My sense is that your comment surfaces other relevant disagreements between us, but doesn’t address my central point (which I perhaps buried in misleading qualifiers!), which is (boringly) that we should have a portfolio approach, and that the meta philosophy concern is plausibly part of a well-rounded portfolio (and currently conspicuously absent).
Maybe you don’t agree with the portfolio approach, or think this concern is so dramatically unlikely to be worthwhile that 1 FTE is too many? I don’t think ‘we’ve got those bases covered’ is that compelling a case (because the whole point of an interest in metaphilosophy is that we may have dramatically incorrect heuristics for judging the existing plan).
My sense is that your comment surfaces other relevant disagreements between us, but doesn’t address my central point (which I perhaps buried in misleading qualifiers!), which is (boringly) that we should have a portfolio approach, and that the meta philosophy concern is plausibly part of a well-rounded portfolio (and currently conspicuously absent).
To be fair, Forethought is kind of doing meta-philosophy under the aegis of AI macrostrategy, and they have talked about philosophical matters, so yes I agree with the boring take.
(My issue isn’t that we shouldn’t do any meta-philosophy, but rather that it’s scope needs to be dramatically narrower than “solve all the problems” or “get a perfect ground truth for everything”, and I was worried that Wei Dai and other people would not be able to do anything about metaphilosophy without substantially narrowing their scope, and in the worst case use the fact that there is no solution to their constructed problem to justify very costly policies like AI pauses, without showing why the problem is so important to solve).
@Wei Dai re: why I dislike the term metaphilosophy in this context:
People have baggage around the term ‘philosophy’, and inviting that baggage along primes people to reuse their clumsy intuitions around philosophy to talk about this endeavor that is, at least, trying to be different from what came before.
Further, many prior philosophers are well-described as themselves doing metaphilosophy (e.g. Kant, Hegel, Derrida, Plato, the pragmatists), and whole specific branches of philosophy (like epistemology and metaphysics) clearly have metaphilosophical implications. Indeed, it seems the most influential philosophers were influential in part because of their keen eye for the metaphilosophical commitments entailed by the object-level systems they were proposing.
Additionally, due to the recursive habits of conceptual arguments, a particular metaphilosophical position may be subsumed by another position (even a merely philosophical one), rendering the metaphilosophy a mesaphilosophy, and further confusing the whole issue of what really lives in which domain, and how you hope to keep your inquiry clear of the myriad traps which befell those preceding it.
Finally, ‘guy who uses the word metaphilosophy’ is an active trope in the minds of many, and broadly understood to be a guy one avoids. This, by itself, is insufficient to kill the term (maybe there’s something important in it worth salvaging?), but is worth mentioning alongside the other considerations, since priming your interlocutors to have reasonable intuitions about your position (and how serious you are in holding it!) matters for how that position is named.
Of course, naming things is very hard, and I don’t think I have an obvious knockdown alternative to the term, but here are some tries (in part to demonstrate sympathy for the difficulty):
Rigorous Epistemology
Insight-seeking
Anti-Paradigmatic Investigation
Non-Idiomatic Inquiry
Taking Responsibility (!!!)
Agent Foundations
(admittedly I didn’t try very hard, but I think if you and others did, you could come up with something!)
My sense is that your comment surfaces other relevant disagreements between us, but doesn’t address my central point (which I perhaps buried in misleading qualifiers!), which is (boringly) that we should have a portfolio approach, and that the meta philosophy concern is plausibly part of a well-rounded portfolio (and currently conspicuously absent).
Maybe you don’t agree with the portfolio approach, or think this concern is so dramatically unlikely to be worthwhile that 1 FTE is too many? I don’t think ‘we’ve got those bases covered’ is that compelling a case (because the whole point of an interest in metaphilosophy is that we may have dramatically incorrect heuristics for judging the existing plan).
To be fair, Forethought is kind of doing meta-philosophy under the aegis of AI macrostrategy, and they have talked about philosophical matters, soyes I agree with the boring take.(My issue isn’t that we shouldn’t do any meta-philosophy, but rather that it’s scope needs to be dramatically narrower than “solve all the problems” or “get a perfect ground truth for everything”, and I was worried that Wei Dai and other people would not be able to do anything about metaphilosophy without substantially narrowing their scope, and in the worst case use the fact that there is no solution to their constructed problem to justify very costly policies like AI pauses, without showing why the problem is so important to solve).
Narrowing scope prematurely forces you back into the frame of those strategies you’re hoping to generate some alternative to.
I do not think forethought is doing (what I think Wei means by) metaphilosophy.
[feels like a decent time to mention that I dislike this term quite a bit]
@Wei Dai re: why I dislike the term metaphilosophy in this context:
People have baggage around the term ‘philosophy’, and inviting that baggage along primes people to reuse their clumsy intuitions around philosophy to talk about this endeavor that is, at least, trying to be different from what came before.
Further, many prior philosophers are well-described as themselves doing metaphilosophy (e.g. Kant, Hegel, Derrida, Plato, the pragmatists), and whole specific branches of philosophy (like epistemology and metaphysics) clearly have metaphilosophical implications. Indeed, it seems the most influential philosophers were influential in part because of their keen eye for the metaphilosophical commitments entailed by the object-level systems they were proposing.
Additionally, due to the recursive habits of conceptual arguments, a particular metaphilosophical position may be subsumed by another position (even a merely philosophical one), rendering the metaphilosophy a mesaphilosophy, and further confusing the whole issue of what really lives in which domain, and how you hope to keep your inquiry clear of the myriad traps which befell those preceding it.
Finally, ‘guy who uses the word metaphilosophy’ is an active trope in the minds of many, and broadly understood to be a guy one avoids. This, by itself, is insufficient to kill the term (maybe there’s something important in it worth salvaging?), but is worth mentioning alongside the other considerations, since priming your interlocutors to have reasonable intuitions about your position (and how serious you are in holding it!) matters for how that position is named.
Of course, naming things is very hard, and I don’t think I have an obvious knockdown alternative to the term, but here are some tries (in part to demonstrate sympathy for the difficulty):
Rigorous Epistemology
Insight-seeking
Anti-Paradigmatic Investigation
Non-Idiomatic Inquiry
Taking Responsibility (!!!)
Agent Foundations
(admittedly I didn’t try very hard, but I think if you and others did, you could come up with something!)