Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

Luke, do you have any ideas how to reform philosophy education and professional practice without antagonizing a lot of current professional philosophers and their students and having the debate degenerate into a blue-vs-green tribal fight? Or more generally see much chance of success for such an attempt? If not, maybe you should reframe your posts (or at least future ones) as being aimed at amateur philosophers, autodidacts, CS and math majors interested in doing FAI research, and the like?

Provocative article. I agree that philosophers should be reading Pearl and Kahneman. I even agree that philosophers should spend more time with Pearl and Kahneman (and lots of other contemporary thinkers) than they do with Plato and Kant. But then, that pretty much describes my own graduate training in philosophy. And it describes the graduate training (at a very different school) received by many of the students in the department where I now teach. I recognize that my experience may be unusual, but I wonder if philosophy and philosophical training really are the way you think they are.

Bearing in mind that my own experiences may be quite unusual, I present some musings on the article nonetheless:

(1) You seem to think that philosophical training involves a lot of Aristotelian ideas (see your entries for "pre-1980 theories of causation" and "term logic"). In my philosophical education, including as an undergraduate, I took two courses that were explicitly concerned with Aristotle. Both of them were explicitly labeled as "history of philosophy" courses. Students are sometimes taught bits of Aristotelian (and Medieval) syllogistic, but those ideas are never, so far as I know, the main things taught in logic (as opposed to history) courses. In the freshman-level logic course that I teach, we build a natural deduction system up through first-order logic (with identity), plus a bit of simplified axiomatic set theory (extensionality, an axiom for the empty set instead of the axiom of comprehension, pairing, union, and power set), and a bit of probability theory for finite sample spaces (since I'm not allowed to assume that freshmen have had calculus). We cover Aristotle's logic in less than one lecture, as a note on categorical sentences when we get to first-order logic. And really, we only do that because it is useful to see that "Some Ss are Ps" is the negation of "No Ss are Ps," before thinking about how to solve probability problems like finding the probability of at least one six in three tosses of a fair die. Critical thinking courses are almost always service courses directed at non-philosophers.

(2) You seem to think that philosophers do a lot of conceptual analysis, rather than empirical work. In my own philosophy education, I was told that conceptual analysis does not work and that with perhaps the exception of Tarski's analysis of logical consequence, there have been no successful conceptual analyses of philosophically interesting concepts. Moreover, I had several classes -- classes where the concern was with how people think (either in general or about specific things) -- where we paid attention to contemporary psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. In fact, restricting attention to material assigned in philosophy classes I have taken, you would find more Kahneman and Tversky than you would Plato or Kant. And you would also find a lot of other psychologists and cognitive scientists, including Gopnik, Cheng, Penn, Povinelli, Sloman, Wolff, Marr, Gibson, Damasio, and so on and so forth. Graduate students in my department are generally distrustful of their own intuitions and look for empirical ways to get at concepts (when they even care about concepts). For example, one excellent student in my department, Zach Horne, has been thinking a bit about the analysis of knowledge (which is by no means the central problem in contemporary epistemology), but he's attacking the problem via experiments involving semantic integration. And I've done my own experimental work on the analysis of knowledge, though the experiments were not as clever.

(3) You seem to think that philosophy before 1980 (why that date??) is not sufficiently connected to actual science to be worth reading, and that this is mostly what philosophers read. Both are, I think, incorrect claims.

With respect to the first claim, there is lots of philosophical work before 1980 that is both closely engaged with contemporaneous science and amazingly useful to read. Take a look at Carnap's article on "Testability and Meaning," or his book on The Logical Foundations of Probability. Read through Reichenbach's book on The Direction of Time. These books definitely repay close reading. All of Russell's work was written before 1980 -- since he died in 1970! Wittgenstein's later work is enormously useful for preventing unnecessary disputes about words, but it was written before 1980. This shouldn't be surprising. After all, lots of scientific, mathematical, and statistical work from before 1980 is well worth reading today. Lots of the heuristics and biases literature from the '70s is still great to read. Savage's Foundations of Statistics is definitely worth reading today. As is lots of material from de Finetti, Good, Turing, Wright, Neyman, Simon, and many others. Feynman's The Character of Physical Law was a lecture series delivered in 1960. Is it past its expiration date? It's not the place to go for cutting edge physics, but I would highly recommend it as reading for an undergraduate. I might assign a chunk of it in my undergraduate philosophy of science course next semester. (Unless you convince me it's a really, really bad idea.) Why think that philosophical work ages worse than scientific work?

With respect to the second claim, you might be right with respect to undergraduate education. On the other hand, undergraduate physics education isn't a whole lot better (if any), is it? But with respect to graduate training, it seems to me that if one is interested in contemporary problems, rather than caring about the history of ideas, one reads primarily contemporary philosophers. In a typical philosophy course on causation, I would guess you read more of David Lewis than anyone. But that's not so bad, since Lewis' ideas are very closely connected to Pearl on the one hand and the dominant approaches to causal inference in statistics on the other. The syllabus and reading lists for the graduate seminar on causation that I am just wrapping up teaching are here, in case you want to see the way I approach teaching the topic. I'll just note that in my smallish seminar (about eight people -- six enrolled for credit) two people are writing on decision theory, two are writing on how to use causal Bayes nets to do counterfactual reasoning, and one is writing on the contextual unanimity requirement in probabilistic accounts of causation. Only one person is doing what might be considered an historical project.

