I know it’s weird to not want to tie ideas to existing bodies of knowledge, and it feels variously like either unseriousness, or giving up on the obligation of closing inferential distance, or the project of making knowledge formation into a process of traversing an already well-ordered network of information, or of failing to pay past (or present) thinkers their due, or in the extreme case of the former of actively trying to steal credit for ideas. And these are things I should work harder to balance, they are real and significant things. But my actual motives are:
Laziness and incapacity
The Popperian indifference to the origin of an idea (not in the terms Yudkowsky expressed hatred for as life-wasting, of “any falsifiable theory is equal”, but in the sense of “any theory worth testing remains the same theory regardless of the position from which it is expressed”
The phenomenon of simultaneous discovery or convergent evolution in ideas, often referenced by the co-discovery of Calculus by Newton and Leibniz but present in many less complex cases throughout history
I have a brain with managed problems but the net effect of this is still something like being drunk all the time in the sense that I continue to have ready access to previously developed skills and knowledge but difficulty using newly learned skills and knowledge or developing new skills or knowledge. As I get older more and more things drop out of my memory, so I feel like I am ok at thinking old thoughts or by old thought patterns but progressively worse at citing sources or tracing my thought process consciously. I’m sorry about this, I genuinely would entirely avoid writing like a continental philosopher if I could, that’s just where I’m most expressively capable right now.
But if there’s ambiguity about me being weird/damaged or having weird values the answer is both, but in a specific and non-malicious way.
I know it’s weird to not want to tie ideas to existing bodies of knowledge, and it feels variously like either unseriousness, or giving up on the obligation of closing inferential distance, or the project of making knowledge formation into a process of traversing an already well-ordered network of information, or of failing to pay past (or present) thinkers their due, or in the extreme case of the former of actively trying to steal credit for ideas. And these are things I should work harder to balance, they are real and significant things. But my actual motives are:
Laziness and incapacity
The Popperian indifference to the origin of an idea (not in the terms Yudkowsky expressed hatred for as life-wasting, of “any falsifiable theory is equal”, but in the sense of “any theory worth testing remains the same theory regardless of the position from which it is expressed”
The phenomenon of simultaneous discovery or convergent evolution in ideas, often referenced by the co-discovery of Calculus by Newton and Leibniz but present in many less complex cases throughout history
I have a brain with managed problems but the net effect of this is still something like being drunk all the time in the sense that I continue to have ready access to previously developed skills and knowledge but difficulty using newly learned skills and knowledge or developing new skills or knowledge. As I get older more and more things drop out of my memory, so I feel like I am ok at thinking old thoughts or by old thought patterns but progressively worse at citing sources or tracing my thought process consciously. I’m sorry about this, I genuinely would entirely avoid writing like a continental philosopher if I could, that’s just where I’m most expressively capable right now.
But if there’s ambiguity about me being weird/damaged or having weird values the answer is both, but in a specific and non-malicious way.