re: meta-sequences, thank you! It’s proven a much bigger and more difficult project than I’d naively imagined, insofar as I began realizing that my own readings of the original or secondary texts were not even remotely adequate, and that I needed to have extensive conversations with people closer to the field in order to understand the intellectual context that makes e.g. the subtle differences in Carnapian linguistics vs that of other logical positivists so salient.
The project will likely end up focusing mostly on language and reality (map and territory) for better or worse. I think it’s a big enough cross-section of LW’s intellectual history, and also enough of a conversation-in-progress in philosophy, that it will hopefully shed light on the larger whole.
As for damning philosophy—I think there are some real self-selection effects; Russell has his quote about young men wanting to think “deep thoughts,” that’s reflected in Livengood’s description of Pitt philosophy; Stove’s “What’s Wrong With Our Thinking” touches on some of the cognitive biases that might guide individuals to certain views, and increase the likelihood of their having a prominent reception and legacy. (One can understand, for instance, why we might be inclined and incentivized to battle against reductionism, or determinism, or relativism.) There’s a certain view of philosophy which sees the Sophists as basically getting the broad brushstrokes right, and much of philosophical history that follows them as being an attempt at “cope” and argue against their uncomfortable truths—that e.g. the ethical and ontological relativism the Sophists pushed was too emotionally and morally destructive to Athens, and Plato’s defense of the forms of beauty, or the just, are an attempt to re-stabilize or re-structure a world that had been proven undone. (I understand “relativism” is in some ways the nemesis of LW philosophy, but I believe this is solely because certain late 20th C relativists took the concept too far, and that a more moderate form is implicit in the LW worldview: there is no such “thing” as “the good” out in the world, e.g.) This is a very partial narrative of philosophy, like any other, but it does resonate with why, e.g., neoplatonism was so popular in the Christian Dark Ages—its idea of an “essence” to things like the Good, or the Just, or a Table, or a human being is all very in accord with Christian theology. And the way that Eastern philosophies avoided this reifying ontology, given a very different religious background, seals the deal. Still, I’d like to do quite a bit more research before taking that argument too seriously.
OTOH, I can’t help but think of philosophy as akin to an aesthetic or cultural endeavour—it can take years of consumption and knowledge to have sophisticated taste in jazz, and perhaps philosophy is somewhat the same. Sure, LessWrong has a kind of clarity in its worldview which isn’t mirrored in philosophy, but as Stove points out and Livengood seconds, the main problem here is that we still have no way of successfully arguing against bad arguments. The positivists tried with their description of “nonsense” (non-analytic or non-verifiable) but this carving still fails to adequately argue against most of what LWers would consider “philosofolly,” and at the same time hacks off large quadrants of humanistically meaningful utterances. Thus, so long as people who want to become philosophers and see value in “philosofolly,” and find readers who see value in philosofolly, then what can the more analytic types say? That they do not see the value in it? Its fans will merely say, well, they do, and that the analytic conception of the world is too narrow, too cold-blooded. think the real takeaway is that we don’t have a good enough understanding of language and communication yet to articulate what is good and productive versus what is not, and to ground a criticism of one school against the other. (Or even to verify, on solid epistemic ground, that such arguments are folly, that they are wrong rather than useful.) This is a big problem for the discipline, as it becomes a pitting of intuitions and taste against one another.
Thank you! I’d be very curious to hear what didn’t resonate, since I’m working the ongoing MetaSequences project, but of course you’re very busy, so only if you think it’d be valuable for both of us!