Rather than giving a very artificial cut-off date, it seems to me we ought to be reading good philosophy from whenever it comes. Sometimes, that will mean reading old-but-good work from Bacon or Boole or (yes) Kant or Peirce or Carnap. And that is okay.

(4) You seem to endorse Glymour's recommendation that philosophy departments be judged based on the external funding they pull in. On the other hand, you say there should be less philosophical work (or training at least) on free will. As I pointed out the first time you mentioned Glymour's manifesto, there is more than a little tension here, since work on free will (which you and I and probably Glymour don't care about) does get external funding. (In any event, this is more than a little odd, since it typically isn't the way funding of university departments works in the humanities, anyway, where most funding is tied to teaching rather than to research and where most salaries are pathetically small in comparison with STEM counterparts.) Where I really agree with Glymour is in thinking that philosophy departments ought to be shelter for iconoclasts. But in that case, philosophy should be understood to be the discipline that houses the weirdos. We should then keep a look-out for good ideas coming from philosophy, since those rare gems are often worth quite a lot, but we also shouldn't panic when the discipline looks like it's run by a bunch of weirdos. In fact, I think this is pretty close to being exactly what contemporary philosophy actually is as a discipline.

I'm sure I could say a lot more, but this comment is already excessively long. Perhaps the take-away should be this. Set aside the question of how philosophy is taught now. I am receptive to teaching philosophy in a better way. I want the best minds to be studying and doing philosophy. (And if I can't get that, then I would at least like the best minds to see that there is value in doing philosophy even if they decide to spend their effort elsewhere.) If I can pull in the best people by learning and teaching more artificial intelligence or statistics or whatever, I'm game. I teach a lot of that now, but even if I didn't, I hope I would be more interested in inspiring people to learn and think and push civilization forward than in business as usual.

EDIT: I guess markdown language didn't like my numbering scheme. (I really wish we had a preview window for comments.)

Hinman, Fundamentals of Mathematical Logic

It's a graduate level text; to benefit from it adequately, one should have at least a pure math undergraduate major worth of training, including the first courses in naive set theory and formal logic. A text that's too advanced for one's level risks confusing the reader, introducing intuitive misconceptions and giving the illusion of understanding, so it's better to read up on something much more basic. This book might be a long term goal that contributes to shaping the curriculum, but then it should be understood that there are at least 20 books before it on the reading list.

I agree that modern science provides valuable insights into philosophical problems. I also agree that Bayesian probability theory and machine learning are powerful models for approaching problems in epistemology. This is why I'm in grad school in machine learning, and not for philosophy. Furthermore, I'm not a big fan of ancient philosophers (especially ones who think categories are absolute), and I'd like to see the computational theory of mind excised from popular thought, in favor of something closer to embodied cognition. I actually really like the idea of incorporating modern theories and empirical discoveries into a philosophical curriculum.

Despite this, I have a strong negative reaction to your post, because it suggests there is One True Way to do philosophy and that everyone who does not follow the Ways of Bayes is doing it wrong. The last thing I want us teaching students is any kind of absolutism. It can only damage students to tell them that our current models are the true models, and all past thinkers were necessarily wrong. It would also damage students to restrict them to one philosophical viewpoint; as much as I like Bayesian reasoning and empiricism, I think it would hurt students to teach them that these methods are the One True Way, because it would prevent them from exploring alternative viewpoints.

I think that students of philosophy should be taught as many theories as possible, both ancient and modern. By coming to understand the diverse range of models that we've applied over the course of human history, students can learn some humility. Just as all of these past models were superceded, our current theories will inevitably be replaced. Just as we can spot the glaring errors in past philosophical models, the people of the future will spot the "obvious" follies in our own ideas.

Also, the more models that students learn, the more "degrees of freedom" they will realize exist. They will come to understand along which dimensions worldviews can vary; they can then explore other options for these dimensions, or discover new dimensions that no one has tried varying yet. I strongly believe that learning more worldviews is a powerful method of keeping one's mind flexible enough to come up with genuinely new ideas.

Lastly, as much as I love mathematical models and rigorous empiricism, I oppose the trend of applying them haphazardly to the social sciences. If we're studying e.g. anthropology, I think it's a mistake to favor statistical data over first-hand accounts or subjective analyses. Not because there's anything inherently wrong with empirical and statistical methods, but because the models we use are too simple. There are so many features, and it's hard to account for all of them, both because we don't know which features to choose, and because inference is computationally intractable in such an enormous model. Fortunately, the typical human brain comes prepackaged with empathy and a theory of mind, a powerful module for modeling the behaviors/preferences/internal experiences of other humans. Certainly, this module is subject to biases and might make systematic errors when reasoning. But when choosing between two imperfect models, I tend to think our built-in circuitry is better suited for the social sciences than tools of machine learning. I assume that our built-in intuitive machinery is useful for some branches of philosophy as well.

Without any comment on if the post is correct or not, I want to note that if the sequences have done their job LWers will not be pursuaded by this post. It looks at a large number of abstracts, picks a non representive (and small) sample and then quotes them to make them salient in the reader's mind.

