Comment by epestr
4 days ago
Yes! There's often no clear thesis or argumentative structure, instead it reads like notes after a rabbit hole session, with little convincing involved.
I see comments defending them for considering "all viewpoints", but these are still a subset of perspectives they've constructed themselves. Good philosophy engages with a work in a way its readers would recognise, rather than arguing against a simplified set of beliefs and closing the book claiming victory.
Even in my brief stint with philosophy of biology, I saw concrete examples and actual positions discussed in the texts, while a lot of rationalist constructions seem to reduce what people believe to almost comical reductive strawmen. I'd say the verbosity often compensates for the lack of historical depth or understanding on the topic.
An example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple.... Its fictional opponent's inability to understand elementary explanations does much of the argumentative work.
Though sadly what I'm doing here is pretty much the same. Maybe the quantity the internet allows us to produce simply makes this form of argumentation more natural.
>Its fictional opponent's inability to understand elementary explanations does much of the argumentative work
My reading is the inability to understand serves only as an educational device for the reader. After all, at the end of the article the only point of contention is whether or not the objective truth exists. Is your point that the postmodern types don't claim that it doesn't? Or that they're an easy target used to later claim victory against a larger group?
Closer to the latter. The narrative gets the reader to empathise with the shepherd and see Mark as representative of people who won't change their beliefs. I understand the educational purpose, but the author decides how reasonable the opposition gets to be. A reader could later cast themselves as the shepherd and their opponent as Mark, taking the resemblance as justification. Also a corpus so broad of such writing can become almost theological.
On the first point, questioning an account of truth isn't the same as claiming the lack of objective truth. Actual coherentists do try to account for observational input, and making Mark unable to understand an elementary explanation doesn't address those attempts. People like reductive accounts of complicated positions. The supposed nuance then comes from covering more positions, rather than engaging deeply with any of them.
I don't even understand what your example blog post is arguing. That counting sheep makes shepherding easier hardly seems like a revolutionary insight.
That being said, I don't think that a lot of the people who are recently opposed to rationalism are doing honest philosophy either. Ten years ago, the trend online was to become a rationalist; these days, the trend online seems to be to accuse rationalists of being sex cult satanists that are not equipped with the magical power of "common sense". Out of these two options, I much prefer the rationalists. For while they may have a lacking understanding of some of the history of philosophy, their contrahents don't even pretend to have an understanding of the world that is grounded in anything but irrational fear and hatred.
The sheep bit is the whole rationalist glorification of "Bayesian thinking". Stones being beliefs and sheep the reality you observe and the process Bayesian thinking.
Scott Alexanders's blog description for example: P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
That seems like a false dichotomy. I don't think either describes the median online opinion. Loud reactionary voices tend to be confident and extreme and bad times promote reactionary views.
The divination sticks passage is quite ironic here. Markos' belief is explained through punishment for out-think, but rationalist communities aren't exempt from social conditioning either. Repeated exposure makes certain reasoning feel natural, while people who dislike it may leave. That's part of what I'm criticising, rather than choosing an opposing internet camp. It could be concerning that the same rationalist thinking might carry into safety research (https://www.lesswrong.com/users/beth-barnes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METR)
Every group has people susceptible to the same social pressures and of varying intelligence, and to claim yours is better at being less wrong, is a bit dangerous.
> It could be concerning that the same rationalist thinking might carry into safety research
Why? "Bayesian thinking" is really just empirical observation and statistics, which is the foundation of all modern research, security or otherwise.
Your comment does nothing but create a vague sense of unease (a hidden cabal of rationalists! they're even doing research!), without making any clear point. At least, I suppose, it's not 25,000 words long.
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