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shokwave comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong
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In general I'm very sympathetic to this point of view, and there are some good examples in your post.
One bad example, in my opinion, is Eliezer's recent procrastination post vs. the survey of "scientific research on procrastination." I read the chapter, and it appears to mostly cite studies that involved casual surveys, subjective description, and fuzzy labeling. Although there are many valid scientific endeavors that involve nothing but categorization (it is interesting to know how many species of tree frog there are and what they look and sound like even if we do not make any predictions beyond what is observed), categorization should at least be rigorous enough that we can specify what we expect to see with a modicum of precision.
When a biologist says that frogus neonblueicus has neon blue spots and chirps at 500 Hz, she will give you enough information that you can go to Costa Rica and check for yourself whether you have found one of the rare neonblueicus specimens. Although there will be some controversies around the edges, your identification of any particular frog will not correlate with your political biases or personal problems, and repeated observation of the same frog population by a few different researchers will tend to decrease error.
When a psychologist says that procrastinators can be divided into "relaxed" types and "tense-afraid" types, the "science" being done is not merely descriptive, but also horrifyingly vague. What does it mean for a human to be "tense-afraid" when "procrastinating"? The three paragraphs or so of context on the topic give you enough of an idea of what the researcher is saying to conjure up a mental image, but not nearly enough to carve thing-space at the joints.
In my experience, this is a very serious problem in social and human sciences -- there are whole subfields where the authors do not know how little they know, and proceed to wax eloquently about all of the empty concepts they have coined. There are other subfields where the researchers suspect that they might not have done very good research, and they cover their tracks with advanced statistics and jargon. After you dig through a few of these booby-trapped caves of wonder, you start to lose, if not respect for scholarship, at least some of the urge to do the moderately hard work of digesting literature reviews yourself on a regular basis. It is dangerous to assume that casually studying the leading textbook in a soft field will usually make you smarter.
However, enough rationality training will have alarm bells ringing when reading soft textbooks and studies. That in itself - "this field is overpopulated with concepts and undermeasured" - is marginally more useful than knowing nothing about the field.
If you haven't already, you should try reading postmodern philosophy. An uninterrupted wall of alarm bells. :)
I was a philosophy student for my brief attempt at tertiary education - I know what you mean. Our lecturer would describe the text as 'dense' - more aptly, I thought, the author is dense.
An anecdote from that class: after a lecture on Wittgenstein, a student asked the lecturer if the rest of the semester's lectures were to be canceled.
I cannot think of a single obvious interpretation for why this occurred, but I can think of a few possible ones. Could you please clarify?
There is an obvious one, actually - a frequent (perhaps inaccurate) interpretation of the last parts of the Tractatus is as a denial of the possibility of any real philosophy (including Wittgenstein's).
Since one would naturally cover the Tractatus before The Philosophical Investigations or other works, a rather juvenile response would be exactly that anecdote.
Yep. The lecture presented the view that Wittgenstein had explained away most of philosophy - in his own words, that he had resolved all philosophical problems.
How silly of Wittgenstein! Didn't he know that Hegel had already completed philosophy?
Oh, Hegel. I remember a lecture where the professor read from Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik like it was a holy scripture. When he was finished, he looked up and said: "With this, everything is said". I didn't understand anything, it was a jungle of words like being and not-being and becoming and how one thing becomes the other. I said that I didn't understand anything, and what did the lecturer reply with a smile? "It's good you don't understand it!" I seriously had the intense urge to shout at him, but instead I just didn't show up anymore.
A perhaps equally juvenile concern of mine, is whether Wittgenstein himself failed to stand on the shoulders of giants (at least in the Tractatus), by essentially starting from scratch with his own propositions, drawing logical conclusions from them rather than using or at least referring to previous work.