It could have been made more convincing by using a less biased sampling such as generating 3 random numbers for each journal, than multiplying by the number of total articles in the journal and then posting the abstract for those articles.

I have a feeling I will have a lot to say about this posting, but I will start with one small issue: what is the watershed that occurred in metaphycs circa 1980? I'm pretty sure the Wikipedia article isn't going to tell me, because I wrote the "history and schools" section.

When you say things like "More machine learning, more physics, more game theory, more math", what I hear is, "more of anything that's not philosophy".

For example, Machine Learning alone is a topic whose understanding requires a semi-decent grounding in math, computer science, and practical programming. That's at least a year of study for someone with an IQ over 150, and probably something like three or four years for the rest of us. And that's just one topic; you list others as well. It sounds like you want us to just stop doing philosophy altogether, and stick to the more useful stuff.

Philosophical training should begin with the latest and greatest formal methods....and the latest and greatest science

We certainly don't start science students off with the latest and greatest science, because there's a boatload of other science they have to study before it'll do them any good. In practice,almost everything we teach undergrads in hard science fields is pre-1980, because of the amount of time it takes to get a student up to speed with where the frontier of the field had progressed to by 1980.

So if I had to design an intro to philosophy/first-year philosophy course (and I will), at the moment I would do this:

There are four ideas in philosophy which stand above the others as ideas which have shaped our thinking and our civilization to the point where you've probably heard of these before you came to class: Plato's theory of forms, Aristotle's theory of causes, Descartes' 'Cogito ergo sum', and Kant's categorical imperative. The aim of this course is to understand what philosophy is, and why one should engage in it.

The course will discuss the writings of these four philosophers:

Plato- Selections from Plato's Republic and Phaedo

Aristotle- Physics book I and II, and III.1, and De Anima II.1, 5.

Descartes- The Meditations

Kant- Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

That's my thought. I'm a frequent reader, and sometimes poster on Less Wrong. I'm also going to be teaching undergraduates philosophy in about two years, and right now my idea of how to go about doing this is very different from yours. I very much do not want to do a bad job, or hurt my students, so if I'm wrong, I should be convinced otherwise.

Maybe it wasn't your purpose, but there's no argument in this post. Please, please, please present an argument. You (or whoever wants to try) would be doing me a very great benefit by correcting me on this, if indeed I am wrong.

Minor nitpick:

Those aren't the world's top 5 philosophy departments, those are the top 5 for the United States. In the rankings for the English-speaking world, Oxford is #2 after NYU (after that the rankings are the same until you get down to ANU and Toronto, which are tied with a bunch of other schools for #15).

Furthermore, the Philosophical Gourmet Report doesn't try to compare English-speaking and non-English-speaking universities.

Playing Devil's Advocate...

As Eliezer has argued, it would be greatly beneficial if science were kept secret. It would be wonderful if students had the opportunity to make scientific discoveries on their own, and being trained to think that way would greatly advance the rate of scientific progress. Making a scientific breakthrough would be something a practicing scientist would be used to, rather than something that happens once a generation, and so it would happen more reliably. Rather than having science textbooks, students could start with old (wrong) science textbooks or just looking at the world, and they'd have to make all their own mistakes along the way to see what making a breakthrough really involves.

This is how Philosophy is already taught! While many philosophers have opinions on what Philosophical questions have already been settled, they do not put forth their opinions straightforwardly to undergrads. Rather, students are expected to read the original works and figure out for themselves what's wrong with them.

For example, students might learn about the debate between Realism and Nominalism, and then be expected to write a paper about which one they think is correct (or neither). Sure, we could just tell them the entire debate was confused, but then we won't be training future philosophers in the same way we would like to train future scientists. The students should be able to work out for themselves what the problems were, so that they will be able to make philosophical breakthroughs in the future.

r/philosophy is not amused by this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/14e815/train_philosophers_with_pearl_and_kahneman_not/

As a philosophy student with a great interest in math and computing, I can definitely attest to the lack of scientific understanding in my department. Worse, it often seems like some professors actively encourage an anti-scientific ideology. I'm wondering if anybody has any practical ideas on how to converse with students and professors [who are not supportive or knowledgeable of the rationalist and Bayesian world-view] in a positive and engaging way.

The things on your curriculum don't seem like philosophy at all in the contemporary sense of the word. They are certainly very valuable at figuring out the answers to concrete questions within their particular domains. But they are less useful for understanding broader questions about the domains themselves or the appropriateness of the questions. Learning formal logic, for example, isn't that much help in understanding what logic is. Likewise, knowing how people make moral decisions is not at all the same as knowing what the moral thing to do would be. I gather your point is that it's only certain concrete questions that have any real meaning.

This naive logical positivism is dismaying in a blog about rationality. I certainly agree that there is plenty of garbage philosophy, and that most of Aristotle's scientific claims were wrong. But the problem with logical positivism is that its claim about what's meaningful and what isn't fails to be a meaningful claim under its own criteria.

Your dismissal of certain types of philosophy inevitably rests on particular implicit answers to the kinds of philosophical questions you dismiss as worthless (like what makes a philosophical idea wrong?). Dismissing those questions—failing to think through the assumptions on which your viewpoint rests—only guarantees that your answers to those questions will be pretty bad. And that's something that you could learn from a careful reading of Plato.

