Whence I come: 78 years old, Ph. D. social psych, musician, lately reading a lot of philosophy. Just wondering if the community here thought Hume was an idiot and the latest findings about emotions being a necessary part of decision-making horrifying. bill w
wondering if the community here thought Hume was an idiot
Just searched old posts, and apparently at least one person on LW thought Hume was a candidate for the Greatest Philosopher in History. That’s an obscure post with only one upvote though, so can’t be considered representative of the community’s views.
In general I think this community tends to be not too concerned with evaluating long-dead philosophers, and instead prefers to figure out what we can, informed by all the knowledge we currently have available from across scientific disciplines.
Historical philosophers may have been bright and made good arguments in their time. But they were starting from a huge disadvantage to us, if they didn’t have access to a modern understanding of evolution, cognitive biases, logic and computability, etc.
wondering if the community here thought… the latest findings about emotions being a necessary part of decision-making horrifying
I’m not sure exactly what you’re referring to. But in general I think the community is pretty on-board with thinking that there’s a lot that our brains do besides explicit verbal deductive reasoning, and that this is useful.
And also that you’ll reason best if you can set up a sort of dialogue between your emotional, intuitive judgments and your explicit verbal reasoning. Each can serve as a check on the other. Neither is to be completely trusted. And you’ll do best when you can make use of both. (See Kahneman’s work on System 1 and System 2 thinking.)
Whence I come: 78 years old, Ph. D. social psych, musician, lately reading a lot of philosophy. Just wondering if the community here thought Hume was an idiot and the latest findings about emotions being a necessary part of decision-making horrifying. bill w
Idiot about what?
Horrifying but true?
Welcome!
Just searched old posts, and apparently at least one person on LW thought Hume was a candidate for the Greatest Philosopher in History. That’s an obscure post with only one upvote though, so can’t be considered representative of the community’s views.
In general I think this community tends to be not too concerned with evaluating long-dead philosophers, and instead prefers to figure out what we can, informed by all the knowledge we currently have available from across scientific disciplines.
Historical philosophers may have been bright and made good arguments in their time. But they were starting from a huge disadvantage to us, if they didn’t have access to a modern understanding of evolution, cognitive biases, logic and computability, etc.
For a fairly representative account of how LW-ers view mainstream philosophy, see: Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy and Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re referring to. But in general I think the community is pretty on-board with thinking that there’s a lot that our brains do besides explicit verbal deductive reasoning, and that this is useful.
And also that you’ll reason best if you can set up a sort of dialogue between your emotional, intuitive judgments and your explicit verbal reasoning. Each can serve as a check on the other. Neither is to be completely trusted. And you’ll do best when you can make use of both. (See Kahneman’s work on System 1 and System 2 thinking.)