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ChristianKl comments on Philosophy professors fail on basic philosophy problems - Less Wrong Discussion
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Where did that assumption come from?
If you ask physics professors questions that go counter to human intuition I wouldn't be to sure that they get them right either.
This assumption comes from expecting an expert to know the basics of their field.
A trained physicist's intuition is rather different from "human intuition" on physics problems, so that's unlikely.
You need to do some tweaking of your faith in experts. Experts tend to be effective in fields where they get immediate and tight feedback about whether they're right or wrong. Physics has this, philosophy does not. You should put significantly LESS faith in experts from fields where they don't have this tight feedback loop.
That's a good point. I'll continue discounting anything ancient and modern moral philosophers say, then. From Aristotle to Peter Singer, they are full of it, by your criteria.
Heh, you're right. I suppose I didn't specify sufficient criteria.
I think that philosophers who have stood the test of time have already undergone post-hoc feedback. Aristotle, Nietzsche,Hume etc all had areas of faulty reasoning, but for the most part this has been teased out and, brought to light, and is common knowledge now. All of them were also exceptionally talented and gifted, and made better arguments than the norm. The fact that their work HAS stood the test of time is an expert vetting process in itself.
In terms of a random philosophy professor on the street, they haven't gone through this process of post-hoc feedback to nearly the same degree, and likely haven't gotten enough real time feedback to have developed these sorts of rationality processes automatically. Singer perhaps has had a bit more post-hoc feedback simply because he's popular and controversial, but not nearly as much as these other philosophers, and I suspect he still has lots of faulty reasoning to be picked up on :).
Heh, you're right, I suppose I didn't correctly specify that criteria.
The point was, not, "every expert in these fields is untrustworthy". Singer/Aristotle/Nietzsche etc have already been vetted by generations that their thinking is good.
However, the random philsophy professor on the street, you should be far more skeptical of, they haven't gone through that post-hoc feedback process, and they haven't gotten (as much of) the real time feedback that would cause them to get things right merely from their training.
I think in Aristo
There quite a difference between knowing basic on system II level and being able to apply it on system I.
I wouldn't characterize the failure in this case as reflecting a lack of knowledge. What you have here is evidence that philosophers are just as prone to bias as non-philosophers at a similar educational level, even when the tests for bias involve examples they're familiar with. In what sense is this a failure to "know the basics of their field"?
A relevantly similar test might involve checking whether physicists are just as prone as non-physicists to, say, the anchoring effect, when asked to estimate (without explicit calculation) some physical quantity. I'm not so sure that a trained physicist would be any less susceptible to the effect, although they might be better in general at estimating the quantity.
Take, for instance, evidence showing that medical doctors are just as susceptible to framing effects in medical treatment contexts as non-specialists. Does that indicate that doctors lack knowledge about the basics of their fields?
I think what this study suggests is that philosophical training is no more effective at de-biasing humans (at least for these particular biases) than a non-philosophical education. People have made claims to the contrary, and this is a useful corrective to that. The study doesn't show that philosophers are unaware of the basics of their field, or that philosophical training has nothing to offer in terms of expertise or problem-solving.
So if you were to poll physicists about, say, string theory vs. quantum loop gravity, or about the interpretations of quantum mechanics, do you think there would be no order or framing effects? That would be quite surprising to me.
I didn't realize that identifying "200 out 600 people die" with "400 of 600 people survive" requires quantum gravity-level expertize.
Maybe they just thought about it in vaguely Carrollian way, like 'if 200 of 600 people die, then we cannot say anything about the state of the other 400, because no information is given on them'?
Is every philosopher supposed to be a moral philosopher?
Edit: Just noticed study contains this (which I missed in the OP):
...which is pretty disconcerting. However asking people to determine for themselves whether they're experts in a particular problem area doesn't strike me as particularly hygienic.