It would be strange if all the greatest minds of human history had indeed merely muddle in the swamp while ignoring all those beautiful low hanging fruits. Even great scientists or mathematicians often produce absurdities when delving into philosophy. Either this is a task completely useless and difficult, or useful and difficult. But theoretical discoveries don't seem easy at all.
Optimistically, I believe there's a massive hindsight bias. But if this is true, philosophy is indeed a sad craft, gems continuously slip from our hands, while he are left with nothing but mud.
On the other hand, I must say sometimes I feel we are slow and stubborn independently of the difficult nature of the huge search space. Perhaps my comment bellow is evidence of that. I remember one time young-Nick said he convinced a big time philosopher of some point, I said "Well, that's it, you should erase everything on your CV and state just that. Forget your fancy PhD, convincing a philosopher triumphs all!". Old-Nick once told sometimes he felt philosophers where only reinstating some long held "truth" they had since early on, and they would build their publications, careers and life over it. How can one be so pathological stubborn?
The weird part is that even though is difficult, hard to advance, its few breakthroughs not acknowledged, relatively low paying, it still is the most competitive academic career, by far. I say all of this, yet I'm pulling all nighters since January to mildly increase my odds of getting in a good philosophy PhD. Maybe only an anthropological/psychiatric study to find out what hell it's wrong with it. I'm sorry if I'm inadvertently psychologising the question. I have been around our kind from birth and can't help but relying on personal experience.
Can't help also remembering the meme "It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it". Is it some kind of necessary evil? Or maybe it is just an ol' boys' club - 2500 years old -, and we gotta show we are tough, stubborn, ruthless and hard to join. Wonder what Robin would say of that.
Finally, although this is no longer true for English speaking contemporary philosophy, might be worth noticing philosophy has also been chiefly a highly influential political activity. Due to its political influence, sometimes you would not be finding the truth, as in science, you would be setting things to be true. That would explain the stubbornness. You are not convincing people of the truth, you are convincing people of what they ought to do, sometimes even through legislation. Today we've lost this powerful role, but it would seem we've maintained the stubbornness. But, wouldn't MIRI "theoretical discoveries" have this moral flavour? You shouldn't expect people to easily buy all your claims, for if they unrestrictedly do, they might be bound to abandon their lives, move to Bay Area, and research FAI. You might be in the fruit selling business instead of fruit finding. They can low hang all they want, you've got to convince people into buying them.
The weird part is that even though is difficult, hard to advance, its few breakthroughs not acknowledged, relatively low paying, it still is the most competitive academic career,
Which breakthrough did philosophy produce that aren't acknowledged?
Previously: Why Neglect Big Topics.
Why was there no serious philosophical discussion of normative uncertainty until 1989, given that all the necessary ideas and tools were present at the time of Jeremy Bentham?
Why did no professional philosopher analyze I.J. Good’s important “intelligence explosion” thesis (from 19591) until 2010?
Why was reflectively consistent probabilistic metamathematics not described until 2013, given that the ideas it builds on go back at least to the 1940s?
Why did it take until 2003 for professional philosophers to begin updating causal decision theory for the age of causal Bayes nets, and until 2013 to formulate a reliabilist metatheory of rationality?
By analogy to financial market efficiency, I like to say that “theoretical discovery is fairly inefficient.” That is: there are often large, unnecessary delays in theoretical discovery.
This shouldn’t surprise us. For one thing, there aren’t necessarily large personal rewards for making theoretical progress. But it does mean that those who do care about certain kinds of theoretical progress shouldn’t necessarily think that progress will be hard. There is often low-hanging fruit to be plucked by investigators who know where to look.
Where should we look for low-hanging fruit? I’d guess that theoretical progress may be relatively easy where:
These guesses make sense of the abundant low-hanging fruit in much of MIRI’s theoretical research, with the glaring exception of decision theory. Our September decision theory workshop revealed plenty of low-hanging fruit, but why should that be? Decision theory is widely applied in multi-agent systems, and in philosophy it’s clear that visible progress in decision theory is one way to “make a name” for oneself and advance one’s career. Tons of quality-adjusted researcher hours have been devoted to the problem. Yes, new theoretical advances (e.g. causal Bayes nets and program equilibrium) open up promising new angles of attack, but they don’t seem necessary to much of the low-hanging fruit discovered thus far. And progress in decision theory is definitely not valuable only to those with unusual views. What gives?
Anyway, three questions:
1 Good (1959) is the earliest statement of the intelligence explosion: “Once a machine is designed that is good enough… it can be put to work designing an even better machine. At this point an ”explosion“ will clearly occur; all the problems of science and technology will be handed over to machines and it will no longer be necessary for people to work. Whether this will lead to a Utopia or to the extermination of the human race will depend on how the problem is handled by the machines. The important thing will be to give them the aim of serving human beings.” The term itself, “intelligence explosion,” originates with Good (1965). Technically, artist and philosopher Stefan Themerson wrote a "philosophical analysis" of Good's intelligence explosion thesis called Special Branch, published in 1972, but by "philosophical analysis" I have in mind a more analytic, argumentative kind of philosophical analysis than is found in Themerson's literary Special Branch. ↩