Your examples of bad philosophy ... your reasons why they are bad ... aargh! Apparently it's bad to (1) reason about psychology (2) use the ideas of ancient philosophers (3) argue about definitions (4) mention religion at all. (I'm just guessing that this is the problem with the last item in the list.)

So far as I can see, the only problem you should have with papers 1 and 3 is that they're not sexy enough to hold your interest. They're not bursting at the seams with citations of experimental psychology or computational epistemology. Really, you shouldn't dismiss paper 2 as you do either, but I concede that seeing value in the psychological reflections of antiquity would require unusual broadmindedness. (Paper 4 is just oddball and I won't try to defend it as a representative of an important and unjustly maligned class of philosophical research.)

Concerning your curriculum for philosophy students, well, such zeal as yours is the basis for the renewal of a subject, but in the end I still think something like Plato and Kant would be a better foundation than Pearl and Kahneman. Causal diagrams and behavioral economics do not touch the why of causation or the how of conscious knowledge. If they were not complemented by something that promoted an awareness of the issues that these formalisms inherently do not answer, then philosophically they would define just another dogma parading itself as truth.

Below this line is the part I cut from the original article.

Below are some quotes from the abstracts of recent papers appearing in the top 5 philosophy journals, along with my reactions.

Abstract #1:

Theoretical and practical deliberation are voluntary activities, and like all voluntary activities, they are performed for reasons. To hold that all voluntary activities are performed for reasons in virtue of their relations to past, present, or even merely possible acts of deliberation thus leads to infinite regresses and related problems. As a consequence, there must be processes that are nondeliberative and nonvoluntary but that nonetheless allow us to think and act for reasons, and these processes must be the ones that generate the voluntary activities making up ordinary deliberation... (Deliberation and Acting for Reasons)

What are you doing? We have experimental psychology now.

Abstract #2:

This article examines Aristotle's model of deliberation as inquiry (zêtêsis), arguing that Aristotle does not treat the presumption of open alternatives as a precondition for rational deliberation... (Deliberation as Inquiry)

Please move to the history department. Philosophy is supposed to be an inquiry into how reality works, not a collection of musings about the possible meaning of ancient, ignorant writings.

Abstract #3:

According to ‘orthodox’ epistemology, it has recently been said, whether or not a true belief amounts to knowledge depends exclusively on truth-related factors: for example, on whether the true belief was formed in a reliable way, or was supported by good evidence, and so on... In the first part of this paper I try to clarify the intellectualist thesis and to distinguish what I take to be its two main strains... (On Intellectualism in Epistemology)

Another paper arguing about the definition of "knowledge"? No thanks.

Abstract #4:

...many who do not believe in God nevertheless regard certain pieces of religious music, such as Bach’s B minor Mass, as among the greatest works of art. The worry is that there must be something compromised or incomplete in the atheist’s experience of such works. Taken together, these thoughts would seem to point to the sceptical conclusion that the high regard in which many atheists hold works such as the B minor Mass must itself be compromised... (Religious Music for Godless Ears)

Okay, now you're just trolling.

This post has a number of useful insights, but I'm not so sure about this:

Beginning with Plato and Kant (and company), as most universities do today, . . . teaches people to revere failed philosophical methods that are out of touch with 20th century breakthroughs in math and science.

As someone who is currently studying philosophy at the undergraduate level--and thus has first-hand knowledge of what it is like to start with Plato and Kant--I don't quite see where you're getting the claim that starting with ancient philosophers either (1) in fact teaches students to revere them/their methods, or (2) is at least meant to teach students to revere them/their methods. My own experience, what I've heard from fellow students, and the academic papers that we are actually assigned to read all run counter to your claim.

First, one of the primary, if not the main, purposes in starting with ancient philosophers is precisely to discuss how and where they went wrong. The professor does not just tell us whether a certain philosopher is right/wrong, but has the students critically evaluate that philosopher's claims both in papers and in discussions. Second, there are numerous academic articles written on their claims (just by virtue of the fact that they are ancient philosophers), which in turn means that those articles--and their arguments--combined with the students' own analyses provide a substantial foundation for 'critical thinking.' Third, regardless of the ancient philosophers' specific claims, the manner in which they argue for their conclusions and critically think themselves is tremendously helpful--both as a model to emulate and to not emulate--for students just starting to learn what constitutes a good argument. A charitable reading, which in particular recognizes the historical context, will show that many of the ancient philosophers do make good arguments, and value precision and rigor in so arguing; of course, many specific empirical claims are wrong, but insofar as those depend on context and not on poor argumentation they are irrelevant.

I do think that there is much wrong with philosophy, but that specific claim you made is a little shaky (and underspecified).

So I have a couple of problems with this post.

Firstly, I think that luke simply has a very different idea of what philosophy ought to be doing compared to most philosophers. For example, most philosophers think that doing a fair amount of what is (more or less explicitly) History of Philosophy is a) of independent interest b) useful for training new philosophers and c) potentially fruitful.

I'm not terribly convinced by a), I have some sympathy with b) (many classic philosophers are surprisingly convincing and it's worth taking the time to figure out why they're wrong), and I strongly disagree with c) (if they had good insights, there should be better presentations of them by now!). I think the disagreement about a) is the most important, however, as it indicates a simple difference in what people are trying to do with philosophy.

