As a professional philosopher who's interested in some of the issues discussed in this forum, I think it's perfectly healthy for people here to mostly ignore professional philosophy, for reasons given here. But I'm interested in the reverse direction: if good ideas are being had here, I'd like professional philosophy to benefit from them. So I'd be grateful if someone could compile a list of significant contributions made here that would be useful to professional philosophers, with links to sources.

(The two main contributions that I'm aware of are ideas about friendly AI and timeless/updateless decision theory. I'm sure there are more, though. Incidentally I've tried to get very smart colleagues in decision theory to take the TDT/UDT material seriously, but the lack of a really clear statement of these ideas seems to get in the way.)

Unfortunately, many important problems are fundamentally philosophical problems. Philosophy itself is unavoidable.

Isn't this true just because the way philosophy is effectively defined? It's a catch-all category for poorly understood problems which have nothing in common except that they aren't properly investigated by some branch of science. Once a real question is answered, it no longer feels like a philosophical question; today philosophers don't investigate motion of celestial bodies or structure of matter any more.

In other words, I wonder what are the fundamentally philosophical questions. The adverb fundamentally creates the impression that those questions will be still regarded as philosophical after being uncontroversially answered, which I doubt will ever happen.

Eliezer's anti-philosophy rant Against Modal Logics was pretty controversial, while my recent pro-philosophy (by LW standards) post and my list of useful mainstream philosophy contributions were massively up-voted. This suggests a significant appreciation for mainstream philosophy on Less Wrong - not surprising, since Less Wrong covers so many philosophical topics.

This opening paragraph set off a huge warning claxon in my bullshit filter. To put it generously it is heavy on 'spin'. Specifically:

• It sets up a comparison based on upvotes between a post written in the last month and a post written on a different blog.
• Luke's post is presented as a contrast to controversy despite being among the most controversial posts to ever appear on the site. This can be measured based on the massive series of replies and counter replies, most of which were heavily upvoted - which is how controversy tends to present itself here. (Not that controversy is a bad thing.)
• Upvotes for a well written post that contains useful references are equivocated with support for the agenda that prompted the author to write it.
• The first 3.5 words were "Eliezer's anti-philosophy rant". Enough said.

All of the above is unfortunate because the remainder of this post was overwhelmingly reasonable and a promise of good things too come.

Note that this is not just my vision of how to get published in journals. It's my vision of how to do philosophy.

Your vision of how to do philosophy suspiciously conforms to how philosophy has traditionally been done, i.e. in journals. Have you read Michael Nielsen's Doing Science Online? It's written specifically about science, but I see no reason why it couldn't be applied to any kind of scholarly communication. He makes a good argument for including blog posts into scientific communication, which, at present, doesn't seem to be amenable with writing journal articles (is it kosher to cite blog posts?):

Many of the best blog posts contain material that could not easily be published in a conventional way: small, striking insights, or perhaps general thoughts on approach to a problem. These are the kinds of ideas that may be too small or incomplete to be published, but which often contain the seed of later progress.

You can think of blogs as a way of scaling up scientific conversation, so that conversations can become widely distributed in both time and space. Instead of just a few people listening as Terry Tao muses aloud in the hall or the seminar room about the Navier-Stokes equations, why not have a few thousand talented people listen in? Why not enable the most insightful to contribute their insights back?

I would much rather see SIAI form an open-access online journal or scholarly FAI/existential risks wiki or blog for the purposes of disseminating writings/thoughts on these topics. This likely would not reach as many philosophers as publishing in philosophy journals, but would almost certainly reach far more interested outsiders. Plus, philosophers have access to the internet, right?

Eliezer's anti-philosophy rant Against Modal Logics hovers near 0 karma points, while my recent pro-philosophy (by LW standards) post and my list of mainstream philosophy contributions were massively upvoted.

The karma of pre-LW OvercomingBias posts that were ported over should not be compared to that of LW post proper. Most of Eliezer's old posts are massively under-voted that way, though some frequently linked to posts less so.

Have you considered taking some of EY's work and jargon-translating it into journal-suitable form?

Format the article attractively. A well-chosen font makes for an easier read. Then publish (in a journal or elsewhere).

