Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Philosophical Landmines - Less Wrong

84 [deleted] 08 February 2013 09:22PM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 08 February 2013 07:48:48PM *  3 points [-]

I have inside view reasons to believe that nyan's cached thoughts are genuinely better. If the point you're trying to make is "repeating cached thoughts is in general not a productive way to have arguments, and you should assume you're doing this by default," I agree but don't think that the outside view is a strong argument supporting this conclusion. And I still think that cached thoughts can be useful. For example, having a cached thought about cached thoughts can be useful.

Comment author: Jack 08 February 2013 08:20:43PM 11 points [-]

I agree with all that: my point was just that the question you were replying to asked about the outside view (which in this context I took to mean excluding the fact that we think our cluster of ideas is better than Nyan's sister's cluster of ideas). I'm just saying: rationalists can get exploded by philosophical landmines too and it seems worthwhile to be able to avoid that when we want to even though our philosophical limbs are less wrong than most people's.

Or to put it another way: philosophical landmines seem like a problem for self-skepticism because they keep you from hearing and responding adequately to the concerns of others. So any account of philosophical landmines ought to be neutral on the epistemic content of sloganeering since assuming we're on the right side of the argument is really bad for self-skepticism.