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Sarunas comments on From Natural (or Naturalized) to Social Epistemology - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (3)
It is an intriguing topic, thank you for posting about it. I haven't read papers by Goldman yet, but I'll try to take a look at them. Some Lesswrong posts that might be somewhat related: Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields , Scholarship: how to tell good advice from bad advice? , maybe tangentially even some posts like this. In addition, potentially some posts on Overcomingbias might be relevant, as well as some posts on Slatestarcodex, e.g. Searching For One-Sided Tradeoffs. However, as you can see, all these posts are scattered here and there and do not seem to form any coherent body of ideas (well, there are some recurring themes on Overcomingbias).
It seems to be such a broad topic, it would require dozens (if not hundreds) Lesswrong posts to do some justice to it. E.g. one could probably expect different answers when analyzing what would be the best strategies for a given individual to follow versus what strategies would lead to "average wrongness in a society" being as small as possible? (well, I'll have to think about it, at this moment this is just a guess). It seems to me that natural epistemology is less likely to contain such tensions (again, a much deeper analysis is required to say whether this is actually true).
Moreover, it seems to me that it is much less likely that a single unifying framework (similar, to e.g. Bayesian inference, that was a recurring theme on Lesswrong) even exists. Again, I should probably read Goldman's papers before saying anything more.
Having looked at "Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields", I'm not convinced. I am grappling towards my own ideas for heuristics in this essay: http://ontologicalcomedian.blogspot.com/2010/07/what-is-machine.html Alternatively, I would ask the question whether the blind men are really feeling up an elephant or not. Perhaps one really is caressing a huge floppy leaf and another is hugging a tree trunk, etc. In some disciplines, I would say there really is an elephant, ergo explorations and comparing of notes will tend to converge on some solid picture. In other fields, such as literary criticism, I doubt that there is an elephant at all; people are just grabbing this and that leaf, vine, branch, tree trunk or rock and, and out of them imagining mythological animals. A lot more should be said about why academic disciplines work when they work. I'd say peer review and the other academic machinery do a better job than most any other arrangement (such as think tanks funded by people whose real interest is in promoting ideological points) -- as long as there really is an elephant. Where there is no elephant, or nobody has really found it yet, all the peer review in the world and/or attempts to mimic physics won't prevent it becoming a factory for turning out "fashionable nonsense".
Thanks. I'll have a look at the links you provided. I haven't found any work in Social Epistemology that was up to my hopes and expectations, but not treating at least half of epistemology in a social context seems like utter blindness. Goldman is good at laying out what should be included in SE, including a "systems oriented" branch, and perhaps less good at realizing the program.