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Benito comments on Deliberate Grad School - Less Wrong
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It's striking how much value there is in academia that I didn't notice, and that a base-level rational person would've noticed if they'd asked "what are the main blind spots of the rationality community, and how can I steelman the opposing positions?". Not a good sign about me, certainly.
Also, is that your actual email address?
I have been talking about this very issue for ages here on LW. "Rationalists" (the tribe, not the ideal platonic type) share a ton of EY's biases, including anti-academic sentiment.
Question: Did you make a post of this nature before?
I don't write top level posts, but I took issue w/ Luke taking a shit on academic philosophy, for instance.
I don't see that the above post refutes any arguments Luke made about academic philosophy. What were the basics of your disagreements with his arguments?
Luke is not qualified to shit on academic philosophy. He simply doesn't have the background or the overview. And it's a terrible idea for social reasons, it just makes people not take LW seriously. I would be happy to accept critiques of the philosophy establishment from e.g. Clark Glymour, not from Luke. There is a ton of value in philosophy you are leaving on the table if you shit on philosophy.
My other big annoyance is the "LW Bayesians" (who are similarly not qualified generally to have strong opinions about these issues, and instead should read stats/ML literature). Although I should say very sophisticated stats folks occasionally post here (but I don't count them among the "LW Bayesians" number, as they understand issues with Bayes very well).
Love this, Luke is actually well read so maybe it's a bit tough on him, but the casual dismissal and elitist posturing is pretty dumb and cringe inducing. Philosophy is underrated around these parts.
Could you provide an object level counter argument please? A strong one would give me a lot more credence that Luke's work was not an accurate portrayal of academic philosophy.
(Three would be preferred)
(Object level might look like "philosophers are making useful progress by metric X" or "I expect philosophers' work to be very useful in area of science a because b" or "doing a PhD in philosophy has lots of value in the world for reasons p, q and r")
I am not very interested in convincing you.
You said:
So look for the value! Don't write the entire field off, lots of smart people there, probably you are missing something.
But for example quite a few very smart causal inference people are in philosophy. That conference on decision theory MIRI went to in Cambridge was hosted by philosophers. Some philosophers deal with very hard problems that do not map onto empiricism very well, etc.
I think Luke will agree with you on what you say here, though. I remember commenting on one of his posts that was critical of philosophy, saying that his arguments didn't really apply to the area of philosophy I'm involved in (technical philosophy of science). Luke's response was essentially, "I agree. I'm not talking about philosophy of science." I think he'd probably say the same about philosophical work on decision theory and causal inference.
Isn't that motte/bailey: "philosophy, a diseased discipline" is not a very discriminating title. The best line of his post is this:
And this is definitely ok!
But again, I am not super interested in arguing with people about whether philosophy is worthwhile. I have better things to do. I was only pointing out in response to the OP that I have been harping on LW's silly anti-academic sentiment for ages, that's all.
He could have saved himself some trouble by writing "Philosophy: a Partly Diseased Disciplien" or "Philosophy: a Bit of a Curate's Egg".
How about:
I think the article Ilya has in mind is this one: Philosophy, a diseased discipline.
I can help with the second request:
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
Someone who's studied stats and ML is much more qualified to talk about philosophy than someone who's studied academic philosophy.
My comment may be irrelevant. You didn't provide a link to Luke's article, so I don't have the context, and am only guessing at your meaning.
^ this is what I am talking about. For some reason I think Luke has a bachelor's degree with a major in cognitive science (but I don't remember exactly).
I was under the impression that he studied psychology, but dropped out before graduating. (An old interview has him mentioning that "I studied psychology in university but quickly found that I learn better and faster as an autodidact", and back when he was still employed at MIRI, his profile on the staff page didn't mention any degree whereas it did for almost everyone else.)
Just so we are clear -- I am not really attacking Luke. I met him, we talked on skype, etc. He's a sensible dude. I am just not weighing his opinion of philosophy very highly. "Mixture of experts" and all that.
Well, to bloat my own ego, one of my most consistently banged-on themes has been, "HEY ACADEMIA BASICALLY TELLS US THINGS FOR FREE!"
Well, not for free exactly. Textbooks and the internet can tell us most of the same things, for much cheaper :). (I'm not arguing against academia in general, but I do think that's a weak argument for it).
I had actually meant that academia provides research to the public more-or-less "for free", in the sense of "free at point of use".
Textbooks and the internet are not actually of much use, as well, when most of the knowledge for how they actually go together is tribal-knowledge among university professors, and never gets written down for non-student self-studiers.
I'm not convinced that "free at point of use" is a useful concept - it's more useful to figure out when and where costs are snuck in, and then decide if the price is worth it and if the right people are paying for it.
In terms of self learning, that hasn't been my experience as an autodidact. A course catalog and a good textbook are more than enough to provide context for learning, with google filling in the gaps.
Go ahead and object that "nothing is really free", but "free at point of use", once we're being specific, is useful. It means, "This service is accessible without paying up-front, because the costs are being paid elsewhere." Of course there are still costs to be paid, but there are a couple of whole fields of study devoted to finding the most socially desirable ways of paying them.
So for instance, we have reason to believe that if, on top of the existing journal-subscription-and-paywall system, we added additional up-front fees for reading academic research papers, this would raise the costs of scientific research, in terms of dollars and labor-hours spent to obtain the outputs we care about.
Also, please, not every LW comment necessitates conceptual nitpicking. If I start with "academia publishes a lot of useful research which can be obtained and read for free by people who know how to do literature searches", please do not respond with, "Well what is free anyway? Shouldn't we digress into the entire field of welfare economics?"
Upvoted for the last paragraph.
Fair point.
It wasn't a "gotcha, you're technically wrong" comment. It was central to the point we're arguing, which is that academia is a net benefit. If the comment was meant in a tongue in cheek "I'm not actually making a real argument for academia, just saying something silly" way, it wasn't clear to me.
If you were actually advancing an argument that academia is useful because it publishes research, you need to prove that the research does enough good to justify the costs it extracts from it's students. It is a meta point, but it's not an irrelevant nitpick - it's central to you're argument.
Ok, there's a confusion here I feel a need to correct: research is almost entirely not funded by students. Teaching is funded by students. Administration is (gratuitously and copiously, beyond anything necessary) funded by students. Teaching and administration are also often funded by endowments and state block grants. Research is (by and large) funded by research grants, and in fact, the level of research output required to justify each dollar of grant has gone solidly up.
The word textbook implies an adademic publisher.
Well, if you're including "anyone who sells things to schools" in academia- then yes, my argument doesn't really make much sense.
But, for the sake of steel-manning, let's pretend that instead of meaning that, I meant academia as the broad collection of things typically associated with it - formal schooling, tenure, teachers, students, classes, etc. Even if you include textbooks as a NARROW part of academia, the point is that you can forgo all that other stuff and JUST take the textbooks, and still be told basically the same things.
I think the idea is that you're supposed to deduce the last name and domain name from identifying details in the post.