I know a lot of people who think of themselves as intellectuals. That is, they spend a substantial fraction of their free time dealing in ideas. Most of these people are mainly consumers who take in ideas, but don’t seem to do much with them, at least as far as anyone else ever sees. But others are more outward facing, talking and writing about ideas, often quite eagerly.
Wouldn't progress be non-quenching? Otherwise it would cease to fluctuate. But this is less helpful.
Too much of my own intellectual discourse is spent agreeing or disagreeing with people's positions, rather than seeking out the deep questions (often enough non-existent or poorly articulated) which drive us to want a position in the first.
I admire thinkers insofar as they are willing to, as Wittgenstein mentions in the introduction to 'Philosophical Investigations', pursue a method of thinking and constantly evaluate it, then having used the ladder to reach a new standpoint, kick the ladder away and ask if the location is meaningful. And if so, how?
Yes, saying "I'm an algebraic topologist" or "an analyst" does seem to be more about the approach taken to solve problems than the questions asked. But I think "development economist" is a label based on questions.
In my opinion ∃ serious incentives to limit one's question and answer styles within the academic economics framework.
But no one considers the obvious question: how does this relate to Robin Hanson's intellectual work?
Robin seldom defends the importance of his research, and he favors research on EMs over prediction markets (apparently, judged by his choice of book to author). He seems guided more by his interests than his sense of importance. (Unfortunately, he rarely seeks out the best arguments against his views.)
It seems there are at least three paths to choice of research topic. 1) Pursue status; 2) Pursue what's important; and 3) Pursue your personal intellectual interests.
Most researchers follow 1 (this is an oversimplification, of course, researchers being complex beings); Robert Wiblin followed 2) when he choice a biology major because he determined that was where he could most benefit ... whatever set of "beings" he hopes to; Robin follows 3 (although, as often, he advocates 2)--for other intellectuals). I think 3 is actually the best choice--if and only if you cultivate rather than fall into far-mode interests and values.
Yes, this is a plausible objection. In that case, I'd still find it at least one of the most interesting questions of our time to find out how those specialized heuristics are implemented and if there's a common theme to them that corresponds to an information-theoretic principle of valuation, even if it has no unifyable common currency, so to speak. I'd still want to know how the actual heuristics work, how neurons have to be wired up to create them, etc.
I don't find that obvious at all. For example, maybe the brain can only determine things like "is this desirable for me", "is this within the social norm", "will this make people trust me more", and "is this fair", for which it uses a large range of specialized heuristics. If something like that turns out to be the case, I'm not sure that any of this would really correspond to "value", which might emerge after talking about some combination of these heuristics a lot, but which I would personally then find not very useful for making a question like "Can two equally adaptive systems in equivalent competitive niches vastly differ in how much value they encode?" meaningful.
I would not be at all surprised (65% expectation) if "value" turned outto be purely a folk psychology concept that did not correspond toanything in particular in the brain.
Maybe the folk psychology concept of value is not precise enough to be of much scientific use. But it's an obvious fact that coding of (subjective) good and bad exist, and it's clear that this information must be implemented somehow. That implementation principle is a crucial scientific and philosophical question imo.
I suspect that if you look at people who do a lot of interdisciplinary work, you will find that they tend to be more focused on the value of the answers they are seeking than the average academic. It's harderto use peer acceptance as a proxy for value when there are few peers who understand or care about one's work.
Hugely influential factor that's been omitted: funding. Cancer is more important than the common cold. Cures for cancer get vastly more funding than cures for the common cold.
The most realistic way to make intellectual progress is not through an attitude of sheer disinterestedness, but through an attitude of sportsmanlike competitiveness. Take your answers (in Hegel's terms, the thesis) into the arena and seek out the best arguments against them (the antithesis). You probably won't change your mind completely, but you should try to force yourself to come up with a synthesis that is superior to the thesis and antithesis.
Robin talks about the "sweet thirst-quenching fount of progress", but he fails to define what is good. Because of that, he is led to two erroneous conclusions: 1) Only interesting questions can matter; 2) All that matters is progress.
Let me offer a counterexample which addresses both these: Let us start with a definition of good which is ingrained in any baby. Life is good. Death is bad. Thus, a baby's cry of hunger is really a statement and a question: "My life matters to me. Does my life matter to anyone else?" No one would vote-up a recording of the cry of a baby on Quora -- not only is it uninteresting, but it is actually painful to listen to. And if someone did vote it up, what could possibly be the progress on the answer. The bulk of life throughout time has answered with the affirmative "Yes." But, if all must be sacrificed to the "sweet thirst-quenching fount of progress," then to progress from "Yes" to "No", we must unlearn the definition of good. We would have progress, but life itself would cease.
