As I just articulated in a different comment, my interest in engaging with your ideas is bottlenecked on whether it seems like you’re building up a set of crisper, clearer concepts, versus invoking a very broad skepticism. Obviously there’s a spectrum between these, and I don’t claim you’re right at the latter end, but you seem too close to it for me to get much value out of many of your comments. In particular, both of the examples you gave in the last thread (the naturalistic fallacy and moral/normative uncertainty) are much closer to “finding new ways of being skeptical” than “developing useful conceptual frameworks”.
To be clear, I like the examples in this post more (especially UDT/decision theory and the moral parliament stuff). I don’t know if you have enough other examples to allow you to catalogue habits of thinking and intellectual patterns that seem unusually productive, but if you do that seems like an interesting direction (and if not, you could probably do a similar thing by looking at patterns in which philosophy is very bad vs less bad).
To cite one field that I’m especially familiar with, consider probability and decision theory, where we went from having no concept of probability, to studies involving gambles and expected value, to subjective probability, Bayesian updating, expected utility maximization, and the Turing-machine-based universal prior, to the recent realizations that EU maximization with Bayesian updating and the universal prior are both likely to be wrong or incomplete.
Insofar as this is a central example of the kind of thing you want to understand and make progress on, I think your mistake might be simply calling it “philosophy”, when in fact the thing people were doing back then bears very little resemblance to modern academic philosophy. The term “natural philosophy” seems more accurate, but probably even better is “pre-paradigmatic science”.
As I just articulated in a different comment, my interest in engaging with your ideas is bottlenecked on whether it seems like you’re building up a set of crisper, clearer concepts, versus invoking a very broad skepticism. Obviously there’s a spectrum between these, and I don’t claim you’re right at the latter end, but you seem too close to it for me to get much value out of many of your comments. In particular, both of the examples you gave in the last thread (the naturalistic fallacy and moral/normative uncertainty) are much closer to “finding new ways of being skeptical” than “developing useful conceptual frameworks”.
To be clear, I like the examples in this post more (especially UDT/decision theory and the moral parliament stuff). I don’t know if you have enough other examples to allow you to catalogue habits of thinking and intellectual patterns that seem unusually productive, but if you do that seems like an interesting direction (and if not, you could probably do a similar thing by looking at patterns in which philosophy is very bad vs less bad).
EDIT: I just saw this other list from this old post, which I also like:
Insofar as this is a central example of the kind of thing you want to understand and make progress on, I think your mistake might be simply calling it “philosophy”, when in fact the thing people were doing back then bears very little resemblance to modern academic philosophy. The term “natural philosophy” seems more accurate, but probably even better is “pre-paradigmatic science”.