved, at least to my satisfaction.
We agree that philosophy can be useful, and that sometimes it’s desirable to speak the common language. I agree that sometimes it is easier to reinvent the wheel, but sometimes it’s not.
As for whether Less Wrong is a branch of mainstream philosophy, I’m not much interested to argue about that. There are many basic assumptions shared by Quinean philosophy and Yudkowskian philosophy in opposition to most philosophers, even down to some very specific ideas like naturalized epistemology that to my knowledge had not been articulated very well until Quine. And both Yudkowskian philosophy and Quinean naturalism spend an awful lot of time dissolving philosophical debates into cognitive algorithms and challenging intuitionist thinking—so far, those have been the main foci of experimental philosophy, which is very Quinean, and was mostly founded by one of Quine’s students, Stephen Stich. Those are the reasons I presented Yudkowskian philosophy as part of the broadly Quinean movement in philosophy.
On the other hand, I’m happy to take your word for it that you came up with most of this stuff on your own, and only later figured out what the philosophers have been calling it, so in another way Yudkowskian philosophy is thoroughly divorced from mainstream philosophy—maybe even more than, say, Nassim Taleb’s philosophical work.
And once we’ve said all that, I don’t think any question remains about whether Less Wrong is really part of a larger movement in philosophy.
Anyway, thanks for this further clarification. I’ve learned a lot from our discussion. And I’m enjoying your interview with Baez. Cheers.
On the general issue of the origin of various philosophical ideas, I had a thought. Perhaps we take a lot of our tacit knowledge for granted in our thinking about attributions. I suspect that abstract ideas become part of wider culture and then serve as part of the reasoning of other people without them explicitly realizing the role of those abstracts. For example, Karl Popper had a concept of “World 3” which was essentially the world of artifacts that are inherited from generation to generation and become a kind of background for the thinking of each successive generation who inherits that culure. That concept of “unconscious ideas” was also found in a number of other places (and has been of course for as far back as we can remember) and has been incorporated into many theories and explanations of varying usefulness. Some of Freud’s ideas have a similar rough feel to them and his albeit unscientific ideas became highly influential in popular culture and influenced all sorts of things, including some productive psychology programs that emphasize influences outside of explcit awareness. Our thinking is given shape in part by a background that we aren’t explicitly aware of and as a result we can’[t always make accurate attributions of intellectual history except in terms of what has been written down. Some of the influence happens outside of our awareness via various mechanisms of implicit or tacit learning. We know a lot more than we realize we know, we “stand on the shoulders of others” in a somewhat obscure sense as well as the more obvious one.
An important implication of this might be that our reasoning starts from assumptions and conceptual schemes that we don’t really think about because it is “intuitive” and appears to each of us as “commonsense.” However it may be that “commonsense” and “intuition” are forms of ubiquitous expertise that differ somewhat between people. If that is the case, then people reason from different starting points and perhaps can reason to different conclusions even when rigorously logical, and this would seemingly support a perspectivist view where logic is not by itself adequate to reconcile differences in opinion.
If that is the case, then it helps explain why we can’t seem to get rid of some fundamental problems just by clarifying concepts and reasoning from evidence. Those operations are themselves shaped by a background. One of the important roles of philosophy may be to give a voice to some of that background, a voice which may not always be scientific (that is, empirical, testable, effectively communicated through mathematics). So it may not be the philosophers who actually make the ideas available ot us, but the philosophers who make them explicit outside of science.
I’m not saying that contradicts the possibly unique value of naturalistic and reductionistic approaches, systematization, etc., just that if we think of philosophy purely in utilitarian terms as a provider of new theories that feed science, we may miss the point of its role in culture and our tracking and understanding of the genesis of ideas.