You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Normal_Anomaly comments on LW Philosophers versus Analytics - Less Wrong Discussion

38 Post author: potato 28 November 2011 03:40PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (84)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 29 November 2011 12:40:24AM 3 points [-]

f) LW has cultish tendencies, as do all movements. Cults actually meet the description of the OP pretty well, except for the whole mapping to reality thing.

Regardless of whether this is true, what relevance does it have to theology being an efficient producer of philosophical ideas (which it is)?

Comment author: [deleted] 29 November 2011 08:53:01AM *  0 points [-]

Cults/sects ect. are examples of where theological ideas have attracted a very dedicated and dynamic following. The OP list a number of similar (feel free to dispute this) features that are evidence in favour of us being a "reliably transmittable well oiled" philosophy machine. Point f) was about how surprisingly well those features map to the features of cults/sects/religions.

Why apply different standards for LW and a random sect when it comes to determining if they are a notable school of philosophy?

Also perhaps I brought it up because it wanted to signal that us being an awesome school of theology/philosophy is not strong evidence in favour of our awesomeness with epistemic rationality and no more evidence of our instrumental rationality than the success of a sect.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 29 November 2011 11:22:31AM 3 points [-]

Also perhaps I brought it up because it wanted to signal that us being an awesome school of theology/philosophy is not strong evidence in favour of our awesomeness with epistemic rationality

This is a good point, which comes back to a comment I and some other people have made. Just because LW can produce philosophy, doesn't mean it can produce true philosophy. Therefore we need an objective metric.