I suspect that your model has been built to serve the hypothesis you started with.
First of all, I’m not sure what measure you’re using for “rigorous thought”. Is it a binary classification? Are there degrees of rigor? I can infer from some of your examples what kind of pattern you might be picking up on, but if we’re going to try and say things like “there’s a correlation between rigor and volume of publication”, I’d like to at least see a rough operational definition of what you mean by rigor. It may seem obvious to you what you mean, and it may seem like a subject many people on this site devoted to refining human rationality will have opinions on. That makes it more important to define your terms rigorously, not less, because your results shouldn’t explain variation in everyone’s definition of rigor.
For the sake of argument, we could use something like “ratio of bits of information implied by factual claims to bits of information contained in presented evidence supporting factual claims” if we want something vaguely quantifiable. It seems your initial set of examples uses a more heuristic approach, with the rigorous group consisting mostly of well-known scientists, artists, and philosophers who are well-liked and whose findings/writings are considered well-founded/meaningful/influential in our current era, and your non-rigorous group consisting of mostly philosophers and some scientists who are at least partially discredited in our current era. I suspect that this might not be a very predictive heuristic, as I think it implicitly relies on some hindsight and also would be vulnerable to exactly the effect you claim if your claim turns out to be true.
Also, I suspect that academic publication and publication of e.g. novels, self-help books, poetry, philosophical treatises, etc. would follow very different rules with respect to rigor versus volume of publication; there are structures in place to make them do exactly that. While journal publication and peer review rules are obviously far from perfect, I suspect that producing a large volume of non-rigorous work is a much better strategy for a fiction writer, philosopher, or artist than it is for a scientist who, if unable to sufficiently hide their non-rigor, will not get their paper published at all, and might start becoming discredited and losing grant money to do further research. In particular, I think the use of a wide temporal range of publishers is going to confound you a lot, because standards have changed and publication rates in general have gone way up in the last ~150 years.
Actually, I’m not even sure how a definition of “rigorous thought” that applies to scientific literature could apply cleanly to fiction-writing, unless it’s the “General Degree of Socially-Accepted Credibility” heuristic discussed earlier.
First of all, I’m not sure what measure you’re using for “rigorous thought”. Is it a binary classification? Are there degrees of rigor? I can infer from some of your examples what kind of pattern you might be picking up on, but if we’re going to try and say things like “there’s a correlation between rigor and volume of publication”, I’d like to at least see a rough operational definition of what you mean by rigor.
The important thing is that I categorized people as rigorous or non-rigorous first, then found a difference between the groups. That suggests there’s some relevant distinction in my mental model
If I’d made an operational definition, I’d have been testing the operational definition, not my mental model, and the definition might not have matched very well. Better to consult the oracle in my head.
I agree that what I’m saying would be more clear to you if I’d tried to define rigor afterwards. Certainly not being well-liked or influential. Zizek, Derrida, and Lacan are all well-liked and very influential today. Spinoza is not as influential as Nietzsche.
I consider Nietzsche not rigorous because he’s upfront about not being rigorous, about not even considering it an issue. The Superman doesn’t stop and try to figure out if he’s correct. Nietzsche does philosophy by telling stories, not by defending propositions.
I consider Freud not rigorous because he made hypothesis but didn’t test them (AFAIK). He told a lot of just-so stories, without contrasting them with alternative explanations. Similar thing with Marx. More a storyteller than a scientist.
I consider Lysenko not rigorous because instead of arguing with his opponents, he had them sent to Siberia and got a law passed saying it was illegal to argue with him.
I consider Hegel not rigorous because nobody can figure out what a lot of the stuff he wrote means, or if it means anything.
I also consider Stein not rigorous because nobody can figure out what she meant. She wrote like a stroke victim. Her book How to Write begins with 3 untranslated sentences in French, then says:
When he will see
When he will see
When he will see the land of liberty.
The scene changes it is a stone high up against with a hill and there is and above where they will have time.
George Steiner is a curious case. He’s very rigorous in considering the meanings and connotations of his words. But he doesn’t believe reality is knowable, so he has no interest in whether anything he says is true.
