Certainly, I'm at least "pretending" to have "some familiarity" with the field's content, and how that content relates to its raison d'etre, by way of citing hundreds of works in the field, quoting philosophers, hosting a podcast for which I interviewed dozens of philosophers for hours on end, etc.

You'd think if this were the case you'd be able to make a more honest assessment of the field.

I've said specific things about the ways in which many philosophers are ignoring scientific results, but I'm quite aware that they pay attention to other parts of science, and of course that many of them (e.g. the experimental philosophers) pay attention to the kinds of evidence that I'm accusing others of ignoring.

Alright, I'll grant you this. You've still made the point that the field of philosophy has not acknowledged the unreliability of intuitions, as if this were a novel insight and not something that is taken very seriously in the modern-day (at least) debates, and that this is a fundamental flaw in the discipline itself.

Where did I say that?

Right here:

What would happen if we dropped all philosophical methods that were developed when we had a Cartesian view of the mind and of reason, and instead invented philosophy anew given what we now know about the physical processes that produce human reasoning?

The implication being that Cartesian views of mind and reason are in any way relevant to modern philosophy. This isn't even true for Continental philosophy and hasn't been for a long time.

Wait, first you claim that "you said in your article that..." and in the very next paragraph you claim that I've "taken it for granted without outright saying it"? I'm very confused.

I agree, you are, so let's slow down and look at my actual criticism again.

What you wrote was that philosophers accept intutions at face value, uncritically...which isn't true, and I responded accordingly.

What you implied, in that it follows necessarily from your explicitly-made argument, is that since some philosophers accept intutions as valid, therefore the discipline-as-a-whole is broken. But that isn't true; the entire point is to discuss disparate, conflicting, and even dubious ideas; this is no blackmark as you've construed it.

No. I complain when I do all the work of presenting arguments, examples, and evidence, and you simply deny it all without presenting any arguments, examples, and evidence of your own.

A convenient way to hide behind your biases, I suppose, but I'm not sure what it accomplishes otherwise. Even the Stanford Encyclopedia's entries on moral theory and ethics don't back up your "unique" assessment of the field.

You can say this is just the way things are in philosophy, but then why should we fund philosophy?

Because some of us realize that there are types of inquiry which are valuable and useful despite the confusion they offer to hyper-systemizing brains who can't accept any view of reality outside a broken conception of radically reductive materialism.

You're asking me to do all the work, here. I've provided examples and evidence, and you've just flatly denied my examples and evidence without providing any counterexamples or counterevidence.

All I've asked you to do is at least pretend you have some familiarity with the field's content, and how that content relates to its raison d'etre. As before, I don't have to provide "counterevidence" that science doesn't take luminiferous ether seriously as a hypothesis; anyone familiar with the field would already know this.

I never said that debates about ethics are problematic, and I never said there's something wrong with philosophy examining ideas.

Of course you didn't say it, because that would be stupid, but it's implicit in the points you've repeatedly made, viz. "philosophers are stupid, if they only paid attention to science...." Well, they do pay attention to science, in fact there is a whole realm of philosophers who pay attention to science and make that a centerpiece of their discussion, and that given philosophy's purpose as "engagement with ideas" it is implicit that, wonder of wonders, some philosophers will take positions that disagree with the claim you've put forth.

That latter statement is the issue, as you said in your article that, since some philosophers accept intuitions as valid (a claim you never bothered to unpack or examine in any detail), therefore we should consider philosophy a primitive and useless artifact of Cartesian thinking.

You've taken it for granted without outright saying it. Maybe if you read more philosophy you wouldn't make these kinds of errors.

Again, I'm the one who bothered to provide examples and evidence for my position. You're the one who keeps declaring things wrong without providing any examples and evidence to support your own view. Declaring something wrong without providing reason or evidence is against the cultural norm around here, and you are the one who is violating it.

I see, so the cultural norm is to take unfavorable samples of a field you don't like, present them as exemplars, used them as grounds to justify a giant-sized strawman against said field, complain when people don't accept that position without criticism, and then hide behind conveniently linked rules meant to fortify your pre-existing groupthink.

Sounds far more rational than every other web forum ever.

Maybe you can somehow show that the problem isn't rampant.

Sure. Should I go about showing there are no unicorns and leprechauns while I'm at it?

ps when a restricted set of statements is used as the exemplar of a very wide and very deep field of which the entire point is to discuss ideas and their implications the proper response to criticism is not "oh yeah well prove it's not true"

According to Luke, this is not a strawman, but in fact a correct representation of the current state of affairs.

It is correct if you go by a select set of quotes that, from what I can tell, have been chosen specifically to support a presupposed position, i.e., philosophers don't think about obvious problems which have been intimately entwined with moral and ethical philosophy for hundreds of years.

Obviously I don't feel that this is correct, or that the quotes given are representative of what they're being made to represent.

I don't know what you mean by "settle", but Luke does present several pieces of strong evidence against the proposition that our intuitions can be trusted.

Sure. And presenting "strong evidence" in a reasoned back-and-forth is the point of philosophy, since every position has evidence which (it considers to be) strong support. This is why the debate is necessary, unless, as I wrote elsewhere, you presuppose there is only one privileged interpretation of the existing data.

If you believe that then I'd refer you to the debate around underdetermination and IBE in philosophy of science for a healthy re-orientation of your worldview.

