Bit of a side point: One thing I got from spending a lot of time in the philosophy department was an appreciation for just how differently many philosophers think compared to how I tend to think. I spent a substantial fraction of my time in college trying to get at the roots of those differences—what exactly are the differences, what are the cruxes of the disagreements, and is there any way to show that one perspective is better than another? (And before anyone asks—nope, I still don’t have good answers to any of those.)
It opened my eyes to the existence of entirely different ways of thinking, even if I still have a hard time wrapping my brain around them.
As I said, I still don’t have a great way to even describe the differences very well. But I will at least say that if the kind of Bayesian and/or reductionist thinking that people tend to promote on LessWrong seems essentially right to you and (once you see it) almost common sense, then you should consider spending time talking to traditional non-Bayesian analytic philosophers and try to understand why their arguments feel compelling to them. Or maybe just read a bunch of articles on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that describe non-reductionist, non-Bayesian approaches to metaphysics or epistemology. Maybe the discussions there will seem perfectly reasonable to you, but maybe you will discover that there are really smart people who think in fundamentally different ways than you do. I think just the realization of that seems useful.
Bit of a side point: One thing I got from spending a lot of time in the philosophy department was an appreciation for just how differently many philosophers think compared to how I tend to think. I spent a substantial fraction of my time in college trying to get at the roots of those differences—what exactly are the differences, what are the cruxes of the disagreements, and is there any way to show that one perspective is better than another? (And before anyone asks—nope, I still don’t have good answers to any of those.)
It opened my eyes to the existence of entirely different ways of thinking, even if I still have a hard time wrapping my brain around them.
As I said, I still don’t have a great way to even describe the differences very well. But I will at least say that if the kind of Bayesian and/or reductionist thinking that people tend to promote on LessWrong seems essentially right to you and (once you see it) almost common sense, then you should consider spending time talking to traditional non-Bayesian analytic philosophers and try to understand why their arguments feel compelling to them. Or maybe just read a bunch of articles on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that describe non-reductionist, non-Bayesian approaches to metaphysics or epistemology. Maybe the discussions there will seem perfectly reasonable to you, but maybe you will discover that there are really smart people who think in fundamentally different ways than you do. I think just the realization of that seems useful.