See what you can learn. Try to steel-man the arguments that you encounter. If you’re faced with bad arguments then three things that you can focus on (in declining order of priority) are: 1) what good points are in the neighborhood of this argument, 2) what is the central flaw of this argument (which gets at its core), and 3) why would someone find this argument plausible? #3 is especially useful if it can lead you back towards 1 & 2.
In most philosophy classes, you can get a good grade if you make clear arguments, and clearly lay out the arguments that you disagree with before expressing your reasons for disagreement. So it’s probably worth at least giving that a try (especially if you have opportunities to try it out early in the class that won’t have much effect on your final grade). If it doesn’t go smoothly, before jumping to the mind-numbing “guess the password” solution, try looking at it as a problem of inferential distance. Are there ways of getting your points across more clearly based on how you frame your argument, what background information you give, which claims you leave out of your argument (because they are inessential and too many inferential steps away), etc.?
I took several philosophy-related classes (in a few different departments), and only had one where I had to do something like guessing the teacher’s password. In that class the professor was a postmodernist type, who designed the course as a way to explain his worldview and assigned papers for us to write that had to follow a template that fit within his worldview. On the whole that class was a good experience. I didn’t have to worry much about password-guessing except when writing those papers; in class I was sincere & engaged and focused on inferential distance (including trying to point out flaws in his reasoning in class discussion in a way that was concise, catchy to other students, and non-annoying). It took some thinking to figure out what was going on in his worldview, and where the main flaws were, which seemed like a useful exercise. I learned some things, and could have learned more if I’d put more effort into steel-manning; looking back there were a lot of arguments in the same neighborhood as Robin Hanson’s points about signaling, group affiliation, and X not being about X (as well as contorted versions of other valuable LW ideas, like warnings about the mind projection fallacy). There wasn’t room within the papers I wrote to raise questions about his worldview, given how the assignments were structured, but I was careful to notice when I was bullshitting or glossing over things to fit the assignment (with one paper I even created a version with footnotes that identified the flaws in what I was writing; I turned in the footnote-free version).
See what you can learn. Try to steel-man the arguments that you encounter. If you’re faced with bad arguments then three things that you can focus on (in declining order of priority) are: 1) what good points are in the neighborhood of this argument, 2) what is the central flaw of this argument (which gets at its core), and 3) why would someone find this argument plausible? #3 is especially useful if it can lead you back towards 1 & 2.
In most philosophy classes, you can get a good grade if you make clear arguments, and clearly lay out the arguments that you disagree with before expressing your reasons for disagreement. So it’s probably worth at least giving that a try (especially if you have opportunities to try it out early in the class that won’t have much effect on your final grade). If it doesn’t go smoothly, before jumping to the mind-numbing “guess the password” solution, try looking at it as a problem of inferential distance. Are there ways of getting your points across more clearly based on how you frame your argument, what background information you give, which claims you leave out of your argument (because they are inessential and too many inferential steps away), etc.?
I took several philosophy-related classes (in a few different departments), and only had one where I had to do something like guessing the teacher’s password. In that class the professor was a postmodernist type, who designed the course as a way to explain his worldview and assigned papers for us to write that had to follow a template that fit within his worldview. On the whole that class was a good experience. I didn’t have to worry much about password-guessing except when writing those papers; in class I was sincere & engaged and focused on inferential distance (including trying to point out flaws in his reasoning in class discussion in a way that was concise, catchy to other students, and non-annoying). It took some thinking to figure out what was going on in his worldview, and where the main flaws were, which seemed like a useful exercise. I learned some things, and could have learned more if I’d put more effort into steel-manning; looking back there were a lot of arguments in the same neighborhood as Robin Hanson’s points about signaling, group affiliation, and X not being about X (as well as contorted versions of other valuable LW ideas, like warnings about the mind projection fallacy). There wasn’t room within the papers I wrote to raise questions about his worldview, given how the assignments were structured, but I was careful to notice when I was bullshitting or glossing over things to fit the assignment (with one paper I even created a version with footnotes that identified the flaws in what I was writing; I turned in the footnote-free version).
Thanks for taking the time to respond! I found your advice helpful. If you’re curious about how my experience was of the class, see this comment.