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Zetetic comments on Connecting Your Beliefs (a call for help) - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is interesting to me in a sort of tangential way. It seems like studying philosophy exercises this tendency to propagate your beliefs in order to make them coherent. In fact logical belief propagation seems to embody a large aspect of traditional philosophy, so I would expect that on average someone who studies philosophy would have this tendency to a greater degree than someone who doesn't.
It would be interesting to me if anyone has seen any data related to this, because it feels intuitively true that studying philosophy changed my way of thinking, but it's of course difficult to pinpoint exactly how. This seems like a big part of it.
I agree, but more generally, philosophy takes more or less as an axiom the idea that a person's beliefs should not be self-contradictory. Many people operate without any such axiom, or (more importantly) without awareness that such an idea exists. Probably any type of scientific training contributes to raising consciousness from this very low base level.
With that view, another issue is to what extent philosophy and scientific training are more attractive to people that have a tendency to avoid compartmentalization and to what extent studying philosophy and science assists in/amplifies the ability to propagate beliefs, if at all.
It seems like the sort of study that goes into these areas of study would provide the learner with heuristics for belief propagation, though each area might come equipped with unique heuristics.
This seems right to me. I know a fair amount of philosophers and at least some varieties of them seem to naturally disfavor compartmentalization.
For example, I was originally an atheist for purely methodological reasons. Religion invites dead dogma, and dead dogma kills your ability to discover true beliefs (for exactly the same reason "0 and 1 are not probabilities"). I felt therefore that adhering to a religion while being a philosopher was professionally irresponsible.