On that ground it just seems childish of luke to criticise Article #2 on the grounds that it's really history: of course it is, that's part of what philosophy departments do. So luke wants to change the way philosophy tends to be done, fine, but it's churlish to assume that that's the way things already are and that the current practitioners are just bad at it.

Secondly, I think I disagree with luke about what a lot of philosophy is trying to do. Luke finds a lot of so-called "linguistic" philosophy frustrating because he doesn't feel it solves problems that are "out there". I'd say that it's not trying to. The clearest way I can think of to put it is like this: philosophy is often trying to solve the problems that ordinary people come up against when they use words. In that situation it's highly relevant to find out, say, what they mean by the word "knowledge", as otherwise your answers will have no relevance to the epistemic concepts they actually use.

Philosophers aren't trying to build an AI, so they're not usually so interested in the ideal epistemology. They're interested in what humans are doing. And that involves a lot of probing the language that humans use. In particular, the much-maligned thought-experiments and "intuitions" are actually perfectly respectable data about what the author, as a competent language-user thinks about the words in question (which is what the author in article #3 is presumably trying to do in a specialised way). I think it's a confusion to think that thought-experiments are meant to tell us about the deep structure of the world! (admittedly, this is a mistake that is made by some philosophers!)

Basically, luke wants to do something completely different to most philosophers, and so is confused that they don't seem to be doing what he wants them to do.

Couple of other things:

• For the record, I think that plenty of philosophers write lots of bullshit, but then so does everyone else. Philosophy is hard, people go astray.
• Article #4... it's discussing some of the potential implications of atheism with regards to people's responses to various artworks. What's so problematic?

I am curious about the qualifier "pre-1980." Do you think later work in these disciplines is noticeably better?

There is some interesting discussion at Hacker News about this article.

I was going to say something about the ease of which I can come up with obviously confused or unimportant "science" abstracts, but then I realized I was missing the point. Philosophy can be improved (and probably more easily than science) and your proposed introductory sequence is actually pretty good.

Luke, this is my first comment on LessWrong so forgive me if I'm missing some of the zeitgeist. But I was wondering if you could elaborate on a couple points:

You recommend replacing ethics with moral psychology and decision theory. Hearing that, I'm concerned that replacing ethics with moral psychology would be falling for a naive is/ought fallacy: just because most people's psychological makeup makes them consider morality in a certain way does not make those moral intuitions correct. And replacing ethics with decision theory would be sidestepping the metaethical question about the legitimacy of consequentialism.

You've also left out any political theory from your syllabus. That is disappointing, since one of the roles that philosophy plays when performing at its best is uniting epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Plato and Kant, for example, were attempting to do that. How do you see your curriculum weighing in on questions like "What is justice?"

As for my background, I studied cognitive science as an undergraduate with a focus on complexity theory and artificial intelligence, but have also spent a lot of time reading and discussing other philosophy. While I think I understand the thrust of your argument (it's one I would have made myself when I was an undergrad), I've been since convinced of the value of other schools of thought.

I'd argue that, say, continental philosophers are not as sloppy as computer scientists or analytically trained philosophers accuse them of. Rather they have a specialized vocabulary (just like other specialists) for some very difficult but powerful concepts. Often these concepts pertain to social and political life. These concepts aren't easily reducible to a naturalized cognitivist wordview because they deal with transpersonal phenomena. That doesn't mean they lack utility though.

Working in philosophy, I see some move toward this, but it is slow and scattered. The problem is probably partially historical: philosophy PhDs trained in older methods train their students, who become philosophy PhDs trained in their professor's methods+anything that they could weasel into the system which they thought important. (which may not always be good modifications, of course)

It probably doesn't help that your average philosophy grad student starts off by TAing a bunch of courses with a professor who sets up the lecture and the material and the grading standards. Or that a young professor needs to clear classes in an academic structure. It definitely doesn't help that philosophy has a huge bias toward historical works, as you point out.

None of these are excuses, of course. Just factors that slow down innovation in teaching philosophy. (which, of course, slows down the production of better philosophical works)

(2) 20th century philosophers who were way too enamored with cogsci-ignorant armchair philosophy.

This made me chuckle. Truth is often funny.

Downvoted for sloganeering and applause-lighting.

Speaking as someone who has read a lot of philosophy...

If I had a boatload of money, I would currently be throwing it at you to make this thing happen.

When I saw the title "Religious Music for Godless Ears," I was sure it would be in some second rate journal, maybe Religious Studies at best. But nope! It's in freakin' Mind.

Is this problem limited to philosophy?

Good work in virtually every discipline requires a semi-decent grounding in math (with the possible exception of menial work)

• History? math
• Linguistics? math
• Medicine? math
• Philosophy? math
• And why not: Art? math

Indeed, the universities teaching such subjects would do well to realize this and make math an integral part of the curriculum in most subjects, as opposed to the tackled-on (or non-existent) math courses they have now.

