"What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts"

Eliezer Yudkowsky

"But let us never forget, either, as all conventional history of philosophy conspires to make us forget, what the 'great thinkers' really are: proper objects, indeed, of pity, but even more, of horror."

David Stove's "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts" is a critique of philosophy that I can only call epic.

The astute reader will of course find themselves objecting to Stove's notion that we should be catologuing every possible way to do philosophy wrong. It's not like there's some originally pure mode of thought, being tainted by only a small library of poisons. It's just that there are exponentially more possible crazy thoughts than sane thoughts, c.f. entropy.

But Stove's list of 39 different classic crazinesses applied to the number three is absolute pure epic gold. (Scroll down about halfway through if you want to jump there directly.)

I especially like #8: "There is an integer between two and four, but it is not three, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed."

"But let us never forget, either, as all conventional history of philosophy conspires to make us forget, what the 'great thinkers' really are: proper objects, indeed, of pity, but even more, of horror."

David Stove's "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts" is a critique of philosophy that I can only call epic.

But Stove's list of 39 different classic crazinesses applied to the number three is absolute pure epic gold. (Scroll down about halfway through if you want to jump there directly.)

I especially like #8: "There is an integer between two and four, but it is not three, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed."

My native language is Russian, yet I find it more comfortable to use English almost exclusively when talking about programming, math or rationality. Case in point: my email conversation with Vladimir Nesov spontaneously switched to English after the first couple emails, even though we're both Russian.

In my impression people born into different languages often do narrate the world differently, at least at the emotional level, and some of those ways can be better than others for certain topics - e.g. less likely to lead you astray with the persuasive/musical component of words. Another example would be the complex, massively recursive sentences common to German philosophy, obviously made possible by regularities and trends of language.

Sorry, I'm downvoting you. You should have argued your point instead of name-calling.

What exactly makes it difficult to use Russian? I know Russian, so I will understand the explanation.

I find my native Norwegian better to express concepts in than English. If I program something especially difficult, or do some difficult math, physics, or logic, I also find Norwegian better.

However, if I do some easier task, where I have studied it in English, I find it easy to write in English, due to a "cut and paste" effect. I just remember stuff, combine it, and write it down.

7Nominull17y

It seems much more likely that the difference in quality between Anglo and Continental philosophy, to the extent that the difference exists, is based on chaotic factors. One (relatively) good philosopher randomly happens to be born in England and then he teaches his students (relatively) good philosophy, and they teach their students, and a whole tradition is born by chance. In continental Europe, that single die roll comes up the other way, and a seductive but (relatively) sinful philosophy is born. This story strikes me as more likely than that English is such a wondrous language out of all the various languages of the world that it alone confers resistance to philosophical sin. I hadn't thought I needed to make an argument for this, I didn't expect the posters here to take the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seriously. That was my mistake, I see. As for why you find it more comfortable to use English when talking about technical subjects, I would guess that it is because English has a particularly rich technical vocabulary, due to English-speakers recently leading the way in technical progress. I don't speak Russian so I don't know how it works there, but I know that many languages use loan words from English heavily for technical subjects. One might be able to argue that this is a deficiency of these other languages, but it doesn't seem like the sort of deficiency that would lead one into philosophical error, and it is not a deficiency that existed when the Platonists were writing in any case.

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