The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship

I see that you have some experience applying the virtue of scholarship... :)

I very much agree with your final sentence.

Do you think Eliezer's post is more precise and useful than the controlled experiments published in peer-reviewed journals described in the book I linked to? I find that most writing on psychology is necessarily pretty soft, because the the phenomena it is trying to describe are vastly more complicated than those of the hard sciences.

It is dangerous to assume that casually studying the leading textbook in a soft field will usually make you smarter.

However, enough rationality training will have alarm bells ringing when reading soft textbooks and studies. That in itself - "this field is overpopulated with concepts and undermeasured" - is marginally more useful than knowing nothing about the field.

Perhaps my choosing a recent Eliezer article as one example of an underuse of schholarship is an instance of "people trying to show off how willing they are to disagree with" Eliezer Yudkowsky!

getting to the "state of the art"/minimum level of knowledge required to speak intelligently, avoid "solved problems", and not run into "already well refuted ideas" is a very expensive process.

So is spending time and effort on solved problems and already well refuted ideas.

need Matrix-style insta-learning. Badly.

Hear, hear! Arguably, resources like Wikipedia, the LW sequences, and SEP (heck even Google and the internet in general) are steps in that general direction.

Research moves fast though; a dissertation just 3 or 4 years old may already be hopelessly out of date. Also, they are written by PhD students who, while masters in their own field of expertise, are really only 'apprentices' in training and many not be very knowledgable about areas only slightly outside their domain.

Scientific journals often publish 'review' articles where people with decades of intimate knowledge about a field summarize recent developments. They are usually more concise than dissertations, and often written much better too. They are also peer-reviewed, just like dissertations and other papers.

I sincerely doubt that the discussions which began on the leading edge would return anywhere near the same amount of progress as those which start in the scholarly middle. After all, those problems are on the edge because they're difficult to solve given the intellectual tools we have today. Though Less Wrong is often insightful, I suspect it's the result not of discovering genuinely new tools, but of applying known tools in ways most readers haven't seen them used. For Less Wrong to make progress with a problem that a lot of smart people have been thinking about in detail for a long time either requires that the entire field is so confused that no one has been able to think as clearly about it as we can (probably hubristic), or that we have developed genuinely new intellectual techniques that no one has tried yet.

I agree that 99.9% of philosophy is very close to worthless. Its signal-to-noise ratio is much lower than in the sciences or in mathematics.

This brings to mind Eliezer's comment that "...if there’s any centralized repository of reductionist-grade naturalistic cognitive philosophy, I’ve never heard mention of it."

But reductionist-grade naturalistic cognitive philosophy is probably an even larger sub-field of philosophy than the formal epistemology I mentioned above. Names that come immediately to mind are: John Bickle, Pat & Paul Churchland, Paul Thagard, Tim Schroeder, William Calvin, Georg Northoff, Thomas Metzinger.

There's some good philosophy out there. Unfortunately, you normally only encounter it after you've spent quite a while studying bad philosophy. Most people are introduced to philosophy through Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel, and might never suspect a neurophilosopher like John Bickle exists.

Which reminds me of the old Bertrand Russell line:

Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.

I don't know what percentage of writing that gets called "philosophy" is worthwhile but it isn't that hard to narrow your reading material down to relevant and worthwhile texts. It's really weird to see comments like this here because so much of what I've found on Less Wrong are ideas I've seen previously in philosophy I've read. Moreover, a large fraction of my karma I got just by repeating or synthesizing things I learned doing philosophy- and I'm not the only one whose gotten karma this way.

I find it particularly perplexing that you think it's a good idea to only read pre-WWII philosophers as their ideas are almost always better said by contemporary authors. One of my major problems with the discipline is that it is mostly taught by doing history of philosophy- forcing students to struggle with the prose of a Plato translation and distilling the philosophy from the mysticism instead of just reading Bertrand Russell on universals.

Curious about the WW2 comment. Trouble parsing it. Do you think pre-WW2, or post-WW2, philosophers are more worthwhile?

I would say pre-Nietzsche philosophers are no longer very worthwhile for helping you solve contemporary problems of philosophy, although some (like Berkely, Hume, and Spinoza) were worthwhile for a time. (This is partly because I think causation and epistemology are not as important as issues like values, ethics, categorization, linguistic meaning, and self-identity.) Some, like Kant, provide definitions that may help clarify things for you, and that you will need if you want to talk to philosophers.

Ancient Greek and Roman poets and orators are worthwhile, because they describe an ethical system that contrasts dramatically with ours. But I read (pre-20th century) Native American speeches for the same reason, and lend them the same credence.

