It’s not clear why this reflects poorly on philosophers.
Like, I’m sure you could find the same thing with controversial scientific questions. Maybe not to the same magnitude.
Suppose you didn’t find it. “Well, yes, we disagree about a number of seemingly-simple topics, but these disagreements aren’t correlated to our personality, so we really have everything figured out, it’s just that …. uh …. um ”
The problem is in philosophy they attempt to use intuitions as evidence. If their “philosophically informed intuitions” are still vulnerable to biases and errors then arguments based on those intuitions are (even more) suspect. I doubt most LW readers found the intuition evidence argument compelling to begin with.
I suspect it’s the same for scientists for controversial topics. But discussing controversial topics is not science. Coming up with a way to verify a claim is. In general personality must be correlated with opinion (or at least that’s my intuition :)).
Right. The thread title is at best an overstatement of the experimental finding. Some significant group of philosophers is influenced by extroversion/introversion. The rest might not be.
It’s not clear why this reflects poorly on philosophers.
Like, I’m sure you could find the same thing with controversial scientific questions. Maybe not to the same magnitude.
Suppose you didn’t find it. “Well, yes, we disagree about a number of seemingly-simple topics, but these disagreements aren’t correlated to our personality, so we really have everything figured out, it’s just that …. uh …. um ”
The problem is in philosophy they attempt to use intuitions as evidence. If their “philosophically informed intuitions” are still vulnerable to biases and errors then arguments based on those intuitions are (even more) suspect. I doubt most LW readers found the intuition evidence argument compelling to begin with.
Although we do use intuitions as evidence, just as evidence about something else. For instance, evidence about what algorithms our minds use.
I suspect it’s the same for scientists for controversial topics. But discussing controversial topics is not science. Coming up with a way to verify a claim is. In general personality must be correlated with opinion (or at least that’s my intuition :)).
Right. The thread title is at best an overstatement of the experimental finding. Some significant group of philosophers is influenced by extroversion/introversion. The rest might not be.