It might be useful, if only for gaining status and attention and funding, to connect your work directly to one or several academic fields. To present it as a synthesis of philosophy, computer science, and cognitive science (or some other combination of your choice.) When people ask me what LessWrong is, I generally say something like “It’s philosophy from a computer scientist’s perspective.” Most people can only put a mental label on something when they have a rough idea of what it’s like, and it’s not practical to say, “Well, our work isn’t like anything.”
That doesn’t mean you have to hire philosophers or join a philosophy department; it might not mean that you, personally, have to do anything. But I do think that more people would be interested, and have a smaller inferential distance, if LW ideas were generally presented as related to other disciplines.
Expanding on this, which section of my local Barnes And Noble is your (Eliezer) book going to be in? Philosophy seems like the best fit (aside from the best selling non-fiction) to get new interested readership.
Amazon’s “Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences” contains things like Malcolm Gladwell and Predictably Irrational, which I think is the audience that Eliezer is targeting.
It might be useful, if only for gaining status and attention and funding, to connect your work directly to one or several academic fields. To present it as a synthesis of philosophy, computer science, and cognitive science (or some other combination of your choice.) When people ask me what LessWrong is, I generally say something like “It’s philosophy from a computer scientist’s perspective.” Most people can only put a mental label on something when they have a rough idea of what it’s like, and it’s not practical to say, “Well, our work isn’t like anything.”
That doesn’t mean you have to hire philosophers or join a philosophy department; it might not mean that you, personally, have to do anything. But I do think that more people would be interested, and have a smaller inferential distance, if LW ideas were generally presented as related to other disciplines.
Expanding on this, which section of my local Barnes And Noble is your (Eliezer) book going to be in? Philosophy seems like the best fit (aside from the best selling non-fiction) to get new interested readership.
Amazon’s “Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences” contains things like Malcolm Gladwell and Predictably Irrational, which I think is the audience that Eliezer is targeting.