Possibly you should state your hypothesis ahead of time and define what would count (or have counted in the past) as a worthwhile contribution to LW-style rationalism from within the analytic philosophy community.
Then we would have a concrete way to decide the question of whether analytic philosophy has contributed anything in the past, or contributes anything in the future.
It also might turn out in the process of formalising your definition of what counts as a worthwhile contribution that nothing outside of your specific field of AI research counts for you, which would in itself be a worthwhile realisation.
Acknowledging my own biases here, I’m an analytic philosopher who mostly teaches scientific methodology and ethics (with a minor side interest in statistics) and my reaction to perusing the LW content was that there were some very interesting and valuable nuggets here for me to fossick out but that the bulk of the content wasn’t new or non-obvious to me.
Possibly there is so little for you in philosophy that has real novelty or value because there is already enormous overlap between what you do and what is done in the relevant subset of philosophy.
Being a philosopher makes you acutely aware of how deep the intellectual debts of most modern people are to philosophy, and how little awareness of this they have. It’s all too easy to believe that one came to one’s moral viewpoint entirely unassisted and entirely naturally, for example, without being aware that one is actually articulating a mixture of Kant and Bentham’s ideas that you never would have come up with had you lived before Kant and Bentham. Many people who have never heard of Peter Singer take the animal liberation movement for granted, unaware that the term “animal liberation” was coined by a philosopher in 1975 drawing on previous work by philosophers in the 1970s.
Possibly you should state your hypothesis ahead of time and define what would count (or have counted in the past) as a worthwhile contribution to LW-style rationalism from within the analytic philosophy community.
Then we would have a concrete way to decide the question of whether analytic philosophy has contributed anything in the past, or contributes anything in the future.
It also might turn out in the process of formalising your definition of what counts as a worthwhile contribution that nothing outside of your specific field of AI research counts for you, which would in itself be a worthwhile realisation.
Acknowledging my own biases here, I’m an analytic philosopher who mostly teaches scientific methodology and ethics (with a minor side interest in statistics) and my reaction to perusing the LW content was that there were some very interesting and valuable nuggets here for me to fossick out but that the bulk of the content wasn’t new or non-obvious to me.
Possibly there is so little for you in philosophy that has real novelty or value because there is already enormous overlap between what you do and what is done in the relevant subset of philosophy.
Being a philosopher makes you acutely aware of how deep the intellectual debts of most modern people are to philosophy, and how little awareness of this they have. It’s all too easy to believe that one came to one’s moral viewpoint entirely unassisted and entirely naturally, for example, without being aware that one is actually articulating a mixture of Kant and Bentham’s ideas that you never would have come up with had you lived before Kant and Bentham. Many people who have never heard of Peter Singer take the animal liberation movement for granted, unaware that the term “animal liberation” was coined by a philosopher in 1975 drawing on previous work by philosophers in the 1970s.