SarahC comments on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy - Less Wrong
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I'm saying that the claim that LW-style philosophy shares many assumptions with Quinean naturalism in contrast to most of philosophy is unimportant, thus, presenting the long list of basic assumptions on which LW-style and Quinean naturalism agree is from my perspective irrelevant.
Yes. What I would consider "standard LW positions" is not "there is no libertarian free will" but rather "the philosophical debate on free will arises from the execution of the following cognitive algorithms X, Y, and Z". If the latter has been a standard position then I would be quite interested.
The kind of reforms you quote are extremely basic, along the lines of "OMG there are cognitive biases and they affect philosophers!" not "This is how this specific algorithm generates the following philosophical debate..." If the movement hasn't progressed to the second stage, then there seems little point in aspiring LW rationalists reading about it.
GJM's suggestion is correct but the thing which you seem to deny and which I think is true is that LW is at a different stage of doing this sort of philosophy than any Quinean naturalism I have heard of, so that the other Quineans "doing things that nobody else have thought of" don't seem to be doing commensurate work.
I am not asking for an example of someone who agrees with me that, sure, cognitive philosophy sounds like a great idea, by golly. There's a difference between saying "Sure, evolution is true!" and doing evolutionary biology.
I'm asking for someone who's dissolved a philosophical question into a cognitive algorithm, preferably in a way not previously seen before on LW.
Did you read the LW sequence on free will, both the setup and the solution? Apologies if you've already previously answered this question, I have a vague feeling that I asked you before and you said yes, but still, just checking.
On the whole, you seem to think that I should be really enthusiastic about finding philosophers who agree with my basic assumptions, because here are these possible valuable allies in academia - why, if we could reframe LW as Quineanism, we'd have a whole support base ready-made!
Whereas I'm thinking, "If you ask what sort of activity these people perform in their daily work, their skills are similar to those of other philosophers and unlike those of people trying to figure out what algorithm a brain is running" and so they can't be hired to do the sort of work we need without extensive retraining; and since we're not out to reform academic philosophy, per se, it's not clear that we need allies in a fight we could just bypass.
It might be useful, if only for gaining status and attention and funding, to connect your work directly to one or several academic fields. To present it as a synthesis of philosophy, computer science, and cognitive science (or some other combination of your choice.) When people ask me what LessWrong is, I generally say something like "It's philosophy from a computer scientist's perspective." Most people can only put a mental label on something when they have a rough idea of what it's like, and it's not practical to say, "Well, our work isn't like anything."
That doesn't mean you have to hire philosophers or join a philosophy department; it might not mean that you, personally, have to do anything. But I do think that more people would be interested, and have a smaller inferential distance, if LW ideas were generally presented as related to other disciplines.
Expanding on this, which section of my local Barnes And Noble is your (Eliezer) book going to be in? Philosophy seems like the best fit (aside from the best selling non-fiction) to get new interested readership.
Amazon's "Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences" contains things like Malcolm Gladwell and Predictably Irrational, which I think is the audience that Eliezer is targeting.