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: benelliott 21 March 2011 06:39:43PM *  2 points [-]

Perhaps the argument is more like this:

  • Quine said many things that we agree with
  • Some of these are non-obvious, its possible that we wouldn't all have come up with them had we not had this community
  • Since we have not explicitly mentioned Quine before it is unlikely that we have already heard everything he came up with
  • Therefore reading Quine may reveal other useful, non-obvious insights, which we might take a long time to come up with on own
  • Therefore we should read Quine.
Comment author: lukeprog 21 March 2011 07:00:20PM *  9 points [-]

I don't advocate reading Quine directly, but rather Quinean philosophy. For example Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, which reads like a series of Less Wrong blog posts, but covers lots of material not yet covered on Less Wrong. (I made a dent in this by transposing its coverage of statistical prediction rules into a Less Wrong post.)

And I don't advocate it for everyone. Doing research in philosophy is my specialty, but I don't think Eliezer should waste his time poring through philosophy journals for useful insights. Nor should most people. But then, most people won't benefit from reading through books on algorithmic learning theory, either. That's why we have divisions of labor and expertise. The thing I'm arguing against is Eliezer's suggestion that people shouldn't read philosophy at all outside of Less Wrong and AI books.

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