I was actually quite amazed to find how far Gary Drescher had gotten, when someone referred me to him as a similar writer—I actually went so far as to finish my free will stuff before reading his book (am actually still reading) because after reading the introduction, I decided that it was important for the two of us to write independently and then combine independent components. Still ended up with quite a lot of overlap!
But I think it probably is unfair to judge Drescher as being at all representative of what ordinary philosophers can do. Drescher is an AI guy. And the comments on the back of his book seem to indicate that he was writing in a mode that philosophical readers found startling and new.
Drescher is not alternative mainstream philosophy. Drescher is alternative Yudkowsky.
I’ve referred to Drescher and SEP a few times. The main reason I don’t refer more to conventional philosophy is that it doesn’t seem very good as a field at distinguishing good ideas from bad ones. If you can’t filter your good ideas and present them in a non-needlessly-complicated fashion, is there much point in pointing a reader to it?
But I’ve taken into account that Greene was able to rescue Roko where I could not, and I’ve promoted him on my list of things to read.
“But I think it probably is unfair to judge Drescher as being at all representative of what ordinary philosophers can do.”
I agree, and I didn’t do so (I used Dennett-type compatibilism in my list of representative views that you conveyed). Even when you do something exceptionally good independently, it can help to defuse affective death spirals to make clear that it’s not quite unique.
“If you can’t filter your good ideas and present them in a non-needlessly-complicated fashion, is there much point in pointing a reader to it?”
This is an authorial point of view. Readers need heuristics to confirm that this is what is going on, and not something less desirable, for particular authors and topics. If they can randomly check some of your claims against the leading rival views and see that the latter are weak, that’s useful.
Alternatively, philosophy is good at finding arguments ffor a wide variety of ideas, which is evidence against the meta level idea that there is a simplistic distinction between good and bad ideas. What is the evidence for that meta level idea?
I was actually quite amazed to find how far Gary Drescher had gotten, when someone referred me to him as a similar writer—I actually went so far as to finish my free will stuff before reading his book (am actually still reading) because after reading the introduction, I decided that it was important for the two of us to write independently and then combine independent components. Still ended up with quite a lot of overlap!
But I think it probably is unfair to judge Drescher as being at all representative of what ordinary philosophers can do. Drescher is an AI guy. And the comments on the back of his book seem to indicate that he was writing in a mode that philosophical readers found startling and new.
Drescher is not alternative mainstream philosophy. Drescher is alternative Yudkowsky.
I’ve referred to Drescher and SEP a few times. The main reason I don’t refer more to conventional philosophy is that it doesn’t seem very good as a field at distinguishing good ideas from bad ones. If you can’t filter your good ideas and present them in a non-needlessly-complicated fashion, is there much point in pointing a reader to it?
But I’ve taken into account that Greene was able to rescue Roko where I could not, and I’ve promoted him on my list of things to read.
“But I think it probably is unfair to judge Drescher as being at all representative of what ordinary philosophers can do.”
I agree, and I didn’t do so (I used Dennett-type compatibilism in my list of representative views that you conveyed). Even when you do something exceptionally good independently, it can help to defuse affective death spirals to make clear that it’s not quite unique.
“If you can’t filter your good ideas and present them in a non-needlessly-complicated fashion, is there much point in pointing a reader to it?”
This is an authorial point of view. Readers need heuristics to confirm that this is what is going on, and not something less desirable, for particular authors and topics. If they can randomly check some of your claims against the leading rival views and see that the latter are weak, that’s useful.
Alternatively, philosophy is good at finding arguments ffor a wide variety of ideas, which is evidence against the meta level idea that there is a simplistic distinction between good and bad ideas. What is the evidence for that meta level idea?