Let me try to translate my thoughts to something which might be more legible / written in a more formal tone.
From my experience observing this in Spain, the philosophy curriculum taught in schools is a political compromise, in which religion plays an important role. Further, if utilitarism is even taught (it wasn’t in my high school philosophy class), it can be taught badly by proponents of some other competing theory. I expect this to happen, because most people (and by expectation most teachers) aren’t utilitarian.
Philosophy doesn’t have high epistemic standards, as evidenced by the fact that it can’t come to a conclusion about “who is right”. Some salient examples of philosophers who continue to be taught and given significant attention despite having few redeeming qualities are Plotinous, Anaximenes, or Hegel. Although it can be argued that they do have redeeming qualities (Anaximenes was an early proponent of proto-scientific thinking, and Hegel has some interesting insights about history, and has shaped further thought), paying too much attention to these philosophers would be the equivalent of coming to deeply understand phologiston or aether theory when studying physics. I understand that grading the healthiness of a field can be counterintuitive or weird, but to the extent that a field can be sick, I think that philosophy ranks near the bottom (in contrast, development economics of the sort where you do an RCT to find out if you’re right would be near the top)
Relatedly, when teaching philosophy too much attention is usually given to the history of philosophy. I agree that an ideal philosophy course which promoted “critical thinking” would be beneficial, but I don’t think that it would be feasible to implement it because: a) it would have to be the result of tricky political compromise and have to be very careful around critizicing whomever is in power, and b) I don’t think that there are enough good teachers who could pull it off.
Note that I’m not saying that philosophy can’t produce success stories, or great philosophers, like Parfit, David Pearce, Peter Singer, arguably Bostrom, etc (though note that all examples except Singer are pretty mathematical). I’m saying that most of the time, the average philosophy class is pretty mediocre
On this note, I believe that my own (negative) experience with philosophy in schools is more representative than yours. Google brings up that you went to Cambridge and UCL, so I posit that you (and many other EAs who have gone to top universities) have an inflated sense of how good teachers are (because you have been exposed to smart and at least somewhat capable teachers, who had the pleasure of teaching top students). In contrast, I have been exposed to average teachers who sometimes tried to do the best they could, and who often didn’t really have great teaching skills.
I have some models of the world which lead me to think that the idea was unpromising. Some of them clearly have a subjective component. Still, I’m using the same “muscles” as when forecasting, and I trust that those muscles will usually produce sensible conclusions.
It is possible that in this case I had too negative a view, though not in a way which is clearly wrong (to me). If I was forecasting the question “will a charity be incubated to work on philosophy in schools” (surprise reveal: this is similar to what I was doing all along), I imagine I’d give it a very low probability, but that my team mates would give it a slightly higher probability. After discussion, we’d both probably move towards the center, and thus be more accurate.
Note that if we model my subjective promisingness = true promisingness + error term, if we pick the candidate idea at the very bottom of my list (in this case, philosophy in schools, the idea under discussion and one of the four ideas to which I assigned a “very unpromising” rating), we’d expect it to both be unpromising (per your own view) and have a large error term (I clearly don’t view philosophy very favorably)
Thanks for the clarifications in your previous two comments. Helpful to get more of an insight into your thought process.
Just a few comments:
I stronglydon’t think a charity to work on philosophy in schools would be helpful and I don’t like that way of thinking about it. My suggestions were having prominent philosophers join (existing) advocacy efforts for philosophy in the curriculum, more people becoming philosophy teachers (if this might be their comparative advantage), trying to shift educational spending towards values-based education, more research into values-based education (to name a few).
This is a whole separate conversation that I’m not sure we have to get into right now too deeply (I think I’d rather not) but I think there are severe issues with development economics as a field to the extent that I would place it near the bottom of the pecking order within EA. Firstly the generalisability of RCT results is highly questionable (for example see Eva Vivalt’s research). More importantly and fundamentally, the problem of complex cluelessness (see here and here). It is partly considerations of cluelessness that makes me interested in longtermist areas such as moral circle expansion and broadly promoting positive values, along with x-risk reduction.
I’m hoping we’re nearing a good enough understanding of each other’s views that we don’t need to keep discussing for much longer, but I’m happy to continue a bit if helpful.
