To be clear, I’m not saying that the story I told above (“here are some cool ideas that I claim haven’t sufficiently saturated the philosophy community to cause all the low-hanging fruit to get grabbed, or to produce fieldwide knowledge and acceptance in the cases where it has been grabbed”) should persuade arbitrary readers that people like Eliezer or Gary Drescher are on the right track; plenty of false turns and wrong solutions can also claim to be importing neglected ideas, or combining ideas in neglected ways. I’m just gesturing at one reason why I think it’s possible at all to reach confident correct beliefs about lots of controversial claims in philosophy, in spite of the fact that philosophy is a large and competitive field whose nominal purpose is to answer these kinds of questions.
I’m also implicitly making a claim about there being similarities between many of the domains you’re pointing to that help make it not just a coincidence that one (relatively) new methodology and set of ideas can put you ahead of the curve on multiple issues simultaneously (plus produce multiple discovery and convergence). A framework that’s unusually useful for answering questions related to naturalism, determinism, and reflective reasoning can simultaneously have implications for how we should (and shouldn’t) be thinking about experience, agency, volition, decision theory, and AI, among other topics. To some extent, all of these cases can be thought of as applications of a particular naturalist/reductionist toolkit (containing concepts and formalisms that aren’t widely known among philosophers who endorse naturalism) to new domains.
I’m curious what criticisms you’ve heard of MIRI’s work on decision theory. Is there anything relevant you can link to?
I don’t think the account of the relative novelty of the ‘LW approach’ to philosophy makes a good fit for the available facts; “relatively” new is, I suggest, a pretty relative term.
You can find similar reduction-esque sensibilities among the logicial positivists around a century ago, and a very similar approach from Quine about half a century ago. In the case of the logical positivists, they enjoyed a heyday amongst the philosophical community, but gradually fell from favour due to shortcomings other philosophers identified; I suggest Quine is a sufficiently ‘big name’ in philosophy that his approach was at least widely appreciated by the relevant academic communities.
This is challenging to reconcile with an account of “Rationality’s philosophical framework allows one to get to confidently get to the right answer across a range of hard philosophical problems, and the lack of assent of domain experts is best explained by not being aware of it”. Closely analogous approaches have been tried a very long time ago, and haven’t been found extraordinarily persuasive (even if we subset to naturalists). It doesn’t help that when the ‘LW-answer’ is expounded (e.g. in the sequences) the argument offered isn’t particularly sophisticated (and often turns out to be recapitulating extant literature), nor does it usually deign to address objections raised by dissenting camps.
I suggest a better fit for this data is the rationality approach looks particularly persuasive to people without subject matter expertise.
Re. decision theory. Beyond the general social epistemiological steers (i.e. the absence of good decision theorists raving about the breakthrough represented by MIRI style decision theory, despite many of them having come into contact with this work one way or another), remarks I’ve heard often target ‘technical quality’: Chalmers noted in a past AMA disappointment this theory had not been made rigorous (maybe things have changed since), and I know one decision theorist’s view is that the work also isn’t rigorous and a bit sloppy (on Carl’s advice, I’m trying to contact more). Not being a decision theorist myself, I haven’t delved into the object level considerations.
Quineans and logical positivists have some vague attitudes in common with people like Drescher, but the analogy seems loose to me. If you want to ask why other philosophers didn’t grab all the low-hanging fruit in areas like decision theory or persuade all their peers in areas like philosophy of mind (which is an interesting set of questions from where I’m standing, and one I’d like to see examined more too), I think a more relevant group to look at will be technically minded philosophers who think in terms of Bayesian epistemology (and information-theoretic models of evidence, etc.) and software analogies. In particular, analogies that are more detailed than just “the mind is like software”, though computationalism is an important start. A more specific question might be: “Why didn’t E.T. Jaynes’ work sweep the philosophical community?”
