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diegocaleiro comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong
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I agree that 99.9% of philosophy is very close to worthless. Its signal-to-noise ratio is much lower than in the sciences or in mathematics.
This brings to mind Eliezer's comment that "...if there’s any centralized repository of reductionist-grade naturalistic cognitive philosophy, I’ve never heard mention of it."
But reductionist-grade naturalistic cognitive philosophy is probably an even larger sub-field of philosophy than the formal epistemology I mentioned above. Names that come immediately to mind are: John Bickle, Pat & Paul Churchland, Paul Thagard, Tim Schroeder, William Calvin, Georg Northoff, Thomas Metzinger.
There's some good philosophy out there. Unfortunately, you normally only encounter it after you've spent quite a while studying bad philosophy. Most people are introduced to philosophy through Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel, and might never suspect a neurophilosopher like John Bickle exists.
Which reminds me of the old Bertrand Russell line:
Having been one of the exceptions, I wonder if there are enough exceptions to create critical mass for philosophy to take off, or if we will always be condemned (in a good sense) to merge with fields that enjoy precision, such as cog psy, chemestry, physics, maths, neuroscience, etology, evo psy and so on.........
Not that I mind being partly neuro/psycho/evo........ it's just that there are, summing all these fields, too many papers to read in a lifetime.........
I think that the state of the field is still something of a barrier to the sort of people who would be of most benefit to it. I personally dropped my double major in philosophy after becoming fed up with how much useless and vacuous material I was being required to cover.