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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Were atoms real? - Less Wrong
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Er... I think a small number of people have made some progress, and I guess you could call that progress 'good chunks', but I get the feeling that the vast majority of rationalists are very confused about the first two questions (or would be if they noticed their confusion). Atheists and theists are both right and wrong in their own way, but neither have a solid understanding of the important underlying considerations. If you asked me if souls are real or if God is real, I'd say yes to both, but the explanation thereof would be excruciatingly difficult, and I'd be tempted to label the question 'not even wrong', akin to 'If a tree falls in the forest...'. (And I'm not talking about trivially true ensemble universe stuff, either -- I think there's more to it than just being smugly meta-contrarian.) Your point stands that there are a lot of solved philosophy problems, I'm just disputing your first two examples. Free will is a good example, though.
What about the virtue of narrowness?
Being narrow with your own conceptual framework is good, but I'm promoting being liberal when it comes to interpreting others' concepts, when playing fast and loose in back-and-forth discourse, and when reasoning very abstractly in order to see connections. As long as you make sure to go back and make sure that everything connects precisely, and avoid affective death spirals around seemingly big insights about the fundamental nature of all things (which is somewhat difficult), it can be useful for getting new perspectives and for communicating concepts effectively.
ETA: With regards to communication, this only really works if each of the participants has some amount of faith in the epistemology of their conversation partner. If some random guy told me God exists, and I wanted to make him smarter, I wouldn't go on about all the ways that God exists; I'd go on about the ways He doesn't.
Or just teach him the Virtue of Narrowness.
True, that's a better solution. But, but, but being contrarian is so much more fun!
You should only be liberal in what you accept, if you can transform it so that when you repeat it, you can still be conservative in what you say.
When possible this is best, but some people at SIAI (cough Vassar cough) have conversational styles that are very fast so as to convey the most information in the shortest time, and it's hard to do real-time transformations from ultra-abstract statements to reasonably-precise internal models and back as information is exchanged and people build up their ontologies on the fly. (Which is pretty awesome when it happens -- one of the joys of being a Visiting Fellow. And of talking to Michael Vassar.)
I'd more or less agree with this, but would add that it's important to flag the difference between asserting the existence of X, making decisions based on the existence of X, and supposing the existence of X. If I start using language in a way that elides those differences, I am doing nobody any favors, least of all myself.