R> lw <- read.csv("2012.csv")
R> lwa <- subset(lw, !is.na(AutismScore))
R> levels(lwa$MoralViews)
[1] " "                                     "Accept / lean toward consequentialism"
[3] "Accept / lean toward deontology"       "Accept / lean toward virtue ethics"
[5] "Other / no answer"
R> lwa <- subset(lwa, as.character(MoralViews) != " " & as.character(MoralViews) != "Other / no answer")
R> cor.test(lwa$AutismScore, as.integer(lwa$MoralViews))

    Pearson's product-moment correlation

data:  lwa$AutismScore and as.integer(lwa$MoralViews)
t = 0.1663, df = 289, p-value = 0.868
alternative hypothesis: true correlation is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
 -0.1053  0.1246
sample estimates:
     cor
0.009783

I like this post. Can you think of any pre-20th century philosophers whose works you still hold to be valid/useful today? [or from that list, any pre-21st century...]

Someone asked me via PM, in reference to this post, "Do you have any specific recommendations on the most useful fields, ideas, or techniques thus far [for solving FAI-related philosophical problems]?" I figure I'd answer here publicly in case anyone else finds my answer helpful. This is a list of topics that I studied over the years that I think contributed most to what philosophical progress I managed to make. (The order given here is not very significant. It's just roughly the order in which I encountered and started studying these topics.)

• evolutionary biology and psychology
• computer science (theory of computation, algorithms, data structures, OS, compiler, languages)
• math (number theory, probability, statistics)
• cryptography
• game theory
• anthropic reasoning / indexical uncertainty
• Tegmark's Ultimate Ensemble
• algorithmic information theory, AIXI
• logic, recusion theory
• decision theory
• philosophy of science, philosophy of math, ethics

Another view of Philosophy, which I believe Russell also subscribed to (but I can't seem to find a reference for presently) is that philosophy was the 'mother discipline'. It was generative. You developed your branch of Philosophy until you got your ontology and methodology sorted out, and then you stopped calling what you were doing philosophy. (This has the amusing side-effect of making anything philosophers say wrong by definition-- sometimes useful, but always wrong.)

The Natural Sciences, Psychology, Logic, Mathematics, Linguistics-- they all got their start this way.

That's how Philosophy used to work. Nowadays, I think the people who can do that type of "mucking around with complex questions of ontology and methodology" thinking have largely moved on to other disciplines. If we define Philosophy as this messily complex discipline-generating process, it no longer happens in the discipline we call "Philosophy".[1]

That said--- while I would personally enjoy the "intro to philosophy" syllabus Luke proposes, I think it's a stretch to label the course a philosophy course, much less [The One And True] Intro To Philosophy. It's cool and a great idea, but the continuity with many models (be they aspirational or descriptive) of Philosophy is fairly tenuous, and without a lot of continuity I think it'd be hard to push into established departments.[2]

If we're speaking more modestly, that philosophers should be steeped in modern science and logic and that when they're not, what they do is often worse than useless, I can certainly agree with that.

[1] E.g., Axiology.

[2] Why not call it "introduction to scientific epistemology"?

I'm not sure if this really applies to philosophers in general or just a few that have been commenting here, but I think I've found one source of friction. It seems that SI/Luke care about problems/questions that are different enough from what philosophers think their field is about for even good(by its own standards) philosophy to be largely worthless for SI's purposes, while still being similar enough on the surface for a lot of destructive interference to happen. By destructive interference I mean things like LWers thinking that phil should have relevant answers because it addresses similar sounding questions, third parties thinking that SI type work belongs in phil journals/departments/grant slots even when its not really appropriate to that venue, having irrelevant phil papers pop up due to overloaded keywords ect.

There don't seem to be anything that shouldn't be changed, and thus it seems meaningless to keep the label "philosophy". Hence why I object to saying LW is about philosophy as well. The ONLY similarity is that it tries to resolve questions (previously) though to be the domain of philosophy to solve, but that used to be the case with many other things that are now their own sciences. I say just plain scrap all of philosophy, and move all the supposed tasks of it that are worth keeping over to new fields if they aren't resolved by existing ones already.

Would you consider turning this knowledge into an actual curriculum that includes practice problems and exams?

I'm thinking of something in the lines of MIT's free curriculum and Khan Academy's Math section. I have no problem with still linking to these text books as long as the freely available curriculum made by you or your team fills the gaps and there are plenty of ways to test understanding. I name khan's math section specifically because it uses that infinite practice problems and 10 in a row signals proficiency and has built in SRS.

Unlike khan however i would want to see mastery of whatever is the current status of the field instead of the low target of a certain school's exam requirements.

And here's a philosopher correcting a scientist

"The interconnection of neuroscience and free will has many researchers trying to make bold claims about their findings. In my last post I called Sam Harris’ conclusion that “free will is an illusion” into question. Specifically, I suggested that there were competing interpretations that could be made from the data that neuroscientist Benjamin Libet was using to debunk free will (I mentioned Al Mele’s interpretation as a counterexample to Libet’s). Finally, some neuroscientists seem to have considered Mele’s suggestion (though interestingly I read no reference to Mele) and did some science to test his alternative interpretation. It turns out that Mele was right,and in turn, that Libet was a bit hasty with his conclusion, as was Sam Harris. Click here for the New Scientist article detailing the study. So it seems that the criticisms I levied against Harris might have more sticking power as a result. Seems that Libet has been debunked and not free will. Below you’ll find some central points directly taken from the New Scientist article."

