Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
Just me or is philosophy actually a complete shitshow? When I was younger I really wanted to major in philosophy because I thought it was "learning to think real good about abstract stuff", but eventually found out it was "quoting other famous people's stuff at each other"
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
but idk how to engage with it because i haven't read those philosophers because reading those philosophers is a kind of masochism i have not yet ascended to, and so I'm in an awkward position of "I have no idea what you're saying but I know I hate it"
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
by this point if i'm at a party and i'm like 'yea but what's it like to feel the sense of thinking' and then someone says 'yeah well nietzsche said-' i just am done, immediately, like my next battle plan is to figure out how to erase philosophers from their mind
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
i can't tell if they're doing some weird actually original and good mental jujitsu while using other philosopher's ideas as pawns, or if they are actually completely unoriginal and think that good thinking is just knowing what other good thinkers think. I can't tell.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
As much as I shit on the rationalist community, this is a big part of why I love them - on a whole, they're a level of well-read and nerdy and *don't* pull the philosopher namedropping card. It's glorious.
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Joscha Bach
@Plinz
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Academic philosophy skews heavy against original thought and towards scholastics, because original thinkers tend to be late to the party by at least a few decades. As a result, it does not attract and retain many original thinkers.
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Joscha Bach
@Plinz
Replying to
@Plinz
and
@Aella_Girl
There are original thinkers in philosophy, but they are harder to meet than original thinkers in physics or computer science, because the low hanging fruits that you can reap without deep formal skills may be mostly gone.
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