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Wei_Dai comments on Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant - Less Wrong
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Luke, do you have any ideas how to reform philosophy education and professional practice without antagonizing a lot of current professional philosophers and their students and having the debate degenerate into a blue-vs-green tribal fight? Or more generally see much chance of success for such an attempt? If not, maybe you should reframe your posts (or at least future ones) as being aimed at amateur philosophers, autodidacts, CS and math majors interested in doing FAI research, and the like?
Yes, this is my intention. I don't think I can reform how philosophy is taught at universities quickly enough to make a difference. My purpose, then, is to help "amateur philosophers, autodidacts, CS and math majors interested in doing FAI research" so that they can become better philosophical thinkers outside the university system, and avoid being mind-poisoned by a standard philosophical education.
What is your strategy for doing this, other than posting articles on Less Wrong ?
Hundreds of hours of personal conversation with promising people. Also, Louie is putting together a list of classes to take at various universities.
I don't think this approach scales very well. Though I may be overestimating the number of people who are interested in philosophy as well as capable of doing FAI research.
This approach will scale a lot better, but it is riskier. Presumably, these specific classes will help the student to "avoid being mind-poisoned by a standard philosophical education"; but what if the students enjoy the course, and end up diving head-first into the standard philosophical education, after all ?
Quickly enough? You think you can do it all??
Of course. Do you think it's impossible, or that there's a task Luke isn't up to? The first seems intuitively more plausible to me than the second.
I think it's a task Luke isn't up to. To single-handedly reform teaching like that you would have to be a renowned philosopher or educationalist, a Dewey or Erasmus, not a twenty-something blogger. His understanding of philosophy is barely up to undergraduate level. Sorry, but that's the way it is.
You pointed out that Luke has not started trying to do X, as evidence that he wouldn't be up to the task of doing X. You don't seem to understand how to do things.
When you want to accomplish a major goal, you need to do a lot of other things first. You need to get clear on what your goal is. You need to do research and accumulate the prerequisite knowledge. You need to accumulate any necessary resources. You probably need to put together a team. You may need to invent some new technologies.
I have absolutely no doubt that if he wanted to, Luke could do all the prerequisite steps and then reform Philosophy. If your hypothesis is correct, he'd in the process become a renowned philosopher of education like Dewey.
Though I would not bet against him being able to pull it off as a twenty-something blogger.
Most people could not single-handedly reform philosophy. There has to be some evidence that Luke is more capable of doing it than most people, or else we are quite sure he is not up to the task by default.
This is Luke Muehlhauser we're talking about.
Okay, and that's an argument; one which has... uh... interesting validity. I'm not sure how to condition on Alicorn's dinner parties as evidence, though, so let's set that aside for now. Would you say, at least, that the fact I am not a renowned philosopher is sufficient to conclude, pending further evidence, that I'm incapable of reforming philosophy?
Edit: in the interests of maintaining my anonymity, let's assume for the sake of argument that I am not, in fact, a renowned philosopher; this should not be taken as indicative of my actual status in the philosophy world one way or the other.
Not given background knowledge. You're on Less Wrong, so there is high probability that you're capable of becoming capable of arbitrary possible things. And capability is transitive, so that means there is high probability that you're capable of that particular thing.
Most people aren't already renowned philosophers, and most of those don't reform philosophy, and for those that did, they usually became renowned in the process of reforming philosophy, so that's not much evidence either way.
Can't argue with that.
Not sure why you feel the need to remind us...
I feel like the phrasing "barely up to undergraduate level" is like saying something is "basic" or "textbook" not when it's actually basic or textbook but because it insinuates there is an ocean of knowledge that your opponent has yet to cross. If luke is "barely undergraduate" then I know a lot of philosophy undergrads who might as well not call themselves that.
While I agree that reform is far more likely to be done by a Dewey or Erasmus, your reasoning gives me a very "you must be accepted into our system if you want to criticize it" vibe.
While it's not actually impossible to reform the teaching on a subject without yourself reaching the highest level in knowledge of it you wish to teach, it is bloody hard.