Philosophy seems to offer a very low chance of doing something extremely valuable.

I suspect it's the valuable human activity with the most extreme odds against success.

timtyler,

Hitchens did not mention complexity or simplicity as you propose. And he did not mention evolution as you propose. If you read the Hitchens quote, you will see he only gave the why-regress objection, which is just as valid against any scientific hypothesis as it is against a theistic one.

There are ways to make the "Who designed the Designer?" objection stick, but Hitchens did not use one of them. If you read the Hitchens quote, you'll see that he explicitly gave the why-regress objection that could be just as accurately be given to any scientific hypothesis ever proposed.

Here, let's play Quick Word Substitution. Let's say a physicist gives a brilliant demonstration of why his theory of quarks does a great job explaining a wide variety of observed subatomic phenomena. Now, Hitchens objects:

"But what explains the quarks? Don’t you run the risk… of asking 'Well, where does that come from? And where does that come from?' and running into an infinite regress?"

Hitchens explicitly gave the why-regress objection that is just as potent against scientific explanations as it is against theistic explanations.

More specifically it is completely rational to use that argument against theists, because one of their arguments for god is that the world is too complex not to have been designed; so in that circumstance you are just pointing out that their claim is just pushing the complexity back one step. If the world is so complex that it needs a designer, then so is god.

Indeed.

Pointing out that setting a rule leads to infinite regress is not the same as requiring that everything being used to explain must also be explained. In fact, this is a flaw with Intelligent Design, not its critics.

Now, the theists have a loophole to answer the question ("only physical complex things require a designer" special pleading), but it does not render the question "who designed the designer" - which should be rephrased "why doesn't necessitating a designer lead to infinite regress" - meaningless under the rules of science.

Not the greatest example in this, Luke. Especially jarring since you just recently quoted Maitzen on the "so what" infinite regress argument against Ultimate Purpose.

A great post; thanks for pointing me to it!

The examples in the post were debate-specific, but I would suggest that the virtue of scholarship is more broadly applicable. Like many parts of rationality, the most important thing is not to use scholarship to win arguments, but to use scholarship to find the right thing to argue for, or more generally, to become correct.

Also, in the softer fields, it's possible to contribute precisely on account of one's ignorance of what went before, too much knowledge of existing theories' assumptions sometimes standing in the way of real progress.

You haven't noted the most horrible thing about this: that the fields are still valuable, even still necessary. Us being no good at them doesn't change this.

c.f. medicine before germ theory and cell theory.

c.f. postmodernism, which is notoriously BS-ridden, but anyone who aspires to write good fiction needs a working knowledge of postmodernist techniques, whether they call them that or not.

diegocaleiro:

Classic Scholarship: Thumbs down http://brainstormers.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/sobre-ler-os-classicos/

That article is very poorly argued. Your argument is more or less correct in those fields where the progress of scholarship has a monotonous upward trend, in the sense that knowledge is accumulated without loss, and all existing insights continuously improved. This is true for e.g. Newtonian physics, and indeed, nobody would ever read Newton's original works instead of a modern textbook except for historical interest.

What you fail to understand, however, is that in many fields there is no such monotonous upward trend. This means that in the old classics you'll often find insight that has been neglected and forgotten, and you'll also find ideas that have fallen out of fashion and ideological favor, and been replaced with less accurate (and sometimes outright delusional) ones. Almost invariably, these insights and ideas are absent from modern texts, even those dealing specifically with the old authors, and there is often nothing comparable being written nowadays that could open your eyes to the errors of the modern consensus.

As a rule of thumb, the softer and more ideologically charged a field is, the more such cases you'll find where the modern range of mainstream opinion has in fact regressed away from reality relative to old authors. In economics, for example, you'll find a lot important insight in The Wealth of Nations that modern economics textbooks, and even modern treatments of Adam Smith, are silent about.

Even in hard sciences, when it comes to questions that raise deeper philosophical issues, revisiting classics can be a fruitful source of ideas. For example, Julian Barbour developed his ideas by studying the history of mechanics and relativity, and Arthur Ekert claims that the idea of quantum cryptography first occurred to him due to an insight he gathered from the classic EPR paper. (Ekert writes, "I guess I was lucky to read it in this particular way. The rest was just about rephrasing the subject in cryptographic terms.")

Another point you're neglecting is that truly good writers are extremely rare. Many classic works have remained in print after so many years exactly because people who wrote them were such good writers that virtually none of the modern authors working in the same field are able to produce anything as readable.

