sfb comments on Were atoms real? - Less Wrong

61 Post author: AnnaSalamon 08 December 2010 05:30PM

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Comment author: AlexU 14 December 2010 02:59:11PM *  10 points [-]

Half the more "philosophical" posts on here seem like they're trying to reinvent the wheel. This issue has been discussed a lot by philosophers and there's already an extensive literature on it. Check out http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/ for starters. Nothing wrong with talking about things that have already talked about, of course, but it would probably be good at least to acknowledge that this is a well-established area of thought, with a known name, with a lot of sophisticated thinking already underway, rather than having the mindset that Less Wrong is single-handedly inventing Western philosophy from scratch.

Comment author: sfb 14 December 2010 08:41:16PM *  6 points [-]

Alternately, Western 'word salad' Philosophy might benefit from a bit of reinventing:

http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy's claims. It's supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.

Because philosophy's flaws turned away the sort of people who might have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating. Bertrand Russell wrote in a letter in 1912:

Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.

[..] There's a market for writing that sounds impressive and can't be disproven.

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