loup-vaillant 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: lukeprog 23 March 2011 05:43:10AM *  10 points [-]

With this comment at least, you aren't addressing the list of 20+ useful contributions of mainstream philosophy I gave.

Almost none of the items I listed have to do with famous old "problems" like free will or reductionism.

Instead, they're stuff that (1) you're already making direct use of in building FAI, like reflective equilibrium, or (2) stuff that is almost identical to the 'coping with cognitive biases' stuff you've written about so much, like Bishop & Trout (2004), or (3) stuff that is dissolving traditional debates into the cognitive algorithms that produce them, which you seem to think is the defining hallmark of LW-style philosophy, or (4) generally useful stuff like the work on catastrophic risks coming out of FHI at Oxford.

I hope you aren't going to keep insisting that mainstream philosophy has nothing useful to offer after reading my list. On this point, it may be time for you to just say "oops" and move on.

After all, we already agree on most of the important points, like you said. We agree that philosophy is an incredibly diseased discipline. We agree that people shouldn't go out and read Quine. We agree that almost everyone should be reading statistics and AI and cognitive science, not mainstream philosophy. We agree that Eliezer Yudkowsky should not read mainstream philosophy. We agree that "their" cognitive workflow is "not like unto" your cognitive workflow.

So I don't understand why you would continue to insist that nothing (or almost nothing) useful comes out of mainstream philosophy, after the long list of useful things I've provided, many of which you are already using yourself, and many more of which closely parallel what you've been doing on Less Wrong all along, like dissolving traditional debates into cognitive algorithms and examining how to get at the truth more often through awareness and counteracting of our cognitive biases.

The sky won't fall if you admit that some of mainstream philosophy is useful, and that you already make use of some of it. I'm not going to go around recommending people join philosophy programs. This is simply about making use of the resources that are out there. Most of those resources are in statistics and AI and cognitive science and physics and so on. But a very little of it happens to come out of mainstream philosophy, especially from that corner of mainstream philosophy called Quinean naturalism which shares lots of (basic) assumptions with Less Wrong philosophy.

As you know, this stuff matters. We're trying to save the world, here. Either some useful stuff comes out of mainstream philosophy, or it doesn't. There is a correct answer to that question. And the correct answer is that some useful stuff does come out of mainstream philosophy - as you well know, because you're already making use of it.

Comment author: loup-vaillant 27 June 2011 10:02:45PM 1 point [-]

I'm late, but… is there substantial chain of cause and effect between the discovery of useful conclusions from mainstream philosophy, and the use of those conclusions by Eliezer? Counter-factually, if those conclusions were not drawn, would it be less likely that Eliezer found them anyway?

Eliezer seems to deny this chain of cause and effect. I wonder to what extent you think such a denial is unjustified.