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

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

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 March 2011 09:59:59AM 26 points [-]

I'll await your next post, but in retrospect you should have started with the big concrete example of mainstream philosophy doing an LW-style dissolution-to-algorithm not already covered on LW, and then told us that the moral was that we shouldn't ignore mainstream philosophy.

I did the whole sequence on QM to make the final point that people shouldn't trust physicists to get elementary Bayesian problems right. I didn't just walk in and tell them that physicists were untrustworthy.

If you want to make a point about medicine, you start by showing people a Bayesian problem that doctors get wrong; you don't start by telling them that doctors are untrustworthy.

If you want me to believe that philosophy isn't a terribly sick field, devoted to arguing instead of facing real-world tests and admiring problems instead of solving them and moving on, whose poison a novice should avoid in favor of eating healthy fields like settled physics (not string theory) or mainstream AI (not AGI), you're probably better off starting with the specific example first. "I disagree with your decision not to cover terminal vs. instrumental in CEV" doesn't cover it, and neither does "Quineans agree the world is made of atoms". Show me this field's power!

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."