I'd add "Learn LaTeX" to this one; if you're publishing in a journal, that matters more than your font preferences and formatting skills (which won't be used in the published version), and if you're publishing online, it can make your paper look like a journal article, which is probably good for status. Even TeX's default Computer Modern font, which I wouldn't call beautiful, has a certain air of authority to it — maybe due to some of its visual qualities, but possibly just by reputation.

This paragraph, from Eugene Mills' 'Are Analytic Philosophers Shallow and Stupid?', made me laugh out loud:

The paradox of analysis concludes that

(PA) A conceptual analysis is correct only if it is trivial.

Philosophers from Socrates onward have [provided] conceptual analyses of knowledge, freedom, truth, goodness, and more. The paradox of analysis suggests that these philosophers... are shallow and stupid: shallow because they stalk triviality, stupid because it so often eludes them.

Mills goes on to defend philosophers, with two sections entitled 'Embracing Triviality, Part I' and 'Embracing Triviality, Part II.'

I agree with a lot of the content -- or at least the spirit -- of the post, but I worry that there is some selectivity that makes philosophy come off worse than it actually is. Just to take one example that I know something about: Pearl is praised (rightly) for excellent work on causation, but very similar work developed at the same time by philosophers at Carnegie Mellon University, especially Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines, isn't even mentioned.

Lots of other philosophers could be added to the list of people making interesting, useful contributions to causation research: Christopher Hitchcock at Caltech, James Woodward at Pitt HPS, John Norton at Pitt HPS, Frederick Eberhardt at WashU, Luke Glynn at Konstanz, David Danks at CMU, Ned Hall at Harvard, Jonathan Schaffer at Rutgers, Nancy Cartwright at the LSE, and many others (maybe even including my own humble self).

I am not trying to defend philosophy on the whole. I agree that we have some disease in philosophy that ought to be cut away. But I don't think that philosophy is in as bad a shape as the post suggests. More importantly, there is a lot of good, interesting, useful work being done in philosophy, if you know where to look for it.

I posted this on Reddit r/philosophy, if anyone would like to upvote it there.

philosophers are "spectacularly bad" at understanding that their intuitions are generated by cognitive algorithms.

What makes you think this? It's true that many philosophers recognize the genetic fallacy, and hence don't take "you judge that P because of some fact about your brain" to necessarily undermine their judgment. But it's ludicrously uncharitable to interpret this principled epistemological disagreement as a mere factual misunderstanding.

Again: We can agree on all the facts about how human psychology works. What we disagree about (some of us, anyway -- there's much dispute here within philosophy too, as seen e.g. if you browse the archives of the Arche methodology weblog ) is the epistemological implications.

Similar objections apply to the claim that "Most philosophers don't understand the basics... that people are made of atoms and intuitions don't trump science." Are you serious?

A few points:

• Philisophy is (by definition, more or less) meta to everything else. By its nature, it has to question everything, including things that here seem to be unuqestionable, such as rationality and reductionism. The elevation of these into unquestionable dogma creates a somewhat cult-like environment.

• Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago. That's one reason philosophers emphasize the history of ideas so much. It's probably a mistake to think you are so smart you will avoid all the pitfalls they've already fallen into.

• I agree with the linked post of Eliezer's that much of analytic philosophy (and AI) is mostly just slapping formal terms over unexamined everyday ideas, which is why I find most of it bores me to tears.

• Continental philosophy, on the other hand, if you can manage to make sense of it, actually can provide new perspectives on the world, and in that sense is worthwhile. Don't assume that just because you can't understand it, it doesn't have anything to say. Complaining because they use what seems like an impenetrable language is about on the level of an American traveling to Europe and complaining that the people there don't speak English. That said, Sturgeon's law definitely applies, perhaps at the 99% level.

• I'm recomending Bruno Latour to everyone these days. He's a French sociologist of science and philosopher, and if you can get past the very French style of abstraction he uses, he can be mind-blowing in the manner described above.

Use your rationality training, but avoid language that is unique to Less Wrong. Nearly all these terms and ideas have standard names outside of Less Wrong (though in many cases Less Wrong already uses the standard language).

Could you please write a translation key for these?

I think it would help LWers read mainstream philosophy, and people with philosophy backgrounds read LW.

I'd welcome more quality discussion of philosophical topics such as morality here. You occasionally see people pop up and say confused things about morality, like

It has been suggested that animals have less subjective experience than people. For example, it would be possible to have an animal that counts as half a human for the purposes of morality.

