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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (510)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: RobbBB 05 December 2012 08:54:08AM *  1 point [-]

'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.'

Comment author: diegocaleiro 06 December 2012 03:05:21AM -1 points [-]

No one wants to graduate a Critical Thinker.

Comment author: RobbBB 06 December 2012 04:33:48AM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 December 2012 07:10:55AM *  1 point [-]

Critical thinking is like intrinsic motivation, a thing everyone wants but no one can effectively systematize.

(yet)

Comment author: Strange7 06 December 2012 11:25:19PM 0 points [-]

How sure are you of this? Has anyone been given the opportunity to invest their own time and money to do so?

Comment author: Peterdjones 07 December 2012 10:57:24AM -2 points [-]

Fair point. it already exists, but is rarely a major. People want to apply CT to something.