I like the example of Rand as way of trying to discern whether we’re biased as consumers of philosophy. The large historical problem has been as much that the books were never written, or at least not widely propagated though.
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Helen Taylor Mill maybe illustrative. JS Mill credits her as being the thinker of the important thoughts in his work, but we only know about that because it was relatively recently and we have documentation of his thoughts on the matter.
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Replying to @tomeclarke @primalpoly
Yep. No coincidence that Ayn Rand lived relatively recently. We all need to be wary of recency bias, but my own theory is that if philosophy were a healthy discipline than little more would be said of Plato than of alchemists. Few read Newton's original writings.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @primalpoly
That’s a great point. To the extent plato is important it’s in the history of philosophy rather than his correctness. Although, no-one I’ve read other than Plato seems to have addressed what the best musical modes are for society.
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In The Republic the Dorian mode was preferred so he would have appreciated Miles Davis' ’So What’.
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The Doors did a lot of work in the Dorian too. Coming back to your point
@ESYudkowsky, would it be a good way to characterize things that what we call ‘Philosophy’ as a discipline is much more conflated with it’s own history than in other disciplines (e.g physics)?1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @tomeclarke @primalpoly
Art and literature have sometimes been likewise conflated with their own history. I see it as a curse of places where objective accomplishment is hard for many to verify and a natural tendency to ancestor-worship and an illusion of scholarship allocates prestige, a la religion.
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It's not that the true accomplishments as they exist beyond human evaluation are somehow more tied to history. It's just that there's a natural kind of fake scholarship and lauding that humans do, which in its unrestrained form is classic religion.
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Objective verification of talent is a different phenomenon, trying to pump against the natural high-entropy state. This pumping force is triumphant in math, weaker in science, weaker yet in literature, and absent in religion or continental philosophy.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @primalpoly
Ok, only now getting that you’re focussing on talent verification. Do you think that verification of talent is a useful metric when thinking about what to learn (particularly for ideas that have been around a long time)?
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I'm just framing it that way because of the original question about great female philosophers. If you can't verify greatness then it's little wonder if men win the status game before 1950.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @primalpoly
Makes sense. And this conversation has lead me to wonder about the framing. What is this quality of greatness that we associate with thinkers and philosophers, and why do I care about it? And if ‘greatness’ is a flawed focus, is the gender balance of greatness important?
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