... that got downvoted, but I still get the impression that confused thinking like that pops up more often on the topic of morality than on others (except Friendly AI), and that Eliezer didn't do a good enough job teaching sane and clear thinking about morality to his readers - including myself.

And morality is a topic that's whack in the middle of philosophy, and AI and statistics don't teach us much about it (though cognitive science and experimental philosophy do). So I have the hope that more input from academic philosophy might raise the quality of thinking here about morality.

Think like a cognitive scientist and AI programmer.

Is it possible to think "like an AI programmer" without being an AI programmer ? If the answer is "no", as I suspect it is, then doesn't this piece of advice basically say, "don't be a philosopher, be an AI programmer instead" ? If so, then it directly contradicts your point that "philosophy is not useless".

To put it in a slightly different way, is creating FAI primarily a philosophical challenge, or an engineering challenge ?

This feels more like a style guide than a "vision of how to do philosophy".

Seems like an appropriate article to relay a bit of wisdom from E.T. Jaynes.

Jaynes quotes a colleague: “Philosophers are free to do whatever they please, because they don’t have to do anything right.”

Use your rationality training, but avoid language that is unique to Less Wrong. All these terms and ideas have standard names outside of Less Wrong

Most, probably not all. Universal statements like this are brittle and rarely correct.

justification bottoms out in the lens that can see its flaws

This statement seems misleading, since justification doesn't actually "hit bottom", doesn't stop. For contrast, a quotation from the post:

So what I did in practice, does not amount to declaring a sudden halt to questioning and justification. I'm not halting the chain of examination at the point that I encounter Occam's Razor, or my brain, or some other unquestionable. The chain of examination continues - but it continues, unavoidably, using my current brain and my current grasp on reasoning techniques.

Why would it be bad for philosophy to work (primarily) with intuitions? And why would philosophy need empirical evidence? (Relating to the point in the linked post on criticism of dualists not having any evidence). Empirical evidence is not what is (primarily) used in mathematics. If everything could be solved with empirical evidence, there would be no need for philosophy. I don’t see how scientific evidence is better than intuition. Or even possible without them... In case you mean not only empirical evidence but also logical/ mathematical (?) evidence: Why is intuition not also evidence itself, i.e. why not let it be a PART of the reasoning?

Also I don‘t get why we would need training in cognitive sciences. What do you mean that the brain is the tool and we need to know how to use it? What will it help my reasoning to know how neural networks are connected (for example)? And why is it necessary? (To the point where it is all you need, and one can just discard philosophical thinking?)

as long as you are human there is no final victory.

Hm, that makes a nifty quote.

One thing I mean by saying that philosophers could benefit from 'thinking like AI programmers' is that forcing yourself to think about the algorithm that would generate a certain reality can guard against superstition, because magic doesn't reduce to computer code.

I recently came across Leibniz saying much the same thing in a passage where he imagines a future language of symbolic logic that had not yet been invented:

The characters would be quite different from what has been imagined up to now... The characters of this script should serve invention and judgment as in algebra and arithmetic... It will be impossible to write, using these characters, chimeral notions.

For the record, I didn't get this little gem from reading Leibniz. I stumbled onto it in Gleick's new history of information, The Information.

What is an example of a magical category being used in philosophy? (That is, a convenient handle that I can use to represent the term, 'magical category' when I read it).

Philosophy was for a long time the leading discipline and a cornerstone of the rationalistic ideals you lesswrong folks seem to follow - from Aristoteles to Kant to Wittgenstein. But then there is a growing number of philosophers who start questioning rationality itself or the attempt to create a "system" to explain everything. (From Nietzsche over Freud to Derrida or Foucault). 

For people who seem so concerned to ,figure it all out' based on rational thinking it baffles me, how little effort I see, to understand what fundamental flaws others have seen in the kind of thinking you base your entire project on. (Please correct me, if I have simply overseen this kind of earnest discussions or misunderstood the lesswrong way alltogether). 

Does it not make you wonder, that a smart cookie like Wittgenstein changed his mind about having once and for all logically solved the questions of 'what can be said sensibly' with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus? 