In this "Philosophy by Humans" sub-sequence, it seems like the most common response I get is, "No, philosophers can't actually be that stupid," even though my post went to the trouble of quoting philosophers saying "Yes, this thing here is our standard practice."

So? I can quote scientists saying all manner of stupid, bizarre, unintuitive things...but my selection of course sets up the terms of the discussion. If I choose a sampling that only confirms my existing bias against scientists, then my "quotes" are going to lead to the foregone conclusion. I don't see why "quoting" a few names is considered evidence of anything besides a pre-existing bias against philosophy.

On a second and more important point, you've yet to elaborate on why having a debate about ethics is problematic in the first place. Your appeal to Eliezer and his vague handwaving about "bad habits" and "real work" (which range from "too vague" to "nonsensical" depending on how charitable you want to be) is not persuasive, so I'd ask again: what is wrong with philosophy doing what it is supposed to do, i.e., examine ideas?

I realize that declaring it "wrong" by fiat seems to be the rule around here, if the comments are any indication, but from the philosophical standpoint that's a laughable argument to make, and it's not persuasive to anyone who doesn't already share your presuppositions.

You can understand the difference between being a rough progenitor of a historical tradition in thought, on the one hand, and the views held by an individual, correct?

Honestly I'd expected a little better than the strategy of circling of the wagons and defending the group on the site of Pure Rationality where we correct biased thinking. Turns out LW is like every other internet forum and the focus on "rationality" makes no difference in the degree biases underpinning the arguments?

If you aren't denying or opposing anything, then what work is "only" doing in the sense "the natural world is the only world"?

In that there is "no more than", in ontological terms, there are no other fundamental categories of being. I don't have to explicitly deny that unicorns exist in order to rule them out of any taxonomy of equine animals.

If you've presupposed a worldview that allows for "supernatural" or "mystical" or Cartesian mind-substance or what have you, then of course the opposition seems obvious, but modern analytical naturalism as it stands makes no such allowance. This is why we cannot take our presuppositions for granted.

Define 'science,' while you're at it.

You don't have the space on this forum for that debate. However, for pragmatic purposes, let's (roughly) call it the social activity of institutionalized formal empirical inquiry, inclusive of the error-correcting norms and structures meant to filter our systematic errors.

The vagueness of the term 'naturalism' is the primary reason it's a bad habit to define your methods or world-view in terms of it.

Maybe if you didn't take flippant comments and run with them you wouldn't encounter this problem. I brought up naturalism because I found it hilarious that "even modern analytic philosophy" teaches these laughably vague "bad habits" -- which you still seem surprisingly unconcerned with, given the far more serious issues there -- and contemporary naturalism as practiced by many philosophers in the English-speaking world is as pro-science a set of ideas as you'll find.

Spiraling it out into this protracted debate about whether we can accurately define naturalism -- on your terms, no less -- is not the point of the exercise (and I suspect it's only happened to take the focus off the matter at hand: that there is no adequate account of these "bad habits" and we're seeing an interference play to keep eyes off it).

There is virtually no content to 'naturalism' or 'scientism,' beyond the fact that both are associated with science and the former has a positive connotation, while the latter has a negative connotation.

Yes I'm well aware of the dislike of anything intrinsically opposed to the formal and computable around these parts, and I also find that position to be laughable (and a shining example of why you folks need to engage with philosophy rather than jumping head-first into troubling [and equally laughable] moral-ethical positions).

But, as per the thread, there is a more interesting and proximate criticism: your intuitions on such are unreliable, by your own lights, so you'll pardon me if I am hardly persuaded by your fiat declaration that i) there is "no content" to a whole wide-ranging debate (of which you seem barely familiar with, at that, with your introduction of yet another nonsensical opposition that might as well be fiction for all it reflects the actual process*) and ii) that we should -- again by decree -- paint as "useless" the tools and methods used to engage in the debate.

We are only fortunate that the actual intellectual world doesn't conduct itself like a message board.

• PS There is no serious debate "between" naturalism and scientism. The latter isn't even a "position" as such, even less so than naturalism could be.

Luke says that even naturalistic philosophers exhibit these bad habits. He does not say that naturalism is a bad habit, or that it's a bad habit because it uses science to understand the world.

Not quite:

reading too much mainstream philosophy ... is somewhat likely to "teach very bad habits of thought that will lead people to be unable to do real work."

"Teach" implies that engaging one's self with "too much" mainstream philosophy will cause bad habits to arise (and make one unable to do 'real work', whatever that might be).

Unexamined presuppositions make a wonderful basis for discourse.

Because in a general sense, ignoring a large and useful body of knowledge out of hand and on the grounds that it triggers intuitive dislikes (esp. when said intuitions are based on a weak strawman interpretation of said discipline) is usually not a good move.

More specific to the argument at hand, why should a debate about reliability of intuitions disqualify philosophy? Do you believe this is a settled debate? And if so, on what grounds is it settled?

The center of the issue is that you can't answer these questions empirically. What observation(s) could you ever make that would settle the matter? We've got to invoke some form of philosophical justification even if it is vague and implicit. I'd prefer a more rigorous framework, as I imagine would most here, and that is what philosophy does and why it is still taken seriously, Eliezer's exasperation and misunderstanding notwithstanding.