lukeprog comments on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy - Less Wrong

106 Post author: lukeprog 20 March 2011 08:28PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (328)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: lukeprog 21 March 2011 04:54:48PM 3 points [-]

you should have started with the big concrete example of mainstream philosophy doing an LW-style dissolution-to-algorithm not already covered on LW

But I've already pointed out that you do a lot more philosophy than just dissolution-to-algorithm. Dissolution to algorithm is not the only valuable thing to do in philosophy. Not all philosophical problems can be dissolved that way. Some philosophical problems turn out to be genuine problems that need an answer.

My claim that we shouldn't ignore philosophy is already supported by the points I made about how vast swaths of the useful content on Less Wrong have been part of mainstream philosophy for decades.

I'm not going to argue that philosophy isn't a terribly sick field, because it is a terribly sick field. Instead I'm arguing that you have already taken a great deal of value (directly or indirectly) from mainstream philosophy, and I gave more interesting examples than "metaphysical libertarianism is false" and "people are made of atoms."