= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
anonym comments on Costs and Benefits 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 (106)
I don't understand this. Everybody knows who George W. Bush is, but having a character in a dialogue speak with him wouldn't impress. Likewise for a character speaking with Newton about mechanics, and Newton is far better known than Bentham and doesn't have a generally negative reputation like Bush.
How is the " 'everybody knows' conveys prestige" supposed to work?
I wasn't sure whether Eliezer's point was that people do in fact all know who Bentham is, or that many people do NOT in fact, but saying "everyone knows who he is" is the sort of thing you say that signals scholarship.
I agree that it signals scholarship, but I think the most natural reading is that the "association" Eliezer had in mind would be the original association.
The claim "everybody knows" isolates those who do not know from those that do. Knowing Bentham is an arbitrary and mostly useless method of grouping people. In other words statements like "everybody knows" helps to create meaningless divisions in groups.
But in context he was defending himself for having mentioned Bentham, and it was an appropriate argument in that context. He had just previously been accused of showing off scholarship, and his defense (appropriate to the charge) was that it does not require scholarship to know who Bentham is. He wasn't trying to set up groups.
And I think he's right. It does not require scholarship to know who Bentham is. By scholarship he mean something specific, expressed here:
It does not require reading through 90%, or even 50%, or even 10% of the literature on utilitarianism to know who Bentham is. I know who Bentham is and I haven't read more than probably a thousandth of one percent of the literature on utilitarianism.
I did not claim he was trying to. Nor do I think he was.
...
I did not mention scholarship in my post so I can not tell what point of mine you are responding to.
You were criticizing his use of "everybody knows", and your attack did not take into account the context. You just took the phrase in isolation and talked about it. I was defending his use of the phrase as having been appropriate in the context in which he used it.
I had no intent of attack.
I was commenting on a phase in abstract sense and how it can often have certain effects and hence why some people interpret it as signally scholarship and implying prestige.
I took the phrase in isolation because I was only commenting on the phrase and not the context. Nothing was supposed to reflect directly on the person who made the original comment.
If you have a method of altering my original statement to communicate that more explicitly please share.
I think you've clarified it at sufficiently at this point, so no need.