Stove himself concludes that his "nosology" is probably not worth compiling. I think he's actually just using it to make the same point you've made by mentioning entropy. He considers it in order to justify rejecting it.
He then does something similar with the possibility of figuring out individual cases, rejecting it because the findings won't be generalizable.
Then he gets to what seems like his main point: getting rid of almost all philosophy because it's crazy.
(I thought the piece as whole was much funnier than the list. It's a tongue-in-cheek version of bending over backwards to avoid accusations of dismissing something crazy out of hand.)
Possibly Stove intended this only as an extended Take That to philosophers he dislikes; but it seems to me that he is a bit too dismissive of his own project, the 'nosology'. Without wanting a Fully General Counterargument, I think it might be useful to have a set of, say, five or six different classes of erroneous statements; and I also think Stove is too eager to insist on the singularity of each of his examples. For example, he states that the objection "not verifiable" cannot be applied to his example 8; I don't see why not. Anything whose &q...
I have to say that the positivist critique that "it's all meaningless" is seductive and it may well be correct - it feels like the words have meaning, but when you try to parse the sentence the feeling quickly disappears.
The problem is, this isn't very useful for talking about specific errors and how to avoid them. Many of the statements on that list looked rather meaningless to me, but to someone who believes in one of these statements, there are some underlying beliefs or confusions that need to be addressed before the "meaningless critique" will have any effect. At this point, pointing out the meaninglessness of their pet statement becomes entirely superfluous.
There is a pretty innocent reason for why those passages look meaningless– they're all jargon filled when you don't know what the jargon means you will likely fail to understand what the passages mean. A paper on quantum chromodynamics is going to look meaningless to someone who doesn't know what quarks, quanta, flavor symmetry, gluons, hadrons, chirality etc. refer to. Similarly, I assume most people here have no idea what Plotinus means by "Being", "Essence", "Intellectual-Principle", "form" etc. I've done course work on Neo-Platonism and I don't remember what all of that was about. The same goes for the other passages.
Now Plotinus is particular might still be meaningless since some of that jargon is actually meant to refer to real things that he thinks exist. And insofar as he is referring to non-existentials whether or not the passage is meaningful depends on your philosophy of language (it is either false, meaningless or non-propositional).
Occasionally you find an analytically trained philosopher working on continental subject matter and they tend to assure me that the jargon and unconventional usage actually DO mean things. What does...
The history of philosophy can't really have been one of thousands of years of nearly unrelenting adoration of stupidity. What probably happened is that philosophers became popular only if their ideas were simple enough and appealing enough. There is a bandpass filter on philosophy, and it has both a low and a high cutoff.
We propagate knowledge by collective judgements about it. In fields where we can't eliminate bad ideas by experiment, both the very worst and the very best ideas must be rejected. The requirement that an influential philosopher appeal ...
While I mostly agree with the article, I don't think the Foucalt example given at the start is entirely bad - it just seems like a long-winded warning against confusing the map with the territory (or more specifically against trying to hammer a square territory into a pre-conceived round map).
The history of philosophy can't really have been one of thousands of years of nearly unrelenting adoration of stupidity.
I often see statements like that. "This couldn't possibly be the case", "that can't really happen", etc.
The first question we should ask ourselves when we see such statements: Why?
Usually, the person speaking is dismissing possibilities and potentialities out of hand for one of a variety of reasons, rather than having a valid and justifiable reason for discarding the contingency.
And even when there are good reason...
Genetic engineering aside, given a large aggregation of human beings, and a long time, you cannot reasonably expect rational thought to win. You could as reasonably expect a thousand unbiased dice, all tossed at once, all to come down 'five,' say. There are simply far too many ways, and easy ways, in which human thought can go wrong. Or, put it the other way round: anthropocentrism cannot lose.
That's the same argument against rationalist winning that has been seen many times on LW. However, it is based on hopelessness and fear, rather than on knowledge...
I've long loved this piece, but today would file most of its examples simply under "getting carried away".
Items on the list that reminded me of Eliezer's writings: #19, #22, #32, #35. Indictment not intended.
