Lumifer comments on Making Rationality General-Interest - LessWrong

30 Post author: Swimmer963 24 July 2013 10:02PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 25 July 2013 01:44:03AM 1 point [-]

'philosophy, mathematics and science' is a better fit than 'logic and science'

I don't agree. You want to teach philosophy as rationality? There are a great deal of different philosophies, which one will you teach? Or you'll teach history of philosophy? Or meta-philosophy (which very quickly becomes yet-another-philosophy-in-the-long-list-of-those-which-tried-to-be-meta)?

And I really don't see what math has to do with this at all. If anything, statistics is going to be more useful than math because statistics is basically a toolbox for dealing with uncertainty and that's the really important part.

Comment author: Peterdjones 25 July 2013 03:31:05AM 2 points [-]

You want to teach philosophy as rationality?

Philosophy includes epistemology, which is kind of important to epistemic ratioanlity.

Philosophy is a toolbox as well as a set of doctrines.

Comment author: Lumifer 25 July 2013 03:34:54AM 1 point [-]

Philosophy includes epistemology, which is kind of important to epistemic ratioanlity.

Various philosophies include different approaches to epistemology. Which one do you want to teach?

I agree that philosophy can be a toolbox, but so can pretty much any field of human study -- from physics to literary criticism. And here we're talking about teaching rationality, not about the virtues of a comprehensive education.