"What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts"

Stove himself concludes that his "nosology" is probably not worth compiling. I think he's actually just using it to make the same point you've made by mentioning entropy. He considers it in order to justify rejecting it.

He then does something similar with the possibility of figuring out individual cases, rejecting it because the findings won't be generalizable.

Then he gets to what seems like his main point: getting rid of almost all philosophy because it's crazy.

(I thought the piece as whole was much funnier than the list. It's a tongue-in-cheek version of bending over backwards to avoid accusations of dismissing something crazy out of hand.)

Possibly Stove intended this only as an extended Take That to philosophers he dislikes; but it seems to me that he is a bit too dismissive of his own project, the 'nosology'. Without wanting a Fully General Counterargument, I think it might be useful to have a set of, say, five or six different classes of erroneous statements; and I also think Stove is too eager to insist on the singularity of each of his examples. For example, he states that the objection "not verifiable" cannot be applied to his example 8; I don't see why not. Anything whose "name and nature are not to be revealed" has just been declared unverifiable, no? Similarly 3 through 7 look pretty unverifiable to me.

Then he has some examples further down the list which look reasonably testable, such as 13 : "3 is a lucky number". One could easily do an experiment on this by submitting lottery tickets with and without 3's filled in; and as for 14, I think a simple "false-to-fact" would suffice to dismiss it.

So far then there are three classifications: False to fact, contradiction, meaningless through having no connection to observation. We may need a fourth to cover such statements as 26: "The tie which unites the number three to its properties (such as primeness) is inexplicable". This seems somehow vaguely related to observation, in that there does seem to be something called three which has the property of primeness, and nobody has really explained the tie between triples of objects and these properties. (It is perhaps not strongly coupled to observation, but I hesitate to dismiss it completely on that ground.) I suggest a fourth classification of 'uninteresting' or 'unfruitful': A proposition which, when adopted as an axiom, yields few or no deductions, is unfruitful. One might also call it the 'So What' error: Making statements which even if true are not useful to know.

There does seem to be some overlap here; for example, Stove's 25: "Five is of the same substance as three, co-eternal with three, very three of three: it is only in their attributes that three and five are different." This looks to me quite unverifiable, but even if it were true, So What? What conclusions or prediction would you draw from this?

Contrary to Stove, I think these four will cover all his list: False to fact, contradiction, meaningless, and So What. I am not certain, however, whether this insight is useful.

I have to say that the positivist critique that "it's all meaningless" is seductive and it may well be correct - it feels like the words have meaning, but when you try to parse the sentence the feeling quickly disappears.

The problem is, this isn't very useful for talking about specific errors and how to avoid them. Many of the statements on that list looked rather meaningless to me, but to someone who believes in one of these statements, there are some underlying beliefs or confusions that need to be addressed before the "meaningless critique" will have any effect. At this point, pointing out the meaninglessness of their pet statement becomes entirely superfluous.

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.

While I mostly agree with the article, I don't think the Foucalt example given at the start is entirely bad - it just seems like a long-winded warning against confusing the map with the territory (or more specifically against trying to hammer a square territory into a pre-conceived round map).

Asking the big question!

The history of philosophy can't really have been one of thousands of years of nearly unrelenting adoration of stupidity.

I often see statements like that. "This couldn't possibly be the case", "that can't really happen", etc.

The first question we should ask ourselves when we see such statements: Why?

Usually, the person speaking is dismissing possibilities and potentialities out of hand for one of a variety of reasons, rather than having a valid and justifiable reason for discarding the contingency.

And even when there are good reasons, it's important to remember that we can always be wrong. Conservation of mass-energy is an incredibly useful and extraordinarily broad-in-application principle, and showing that a proposed idea in physics or engineering violates it is a powerful critique, but it's possible that it's not really the case.

Genetic engineering aside, given a large aggregation of human beings, and a long time, you cannot reasonably expect rational thought to win. You could as reasonably expect a thousand unbiased dice, all tossed at once, all to come down 'five,' say. There are simply far too many ways, and easy ways, in which human thought can go wrong. Or, put it the other way round: anthropocentrism cannot lose.

That's the same argument against rationalist winning that has been seen many times on LW. However, it is based on hopelessness and fear, rather than on knowledge of even a single failure of an organised attempt at large-scale rational winning. So, while Stove recognises the obviously wrong thoughts of philosophers, he himself goes wrong in thinking the above by making a wrong probability estimate.

So just to be clear, we are saying that the probability of a significant number of people turning to rational thinking is greater than the probability of winning a lottery, right?

I've long loved this piece, but today would file most of its examples simply under "getting carried away".

Items on the list that reminded me of Eliezer's writings: #19, #22, #32, #35. Indictment not intended.

I don't like this paper. It's wholly scathing for no reason other than to justify ignoring all of philosophy. Some philosophy is valuable and some is not, and of his 40 statements about three, I'd say 6 of them are claims I would take seriously and would hear arguments for, were I interested in the nature of three.

Generally, continental philosophy is trash, but I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Your link is now broken. Is there some other web archive of the chapter? I've saved a copy from the google cache, in case it matters to anyone.

does #23 have a quick explanation or does it require a serious delve into abstract math?

Regarding most of the lengthy examples of "philosophy" given by Stove:

Reading a text takes time, time can be spent acquiring utilions. Hence reading a text is only worth if the expected utilion win due to additional knowledge is grater than the expected utilions when using the time differently. This approach kills most of his examples dead in their tracks for me. This also implies positivism, if a text does not either generate utilions directly, i.e. fun reading fiction, then it needs to provide knowledge (in form of testable statements about the world), otherwise, how would I generate utilions from the "knowledge"?

Possibly, some thoughts are only valuable when more efficient methods of communication become available.

Interesting, but too verbose.

The author is clearly not aware of the value of the K.I.S.S. principle, or Ockhams razor, in this context.

David Stove's "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts" is a critique of philosophy that I can only call TL;DR.

(It is a very striking fact, however, that I had to go to translations for my three quotations above. Nothing which was ever expressed originally in the English language resembles, except in the most distant way, the thought of Plotinus, or Hegel, or Foucault. I take this to be enormously to the credit of our language.)

How racist and ignorant is this: very racist and ignorant, or super racist and ignorant?