I’m not sure we should be sending people to less analytical/technical philosophy forums. Most philosophy is bullshit, and most philosophical debate, as it’s usually structured, just serves to reinforce people’s confidence in their preferred bullshit. You compared it to MathOverflow referring basic questions to Dr. Math, etc., but I’m not sure the comparison is valid, because people will still usually get the right answers when they ask their more basic math questions on more basic sites.
Whereas if someone comes here and tries to start a discussion about the nature of free will, and we refer them to a philosophy forum, they’ll probably end up with ideas about it no better than the ones they started with. If we refer them to the sequence on it without further comment, they may not bother reading it, if they don’t have some sense of what to expect or why it would be worth reading a sequence of a dozen posts.
Maybe what we need, to supplement the Less Wrong FAQ, is a Reality FAQ — something that summarizes the generally-accepted LW positions on all the big mysterious deep philosophical questions that we’ve long since answered. (It would, of course, link each question to posts/sequences on them for anyone who wants to go further into it after reading the summary of the answer.)
Well is there anywhere that focuses on say history of science issues? Even if people don’t get a heavy dose of Bayesianism they can still get a pretty decent background if they get the basic ideas of Popper, Quine and Lakatos for example. And it isn’t like LW really does focus on philosophy in the general sense.
I suspect that more people would benefit not from emphasis on philosophy but on clear thinking. If that’s what we focus on a lot of the general skeptical websites can teach simply by osmosis a lot of the basic good habits. (Yes, I know that’s a claim that a lot of people here seem to disagree with. Part of the issue is that the aims of the skeptical movement are not identical to those of the rationalists).
I’m not sure we should be sending people to less analytical/technical philosophy forums. Most philosophy is bullshit, and most philosophical debate, as it’s usually structured, just serves to reinforce people’s confidence in their preferred bullshit. You compared it to MathOverflow referring basic questions to Dr. Math, etc., but I’m not sure the comparison is valid, because people will still usually get the right answers when they ask their more basic math questions on more basic sites.
Whereas if someone comes here and tries to start a discussion about the nature of free will, and we refer them to a philosophy forum, they’ll probably end up with ideas about it no better than the ones they started with. If we refer them to the sequence on it without further comment, they may not bother reading it, if they don’t have some sense of what to expect or why it would be worth reading a sequence of a dozen posts.
Maybe what we need, to supplement the Less Wrong FAQ, is a Reality FAQ — something that summarizes the generally-accepted LW positions on all the big mysterious deep philosophical questions that we’ve long since answered. (It would, of course, link each question to posts/sequences on them for anyone who wants to go further into it after reading the summary of the answer.)
Well is there anywhere that focuses on say history of science issues? Even if people don’t get a heavy dose of Bayesianism they can still get a pretty decent background if they get the basic ideas of Popper, Quine and Lakatos for example. And it isn’t like LW really does focus on philosophy in the general sense.
I suspect that more people would benefit not from emphasis on philosophy but on clear thinking. If that’s what we focus on a lot of the general skeptical websites can teach simply by osmosis a lot of the basic good habits. (Yes, I know that’s a claim that a lot of people here seem to disagree with. Part of the issue is that the aims of the skeptical movement are not identical to those of the rationalists).