I'm curious how many people here think of rationalism as synonymous with something like Quinean Naturalism (or just naturalism/physicalism in general). It strikes me that naturalism/physicalism is a specific view one might come to hold on the basis of a rationalist approach to inquiry, but it should not be mistaken for rationalism itself. In particular, when it comes to investigating foundational issues in epistemology/ontology a rationalist should not simply take it as a dogma that naturalism answers all those questions. Quine's Epistemology Naturalized is an instructive text because it attempt actually to produce a rational argument for approaching foundational philosophical issues naturalistically. This is something I haven't seen much on LW, it usually seems like this is taken as an assumed axiom with no argument.

The value of attempting to make the arguments for naturalized epistemology explicit is that they can then be critiqued and evaluated. As it happens, when one reads Quine's work on this and thinks carefully about it, it becomes pretty evident that it is problematic for various reasons as many mainstream philosophers have attempted to make clear (e.g., the literature around the myth of the given).

I'd like to see more of that kind of foundational debate here, but maybe that's just because I've already been corrupted by the diseased discipline of philosophy ; )

As a scientist, not a philosopher, I still don't see much virtue in writing "simply". This is a particulary Anglo-Saxon tradition, whereas I (and most of the German-Russian tradition, AFAIK) have always felt that when you try writing simply you lose at least speed of the train of thought and quite likely some of your arguments' power. "No math - no science" is a specific example, but not the only one.

Sorry, I'm not a professional philosopher but did study it at university and still retain an interest in it. I was interested to read this statement. "Many philosophers have been infected (often by later Wittgenstein) with the idea that philosophy is supposed to be useless.".

I take that to mean you consider Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to be his better work. I do too and have been mocked for saying so when I was a student. I was taught by some very famous professors at a well placed university but I wasn't much of a student, not the brightest crayon in that years box.

I agree, the professional philosophers look back at some fairly ancient text, but there is a reason for that. If you are building a car that is aiming to be better than everything else on the road you dont start blindly, you look at other cars and check their faults and build something that does not have the same faults. The aim of philosophy is not a combative sport. Its true aim is to build upon knowledge, but what knowledge is also becomes a philosophical debate. I prefer meta-philosophy and scientific method, I prefer igtheism to atheism and prefer Hume to Descartes. The old dead guys determine, in part how I think of the alive new guys. The old guys gave me a set of tools to dissect the work of the new guys.

Peter Hacker is not somebody who thinks "philosophy should be useless." Of the list of "basics" that you cite Peter Hacker would agree that "things are made of atoms", "that many questions don't need to be answered but instead dissolved" and "that language is full of tricks." He also explicitly states that "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience" should be judged on its usefulness (which is why methodological concerns are relegated to the back pages). Indeed, it seems you equate dissolving problems with "thinking philosophy should be useless" (you cite the later Wittgenstein and dissolution was his method), despite the fact that you also cite it favourably. I find this odd.

lukeprog wrote "philosophers are 'spectacularly bad' at understanding that their intuitions are generated by cognitive algorithms." I am pretty confident that minds are physical/chemical systems, and that intuitions are generated by cognitive algorithms. (Furthermore, many of the alternatives I know of are so bizarre that given that such an alternative is the true reality of my universe, the conditional probability that rationality or philosophy is going to do me any good seems to be low.) But philosophy as often practiced values questioning everything, and so I don't think it's quite fair to expect philosophers to "understand" this (which I read in this context as synonymous as "take this for granted"). I'd prefer a formulation like "spectacularly bad at seriously addressing [or, perhaps, even properly understanding] the obvious hypothesis that their intuitions are generated by cognitive algorithms." It seems to me that the criticism rewritten in this form remains severe.

It may just be my physician's bias, but "diseased" seems like a very imprecise term. The title would be more informative and more widely quoted with another word choice. In medicine you would not find that word in an article title.

There needs to be more cross-talk between philosophy and science. It is not an "either or" choice; we need an amalgam of the two. As a scientist I object strongly to your statement "Second, if you want to contribute to cutting-edge problems, even ones that seem philosophical, it's far more productive to study math and science than it is to study philosophy." Combined approaches are what is needed, not abandonment of philosophy.

It is not easy to overcome millions of years of brain evolution [...]

Since evolution, in particular, formed our moral inclination and our reasoning ability, this statement sounds a bit unfair/one-sided.

The link's moved to http://certaindoubts.com/characterizing-a-fogbank-what-is-postmodernism-and-why-do-i-take-such-a-dim-view-of-it/. Found http://pkdreligion.blogspot.com/2011/11/kripal-vs-pkd-as-postmodernist-critics.html, which has a comment with the same link, and has the title.

