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Konkvistador comments on Rational Repentance - Less Wrong
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They may have wasted their minds on it, but the better they where at wasting their minds the higher their status was, the likelier it was they would marry a girl from another respected or wealthy family and consequently the more they got to reproduce.
Where their minds truly wasted? Or did it by happy accident, a hack of our out of date reward systems, managed to produce more brilliant, if deluded and blinded minds? History has also since shown that the minds aren't irreversibly deluded.
I can't help but wonder if we would have had quite as many wonderful minds like Bohr, Einstein, Hertz or Nobele prize winners like Richard Phillips Fenyman or Isidor Isaac Rabi (!) if those minds in the late middle ages or early modern period weren't wasted.
Possibly, but at the same time, a lot of those people in the Middle Ages were still wasting time and are still doing so today. There's no question for example that Maimonides was brilliant. He was impressive for his accomplishments in philosophy, medicine, and even in other areas that he only dabbled in (such as math). That he spent most of his time on halachah certainly held back society. And he's not the only example. Similar remarks would apply to many of the great Rabbis in history and even some of the modern ones.
I'd be interested in seeing how you draw the line between Maimonides' work in halachah and in philosophy. I can certainly identify outputs that I would classify as one or the other, but I would have a very hard time drawing a sharp line between the processes.
I agree that there isn't a sharp line. But if we just look at the material that falls unambiguously into halachah as opposed to all the material that falls into philosophy or the borderline, there's a lot more halachich material.
Sure. Again, classifying the outputs isn't too hard. Philosophical and halachic writing are different genres, and it's relatively easy to class writing by genre. Sure, there's a fuzzy middle ground, but I agree that that's a minor concern.
But your argument seems to depend on the idea that if he spent a year thinking about stuff and at the end of that year wrote five thousand words we would class as halachah and five hundred words we would class as philosophy, that means he wasted that year, whereas if it had been the other way around, that would advance society.
Before endorsing such an argument, I'd want to know more about what was actually going on in that year. I could easily see it going either way, simply because there isn't a clear correlation in this context between how useful his thinking was vs. what genre he published the results in.