To be clear, I’m not saying that the story I told above (“here are some cool ideas that I claim haven’t sufficiently saturated the philosophy community to cause all the low-hanging fruit to get grabbed, or to produce fieldwide knowledge and acceptance in the cases where it has been grabbed”) should persuade arbitrary readers that people like Eliezer or Gary Drescher are on the right track; plenty of false turns and wrong solutions can also claim to be importing neglected ideas, or combining ideas in neglected ways. I’m just gesturing at one reason why I think it’s possible at all to reach confident correct beliefs about lots of controversial claims in philosophy, in spite of the fact that philosophy is a large and competitive field whose nominal purpose is to answer these kinds of questions.
I’m also implicitly making a claim about there being similarities between many of the domains you’re pointing to that help make it not just a coincidence that one (relatively) new methodology and set of ideas can put you ahead of the curve on multiple issues simultaneously (plus produce multiple discovery and convergence). A framework that’s unusually useful for answering questions related to naturalism, determinism, and reflective reasoning can simultaneously have implications for how we should (and shouldn’t) be thinking about experience, agency, volition, decision theory, and AI, among other topics. To some extent, all of these cases can be thought of as applications of a particular naturalist/reductionist toolkit (containing concepts and formalisms that aren’t widely known among philosophers who endorse naturalism) to new domains.
I’m curious what criticisms you’ve heard of MIRI’s work on decision theory. Is there anything relevant you can link to?
I don’t think the account of the relative novelty of the ‘LW approach’ to philosophy makes a good fit for the available facts; “relatively” new is, I suggest, a pretty relative term.
You can find similar reduction-esque sensibilities among the logicial positivists around a century ago, and a very similar approach from Quine about half a century ago. In the case of the logical positivists, they enjoyed a heyday amongst the philosophical community, but gradually fell from favour due to shortcomings other philosophers identified; I suggest Quine is a sufficiently ‘big name’ in philosophy that his approach was at least widely appreciated by the relevant academic communities.
This is challenging to reconcile with an account of “Rationality’s philosophical framework allows one to get to confidently get to the right answer across a range of hard philosophical problems, and the lack of assent of domain experts is best explained by not being aware of it”. Closely analogous approaches have been tried a very long time ago, and haven’t been found extraordinarily persuasive (even if we subset to naturalists). It doesn’t help that when the ‘LW-answer’ is expounded (e.g. in the sequences) the argument offered isn’t particularly sophisticated (and often turns out to be recapitulating extant literature), nor does it usually deign to address objections raised by dissenting camps.
I suggest a better fit for this data is the rationality approach looks particularly persuasive to people without subject matter expertise.
Re. decision theory. Beyond the general social epistemiological steers (i.e. the absence of good decision theorists raving about the breakthrough represented by MIRI style decision theory, despite many of them having come into contact with this work one way or another), remarks I’ve heard often target ‘technical quality’: Chalmers noted in a past AMA disappointment this theory had not been made rigorous (maybe things have changed since), and I know one decision theorist’s view is that the work also isn’t rigorous and a bit sloppy (on Carl’s advice, I’m trying to contact more). Not being a decision theorist myself, I haven’t delved into the object level considerations.
The “Cheating Death in Damascus” and “Functional Decision Theory” papers came out in March and October, so I recommend sharing those, possibly along with the “Decisions Are For Making Bad Outcomes Inconsistent” conversation notes. I think these are much better introductions than e.g. Eliezer’s old “Timeless Decision Theory” paper.
Quineans and logical positivists have some vague attitudes in common with people like Drescher, but the analogy seems loose to me. If you want to ask why other philosophers didn’t grab all the low-hanging fruit in areas like decision theory or persuade all their peers in areas like philosophy of mind (which is an interesting set of questions from where I’m standing, and one I’d like to see examined more too), I think a more relevant group to look at will be technically minded philosophers who think in terms of Bayesian epistemology (and information-theoretic models of evidence, etc.) and software analogies. In particular, analogies that are more detailed than just “the mind is like software”, though computationalism is an important start. A more specific question might be: “Why didn’t E.T. Jaynes’ work sweep the philosophical community?”