Hrm, Laplace at least seems to have been a Laplace of rationality, and I think we might underestimate the strength of a lot of historical rationalists in general. Gautama Buddha is the extreme case, but it’s hard to know what the hell happened there. So I agree that it’s undisciplined, especially in the sense that it has few explicit disciples, but I’m not sure about its ‘youth’, as the foundations of epistemology seem to have been being pioneered since the dawn of humanity, and it’s hard to talk about the instrumental rationality of agents that seem to not have anything very obvious or tangible to be optimizing for (hence the self-understanding-oriented epistemology).
Hrm, Laplace at least seems to have been a Laplace of rationality, and I think we might underestimate the strength of a lot of historical rationalists in general. Gautama Buddha is the extreme case, but it’s hard to know what the hell happened there. So I agree that it’s undisciplined, especially in the sense that it has few explicit disciples, but I’m not sure about its ‘youth’, as the foundations of epistemology seem to have been being pioneered since the dawn of humanity, and it’s hard to talk about the instrumental rationality of agents that seem to not have anything very obvious or tangible to be optimizing for (hence the self-understanding-oriented epistemology).