protest_boy comments on How to Measure Anything - LessWrong

50 Post author: lukeprog 07 August 2013 04:05AM

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Comment author: protest_boy 12 July 2014 05:08:07AM 0 points [-]

Before I embark on this seemingly Sisyphean endeavor, has anyone attempted to measure "philosophical progress"? It seems that no philosophical problem I know of is apparently fully solved, and no general methods are known which reliably give true answers to philosophical problems. Despite this we definitely have made progress: e.g. we can chart human progress on the problem of Induction, of which an extremely rough sketch looks like Epicurus --> Occam --> Hume --> Bayes --> Solomonoff, or something. I don't really know, but there seem to be issues with Solomonoff's formalization of Induction.

I'm thinking of "philosophy" as something like "pre-mathematics/progressing on confusing questions that no reliable methods exist yet to give truthy answers/forming a concept of something and formalizing it". Also it's not clear to me "philosophy" exists independent of the techniques its spawned historically, but there are some problems for which the label of "philosophical problem" seems appropriate, e.g. "how do uncertainties work in a universe where infinite copies of you exist?" and like, all of moral philosophy, etc.