Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant - Less Wrong

65 Post author: lukeprog 06 December 2012 12:42AM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 04 December 2012 11:17:02PM *  5 points [-]

It's not clear that Hume having drawn correct conclusions from very little information comes from any essential Humeness that you should be trying to emulate. If the set of reasonable-sounding answers to the kinds of questions philosophers like Hume were thinking about is small enough, you'd expect that out of a sufficiently large pool of philosophers some of them would get it mostly right by sheer luck (e.g. Democritus and atoms). You'd need evidence that Hume was doing very well even after adjusting for this before he becomes worth studying.

(I say this knowing almost nothing about Hume - I last took a philosophy course over 8 years ago - and so if it's obvious that Hume was doing very well even after adjusting for the above then sure, study Hume.)

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 05 December 2012 10:57:46AM 6 points [-]

if it's obvious that Hume was doing very well even after adjusting for the above

This seems to be the case.