A reply to Mark Linsenmayer about philosophy

If Sturgeon's Law is true, then 90% of psychology is crap-- possibly higher because it's very tempting to publish fascinating generalizations-- what implications does this have for philosophy?

Citing Sturgeon's Law - while the amiable thing to do, charitably offering to resolve the dispute in a general cloud of "we should all improve" - seems a bit like a cop out.

Making a claim such as "90% of philosophy should be thrown out for rationality reasons" (assuming that quote isn't a strawman) singles out philosophy. Defending that using Sturgeon's Law - which in your estimation applies to various fields, if to differing extents - portrays your posts retrospectively in a much more generic and thus less hard hitting and less aimed critique of the current modus operandi of science. Did you really mean to quiet your thunder thus, when you started like Prometheus)?

So while you technically can cite Sturgeon's Law as predicting/explaining your stance, it goes against the spirit of dealing with philosophy specifically.

Philosophy is a pretty varied discipline. It's worth distinguishing philosophy of religion and ethical theory (which, if I'm not mistaken, are the main fields you have researched) from, say, philosophy of science, to which your criticisms don't really apply, and which, I would argue, has been responsible for a number of genuinely valuable advances in recent years.

Look, for instance, at the abstracts from a random issue of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (the premier journal in the field), and tell me if the majority seem to be of the kind that are susceptible to your worries. As a suggestive illustration, here are the titles of all the articles in the latest issue:

• Quantum Theory: A Pragmatist Approach
• Relational Holism and Humean Supervenience
• Symplectic Reduction and the Problem of Time in Nonrelativistic Mechanics
• Selection Biases in Likelihood Arguments
• Objective Bayesian Calibration and the Problem of Non-convex Evidence
• Calibration and Convexity

Incidentally, the BJPS has an Editor's Choice section, where certain articles are made freely available, and which I highly recommend.

What I do claim is that many specific philosophical positions and methods are undermined by scientific knowledge about how brains and other systems work.

It would be useful to have a list of such positons which are still taken seriously by anglophone philosophy. FYI Hegel, Heidegger, Berkely and other easy targets generally aren't.

For example, I've argued that a particular kind of philosophical analysis, which assumes concepts are defined by necessary and sufficient conditions, is undermined by psychological results showing that brains don't store concepts that way.

But science gains benefits from using categories that are artficially tidy compared to folk concepts.Thus a tomato is not a scientific vegetable, nor a whale a scientific fish. Why shouldn't philosophy do the same?

I'm curious to know what progress you think Hume made. I'm a big fan of Hume the observer of human behavior, Hume the proto-economist, and Hume the critic of religion; I'm less enthusiastic about what you might call Hume's purely philosophical work (problem of induction and so on).

Another The Partially Examined Life host weighs in his own post.

Mark Linsenmayer, one of the hosts of a top philosophy podcast called The Partially Examined Life

Luke, is this a podcast you recommend for those who are interested in philosophy? Is it 99% crap like philosophy at large or is it closer to the 90% crap?

I ask because I wouldn't mind picking up some philosopher jargon. I find it hard to remember words that don't seem to carve reality at its joints---the words just don't feel salient enough. But they can nevertheless be useful when trying to communicate with people that speak only that language.

Mark makes a good point here:

Much less does reason itself necessitate a certain whole world view, a way of determining what’s truly important and worth spending time on and what isn’t. Many Chinese folks who mix Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism in their personal philosophies understand this. Though these views all have different practical upshots (e.g. re. do you respect state authority and tradition or not?), they all contain insights that have worked well in various contexts, and they are (in some portion of the cultural traditions relevant to this example, anyway) based more on different, non-empirically-verifiable attitudes towards life, rather than (as in some Western creeds) on some alleged matters of fact (which makes it much harder for someone to be a Christian-Jewish-Muslim hybrid, though it can be done).

So being a scientist, even one highly tuned into the latest development in cognitive science, statistics, and the like, does not actually dictate a single overall attitude toward life, a mission, a set of core beliefs. And yet, this is what we see in Eliezer’s attitude as exemplified in this podcast and on Less Wrong, which contains numerous articles on mistakes in reasoning that come from an ignorance of such advances as Bayes’s theorem

TLDR: Science deals with "is". Since there is an is-ought gap, there is still plenty for philosophy to say about "ought".

I do claim that almost all philosophy is useless for figuring out what is true,

I'll say it again: there is no point in criticising philosophy unless you have (1) a better way of (2) answering the same questions.

ETA:

Mark doesn't explain here why it's "nonsense" to propose that truth-seekers (qua truth-seekers) should ignore 99% of all philosophy,

See above. You need something better.

why many metaphysical arguments aren't meaningless

LP is a known failure, as has been pointed out here innumberable times The burden is on you to justify the LP metaphsics-is-nonsense principle.

, why some philosophical problems can't simply be dissolved,

Mark doesn't have to arge that no problem can be dissolved, since he never claimed that. You probably need to arge that the majority can be dissolved , since you keep citing the proportion of philosophy that is worthless as over 90%. You also probably need to expaln why phils. can't do that, in the teeth of examples of the doing just that (eg Dennett on quaia).

nor why Chalmers' approach to philosophy is superior to Eliezer's.

Consider this: If an amaterur claims to be doing considerably better than an acknowledged domain expert, he is probably suffering from the Dunning-Krueger effect.

I generally get what you mean

I only experience from my own experience Therefore other people and their experience should only matter insofar as they affect my own

This simple rationality throws away just about all philosophy of morality, because morality is irrelevant

[Mark;} I'm generally skeptical when someone proclaims that "rationality" itself should get us to throw out 90%+ of philosophy...

[Luke:] Sturgeon's Law declares that "90% of everything is crap.

But the problem is knowing what the 90% is. It isn't clear why your training in ratioanlity should allow you to do better than philosophers, who are also highly trained in rationality.

I think it's instructive to contrast Eliezer with David Chalmers... who is very much on top of the science in his field. [...]

Pah! To make Yudkowsky look bad - do not contrast with Chalmers!