Let me try to translate my thoughts to something which might be more legible / written in a more formal tone.
From my experience observing this in Spain, the philosophy curriculum taught in schools is a political compromise, in which religion plays an important role. Further, if utilitarism is even taught (it wasn’t in my high school philosophy class), it can be taught badly by proponents of some other competing theory. I expect this to happen, because most people (and by expectation most teachers) aren’t utilitarian.
Philosophy doesn’t have high epistemic standards, as evidenced by the fact that it can’t come to a conclusion about “who is right”. Some salient examples of philosophers who continue to be taught and given significant attention despite having few redeeming qualities are Plotinous, Anaximenes, or Hegel. Although it can be argued that they do have redeeming qualities (Anaximenes was an early proponent of proto-scientific thinking, and Hegel has some interesting insights about history, and has shaped further thought), paying too much attention to these philosophers would be the equivalent of coming to deeply understand phologiston or aether theory when studying physics. I understand that grading the healthiness of a field can be counterintuitive or weird, but to the extent that a field can be sick, I think that philosophy ranks near the bottom (in contrast, development economics of the sort where you do an RCT to find out if you’re right would be near the top)
Relatedly, when teaching philosophy too much attention is usually given to the history of philosophy. I agree that an ideal philosophy course which promoted “critical thinking” would be beneficial, but I don’t think that it would be feasible to implement it because: a) it would have to be the result of tricky political compromise and have to be very careful around critizicing whomever is in power, and b) I don’t think that there are enough good teachers who could pull it off.
Note that I’m not saying that philosophy can’t produce success stories, or great philosophers, like Parfit, David Pearce, Peter Singer, arguably Bostrom, etc (though note that all examples except Singer are pretty mathematical). I’m saying that most of the time, the average philosophy class is pretty mediocre
On this note, I believe that my own (negative) experience with philosophy in schools is more representative than yours. Google brings up that you went to Cambridge and UCL, so I posit that you (and many other EAs who have gone to top universities) have an inflated sense of how good teachers are (because you have been exposed to smart and at least somewhat capable teachers, who had the pleasure of teaching top students). In contrast, I have been exposed to average teachers who sometimes tried to do the best they could, and who often didn’t really have great teaching skills.
tl;dr/Notes:
I have some models of the world which lead me to think that the idea was unpromising. Some of them clearly have a subjective component. Still, I’m using the same “muscles” as when forecasting, and I trust that those muscles will usually produce sensible conclusions.
It is possible that in this case I had too negative a view, though not in a way which is clearly wrong (to me). If I was forecasting the question “will a charity be incubated to work on philosophy in schools” (surprise reveal: this is similar to what I was doing all along), I imagine I’d give it a very low probability, but that my team mates would give it a slightly higher probability. After discussion, we’d both probably move towards the center, and thus be more accurate.
Note that if we model my subjective promisingness = true promisingness + error term, if we pick the candidate idea at the very bottom of my list (in this case, philosophy in schools, the idea under discussion and one of the four ideas to which I assigned a “very unpromising” rating), we’d expect it to both be unpromising (per your own view) and have a large error term (I clearly don’t view philosophy very favorably)
Thanks for the clarifications in your previous two comments. Helpful to get more of an insight into your thought process.
Just a few comments:
I strongly don’t think a charity to work on philosophy in schools would be helpful and I don’t like that way of thinking about it. My suggestions were having prominent philosophers join (existing) advocacy efforts for philosophy in the curriculum, more people becoming philosophy teachers (if this might be their comparative advantage), trying to shift educational spending towards values-based education, more research into values-based education (to name a few).
This is a whole separate conversation that I’m not sure we have to get into right now too deeply (I think I’d rather not) but I think there are severe issues with development economics as a field to the extent that I would place it near the bottom of the pecking order within EA. Firstly the generalisability of RCT results is highly questionable (for example see Eva Vivalt’s research). More importantly and fundamentally, the problem of complex cluelessness (see here and here). It is partly considerations of cluelessness that makes me interested in longtermist areas such as moral circle expansion and broadly promoting positive values, along with x-risk reduction.
I’m hoping we’re nearing a good enough understanding of each other’s views that we don’t need to keep discussing for much longer, but I’m happy to continue a bit if helpful.
Acknowledged.