I don't like this paper. It's wholly scathing for no reason other than to justify ignoring all of philosophy. Some philosophy is valuable and some is not, and of his 40 statements about three, I'd say 6 of them are claims I would take seriously and would hear arguments for, were I interested in the nature of three.
Generally, continental philosophy is trash, but I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Your link is now broken. Is there some other web archive of the chapter? I've saved a copy from the google cache, in case it matters to anyone.
Regarding most of the lengthy examples of "philosophy" given by Stove:
Reading a text takes time, time can be spent acquiring utilions. Hence reading a text is only worth if the expected utilion win due to additional knowledge is grater than the expected utilions when using the time differently. This approach kills most of his examples dead in their tracks for me. This also implies positivism, if a text does not either generate utilions directly, i.e. fun reading fiction, then it needs to provide knowledge (in form of testable statements about the...
Interesting, but too verbose.
The author is clearly not aware of the value of the K.I.S.S. principle, or Ockhams razor, in this context.
David Stove's "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts" is a critique of philosophy that I can only call TL;DR.
Some examples off the top of my head:
Rodney Brooks and others published many papers in the 1980s on reactive robotics. (Yes, reactive robotics are useful for some tasks; but the claims being made around 1990 were that non-symbolic, non-representational AI was better than representational AI at just about everything and could now replace it.) Psychologists and linguists could immediately see that the reactive behavior literature was chock-full of all the same mistakes that were pointed out with behavioral psychology in the decade after 1956 (see eg. Noam Chomsky's article on Skinner's Verbal Behavior).
To be fair, I'll give an example involving Chomsky on the receiving end: Chomsky prominently and repeatedly claims that children are not exposed to enough language to get enough information to learn a grammar. This claim is the basis of an entire school of linguistic thought that says there must be a universal human grammar built into the human brain at birth. It is trivial to demonstrate that it is wrong, by taking a large grammar, such as one used by any NLP program (and, yes, they can handle most of the grammar of a 6-year-old), and computing the amount of information needed to specify that grammar; and also computing the amount of information present in, say, a book. Even before you adjust your estimate of the information needed to specify a grammar by dividing by the number of adequate, nearly-equivalent grammars (which reduces the information needed by orders of magnitude), you find you only need a few books-worth of information. But linguists don't know information theory very well.
Chomsky also claims that, based on the number of words children learn per day, they must be able to learn a word on a single exposure to it. This assumes that a child can work on only one word at a time, and not remember anything about any other words it hears until it learns that word. As far as I know, no linguist has yet noticed this assumption.
In the field of sciencology?, or whatever you call the people who try to scientify science (eg., "We must make science more efficient, and only spend money discovering those things that can be successfully utilized"), there was an influential paper in 1969 on Project Hindsight, which studied the major discoveries contributing to a large number of US weapons systems, and asked whether each discovery was done via basic research (often at a university), or by a DoD-directed applied R+D program specific to that weapon system. They found that most of the contributions, numerically, came from applied engineering specific to that weapon system. They concluded that basic research is basically a waste of money and should not have its funding increased anymore. Congress has followed their advice since then. They ignored 2 factors: 1) According to their own statistics, universities accounted for 12% of the discoveries, but only 1% of the cost. This by itself shows basic research to be more cost-effective than applied research. 2) They did not factor in the fact that the results of each basic research project were applied to many different engineering projects; but the results of each applied project were often applied only to one project.
NASA has had some projects to try to notify ETs of our presence on Earth. AFAIK they're still doing it? They should have asked transhumanists what the expected value of being contacted by ET is.
These are interesting examples, but they're not what I envisioned from your original comment. (The Brooks example might be, but it's the vaguest.)
A problem is that people gain status in high-level fights, so there is a lot of screening of who is allowed to make them. But the screening is pretty lousy and, I think, most high-level fights are fake. Are Chomsky's followers so different from other linguists? Similarly, Brooks may have been full of bluster for status reasons that were not going to affect how the actual robots. It may be hard for outsiders to te...
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."