thomblake comments on The Correct Contrarian Cluster - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 December 2009 10:01PM

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Comment author: thomblake 22 December 2009 10:20:32PM *  5 points [-]

I don't see what's "useless" about it; at least, I hear a lot of speculation about what sorts of things philosophers generally think, and there hasn't previously been a good dataset for that.

A related concern is that I've run into a lot of philosophers who think that "practically nobody" believes X, where X is one or another view on a major philosophical question. For example, I sat in a car with a compatibilist and a believer in libertarian free will, each of whom thought their view was nearly universal amongst philosophers. It was an eye-opening experience that maybe a lot of people will have looking at results like this. Even if it's not representative of philosophers in general, it points out that the number of philosophers who (for instance) "Accept non-physicalism" is not "approximately 0".

Of course, I might be slightly biased since my dissertation is in part a piece of experimental philosophy, and in part because I'm happy to see that virtue ethics won.

No, it wasn't a competition, and yes, it is now.