I'll await your next post, but in retrospect you should have started with the big concrete example of mainstream philosophy doing an LW-style dissolution-to-algorithm not already covered on LW, and then told us that the moral was that we shouldn't ignore mainstream philosophy.
I did the whole sequence on QM to make the final point that people shouldn't trust physicists to get elementary Bayesian problems right. I didn't just walk in and tell them that physicists were untrustworthy.
If you want to make a point about medicine, you start by showing people a Bayesian problem that doctors get wrong; you don't start by telling them that doctors are untrustworthy.
If you want me to believe that philosophy isn't a terribly sick field, devoted to arguing instead of facing real-world tests and admiring problems instead of solving them and moving on, whose poison a novice should avoid in favor of eating healthy fields like settled physics (not string theory) or mainstream AI (not AGI), you're probably better off starting with the specific example first. "I disagree with your decision not to cover terminal vs. instrumental in CEV" doesn't cover it, and neither does "Quineans agree the world is made of atoms". Show me this field's power!
Comment author:r90
21 March 2011 11:53:37AM
0 points
[-]
Well, show me the power of LW then.
Since Quinean philosophy is just LW rationality but earlier, then that should settle it.
I find it likely that if someone were to trace the origins of LW rationality one would end up with Quine or someone similar.
E.g. perhaps you read an essay by a Quinean philosopher when you were younger.
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I'll await your next post, but in retrospect you should have started with the big concrete example of mainstream philosophy doing an LW-style dissolution-to-algorithm not already covered on LW, and then told us that the moral was that we shouldn't ignore mainstream philosophy.
I did the whole sequence on QM to make the final point that people shouldn't trust physicists to get elementary Bayesian problems right. I didn't just walk in and tell them that physicists were untrustworthy.
If you want to make a point about medicine, you start by showing people a Bayesian problem that doctors get wrong; you don't start by telling them that doctors are untrustworthy.
If you want me to believe that philosophy isn't a terribly sick field, devoted to arguing instead of facing real-world tests and admiring problems instead of solving them and moving on, whose poison a novice should avoid in favor of eating healthy fields like settled physics (not string theory) or mainstream AI (not AGI), you're probably better off starting with the specific example first. "I disagree with your decision not to cover terminal vs. instrumental in CEV" doesn't cover it, and neither does "Quineans agree the world is made of atoms". Show me this field's power!
Well, show me the power of LW then.
Since Quinean philosophy is just LW rationality but earlier, then that should settle it.
I find it likely that if someone were to trace the origins of LW rationality one would end up with Quine or someone similar. E.g. perhaps you read an essay by a Quinean philosopher when you were younger.