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TheAncientGeek comments on Philosophy professors fail on basic philosophy problems - Less Wrong Discussion

16 Post author: shminux 15 July 2015 06:41PM

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Comment author: TheAncientGeek 17 July 2015 03:30:21PM *  2 points [-]

No, for just the reason I pointed out. Mathematicians, "hard" scientists, engineers, etc. all have objective measures of correctness.

Within their domains.

They can and do disprove wrong, biased results. And they certainly can't fall prey to a presentation bias that makes them give different answers to the same, simple, highly formalized question.

So when kahneman et al tested hard scientists foe presentation bias, they found them, out of the population, to be uniquely free from it? I don't recall hearing that result.

You are not comparing like with like. You are saying that science as a whole, over the long term, is able to correct it's biases, but you know perfectly well that in the short term, bad papers got published. Interviewing individual philosophers isnt comparable to the long term, en masse behaviour of science,

A problem, or area of study, may require a lot more knowledge than that of simple logic. But it shouldn't ever be contrary to simple logic.

Even if it's too simple?

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 17 July 2015 05:28:29PM *  1 point [-]

Consistency is more important than correctness.

Consistency shouldn't be regarded as more important than correctness, in the sense that you check for consistency, and stop.

f you believe you theory is right, you may be wrong, and if you discover this (because it makes wrong predictions) you can fix it. But if you accept inconsistent predictions from your theory, you can never fix it..

But the inconsistency isnt in the theory, and, in all likelihood, they are not .running off an explicit theory ITFP.