Robin laments that not enough questioners ask why an answer matters. I'd like to posit that the questioners don't ask why, because subconsciously they already know the answer. They fully believe that the world will be "more good" with the answer than without. The question for all of us to ask is what is good and who is it good for? Only with this standard will we be able to say if a question is worth answering.
Isn't this something you've already figured out, Robin? The academic disciplines are for raising the status of academics, not for creating knowledge. From this it more or less follows that most research doesn't foster intellectual progress and that to make progress you must think about the questions rather than unthinkingly plucking at what's around or thinkingly pursuing status--to the small extent that we're capable of avoiding such behavior.
This is a very good point. Sometimes we realize the importance of a question only in hindsight. In order to gain such answers, it is necessary to use heuristics for choosing problems that may not always seem to provide adequate explicit justification. Hence the concept of intellectual "taste", and perhaps the ultimate raison d'être of academia and institutions like it.
I would not be at all surprised (65% expectation) if "value" turned out to be purely a folk psychology concept that did not correspond to anything in particular in the brain.
However, that doesn't mean that being "important to the world" is meaningless. Loosely, I'd say that a discovery/"answer" A is more important to the world than discovery B, if the world with no A is more different from the world with A than the world with no B is from the world with B (in the long term, with temporal discounting if you choose to use that).
"But my guess is that most intellectual progress comes from people who focus on a question to which they do not currently know the answer, and then try to answer it."I don't believe that. I think much progress comes from work that a substantial minority believes to be true but that the majority/or the major elites are ignorant of or indifferent too. Absent promotion and intellectual competition in whatever form, it is difficult for those ideas to make it to the top of the pile and get disseminated in a form that's useful. Furthermore, most groups that feel that their special answer is right will turn out to be wrong. But again, the "median voter" in the world of ideas has no simple mechanism for selecting among these competing "truths," hence the need for competition with a bit of self-promotion thrown in.
Moreover, a lot of new work can be offshoots of answers to general questions that you already believe where the details haven't been fully worked out.
Wouldn't progress be non-quenching? Otherwise it would cease to fluctuate. But this is less helpful.
Too much of my own intellectual discourse is spent agreeing or disagreeing with people's positions, rather than seeking out the deep questions (often enough non-existent or poorly articulated) which drive us to want a position in the first.
I admire thinkers insofar as they are willing to, as Wittgenstein mentions in the introduction to 'Philosophical Investigations', pursue a method of thinking and constantly evaluate it, then having used the ladder to reach a new standpoint, kick the ladder away and ask if the location is meaningful. And if so, how?
Yes, saying "I'm an algebraic topologist" or "an analyst" does seem to be more about the approach taken to solve problems than the questions asked. But I think "development economist" is a label based on questions.
In my opinion ∃ serious incentives to limit one's question and answer styles within the academic economics framework.
I have no idea how you get the impression that I don't think my research topics are very important. I do; they are.
Exactly right, even to the Hegel point.
But no one considers the obvious question: how does this relate to Robin Hanson's intellectual work?
Robin seldom defends the importance of his research, and he favors research on EMs over prediction markets (apparently, judged by his choice of book to author). He seems guided more by his interests than his sense of importance. (Unfortunately, he rarely seeks out the best arguments against his views.)
It seems there are at least three paths to choice of research topic. 1) Pursue status; 2) Pursue what's important; and 3) Pursue your personal intellectual interests.
Most researchers follow 1 (this is an oversimplification, of course, researchers being complex beings); Robert Wiblin followed 2) when he choice a biology major because he determined that was where he could most benefit ... whatever set of "beings" he hopes to; Robin follows 3 (although, as often, he advocates 2)--for other intellectuals). I think 3 is actually the best choice--if and only if you cultivate rather than fall into far-mode interests and values.
Yes, this is a plausible objection. In that case, I'd still find it at least one of the most interesting questions of our time to find out how those specialized heuristics are implemented and if there's a common theme to them that corresponds to an information-theoretic principle of valuation, even if it has no unifyable common currency, so to speak. I'd still want to know how the actual heuristics work, how neurons have to be wired up to create them, etc.
