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steven0461 comments on Just a reminder: Scientists are, technically, people. - Less Wrong
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Yes. Actually, I would say scientists are better ethicists in their area of expertise, because
moral reasoning is reasoning, and smarter people are better at reasoning
they know what the heck they're talking about.
Can you specialize in ethics? Or is it like - to use the ever-popular reason-as-martial-arts metaphor - like specializing in kata? You sometimes see schools that strongly emphasize kata. IMHO their kata is weak, because they don't understand the purpose of their movements. To answer to this question, you need to ask whether moral reasoning within a domain is qualitatively different from any other kind of reasoning in a domain.
Perhaps if our debates on ethics used esoteric concepts from category theory and the writings of German philosophers, it would be of some benefit to specialize in ethics. But they have never risen to that level.
Philosophers are pretty smart.
Philosophers are pretty smart.
They get good scores on IQ tests. But in terms of dealing with reality, and producing real knowledge, they're incredibly dumb.
High INT, low WIS.
Generalizations, ahoy! That being said,
And sometimes way-too-high CHA. If you're naive and looking for wisdom, it's too easy to listen to someone talking nonsense about philosophy and be completely taken in. Witness the success of the irritatingly wrong postmodern thinking which holds that science is just another cultural opinion with no more validity than any other. If that were true then transistors would work about as well as rain dances or ancient Hindu theurgy, and yet people continue to spread the meme.
If they were that smart they would be avoiding politics; then again, maybe the smart ones are and that's why the gov't ethicists seem so incredibly dumb.