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.

RobbBB comments on What do professional philosophers believe, and why? - Less Wrong Discussion

31 Post author: RobbBB 01 May 2013 02:40PM

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

Comments (249)

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

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 May 2013 07:06:35PM *  4 points [-]

Regarding specialists sometimes being wrong, and in some categories being more likely to be wrong, there are two issues here. First, it might be that this should be evidence to cause us to wonder whether they are in fact wrong and the LW conventional wisdom is correct (or at least that it is nearly as obviously as correct).

Second, many of these issues becomes substantially less interesting as fields if one accepts the LW correct view. This is most obviously the issue where 79.13% of phil religion people are theists but only 13.22% of non-specialists. are theists. Simply put, philosophy of religion is much harder to justify as a subject with much content if theism is wrong.

I'm a little confused why you describe Humean as wrong. Although LW doesn't buy into some of Hume's ideas (e.g. the inherent unreliability of induction), a lot of what is discussed here are ideas somewhat compatible or at least not in conflict with Hume. For example, the fact that an AI might not share human values at all is pretty Humean in its approach to moral questions.

Comment author: RobbBB 02 May 2013 05:35:55AM 0 points [-]

it might be that this should be evidence to cause us to wonder whether they are in fact wrong and the LW conventional wisdom is correct (or at least that it is nearly as obviously as correct).

It's evidence for both. If philosophers disagree with us, we should be less confident that we're right, and also less confident that they're right. The examples I provided were ones where I had high enough priors on the issues to not be dragged into agnosticism by specialists' disagreeing with me. (But, of course, I could still change my mind if we talked about it more. I don't mean to encourage lock-step adherence to some vague idea of LW Consensus as a shortcut for avoiding actually evaluating these philosophical doctrines.)

Regarding Humeanism, I was voicing my own view (and Eliezer's), not speaking for LessWrong as a whole. I'm more worried about philosophers being wrong than about their being un-LWy as such. Note that Humeanism here only refers to skepticism or reductionism about laws of ntaure; it doesn't refer to any of Hume's other views. (In fact, Hume himself was not a Humean in the sense used in the PhilPapers Survey. 'Humeanism' is like 'Platonism' in a modern context; a view only vaguely and indirectly inspired by the person for whom it's named.)