Who arent trying to reform the subject.
It's not that. There is just no practical possibility of philosophy, or any other subject, being reformed by someone who does not have a very good grasp of it. You need a good grasp of it just to dagnose the problems.
The former is definitely possible, given that it's almost continuously actual. Philosophical education is reformed all the time. The latter will be difficult for Luke to do directly, just because accomplishing the reform comes down to convincing philosophers to do things differently, and philosophers are unlikely to be exposed to Luke's work. And, has been mentioned, Luke's writings on the subject are not presently set up to convince philosophers.
I think the counterfactual under consideration was where Luke actually tries. That his writings are not presently set up for that is just arguing with the setup of the thought experiment.
Fair enough, though the exposure bit was my main point.
Do you think they would find it convincing if they were?
I still don't see this as sufficiently different from a blue-green tribal fight - there's a lot of "quantitative/Bayesian approaches are the way to go, and everyone else sucks". By targeting everyone who is not an established philosopher, you're just demonstrating that you're smart enough to make this divide along generational lines (which is, as Kuhn tells us, how new paradigms succeed).
I appreciate your sentiment; I'm one of those people who actually got an undergraduate degree in Philosophy. Ivory tower thinking has been detrimental to philosophy but the changes your purposing would destroy philosophy education as its been practiced for well over 2000 years.
Maybe you think that's a good thing, having been through the education I do not. Philosophy, or rather the study of old dead philosophers, is not for the sake of their ideas but for the developing of a thought paradigm. The course you would be creating is not philosophy, instead it is something more akin to, "How does science explain reality?"
Moreover, most disciplines were birthed in philosophy, eventually becoming its own discipline and there there's the whole philosopher-mathematician love affair because two have been linked pretty closely for awhile . There's a reason why you get a PhD (Doctorate of Philosophy).
So in essence, you went and cherry-picked stupid abstracts to prove your point. Yes, there are many ivory-tower philosophers who are adding nothing to our knowledge base. But no, the answer is not to sink the ship.
Go spend three months with Hegel's Phenomonolgy of Spirit; it won't change how you view the world but it'll sharpen your mind; same goes for Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
For what its worth, I'm a physics/cs major and I wish I'd seen this article two years ago so I wouldn't have wasted my credits on two philosophy classes.
Don't be deterred from learning philosophy -- just think carefully about to do it. A decent AI class, for example, will almost certainly cover a lot of what Luke mentioned in his ideal curriculum.
Georgetown University is a prestigious university. They "reformed" medicine education by introducing a new 'Complementary and Alternative Medicine(CAM)'-program in 2003.
Most mainstream medicine professors don't like alternative medicine. They still didn't succeed in blocking the CAM program. The CAM people didn't get their program by avoiding to antagonize mainstream medicine.
LessWrong is filled with a bunch very smart people and highly skilled people in their mid twenties. In one or two decades there a good chance that a fair number of those people are in positions of power. Maybe not enough power to get every university to teach all philosophy courses this way, but enough power to get a few university to make courses to teach philosophy that way.
In a decade Singularity University might be a bigger institution that opens a philosophy bachlor program that teaches philosophy according to the way Luke proposes.
Just because there no way to get such a philosophy program in the next five years, doesn't mean that it's an impossible long-term goal. Trying to avoid to antagonize the establishment is a bad strategy when you to create bigger changes in society.
A better way to put this is "listen to your supporters, not your enemies." When you want big changes, the establishment will often be your enemy, but it is rarely sensible to assume that they will be.
I don't think so. In this case it's more: "Say what you consider to be right, regardles of what other people say." Don't tone down your message because it might annoy the establishment. Don't focus on saying what's popular.
I don't think lukeprog wrote the post because being anti-academic philosophy is hip on LessWrong. I don't think that should be his main consideration when he decides how he writes his posts.
If you focus on saying stuff that might give you a tactical advantage in the moment instead of focusing on having a meaningful message, you are unlikely to say stuff with meaningful long-term impact.