I consider Spinoza rigorous because he wrote in the 17th century, and yet confined himself to meaningful statements and inferences that he could draw based on evidence. His reputation is not very high IMHO because he was so rigorous that he said mainly things we now take for granted and consider obvious.
I consider Robert Penn Warren rigorous because he looks at a story as something that communicates the author’s opinions about life through the logical relationships between the different components of the story, and he illustrates this by going through dozens of stories and showing what the intended communication is and how the components interact to support it.
I consider I. A. Richards rigorous because he took stories, showed them to students, asked them to interpret them, and astounded everybody by demonstrating that university literature students understood much less of what was generally thought to be meant in those stories than literary critics believed the general public did.
Jon von Neumann was either rigorous in his thought, or magical.
I don’t think I had any good justification for listing Minsky. I think I meant to contrast him with somebody else from MIT from some of the sloppy “look how cool my robot / simulation is” work done there, but was too lazy to put in the time to justify a choice.
Wiles wrote a humongous proof that has withstood (with some provisos that I don’t understand) the scrutiny of many mathematicians.
Robert Frost is probably the most controversial. I listed him because his work is very tight. His poems have a surface meaning and one or more deeper meanings, and they communicate clearly enough to bring you to contemplate that deeper meaning, rather than (as most modernist poetry does) merely enough to let you contemplate what that deeper meaning might be.
How does this not come down to saying that people you consider rigorous, on average did more work on their texts than people you don’t consider rigorous, and therefore they wrote less as a whole?
If we take a random (educated) person, and ask him to classify authors into rigorous and non-rigorous, something similar should be true on average, and we should find similar statistics. I can’t see how that shows some deep truth about the nature of rigorous thought, except that it means doing more work in your thinking.
I agree that it does mean at least that, so that e.g. some author has written more than 100 books, that is a pretty good sign that he is not worth reading, even if it is not a conclusive one.
How does this not come down to saying that people you consider rigorous, on average did more work on their texts than people you don’t consider rigorous, and therefore they wrote less as a whole?
That is what it comes down to. I’m not trying to show any truth about the nature of rigorous thought.
Ok. In that sense I agree that this is likely to be the case, and would be the case more often than not with any educated person’s assessment of who does rigorous work.
I suspect that your model has been built to serve the hypothesis you started with.
First of all, I’m not sure what measure you’re using for “rigorous thought”. Is it a binary classification? Are there degrees of rigor? I can infer from some of your examples what kind of pattern you might be picking up on, but if we’re going to try and say things like “there’s a correlation between rigor and volume of publication”, I’d like to at least see a rough operational definition of what you mean by rigor. It may seem obvious to you what you mean, and it may seem like a subject many people on this site devoted to refining human rationality will have opinions on. That makes it more important to define your terms rigorously, not less, because your results shouldn’t explain variation in everyone’s definition of rigor.
For the sake of argument, we could use something like “ratio of bits of information implied by factual claims to bits of information contained in presented evidence supporting factual claims” if we want something vaguely quantifiable. It seems your initial set of examples uses a more heuristic approach, with the rigorous group consisting mostly of well-known scientists, artists, and philosophers who are well-liked and whose findings/writings are considered well-founded/meaningful/influential in our current era, and your non-rigorous group consisting of mostly philosophers and some scientists who are at least partially discredited in our current era. I suspect that this might not be a very predictive heuristic, as I think it implicitly relies on some hindsight and also would be vulnerable to exactly the effect you claim if your claim turns out to be true.
Also, I suspect that academic publication and publication of e.g. novels, self-help books, poetry, philosophical treatises, etc. would follow very different rules with respect to rigor versus volume of publication; there are structures in place to make them do exactly that. While journal publication and peer review rules are obviously far from perfect, I suspect that producing a large volume of non-rigorous work is a much better strategy for a fiction writer, philosopher, or artist than it is for a scientist who, if unable to sufficiently hide their non-rigor, will not get their paper published at all, and might start becoming discredited and losing grant money to do further research. In particular, I think the use of a wide temporal range of publishers is going to confound you a lot, because standards have changed and publication rates in general have gone way up in the last ~150 years.