Look at your intuitions from the outside, as cognitive algorithms.

Which Less Wrong post do I need to read to find out how to do that? Also is there a hard definition of an AI programmer?

The difference between much of mainstream philosophy and LessWrongian philosophy: http://www.lulztruck.com/43901/the-thinker-and-the-doer/

This is my viewpoint as a philosophical laymen. I've liked a lot of the philosophy I've read, but I'm thinking about what the counter-proposal to what your post might be, and I don't know that it wouldn't result in a better state of affairs. I don't believe we'd have to stop reading writers from prior eras, or keep reinventing the wheel for "philosophical" questions. But why not just say, from here on out, the useful bits of philosophy can be categorized into other disciplines, and the general catch all term is no longer warranted? Philosophy covered just too wide a swath of topics: political science/economics, physics/cosmology, and psychology, just to name a few. I don't really know how to categorize everything Leibnitz and Newton were interested in. Now that these topics have more empirical data, there's less room for general speculation like there was in the old days. When you reclassify the useful stuff of philosophers' work as science, math, or logic I think it's very clarifying. All that remains afterwards (in my opinion) is more cultural commentaries and criticisms, and general speculations about life. I wouldn't call them useless; I found Rawls and Nozick to be interesting. But there would be big picture thinkers, cross-disciplinary studiers, and other types of thinkers even without a formal academic discipline called philosophy.

The traditional definition of philosophy (in Greek) implied that philosophy's purpose was not to convey information, but to produce a transformation in the individual who practices it. In that sense, it is not supposed to be "useless", but it may appear so to someone who is looking to it for "information" about reality. By this standard, very little of what goes on in academic Philosophy departments today would qualify.

"3. Philosophy has grown into an abnormally backward-looking discipline."

Indeed. One of the salutory roles that philosophy served until about the 18th century (think e.g. "natural philosophy") was to serve as an intellectual context within new disciplines could emerge and new problems could be formulated into coherent complexes of issues that became their own academic disciplines.

In a world where cosmology and quantum physics and neuroscience and statistics and scientific research methods and psychology and "law and whatever" are vibrant we don't need philosophers to deal with metaphysics and epistomology, but we may need considerable more philosophical attention to questions like "what about a book has value?", or "what obligations do people have to each other in an unequal society?," or "what does it mean to be human?"

One of philosophy's main cutting edge agendas should be formulating new questions to ask and serving as an incubator from which to outline the boundaries of new disciplines of specialists to answer those questions.

Any summary of the discipline that is looks like an index of the last two thousand years of philosophical thought is probably missing the stuff that philosophers should be spending their time considering.

Alternately, one approach that many academic philosophers seem to be fond of taking is to consider themselves to be primarily intelllectual historians, with a particularly rich and subtle tradition to understand so that it can be understood by those who are primarily interested in the history of ideas. In the same way, Freud is a bad place to look for someone interesting in doing clinical psychology, but a good place to look for someone interesting in understanding the conceptual roots of lots of ideas that shaped by lay and professional understanding of the individual mind.

The philosophers I study under criticise the sciences for not being rigorous enough. The problem goes both ways. The sciences often do not understand the basic concepts from which they are functioning. A good scientist will also have a rudimentary understanding of philosophy, in order to fiddle with the background epistemology of their work.

You are correct in thinking that Continental philosophy is not continuous with the sciences, because it is the core of the humanities and as such being continuous with the sciences would be unnatural for it. I still think that asking questions about our connection to existence is interesting and important, although I personally do not find Continental philosophy as potentially fruitful as Analytic.

Intuitions are by no means accepted within the discipline as a whole, and are also an interesting topic of debate within it. Because philosophy is a highly speculative discipline it isn't going to be following a normal scientific model, but instead will model constant discovery. If you want to see where science connects up with philosophy what you should look at is the disciplines that end up coming out of philosophy as questions that can be answered scientifically. This is what we produce with regard to science.

Philosophy is the core of the academic disciplines. It isn't in the business of scientific inquiry and it should not be. Some philosophers are still looking for universal truths after all. Simply disagreeing with the idea of a priori does not make it go away.

It is good that you recognise there are problems in philosophy. Too many people take it as dogma and do not question the area they have explored. My advice is to take what you can from the discipline well keeping in mind that every piece you take comes with a centuries long dialogue.

