Comment by vovavili
4 days ago
>That said, I don’t agree at all that authors are incentivized to be obscure. That is a typical criticism from people that don’t have actual experience in the field, but are just repeating culture war tropes.
People like Jon Elster and Lionel Page much be culture war ideologues, I see.
Yeah I’m gonna guess 99.9% of people making that criticism against academic philosophy don’t know those names.
The LW/rationalist space, and other spheres adjacent to it, have a disdain for traditional philosophy, but have spent very little time engaging with that philosophy and giving sufficient reasons as to why it’s not important, or not even worth engaging with.
> Yeah I’m gonna guess 99.9% of people making that criticism against academic philosophy don’t know those names.
The majority of people who hold just about any viewpoint are going to be uninformed, so arguing against the average holder of any idea is going to be pretty trivial as long as you know a bit of the subject matter. The value of an idea is surely roughly proportional instead to the strongest argument for it.
I’m not arguing against the average holder of the idea.
I’m saying that the argument that “academic philosophy is verbose and obscure on purpose” isn’t a good argument, and is most often repeated by people with little knowledge of the field, so often that it’s become something of a culture war trope. At the very least it’s a well-known quality of LW and similar spaces.
As in the comments above, there is often no actual paper, no argument, just vague assertions and a couple random name drops, as if that’s an argument.
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You are explicitly responding to a person who is not in that 99.9%.
And you still haven’t made any real point, other than drop a couple names.
What do they have to say? What is their argument? Why is a behavioral economist’s opinion relevant in a discussion about academic philosophy? Etc.
“Academic philosophy is obscure on purpose and X two people say so.” is not an argument.
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