Eric Drexler on Learning About Everything

Vladimir_Nesov

Eric Drexler wrote a couple of articles on the importance and methods of obtaining interdisciplinary knowledge:

Note that the title above isn't "how to learn everything", but "how to learn about everything". The distinction I have in mind is between knowing the inside of a topic in deep detail — many facts and problem-solving skills — and knowing the structure and context of a topic: essential facts, what problems can be solved by the skilled, and how the topic fits with others.

This knowledge isn't superficial in a survey-course sense: It is about both deep structure and practical applications. Knowing about, in this sense, is crucial to understanding a new problem and what must be learned in more depth in order to solve it.

This topic was discussed intermittently on Overcoming Bias. Basic understanding of many fields allows to recognize how well-understood by science a problem is and to see its place in the structure of scientific knowledge; to develop better intuitive grasp on what's possible and what's not; and to adequately perceive the natural world.

The advice he gives for obtaining general knowledge feels right, even for studying the topics that you intend to eventually understand in depth:

Don't drop a subject because you know you'd fail a test — instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to accumulate vocabulary, perspective, and context.

Eric Drexler wrote a couple of articles on the importance and methods of obtaining interdisciplinary knowledge:

Note that the title above isn't "how to learn everything", but "how to learn about everything". The distinction I have in mind is between knowing the inside of a topic in deep detail — many facts and problem-solving skills — and knowing the structure and context of a topic: essential facts, what problems can be solved by the skilled, and how the topic fits with others.

This knowledge isn't superficial in a survey-course sense: It is about both deep structure and practical applications. Knowing about, in this sense, is crucial to understanding a new problem and what must be learned in more depth in order to solve it.

The advice he gives for obtaining general knowledge feels right, even for studying the topics that you intend to eventually understand in depth:

Don't drop a subject because you know you'd fail a test — instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to accumulate vocabulary, perspective, and context.

One field that gets disregarded repeatedly is feminism or women's studies. Lots of geeks want to look at it like a solved problem, but anybody who has worked in the industry knows the ridiculous sexism that continues to pop up without the geeks-in-charge even noticing it.

It's true that feminists make some correct empirical and moral claims that are prematurely discarded. Yet this mistake doesn't mean that Women's Studies isn't rightly looked down on as a real academic field.

I've taken Women's Studies classes at a top university. Here's a quote from my Feminism 101 syllabus:

This course embarks from a few key feminist assumptions: women’s and men’s lives are thoroughly gendered, gendered dynamics of power and inequality are reproduced in and through other forms of difference (class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, religion, disability and so on), and such social inequality is unjust.

Whoa there! Instead of explaining and justifying the foundations of a discipline, this course simply "assumed" them, and "embarked" from there. And admits it! (not that there weren't many other assumptions in the course that weren't admitted) This sentence has at least 4 loaded terms: gender, power, inequality, and unjust. Feminists are constantly throwing around terms like this, and I was taking this course to try to figure out what they mean (along with "patriarchy," "oppression," etc...). Unfortunately, I was disappointed: no real analysis occurred for the latter three. "Gender," was discussed, but from a muddled anti-scientific social constructionist perspective based on the work of Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling (who dubiously believes that sex, i.e. classification of people as male and female, is also socially constructed).

The epistemic standards of feminist theory are horribly bad. This doesn't make feminism completely wrong; I actually agree with the sentence I quote from the syllabus (based on my own conceptualization of those terms, no thanks to Feminism 101) with the stipulation that "inequality" often disfavors men, not just women as assumed in the course. Many of the moral claims of feminism are correct, even when they are based on shoddy reasoning.

Some of the claims of feminism are so lacking in rigor that they aren't even wrong: for example, the typical view of academic feminists that women are "oppressed" and men are not (and if it is granted that men can be oppressed, women are still oppressed "more"). You can't evaluate the truth of this claim any more than you can say whether an oak tree is "bigger" than a pine tree: it depends on what you mean by "bigger" (height? width? mass? surface area?).

Not only does feminism contain a high concentration of thought gone wrong, but an example of its bad epistemic standards is its lack of quality control. Relatively rational feminists are notoriously bad at criticizing the thought-gone-wrong of other feminists. Mary Daly wouldn't mind if men were wiped off the face of the earth(I'm not kidding; read the entire interview and see if you can figure out what is wrong with that thought process).

You would think that other feminists would condemn Daly for giving feminism a bad name and try avoid being associated with her. Yet despite attracting some incidental criticism, Daly is popular enough that she has been invited to speak at about 12% of North American Universities over the past few decades.

There are many problems with feminist thought, in and out of academia. For a more comprehensive treatment, see Daphne Patai's Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies and Nathanson and Young's Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry. While my personal experience in Women's Studies was not as bad as some of the horror stories Patai describes, it did show me that feminists don't have rigorous reasoning (or often, any reasoning) behind feminist theory, and that it is a morass of articles of faith, self-serving arguments, circular reasoning, and already-falsified hypotheses. These problems make it questionable as an academic discipline, despite getting some moral and empirical arguments right.

I almost totally agree here. The implementations are often provocative rather than rational. It's an emotionally charged subject and yeah, the formalization and thorough understanding of the problems it addresses leaves a lot to be desired. Yet some of the ideas are right, and just discarding the commentary makes the problem seem worse to anyone introduces to those ideas encountering your average 'bunch of intellectual-seeming guys' style forum. I wouldn't say just feminists have generally "no reasoning" about the problems involved -- that strikes me as a little wide of a generalization. Thanks a lot for the well-referenced post.

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Eric Drexler on Learning About Everything

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Eric Drexler on Learning About Everything

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