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Wei_Dai comments on Call for new SIAI Visiting Fellows, on a rolling basis - Less Wrong
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Ok, one possible answer to my own question: people who are interested just to satisfy their curiosity, tend to find an answer they like, and stop inquiring further, whereas people who have something to protect have a greater incentive to make sure the answer is actually correct.
For some reason, I can't stop trying to find flaws in every idea I come across, including my own, which causes me to fall out of this pattern.
More like if a question activates Philosophy mode, then people just make stuff up at random like the greek philosophers did, unless they are modern philosophers, in which case they invent a modal logic.
Ancient philosophy would look very different if the Greek philosophers had been making stuff up at random. Plato and Aristotle followed cognitive strategies, strategies that they (1) could communicate and (2) felt constrained to follow. For these reasons, I don't think that those philosophers could be characterized in general as "making stuff up".
Of course, they followed different strategies respectively, and they often couldn't communicate their feelings of constraint to one another. And of course their strategies often just didn't work.