As I understand it, Chapman is promoting some form of Buddhism. (I think he might even be a leader of some small sect? Not sure.) The bottom line is already written; now he is adding the previous lines to make it seem like this is something that a sufficiently smart modern thinker would discover independently.
Here he is using an ancient Dark Arts technique, which in our culture is known as Hegel’s dialectic, but it was already used by Buddha—to win a debate, create two opposed strawmen, classify all your competitors as belonging to one or the other, and then you are the only smart person in the room who can transcend the strawmen and find the golden middle way of “it is actually the reasonable parts of this, plus the reasonable parts of that, minus all the unreasonable parts”. Congratulations, you win!
Buddha classified his philosophical/religious competitors into two groups, and Chapman translated one of those words as “rationalists”. (The reference to early 20th-century logical positivism is just another nice trick, where Chapman is promoting an ancient belief, but he is rebranding it as a cool modern perspective, as opposed to the outdated and therefore low-status ideas of positivism.)
I don’t have the energy to get into it in depth, but I think you’re being pretty uncharitable here and it feels to me like you’re trying to weaponize rationalist applause lights. Some quick thoughts on what I think is insufficient about your comment:
You claim he already wrote the bottom line, but you provide no evidence to substantiate that.
You claim that Hegelian dialectic is a dark art technique with no justification.
You makes some claims about what’s written in Buddhists texts, but offer no reference to the specific arguments that were made to justify the claim that he set up strawmen, which would also require proving that they were strawmen at the time, not just now with 2500 years of philosophical progress.
You offer what I guess I can best interpret as an attempt to dunk on Chapman for promoting “ancient” ideas, as if ancient ideas were inherently bad (lots of math is just as old and we still use it every day, so being old is obviously not the problem; would you dunk on someone for promoting the “ancient” belief in the Pythagorean theorem?).
You claim he already wrote the bottom line, but you provide no evidence to substantiate that.
Prediction: No matter how many books or web articles Chapman writes, their conclusions will always support Buddhism. He will not conclude anything fundamentally incompatible with Buddhism.
You claim that Hegelian dialectic is a dark art technique with no justification.
Yes, and I have just explained how exactly it works. Once you see the pattern, it is obvious. Let me show you how it works in practice:
“There are people who believe that Hegelian dialectic is a useful method to transcend our limited beliefs by transcending the thesis and anti-thesis by creating a new and better syn-thesis.
There are also people who believe that Hegelian dialectic is a dark art technique, where people who disagree with the author’s conclusion are sorted into two opposing groups, and then the author’s solution is presented as the middle way superior to both.
My opinion is that both of these people are correct in some aspect, but wrong in some other aspect. The actual deep understanding of Hegelian dialectic is that in some situations it can be used to transcend two existing contradictory beliefs, while in other situations it can be used as a dark arts technique.”
You makes some claims about what’s written in Buddhists texts, but offer no reference
True; that would be too much work. (Probably enough for someone to write a master’s thesis.)
You offer what I guess I can best interpret as an attempt to dunk on Chapman for promoting “ancient” ideas, as if ancient ideas were inherently bad
I don’t mind the ancient ideas, but the rebranding feels a bit dishonest. To use your analogy, it would be like teaching the Pythagorean theorem under a new name, pretending that it was my invention.
If Chapman said plainly that he was repeating an ancient argument about pre-Buddhist “rationalists”, we could have avoided a confusion. But he made it sound like he was making a fresh observation based on current data.
Notice how Chapman reacts to finding out that there are actual rationalists out there who do not fit his definition of “rationalists”. He simply says “those are not the rationalists I was talking about”. And that’s great! But does this new knowledge make him somehow revise his existing conclusions?
I haven’t read the relevant Chapman stuff, but, to be sure, if we look up Rationalism on Wikipedia, it lists Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, devoting many paragraphs to their views. Only in one sentence at the end does it mention Less Wrong: “Outside of academic philosophy, some participants in the internet communities surrounding Less Wrong and Slate Star Codex have described themselves as “rationalists.”″ It doesn’t even mention Yudkowsky, Hanson, or Scott Alexander by name.
The point is, there exists some academic context in which “rationalism” has a preexisting meaning that refers to those 1600s-1800s people, and probably not to Less Wrong people. So, when Chapman writes about “rationalists”, is it possible he’s acting like he’s in that context, and talking about the pre-1900 people?
Doing Google searches with site:meaningness.com, I get “descartes” → 8 results, “spinoza” → 2 results, “leibniz” → 1 result [though it’s about calculus], “kant” → 21 results; meanwhile, “yudkowsky OR eliezer” → 10 results, “less wrong” → 5 results, “hanson” → 3 results… and “scott alexander” OR “slate star codex” OR “astral codex ten” → 31 results!
Hmmph. I guess he talks about both. It would require actually reading the blog to judge what he means when he says “rationalist” and whether he’s consistent about it. I’ll let Viliam report on this.
… And I see a further result, from what seems to be a book Chapman wrote, bold added by me:
The book uses “rationality” to refer to systematic, formal methods for thinking and acting; not in the broader sense of “any sensible way of thinking or acting,” as opposed to irrationality.
“Rationalism” refers to any belief system that makes exaggerated claims about the power of rationality, usually involving a formal guarantee of correctness.
Oh, dear. You define a term like that based on whether the claims are exaggerated vs accurate? That seems like a recipe for generating arguments about whether something qualifies as “rationalism”. (If Descartes writes an essay about the power of rationality, and some of the claims are exaggerated while others are correct, does that mean the essay is partly rationalism and partly not? And, obviously, if we disagree about something’s correctness, then that means we’d disagree about whether it’s “rationalism”. I have the impression that people often don’t try to label philosophical ideas beyond who wrote them and when, and any voluntary self-labeling the author did; this type of thing is probably why.)
