= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
spencerth comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (153)
Though I agree with you strongly, I think we should throw the easy objection to this out there: high-quality, thorough scholarship takes a lot of time. Even for people who are dedicated to self-improvement, knowledge and truth-seeking (which I speculate this community has many of), for some subjects, getting to the "state of the art"/minimum level of knowledge required to speak intelligently, avoid "solved problems", and not run into "already well refuted ideas" is a very expensive process. So much so that some might argue that communities like this wouldn't even exist (or would be even smaller than they are) if we all attempted to get to that minimum level in the voluminous, ever-growing list of subjects that one could know about.
This is a roundabout way of saying that our knowledge-consumption abilities are far too slow. We can and should attempt to be widely, broadly read knowledge-generalists and stand on the shoulders of giants; climbing even one, though, can take a dauntingly long time.
We need Matrix-style insta-learning. Badly.
Hear, hear! Arguably, resources like Wikipedia, the LW sequences, and SEP (heck even Google and the internet in general) are steps in that general direction.
So is spending time and effort on solved problems and already well refuted ideas.
True. But there are also personal benefits to working on problems (increased cognitive ability, familiarity with useful methods, etc.) that arise even if the problem itself is already 'solved.'
And worse, by spending time on solved problems and refuted ideas in public, you can easily destroy your credibility with those that could help you.
This is a serious issue with how people like us, that have interdisciplinary interests, interact with and are respected by experts in fields touching on our own. Those that study, for instance, epistemology, view those that study, say, probability theory, fairly negatively, because they keep hearing uninformed and stupid opinions about things they know more about. This is especially bad because it happens instead of gaining from the knowledge of those experts, who are in a great position to help with thorny issues.