Much of professional analytic philosophy makes my heart sink too. Reading Kant isn't fun - even if he gains in translation. But I don't think we can just write off Kant's work, let alone the whole of still unscientised modern philosophy. In particular, Kant's exploration of what he calls "The Transcendental Unity of Apperception" (aka the unity of the self) cuts to the heart of the SIAI project - not least the hypothetical and allegedly imminent creation of unitary, software-based digital mind(s) existing at some level of computational abstraction. No one understands how organic brains manage to solve the binding problem (cf. http://lafollejournee02.com/texts/body_and_health/Neurology/Binding.pdf) - let alone how to program a classical digital computer to do likewise. The solution IMO bears on everything from Moravec's Paradox (why is a sesame-seed-brained bumble bee more competent in open-field contexts than DARPA's finest?) to the alleged prospect of mind uploading, to the Hard Problem of consciousness.

Presumably, superintelligence can't be more stunted in its intellectual capacities than biological humans. Therefore, hypothetical nonbiological AGI will need a capacity to e.g. explore multiple state spaces of consciousness; close Levine's Explanatory Gap (cf. http://cognet.mit.edu/posters/TUCSON3/Levine.html) map out the "neural correlates of consciousness"; and investigate qualia that natural selection hasn't recruited for any information-processing purpose at all. Yet classical digital computers are still zombies. No one understands how classical digital computers (or a massively classically parallel connectionist architecture, etc) could be otherwise / or indeed have any insight into their zombiehood. [At this point, some hard-nosed behaviourist normally interjects that biological robots _are_zombies - and qualia are a figment of the diseased philosophical imagination. Curiously, the behaviourist never opts to forgo anaesthesia before surgery. Why not save money and permit his surgeons to use merely muscle relaxants to induce muscular paralysis instead?]

The philosophy of language?Anyone who believes in the possibility of singleton AGI should at least be aware of Wittgenstein's Anti-Private Language Argument. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein_on_Rules_and_Private_Language) What is the nature of the linguistic competence, i.e. the capacity for meaning and reference, possessed by a notional singleton superintelligence?

Anyone who has studied Peter Singer - or Gary Francione - may wonder if the idea of distinctively Human-Friendly AGI is even intellectually coherent. (cf. "Aryan-Friendly" AGI or "Cannibal-Friendly" AGI?) Why not an impartial Sentience-Friendly AGI?

Hostility to "philosophical" questions has sometimes had intellectually and ethically catastrophic consequences in the natural sciences. Thus the naive positivism of the Copenhagen school retarded progress in pre-Everett quantum mechanics for over half a century. Everett himself, despairing at the reception of his work, went off to work for the Pentagon designing software targeting cities in thermonuclear war. In countless quasi-classical Everett branches, his software was presumably used in nuclear Armageddon.

And so forth...

Note that I'm not arguing that SIAI / lesswrongers don't have illuminating responses to all of the points above (and more!), merely that it might be naive to suggest that all of modern philosophy, Kant, and even Plato (cf. the Allegory of the Cave) are simply irrelevant. The price of ignoring philosophy isn't to transcend it but simply to give bad philosophical assumptions a free pass. History suggests that generation after generation believes they have finally solved all the problems of philosophy; and time and again philosophy buries its gravediggers.

But this time is different? Maybe...

You seem to want philosophers to start being generalists who understand the cutting edge that science and math have to offer. But what kind of contributions do you expect them to make: some examples where a philosopher added critical insight because of his/her generalist background would be nice. Clark Glymour was a good one, but his work seems to have been just math and CS (I maybe wrong). Do you think his background as a generalist made it more likely for him to achieve his insights, compared to say someone with just a math or CS background?

Also, do you expect that the kind of philosophers you are proposing could someday be hired by the private sector?

Thank you for clearly expressing what is wrong with the current state of philosophy as practiced by professional philosophers. It sums up my own vague reservations pretty well. (Yes, I know, confirming evidence bias.) Catchy title, too. The next time I hear someone quoting Plato or Kant, I'll be tempted to reply "Bzzt! wrong P&K!".

I see you're point. Many philosophers still like reading and writing about dead people rather than looking to science for entertainment and answers. However, it is a hasty generalization to infer from this fact that "philosophy is a diseased discipline which spends much of its time debating definitions, ignoring relevant scientific results, and endlessly re-interpreting old dead guys who didn't know the slightest bit of 20th century science." And it is a bit myopic to think that your suggestion has not already been addressed by numerous institutions.

Plenty of philosophers study contemporary science and statistics about as much as philosophy. I myself am very interested in understanding philosophical cognition, and I am by no means alone in that interest.

The reason most departments do not teach what you want them to teach is because almost no one in a philosophy department specializes in what you are after, otherwise they would not be (solely) in the philosophy department. So to do what you want, universities would have to offer philosophy degrees that are interdisciplinary...and they already do. CU Boulder, UCSD, and GSU all offer PhDs in philosophy and neuroscience, for example.

This post has me wondering if we should make basic philosophy (and by basic I do not mean "ancient") compulsory for computer science, engineering, and science majors. Perhaps that would obviate the need for unwarranted commentary like this post.

Dogmas of analytic philosophy, part 1/2 and part 2/2 by Massimo Pigliucci in his Rationally Speaking blog.