Philosophy is usually negative. Change my mind.

What's weird is that you begin criticizing continental philosophy. Then you say that philosophers do not understand how their brain work, and what their intuition is (linking to an article which explains that our intuition of reality is not reality). But one of the main topic of continental philosophy, long before cognitive science existed, was to argue that we are in a sense trapped inside our cognitive situation with no way out, and for that reason, we cannot know what reality-in-itself is. It feels like you rediscovered Kant... I agree that continental philosophy as somehow derived to something obscure, and that analytic philosophy is much clearer. But it is also argued sometimes that analytic philosopher never read or cite past philosophers, and that they tend to ignore some large areas that have been widely discussed before. I would say this article illustrate that.

In these articles, I believe Less Wrong is approaching extraordinary levels of group think. I had the misfortune of growing up as the child of bona fide cult members, complete with guru. There are many similarities here.

And what is significantly absent is self-awareness of the blatant conceit in believing that some super smart dude can reinvent all thinking all-by-self (don't deny it, that's what's going on). I have been disgusted by articles written by Eleazar which virtually lifted whole swaths of Nietzsche, completely unattributed. There is no way that most of this is original thinking.

And I'll also point out to all the people with rationality blinders on that if the poor dumb sheeples (as appears to be the general attitude around here) get wind that you're anywhere close to installing super-awesome robot overlords that you are certain will rule with love and compassion, then we'll see an uprising which will make the French Revolution look like a love-in.

Really super disgusted. And I don't even give a shit about Wittgenstein. Though I think rationalists who believe they have found or are close to finding the key to living and thinking non-metaphorically are living in their own very delusional altered reality.

What's most ironic is that Less Wrong IS mainstream philosophy. Look around peeps, this IS the zeitgeist of the scientific set. Just because universities haven't caught up with you means Nothing. Get some self-awareness, this is pure and simply an advanced step in the progression of the Enlightenment, although more accurately it's an advanced step in scientific reason a-la the school of Socrates. Of course you're different, advanced, but you are a part of that specific genealogy. And this is the damning lack of awareness most present in this mindset. You are children of Enlightenment. (Go ahead, murder your fathers ;)

The analysis of mainstream philosophy is missing some key analytical components. Namely, the big picture: the nature, progression of change at, and priorities of academia overall. The political and social world in which that academic progression took shape. The rationalizations and biases supporting major universities as suppliers of ruling classes, as well as the rationalizations and biases of the academia in working class university, and of course the funding of all of the above, and how those shape thinking. Not exploring this issues is tantamount to not exploring the problem. It's just hand wringing.

And why this glaring lack? Those are the hard problems. Hard to talk about aren't they. Hell, all this philosophy debate sparks hundreds of comments, but this is a particularly abstract topic. 10% concrete development, 90% repainting the bike shed.

Here's my contribution to LW: the Fallacy of the Single Solution (to society's ills), i.e. AI; i.e. Rationality. Particularly abstract solutions, mind you. A lot of what goes on around here is quite Utilitarian, a point alone which should make people sit back and consider, "do we really have the knowledge and capabilities yet to resolve through advanced AI the serious unresolved problems of Utilitarianism?" I'd say that you'd better be Insanely Sure. The bar for evidence better be high, this is high-risk territory. Or, instead, are the Old Dead Guys who have discussed these problems Not Worth Reading either? "Stick with our dogma peeps, don't confuse yourselves!"...

..Oh man, when you're telling people "don't confuse yourselves with the old literature, you are in really altered reality. Wow. Cults.

Quite strange all the denial. But then again, that's what group think is all about.

I can see why philosophy is so bothersome to people who believe that rationality can and should be the only path to knowledge, and the equally troubled belief that reductionism applies to any science outside of physics.

So I have to ask: on what grounds do you rationally justify any of your own claims to Truth and Right? It certainly isn't through empiricism, despite the vile form of scientistic reductionism that is evangelized around these parts. There is a form of reasoning at work behind these claims, of course, but without a clear philosophical grounding you're left with a series of implicit, half-formed assumptions that you simply hold up as self-evident (they are not, which is why we have philosophy in the first place).

You will earn +5 points if you can justify any of your presuppositions regarding the superiority of "objectivity" and "rationality" as modes of inquiry without an appeal to metaphysics and the "magical categories" that your rationality-seeking brains reject a priori.