= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
lukeprog comments on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy - 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 (328)
No, it's more than that, but only things of that level are useful philosophy. Other things are not philosophy or more like background intros.
Amy just arrived and I've got to start book-writing, but I'll take one example from this list, the first one, so that I'm not picking and choosing; later if I've got a moment I'll do some others, in the order listed.
Funny you should mention that.
There is this incredibly toxic view of predicate logic that I first encountered in Good Old-Fashioned AI. And then this entirely different, highly useful and precise view of the uses and bounds of logic that I encountered when I started studying mathematical logic and learned about things like model theory.
Now considering that philosophers of the sort I inveighed against in "against modal logic" seem to talk and think like the GOFAI people and not like the model-theoretic people, I'm guessing that the GOFAI people made the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mistake of getting their views of logic from the descendants of Bertrand Russell who still called themselves "philosophers" instead of those descendants who considered themselves part of the thriving edifice of mathematics.
Anyway. If you and I agree that philosophy is an extremely sick field, that there is no standardized repository of the good stuff, that it would be a desperate and terrible mistake for anyone to start their life studying philosophy before they had learned a lot of cognitive science and math and AI algorithms and plain old material science as explained by non-philosophers, and that it's not worth my time to read through philosophy to pick out the good stuff even if there are a few small nuggets of goodness or competent people buried here and there, then I'm not sure we disagree on much - except this post sort of did seem to suggest that people ought to run out and read philosophy-qua-philosophy as written by professional philosophers, rather than this being a terrible mistake.
Will try to get to some of the other items, in order, later.
Yeah, we don't disagree much on all those points.
I didn't say in my original post that people should run out and start reading mainstream philosophy. If that's what people got from it, then I'll add some clarifications to my original post.
Instead, I said that mainstream philosophy has some useful things to offer, and shouldn't be ignored. Which I think you agree with if you've benefited from the work of Bostrom and Dennett (including, via Drescher) and so on. But maybe you still disagree with it, for reasons that are forthcoming in your response to my other examples of mainstream philosophy contributions useful to Less Wrong.
But yeah, don't let me keep you from your book!
As for predicate logic, I'll have to take your word on that. I'll 'downgrade it' in my list above.
FWIW, what I got from your original post was not "LW readers should all go out and start reading mainstream philosophy," but rather "LW is part of a mainstream philosophical lineage, whether its members want to acknowledge that or not."
Thanks for sharing. That too. :)
I'm part of Roger Bacon's lineage too, and not ashamed of it either, but time passes and things improve and then there's not much point in looking back.
Meh. Historical context can help put things in perspective. You've done that plenty of times in your own posts on Less Wrong. Again, you seem to be holding my post to a different standard of usefulness than your own posts. But like I said, I don't recommend anybody actually read Quine.
Oftentimes you simply can't understand what some theorem or experiment was for without at least knowing about its historical context. Take something as basic as calculus: if you've never heard the slightest thing about classical mechanics, what possible meaning could a derivative, integral, or differential equation have to you?
Does human nature improve, too?
What's "human nature"?
Something that probably hasn't changed much over the history of philosophy.