Reading the masters (the little I've done of it) has taught me the following things:

1. Almost no ideas are good
2. Almost no ideas are new

Plato's ideas were, at least, new. And (per 2) they're the most influential ideas ever to be put on paper. There's value in seeing that for yourself.

One counterpoint:

In The Failures of Eld Science, Eliezer's character points out that most scientists were never trained to recognize and navigate a genuine scientific controversy; instead, we hand our undergraduates the answers on a silver platter and have them do textbook problems. He proposes that if scientists had first had to think through and defeat phlogiston themselves, they would have been less stymied by the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Similarly, I think I'm better off for having encountered some of the grand old systems of philosophy in their earliest and most viral forms, without all the subsequent criticisms and rebuttals attached. Of course I ran the risk of getting entrapped permanently in Plato or Nietzsche, but I learned things about rationality and about myself this way, and I don't think I would have learned those had I started by reading a modern digest of one or the other (with all the mistakes pointed out). (Of course, I have since read modern critiques and profited from them.)

On the other hand, some Great Books schools like to teach higher mathematics by having the students read Euclid, and I agree that's insane and not worth all the extra effort.

On the whole I'd agree that most of the time it's better to focus on high-quality up-to-date summaries/textbooks than high-quality classical sources.

But I'd suggest a few caveats:

1) It is much easier to find high-quality classics than it is to find high-quality contemporary stuff. Everyone knows who Darwin was, I don't even know how to find a good biology textbook, and I personally got a lot more out of reading and thinking about Darwin than by reading my high school biology textbook. This is a consideration for students and autodidacts, less so for smart and well-informed teachers who know how to find the good stuff.

2) Many summarizers are simply not as smart as the greats, and don't pick up on a lot of good stuff the classics contain. This is less important for a survey that has only a small amount of time to spend on each topic, but if you want deep understanding of a discipline, you will sometimes have to go beyond the available summaries.

3) The ancients are the closest we have to space aliens; people who live in a genuinely different world with different preconceptions.

That post says, "You might find it more enjoyable to read Plato rather than more modern work just as someone else might prefer to have their philosophical arguments interspersed in Harry Potter slash," and was posted February 25, 2010. The first chapter of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was posted Feb. 28, 2010. Coincidence?

Completely agreed. I wrote very much the same thing in How to Do Philosophy Better.

Indeed. If you're asking students to read the initial source material, there's a 90% chance you're doing it wrong.

Wow. I disagree exactly.

This happens when

One way to avoid formatting problems is to write your article in an external word processor (such as Microsoft Word) and then copy/paste it into the Website:LessWrong.com article entry field. (You cannot add the summary break this way, so that must be done afterward.)

This seems to always occur around hyperlinks for me- and some other formatting too (e.g. "I've said almostnothing that is original.") I don't know why; I usually manually input an extra space.

I don't know. It's a great post, though: go fix it!

PhilGoetz,

And I'll give the same reply as i gave to Tim Tyler. :)

Hitchens did not mention entropy or complexity. He mentioned exactly and only the why-regress, the exact same why-regress that all scientific hypotheses are subject to. Perhaps the objection you raise to theism would have been good for Hitchens to give, but it is not the objection Hitchens gave.

It looks to me like people are trying to make Hitchens look good by putting smarter words in his mouth than the ones he actually spoke.

Whether or not the first cause argument should be a concern in science, i think Bertrand Russell summarizes its problems quite well:

"Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God. That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality that it used to have; but apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man, and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question, Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant, and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause." http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell0.htm

I think the logical incoherence of theism is a stronger knock down argument. The most devastating criticism of theism relates not to what caused god but what causes his actions. God is conceived as an all-powerful will, subjecting it to the same simple argument that disposes of libertarian "free will." Either God's conduct is random or determined. But conceiving of god as something other than a will makes god otiose. If god acts randomly, the description is indistinguishable from the universe simply being random; if god is determined that is indistinguishable from the universe is simply determined.

Who created the creator is a good argument, but it isn't decisive. To say god must be more complex than the universe 1) is denied by theists, who call god uniquely simply; and 2) leaves the theist with one (weak) counterargument, inasmuch as it means treating god as a mechanism rather than something that is, well, supernatural. The theist says the causal requirements that govern matter don't apply, and we're unwarranted in generalizing our observations about the material world to the characteristics of god.

Ultimately, you can't avoid getting down to the really basic question: what is this god. If he's not a deterministic entity, what's the alternative to his behavior being random? [Actually, I'm not sure raw randomness is coherent either, but you don't have to take the argument that far.]