LessWrong opinion of Nietzsche?

The modifier "rationalist" is pretty unnecessary - I'd just ask for "Opinions on Nietzsche". There seems no good reason for putting it in and several good ones for leaving it out. As a semantic point, it sends off dark arts alarms when you ask for the "rationalist opinion" on Nietzsche. While I certainly think that, in this case, it's possible to rationally evaluate Nietzsche, asking for consensus of "rationalist opinions" is going to get very cultish - it implies that you're not a rationalist if you disagree. And there shouldn't necessarily be a "rationalist opinion" on everything. There are some things that aren't issues of rationality - like asking for the "rationalist opinion" on what the best flavor of ice cream is.

Funny, this post just made me open "Human, All Too Human" for the first time after several years, and I was struck by many quotes that I now see in a different light thanks in part to the influence of Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong.

Some examples (all emphasis mine):

• Just as the bones, flesh, intestines, and blood vessels are enclosed by skin, which makes the sight of a man bearable, so the stirrings and passions of the soul are covered up by vanity: it is the skin of the soul.

• Man is very well defended against himself, against his own spying and sieges; usually he is able to make out no more of himself than his outer fortifications. The actual stronghold is inaccessible to him, even invisible, unless friends and enemies turn traitor and lead him there by a secret path.

• We praise or find fault, depending on which of the two provides more opportunity for our powers of judgment to shine.

• When a man tries earnestly to liberate his intellect, his passions and desires secretly hope to benefit from it also.

• In interaction with people, a benevolent dissembling is often required, as if we did not see through the motives for their behavior.

• Sometimes in conversation the sound of our own voice confuses us and misleads us to assertions that do not at all reflect our opinion.

• It is much more common for a person to appear to have character because he always acts in accord with his temperament, rather than because he always acts in accord with his principles.

This month I had an interesting* conversation with Michael Vassar about Nietzsche.

Nietzsche (in one popular interpretation) thought that ripping Christianity out of the European value system would undermine it, leading to nihilism and the collapse of society. Of course, Christianity is false, but European morality is built upon the Christian worldview even when the Christian vocabulary is not used to describe it.

Vassar pointed out that this collapse into nihilistic anti-productivity in general had not occurred with the spread of atheism, but was, he felt, unusually common in the LessWrong community. (Perhaps this is one reason Eliezer tried to give his metaethics sequence a 'moral realist' flavor even though his actual claims would be described by most moral philosophers as a variety of moral anti-realism.) Vassar suggested this may be because LessWrong does an unusually thorough job of eviscerating the phantoms of the Christian worldview that still exist in most atheists' implicit world model.

When you know as much cognitive science as a veteran LessWronger does, you understand that (1) we don't have libertarian free will, (2) we don't know our own desires and kinda don't have "desires" at all, (3) we can be wrong about our own subjective experience, and so on with much greater certainty and in much greater detail than most atheists do.

So maybe pop-atheism isn't enough to rip out ones values and general motivation, but a master's degree's worth of reductionist-grade cutting-edge cognitive science (on Less Wrong) is, at least for many people.

Or maybe both Nietzsche and Vassar are just wrong. Maybe the Less Wrong community doesn't display an unusual degree of nihilism and akrasia at all, or maybe it does but cogsci education has little to do with it.

*Oops. The word "interesting" in this sentence is redundant with "conversation with Michael Vassar."

Nietzsche was like a lot of those who are regarded as great thinkers; he was able to somehow get a lot of things right, without benefit of the additional information and techniques which make it easy for us now to recognize that they were right. Also like many of the great thinkers, he was overconfident and of course he also made mistakes. I think it is a defect in his work that he was not more systematic, as being more systematic makes it easier to test for conflicts and errors. Still, he was much more alert to problems than most; he was good at criticizing himself, which is surely an important trait in the effort to be less wrong. His views certainly changed over time as a result; he revises a lot of his opinions from Human, All To Human in Beyond Good and Evil, even though the latter was written within ten years of the former.

IMHO, Nietzsche is a great source of aphorisms, and may be able to trigger some Deep Thoughts in readers, but a lot of his writing seems more like a sort of performance art to me. At least on a superficial level, he's much easier to read than Kant or Hegel, but that also means he does not even try to argue his point in a rigorous way.

To some extent I liked Also Sprach Zarathustra and Twilight of the Idols (IIRC), but I think it is quite far away from rationality. Then again, IANAPh, maybe I am missing something.

See Vladimir_M's comment on Nietzsche (which I agree with).

Nietzsche writes pretty stuff for people who'd like the world to be awesomer, because he'd like it to be awesomer too. It's fun to read and arm-flailingly beautiful if you're into his style and motivating if you're on board with awesomification projects. It has a bunch of good quotes, from "hmm"-inducing ideas to zingers on Christianity to heartwarming observations to just plain cool bits.

A beanie doll of him also exists.

Nietzsche seems to have understood that morality and value are things that happen inside your head with a completeness that most "humanists" do not achieve.

I'm rather ambivalent towards Nietzsche; he had some interesting ideas, but he also had an utter contempt for anything resembling system or formality. Ultimately, I think that Max Stirner fills that specific niche a lot better, and would recommend his work over Nietzsche's for anyone interested in Ur-dissenting, skeptical-towards-everything, everything-about-modern-civilization-is-wrong philosophy.

He writes with a substantial amount of hyperbole, which makes him much harder to understand that more straightforward philosophy writers. I think that understanding him is very important to understanding the nature of morality, especially "Genealogy of Morals"

Perhaps see the recent Volume 21 Issue 1 of JET. It is called "Nietzsche and European Posthumanisms".

I enjoyed what I read of him (Twilight of the Idols, the Gay Science and maybe Human, All Too Human, if I recall correctly, maybe the Genealogy of Morals too), and consider him still worth reading. He's not much into heavily formal thinking or even solid scholarship, but then, since a lot of philosophy that tries to be formal still ends up being totally wrong (like Pascal or Rousseau), I don't hold that against him.

I value him mostly for his way of thinking and attitude - "philosophy of life" if you want, he seemed good enough at thinking outside the box and changing his mind, even if he wasn't interested in "scientific" topics. When reading his stuff I would frequently take notes on clever ideas.

I'd say he's a good complement for a philosophy diet, he brings some good stuff you may not find in the main courses, though I wouldn't take him as a main course. Pascal and Rousseau, on the other hand, I would probably just ignore (unless you're interested in understanding the history of ideas of their period, in which case Rousseau is pretty darn important).