Actually, I’m not even sure how a definition of “rigorous thought” that applies to scientific literature could apply cleanly to fiction-writing, unless it’s the “General Degree of Socially-Accepted Credibility” heuristic discussed earlier.
The important thing is that I categorized people as rigorous or non-rigorous first, then found a difference between the groups. That suggests there’s some relevant distinction in my mental model
If I’d made an operational definition, I’d have been testing the operational definition, not my mental model, and the definition might not have matched very well. Better to consult the oracle in my head.
I agree that what I’m saying would be more clear to you if I’d tried to define rigor afterwards. Certainly not being well-liked or influential. Zizek, Derrida, and Lacan are all well-liked and very influential today. Spinoza is not as influential as Nietzsche.
I consider Nietzsche not rigorous because he’s upfront about not being rigorous, about not even considering it an issue. The Superman doesn’t stop and try to figure out if he’s correct. Nietzsche does philosophy by telling stories, not by defending propositions.
I consider Freud not rigorous because he made hypothesis but didn’t test them (AFAIK). He told a lot of just-so stories, without contrasting them with alternative explanations. Similar thing with Marx. More a storyteller than a scientist.
I consider Lysenko not rigorous because instead of arguing with his opponents, he had them sent to Siberia and got a law passed saying it was illegal to argue with him.
I consider Hegel not rigorous because nobody can figure out what a lot of the stuff he wrote means, or if it means anything.
I also consider Stein not rigorous because nobody can figure out what she meant. She wrote like a stroke victim. Her book How to Write begins with 3 untranslated sentences in French, then says:
George Steiner is a curious case. He’s very rigorous in considering the meanings and connotations of his words. But he doesn’t believe reality is knowable, so he has no interest in whether anything he says is true.
I consider Spinoza rigorous because he wrote in the 17th century, and yet confined himself to meaningful statements and inferences that he could draw based on evidence. His reputation is not very high IMHO because he was so rigorous that he said mainly things we now take for granted and consider obvious.
I consider Robert Penn Warren rigorous because he looks at a story as something that communicates the author’s opinions about life through the logical relationships between the different components of the story, and he illustrates this by going through dozens of stories and showing what the intended communication is and how the components interact to support it.
I consider I. A. Richards rigorous because he took stories, showed them to students, asked them to interpret them, and astounded everybody by demonstrating that university literature students understood much less of what was generally thought to be meant in those stories than literary critics believed the general public did.
Jon von Neumann was either rigorous in his thought, or magical.
I don’t think I had any good justification for listing Minsky. I think I meant to contrast him with somebody else from MIT from some of the sloppy “look how cool my robot / simulation is” work done there, but was too lazy to put in the time to justify a choice.
Wiles wrote a humongous proof that has withstood (with some provisos that I don’t understand) the scrutiny of many mathematicians.
Robert Frost is probably the most controversial. I listed him because his work is very tight. His poems have a surface meaning and one or more deeper meanings, and they communicate clearly enough to bring you to contemplate that deeper meaning, rather than (as most modernist poetry does) merely enough to let you contemplate what that deeper meaning might be.
How does this not come down to saying that people you consider rigorous, on average did more work on their texts than people you don’t consider rigorous, and therefore they wrote less as a whole?
If we take a random (educated) person, and ask him to classify authors into rigorous and non-rigorous, something similar should be true on average, and we should find similar statistics. I can’t see how that shows some deep truth about the nature of rigorous thought, except that it means doing more work in your thinking.
I agree that it does mean at least that, so that e.g. some author has written more than 100 books, that is a pretty good sign that he is not worth reading, even if it is not a conclusive one.
That is what it comes down to. I’m not trying to show any truth about the nature of rigorous thought.
Ok. In that sense I agree that this is likely to be the case, and would be the case more often than not with any educated person’s assessment of who does rigorous work.