I’ve now updated to find Said and Viliam’s complaints very plausible.
I’ve only read some of his work, but I didn’t walk away with a sense he wants everyone to be Buddhist. My sense was more that he was pushing back against things he didn’t like within Buddhism, including changes it made to become more memetically fit.
As I understand it, Chapman is promoting some form of Buddhism. (I think he might even be a leader of some small sect? Not sure.) The bottom line is already written; now he is adding the previous lines to make it seem like this is something that a sufficiently smart modern thinker would discover independently.
Here he is using an ancient Dark Arts technique, which in our culture is known as Hegel’s dialectic, but it was already used by Buddha—to win a debate, create two opposed strawmen, classify all your competitors as belonging to one or the other, and then you are the only smart person in the room who can transcend the strawmen and find the golden middle way of “it is actually the reasonable parts of this, plus the reasonable parts of that, minus all the unreasonable parts”. Congratulations, you win!
Buddha classified his philosophical/religious competitors into two groups, and Chapman translated one of those words as “rationalists”. (The reference to early 20th-century logical positivism is just another nice trick, where Chapman is promoting an ancient belief, but he is rebranding it as a cool modern perspective, as opposed to the outdated and therefore low-status ideas of positivism.)
I don’t have the energy to get into it in depth, but I think you’re being pretty uncharitable here and it feels to me like you’re trying to weaponize rationalist applause lights. Some quick thoughts on what I think is insufficient about your comment:
You claim he already wrote the bottom line, but you provide no evidence to substantiate that.
You claim that Hegelian dialectic is a dark art technique with no justification.
You makes some claims about what’s written in Buddhists texts, but offer no reference to the specific arguments that were made to justify the claim that he set up strawmen, which would also require proving that they were strawmen at the time, not just now with 2500 years of philosophical progress.
You offer what I guess I can best interpret as an attempt to dunk on Chapman for promoting “ancient” ideas, as if ancient ideas were inherently bad (lots of math is just as old and we still use it every day, so being old is obviously not the problem; would you dunk on someone for promoting the “ancient” belief in the Pythagorean theorem?).
Prediction: No matter how many books or web articles Chapman writes, their conclusions will always support Buddhism. He will not conclude anything fundamentally incompatible with Buddhism.
Yes, and I have just explained how exactly it works. Once you see the pattern, it is obvious. Let me show you how it works in practice:
“There are people who believe that Hegelian dialectic is a useful method to transcend our limited beliefs by transcending the thesis and anti-thesis by creating a new and better syn-thesis.
There are also people who believe that Hegelian dialectic is a dark art technique, where people who disagree with the author’s conclusion are sorted into two opposing groups, and then the author’s solution is presented as the middle way superior to both.
My opinion is that both of these people are correct in some aspect, but wrong in some other aspect. The actual deep understanding of Hegelian dialectic is that in some situations it can be used to transcend two existing contradictory beliefs, while in other situations it can be used as a dark arts technique.”
True; that would be too much work. (Probably enough for someone to write a master’s thesis.)
I don’t mind the ancient ideas, but the rebranding feels a bit dishonest. To use your analogy, it would be like teaching the Pythagorean theorem under a new name, pretending that it was my invention.
If Chapman said plainly that he was repeating an ancient argument about pre-Buddhist “rationalists”, we could have avoided a confusion. But he made it sound like he was making a fresh observation based on current data.
Notice how Chapman reacts to finding out that there are actual rationalists out there who do not fit his definition of “rationalists”. He simply says “those are not the rationalists I was talking about”. And that’s great! But does this new knowledge make him somehow revise his existing conclusions?
I haven’t read the relevant Chapman stuff, but, to be sure, if we look up Rationalism on Wikipedia, it lists Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, devoting many paragraphs to their views. Only in one sentence at the end does it mention Less Wrong: “Outside of academic philosophy, some participants in the internet communities surrounding Less Wrong and Slate Star Codex have described themselves as “rationalists.”″ It doesn’t even mention Yudkowsky, Hanson, or Scott Alexander by name.
The point is, there exists some academic context in which “rationalism” has a preexisting meaning that refers to those 1600s-1800s people, and probably not to Less Wrong people. So, when Chapman writes about “rationalists”, is it possible he’s acting like he’s in that context, and talking about the pre-1900 people?
Doing Google searches with site:meaningness.com, I get “descartes” → 8 results, “spinoza” → 2 results, “leibniz” → 1 result [though it’s about calculus], “kant” → 21 results; meanwhile, “yudkowsky OR eliezer” → 10 results, “less wrong” → 5 results, “hanson” → 3 results… and “scott alexander” OR “slate star codex” OR “astral codex ten” → 31 results!
Hmmph. I guess he talks about both. It would require actually reading the blog to judge what he means when he says “rationalist” and whether he’s consistent about it. I’ll let Viliam report on this.
… And I see a further result, from what seems to be a book Chapman wrote, bold added by me:
Oh, dear. You define a term like that based on whether the claims are exaggerated vs accurate? That seems like a recipe for generating arguments about whether something qualifies as “rationalism”. (If Descartes writes an essay about the power of rationality, and some of the claims are exaggerated while others are correct, does that mean the essay is partly rationalism and partly not? And, obviously, if we disagree about something’s correctness, then that means we’d disagree about whether it’s “rationalism”. I have the impression that people often don’t try to label philosophical ideas beyond who wrote them and when, and any voluntary self-labeling the author did; this type of thing is probably why.)
I’ve now updated to find Said and Viliam’s complaints very plausible.
I’ve only read some of his work, but I didn’t walk away with a sense he wants everyone to be Buddhist. My sense was more that he was pushing back against things he didn’t like within Buddhism, including changes it made to become more memetically fit.