It's weird that "being interested in philosophy" is like... a movement. My background is in philosophy, but the rationalist vs nonrationalist debate seems like an undergraduate class dispute.
My old roommate worked for Open Phil, and was obsessed with AI Safety and really into Bitcoin. I never was. We still had interesting arguments about it all the time. Most of the time we just argued until we got to the axioms we disagreed on, and that was that.
You don't have to agree with the Rationalist™ perspective to apply philosophically rigorous thinking. You can be friends and allies with them without agreeing with all their views. There are strong arguments for why frequentism may be more applicable than bayesianism in different domains. Or why transhumanism is a pipe dream. They are still conversations that are worthwhile as long as you're not so confident in your position that you think you might learn something.
> It's weird that "being interested in philosophy" is like... a movement. My background is in philosophy, but the rationalist vs nonrationalist debate seems like an undergraduate class dispute.
Bring up the rationalist community within academic philosophy circles and you'll get a lot of groans.
The fun part about rationalists is that they like to go back to first principles and rediscover basics. The less fun part is that they'll ignore all of the existing work and pretend they're going to figure it all out themselves, often with weird results.
This leaves philosophy people endlessly frustrated as the rationalists write long essays about really basic philosophy concepts as if they're breaking new ground, while ignoring a lot of very interesting work that could have made the topic much more interesting to discuss.
Rationalists are constantly falling into ditches that actual philosophers crawled out of centuries ago. But what's even more exasperating is that they do it in tendentious disquisitions that take thousands of wasted words to get.. to.. the.. everloving.. point.
Thanks for reminding me that I left out their unjustified sense of significance and self-importance, thinking that their sophomoric ramblings are somehow comparable to Sartre's or Heidegger's writings.
It's a lot like how every "interesting"/pop scientific field (think quantum) has a niche community of Free Thinkers that the "establishment" just won't listen to. If you hear from the actual core scientific community you'll find out that they just already went over this 40-400 years ago and nothing being argued as groundbreaking is new or groundbreaking like it's being pitched as. That indifference can feel like rejection to the highly-excited outsiders which can develop into animosity which just further isolates them.
I mean, I don't disagree with you there. Even within academic philosophy circles, you'll get groans when one sect is discussing things with another sect. Lord knows ancient philosophy academics and analytic philosophy academics are going to get headaches just trying to hold a conversation... and we're not even including continental school.
My point is that, yes, while it may be a bit annoying in general (lord knows how many times I rolled my eyes at my old roommate talking about trans-humanism), the idea that this Rationalist™ movement "thinking about things philosophically" is controversial is just weird. That they seem to care about a philosophical approach to thinking about things, and maybe didn't get degrees and maybe don't understand much background while forming their own little school, seems as unremarkable is it is uncontroversial.
My old roommate worked for Open Phil, and was obsessed with AI Safety and really into Bitcoin. I never was. We still had interesting arguments about it all the time. Most of the time we just argued until we got to the axioms we disagreed on, and that was that.
You don't have to agree with the Rationalist™ perspective to apply philosophically rigorous thinking. You can be friends and allies with them without agreeing with all their views. There are strong arguments for why frequentism may be more applicable than bayesianism in different domains. Or why transhumanism is a pipe dream. They are still conversations that are worthwhile as long as you're not so confident in your position that you think you might learn something.