"But let us never forget, either, as all conventional history of philosophy conspires to make us forget, what the 'great thinkers' really are: proper objects, indeed, of pity, but even more, of horror."
David Stove's "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts" is a critique of philosophy that I can only call epic.
The astute reader will of course find themselves objecting to Stove's notion that we should be catologuing every possible way to do philosophy wrong. It's not like there's some originally pure mode of thought, being tainted by only a small library of poisons. It's just that there are exponentially more possible crazy thoughts than sane thoughts, c.f. entropy.
But Stove's list of 39 different classic crazinesses applied to the number three is absolute pure epic gold. (Scroll down about halfway through if you want to jump there directly.)
I especially like #8: "There is an integer between two and four, but it is not three, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed."
The history of philosophy can't really have been one of thousands of years of nearly unrelenting adoration of stupidity. What probably happened is that philosophers became popular only if their ideas were simple enough and appealing enough. There is a bandpass filter on philosophy, and it has both a low and a high cutoff.
We propagate knowledge by collective judgements about it. In fields where we can't eliminate bad ideas by experiment, both the very worst and the very best ideas must be rejected. The requirement that an influential philosopher appeal to a large group of philosophers guarantees that relatively simplistic, self-aggrandizing or at least inoffensive crap with enough fuzziness to give one leeway in how to interpret it will be favored over careful, complex, a-polite ideas.
I recently looked at a bunch of my grad-school AI textbooks. It made me ill to think how many years I wasted studying an entire discipline filled with almost nothing but knowledge that has so far proven useless to me across a wide range of problems and disciplines for anything other than writing computer games - and useful there only because you can scale the game down and restrict its environment until the techniques work. Is this a different way of going wrong than the philosophers, or is it the same thing? Many of the bad-old-fashioned-AI (BOFAI) way of doing things are quite difficult: You can't accuse Kripke or Quine of being simplistic.
I wonder if the internet can provide a way for thinkers of the highest quality to find each other, and pass on ideas to each other that would go over the head of the larger professional bodies. I wonder if these ideas would influence the world, or remain useless in the hands of their brilliant but uninfluential custodians.
However, my experience on LW has shown that the best and brightest people are still very bad at conveying even relatively simple ideas to each other.
I have also seen instances where nearly an entire field is making some elementary error, which people outside that field can see more clearly, but which they can't communicate to people in that field because they would have to spend years learning enough about the field to write a paper, probably with half a year's worth of experimental work, and not get rejected, even if their insight is something that could be communicated in a single sentence. I wish there were some Twitter version of Science, that published only pithy, insightful comments, unsubstantiated by experiment. But since I've also seen cases where researchers spent decades gathering data and publishing critiques in their field and getting no traction, this alone is not enough.
How can we use the internet to recognize good ideas and get them to the people who can use them? Cross-discipline reputation brokers could be part of the solution.
TED.