By "a better way to put this" I was referring to the insight of the underlying strategic consideration; good advice rarely takes the form of "don't take tactics into account, do what feels good." If your supporters are the type to be fired up by anti-establishment talk, then fire up your supporters; if you would do better with supporters in the establishment, then don't scare them away because you were harsher than you needed to be.
Compare "philosophers don't have their act together, this is what it would look like if they did" with "we're partnering with some professors to launch a MOOC on how to do philosophy from the LW perspective, starting with Pearl and Kahneman and focusing on how to dissolve questions."
Luke still could have said what he said with a whole lot more tact.
The most polite way would be to call it a new subset of philosophy, let's say "Scientific Philosophy" (or something else if this name is already taken), and then open Scientific Philosophy courses. Nobody would get offended by this.
On the other hand, it would give people easy opportunity to ignore it. They could just teach Philosophy as they did before... and perhaps include one useless short lecture on Scientific Philosophy just to show that: yeah, they heard about it.
Isn't that one of those things like "they couldn't hit an elephant at this distance" which people traditionally say right before being horribly surprised?
'Most polite'? Suggesting that all other philosophical approaches are 'unscientific' is not very diplomatic. There's no need for new jargon; just call it what it is, a course in Critical Thinking. This solves the problem of 'philosophy' being a terribly ill-defined word to begin with, rather than compounding the problem with poorly-defined terms like 'experimental' or 'scientific.'
No one wants to graduate a Critical Thinker.
Then that needs to change. I'm fine with coining new words for utilitarian purposes, but 'critical thought' is such a semantically transparent umbrella terms for all the things we want to promote — certainly its scope and significance is more immediately obvious than that of 'rationality,' 'philosophy,' 'science,' etc. — that it concerns me how hard rationalists sometimes work to avoid promoting that term. It's cheesier and less edgy in connotation than some of the other terms, but that mainstream valence works to our advantage in some contexts.
Critical thinking is like intrinsic motivation, a thing everyone wants but no one can effectively systematize.
(yet)
How sure are you of this? Has anyone been given the opportunity to invest their own time and money to do so?
Fair point. it already exists, but is rarely a major. People want to apply CT to something.
It is already taken (see Reichenbach's The Rise of Scientific Philosophy), but it arguably means something very similar to what Luke seems to be advocating anyway (that is to say, it seems to be in the same direction that Carnap, Reichenbach, and some of the other logical empiricists were moving in after the mid-20th century), so I don't think it would be much of a problem.
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At first I interpreted this as some kind of meta-post-modernist-abstract-(insert buzzword) comment.
This seems like an unavoidable problem with professional psychoanalysts. But philosophers are, up to certain age at least, willing to change their minds. It could be targeted at the first few years of undergrad. I've seen people change from "the dead old guys" to good stuff. Just give them a chance! And a figure of high status (Bostrom and Russell come to mind) to be inspired by.
On the spirit of Viliam_Bur below here. I would strongly argue in favour of it being a new course, called "Philosophy Given Science".
There is no way professional philosophers would learn all that Luke (and reality, because reality doesn't care about your brains capacity to grasp what is necessary to undertake the Big questions) would like them to. Leave them the name "Philosophy".
A new course would be great. "Given" somehow brings connotations of probability and Bayes, which is good. Trouble: The Mega-course depends on having thousands of free hours to read several topics that take a semester each to teach. Probably the entire extention of the thing would span longer then a Medical course nowadays does. Except some very lucky philosophers/autodidacts like Luke, who have the discipline, cognitive capacity, time and resources to actually learn all that, nearly no one would be able to learn it all.
It sucks, when the problems set by nature and reality are not proportional to human cognition/nature/condition/capitalism/constraints.
EDIT: I have decided to tranform this comment into a post in discussion Complement Luke's List. The post contains also the beggining of a list of philosophy that is consistent with what Luke posts here. His layer here (science) should precede, but not substitute, the philosophy layer being forged there (with recommendations by Bostrom, Dennett, Luke himself etc...)