I don't find that obvious at all. For example, maybe the brain can only determine things like "is this desirable for me", "is this within the social norm", "will this make people trust me more", and "is this fair", for which it uses a large range of specialized heuristics. If something like that turns out to be the case, I'm not sure that any of this would really correspond to "value", which might emerge after talking about some combination of these heuristics a lot, but which I would personally then find not very useful for making a question like "Can two equally adaptive systems in equivalent competitive niches vastly differ in how much value they encode?" meaningful.
I would not be at all surprised (65% expectation) if "value" turned outto be purely a folk psychology concept that did not correspond toanything in particular in the brain.
Maybe the folk psychology concept of value is not precise enough to be of much scientific use. But it's an obvious fact that coding of (subjective) good and bad exist, and it's clear that this information must be implemented somehow. That implementation principle is a crucial scientific and philosophical question imo.
I suspect that if you look at people who do a lot of interdisciplinary work, you will find that they tend to be more focused on the value of the answers they are seeking than the average academic. It's harderto use peer acceptance as a proxy for value when there are few peers who understand or care about one's work.
Hugely influential factor that's been omitted: funding. Cancer is more important than the common cold. Cures for cancer get vastly more funding than cures for the common cold.
Good grief, hardly anyone changes their mind about anything ever.
The most realistic way to make intellectual progress is not through an attitude of sheer disinterestedness, but through an attitude of sportsmanlike competitiveness. Take your answers (in Hegel's terms, the thesis) into the arena and seek out the best arguments against them (the antithesis). You probably won't change your mind completely, but you should try to force yourself to come up with a synthesis that is superior to the thesis and antithesis.
Robin talks about the "sweet thirst-quenching fount of progress", but he fails to define what is good. Because of that, he is led to two erroneous conclusions: 1) Only interesting questions can matter; 2) All that matters is progress.
Let me offer a counterexample which addresses both these: Let us start with a definition of good which is ingrained in any baby. Life is good. Death is bad. Thus, a baby's cry of hunger is really a statement and a question: "My life matters to me. Does my life matter to anyone else?" No one would vote-up a recording of the cry of a baby on Quora -- not only is it uninteresting, but it is actually painful to listen to. And if someone did vote it up, what could possibly be the progress on the answer. The bulk of life throughout time has answered with the affirmative "Yes." But, if all must be sacrificed to the "sweet thirst-quenching fount of progress," then to progress from "Yes" to "No", we must unlearn the definition of good. We would have progress, but life itself would cease.
Robin laments that not enough questioners ask why an answer matters. I'd like to posit that the questioners don't ask why, because subconsciously they already know the answer. They fully believe that the world will be "more good" with the answer than without. The question for all of us to ask is what is good and who is it good for? Only with this standard will we be able to say if a question is worth answering.
Isn't this something you've already figured out, Robin? The academic disciplines are for raising the status of academics, not for creating knowledge. From this it more or less follows that most research doesn't foster intellectual progress and that to make progress you must think about the questions rather than unthinkingly plucking at what's around or thinkingly pursuing status--to the small extent that we're capable of avoiding such behavior.
This is a very good point. Sometimes we realize the importance of a question only in hindsight. In order to gain such answers, it is necessary to use heuristics for choosing problems that may not always seem to provide adequate explicit justification. Hence the concept of intellectual "taste", and perhaps the ultimate raison d'être of academia and institutions like it.
I would not be at all surprised (65% expectation) if "value" turned out to be purely a folk psychology concept that did not correspond to anything in particular in the brain.
However, that doesn't mean that being "important to the world" is meaningless. Loosely, I'd say that a discovery/"answer" A is more important to the world than discovery B, if the world with no A is more different from the world with A than the world with no B is from the world with B (in the long term, with temporal discounting if you choose to use that).
"But my guess is that most intellectual progress comes from people who focus on a question to which they do not currently know the answer, and then try to answer it."I don't believe that. I think much progress comes from work that a substantial minority believes to be true but that the majority/or the major elites are ignorant of or indifferent too. Absent promotion and intellectual competition in whatever form, it is difficult for those ideas to make it to the top of the pile and get disseminated in a form that's useful. Furthermore, most groups that feel that their special answer is right will turn out to be wrong. But again, the "median voter" in the world of ideas has no simple mechanism for selecting among these competing "truths," hence the need for competition with a bit of self-promotion thrown in.
Moreover, a lot of new work can be offshoots of answers to general questions that you already believe where the details haven't been fully worked out.