Will_Sawin comments on (Philosophical) Disagreements are not Rational - Less Wrong

8 Post author: gwern 02 June 2011 12:10AM

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Comment author: Will_Sawin 02 June 2011 01:57:13AM 2 points [-]

It's not clear why this reflects poorly on philosophers.

Like, I'm sure you could find the same thing with controversial scientific questions. Maybe not to the same magnitude.

Suppose you didn't find it. "Well, yes, we disagree about a number of seemingly-simple topics, but these disagreements aren't correlated to our personality, so we really have everything figured out, it's just that .... uh .... um "

Comment author: jhuffman 02 June 2011 03:51:33PM 4 points [-]

The problem is in philosophy they attempt to use intuitions as evidence. If their "philosophically informed intuitions" are still vulnerable to biases and errors then arguments based on those intuitions are (even more) suspect. I doubt most LW readers found the intuition evidence argument compelling to begin with.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 02 June 2011 04:39:18PM 0 points [-]

Although we do use intuitions as evidence, just as evidence about something else. For instance, evidence about what algorithms our minds use.

Comment author: outlier 02 June 2011 09:09:19AM 2 points [-]

I suspect it's the same for scientists for controversial topics. But discussing controversial topics is not science. Coming up with a way to verify a claim is. In general personality must be correlated with opinion (or at least that's my intuition :)).

Comment author: torekp 04 June 2011 03:10:41AM 1 point [-]

Right. The thread title is at best an overstatement of the experimental finding. Some significant group of philosophers is influenced by extroversion/introversion. The rest might not be.