"old dead guys" is mind kill, and it sounds immature/impolite.

On the post itself, it'd be awesome if SIAI starts this in-house, something along the lines of semester long CFAR boot camp.

The undergrad majors at Yale University typically follow lukeprog's suggestion -- there will be 20 classes on stuff that is thought to constitute cutting-edge, useful "political science" or "history" or "biology," and then 1 or 2 classes per major on "history of political science" or "history of history" or "history of biology." I think that's a good system. It's very important not to confuse a catalog of previous mistakes with a recipe for future progress, but for the same reasons that general history is interesting and worthwhile for the general public to know something about, the history of a given discipline is interesting and worthwhile for students of that discipline to look into.

Hume and Nietzsche are both excellent exceptions to your general rule.

Also, #4 seems completely fine to me.

Weatherson ask what could be done in other departments. R: all the formal methods(logic, decision and game theory), and empirical like x-phi. Besides, I don't want shut down philosophy departments, but I will be happy if they move to something like CMU + cogsci.

So I've made this sort of argument before in a somewhat more limited form. The analogy I like to give is that we don't spend multiple semesters in chemistry discussing the classical elements and phlogiston (even though phlogiston did actually give testable predictions(contrary to some commonly made claims on LW). We mention them for a few days and go on. But in this context, while I'd favor less emphasis on the old philosophers, they are still worth reading to a limited extent, because they did phrase many of the basic questions (even if imprecisely) that are still relevant, and are necessary to understand the verbiage of contemporary discourse. Some of them even fit in with ideas that are connected to things that people at LW care about. For example, Kant's categorical imperative is very close to a decision-theory or game theory approach if one thinks about it as asking "what would happen if everyone made the choice that I do?" Even Pearl is writing in a context that assumes a fair bit of knowlege about classical notions. What is therefore I think needed is not a complete rejection of older philosophers, but a reduction in emphasis.

Great post.

I wonder is this study-list also good enough for applied psychology? I would like to learn Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and as you point out above most studies are flawed.

If this post post is not enough could you write another one answering my question?

I studied a philosophy module during my undergraduate in the UK. I noticed that the course was structured very carefully so that in the exam there were two ways of succeeding. (1) Having a very good memory of who had said what, and the ability to write something "English-literature-y" about what they had said. Here I noticed a strong taste for worrying about how stylishly things were said. (2) Doing something more on the logic side of things - this felt much more natural and more precise (less wooly) to me. Now, I have been told that in most mainland European coutnires option (2) is less emphasised and its more squarely of an essay-based humanity.  

There is nothing wrong with thing (1) existing. I prefer thing (2), and clearly so do you. But I think maybe making the argument "we should drive out (1) to make more space for (2)" is wrong, and a better line is "they should be seperate courses". (Perhaps with the names "Ancient Thought" and "Modern Philosophy".)

I am surprised by how much science you bring up. I would assume that scientific advancement will only tangentially change most philosophy. Yes, we no longer think there are only 4 elements (fire, earth etc), but in a modern clasification that would be labelled a scientific theroy (an incorrect one, but still a scientific one).

You recommend Howson & Urbach's "Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach." However, ET Jaynes had some fairly harsh things to say about this book in the References section of PT:LoS:

A curiously outdated work, which might have served a useful purpose 60 years earlier. Mostly a rehash of all the false starts of philosophers in the past, while offering no new insight into them and ignoring the modern developments by scientists, engineers, and economists which have made them obsolete. What little positive Bayesian material there is represents a level of understanding that Harold Jeffreys had surpassed 50 years earlier, minus the mathematics needed to apply it. They persist in the pre-Jeffreys notation, which fails to indicate the prior information in a probability symbol, take no note of nuisance parameters, and solve no problems.

I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing that I expect Jaynes to be right about though. He would certainly know what modern developments were missing, but I don't know if he can judge what's needed in a textbook on philosophy of science.

Are his criticisms here correct? Instead of reading Howson & Urbach, should I be looking for a book that contains what Jaynes says it's missing, and does not contain what Jaynes says is obselete?

http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=6424

(1) old dead guys who were wrong about almost everything because they knew nothing of modern logic, probability theory, or science

I'd argue the old dead guys where much less wrong on a great many things where modern popular educated opinion is not informed by logic, probability theory and science. From the ones you cited I gained non-trivial insight by reading Aristotle and Nietzsche (haven't gotten around to Kant). Feelings of insight on their own probably should be mistrusted, but besides it being an indicator of them being interesting I think they are probably right on many matters.

Not that I'm disagreeing with your proscription as those bits are never steel manned so as to take into account modern discoveries, but worse systematically rendered intellectually impotent by the way they are taught about. Furthermore most of those observations should be studied by branches other than philosophy (though I really like Aristotle's approach to virtue).

Also can I just ask why you used "guys" instead of using a more gender neutral tag of philosophers or thinkers? I don't think their sex is at all relevant to their philosophical failings or successes. They where separated by a social and cultural gap that is much larger than the one that usually exists between people of a different sex in a given society. The raw underlying biology probably does cause a systematic effect, but it isn't anything not shared by the branches of modern philosophy you champion, the other sciences or even LessWrong for that matter.

Are you trying to piggyback on or carrying this meme? Or do you just comply with the convention of using male pronouns and the like as default?