Philosophy is so hard that most people don’t ever start
In fact in my experience people who can push past this “epistemological learned helplessness” also tend to have significant problems with day to day living
In a manner of speaking, I boil this down to how often you spend in different levels of thinking. I’m gonna go ahead and share a back-and-forth chat I had with ChatGPT on this precise topic the other day:
To me it boils down to an intersection of raw IQ and experience. If you’re generally “thinking fast” in Kahneman-language then that would be “type1” thinking that most people do most of the day.
Much beyond that and thinking becomes exponentially harder with every level of “simulation” your brain has to do with more complex, multi variable simulations walking up the abstraction stack.
The downside to that, however, is that if you don’t have accurate perceptions, or there are flaws in reasoning, then you come to conclusions that don’t fit because your perceptions are off. This is the other side of genius, which is typically some kind of very iconoclastic position on something political social or personal.
I think it fits with what the author said to conclude:
“ It seems to me that although these people are more likely to become terrorists or Velikovskians or homeopaths, they’re also the only people who can figure out if something basic and unquestionable is wrong, and make this possibility well-known enough that normal people start becoming willing to consider it.”
Most people however have neither the IQ nor the experience to actually have coherence for almost anything at the 4th or 5th order.
Usually only in one area of their life like work or a hobby do anyone actually have the attention and focus to get to that level of coherency - and worldwide that’s extremely rare as most people aren’t secure enough to have the time and resources to gain the experience needed.
I have a hard time engaging deeply with philosophy. I've tried to get a good overview, but whenever I read the real scholarly work I find an assumption I hate on page 3 and cannot bear to engage with that assumption for a thousand further pages of close reading.
I don't want to be the philosophical equivalent of those guys who pester physics professors with "I've unified gravity with quantum mechanics and I just need you to add the math". But I can't pick up Kant or Hegel or Sartre without screaming.
Ah, there’s your problem, at least in my opinion/experience. You have to start at the beginning, read Plato’s Republic followed by Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics. When you read them don’t take them as fact but as a “living” historical foundation that will help you set the stage for reading increasingly more recent books.
That's part of it. I feel like I can't even start without reproducing 2,000 years of back work. I know it's not the same as science, but if someone said "you can't do basic mechanics without reading Archimedes in the original Greek", I'd laugh at them.
What do you think about Good and Real by Gary L. Drescher? I wrote about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789146, so it's not perfect, but I haven't found anything that is.
Broke: Reading books or attending classes on philosophy and cognitive science to learn from hundreds of years of combined research from the world's greatest minds.
Woke: Pulling up a new theory of intelligence and for why everyone else is too damn stupid for "fourth order thinking" out of thin air, talking to it about an LLM and deeming it so important it has to be shared with an online community.
In fact in my experience people who can push past this “epistemological learned helplessness” also tend to have significant problems with day to day living
In a manner of speaking, I boil this down to how often you spend in different levels of thinking. I’m gonna go ahead and share a back-and-forth chat I had with ChatGPT on this precise topic the other day:
https://chat.openai.com/share/03302643-5efc-41e0-a681-6d1699...
To me it boils down to an intersection of raw IQ and experience. If you’re generally “thinking fast” in Kahneman-language then that would be “type1” thinking that most people do most of the day.
Much beyond that and thinking becomes exponentially harder with every level of “simulation” your brain has to do with more complex, multi variable simulations walking up the abstraction stack.
The downside to that, however, is that if you don’t have accurate perceptions, or there are flaws in reasoning, then you come to conclusions that don’t fit because your perceptions are off. This is the other side of genius, which is typically some kind of very iconoclastic position on something political social or personal.
I think it fits with what the author said to conclude:
“ It seems to me that although these people are more likely to become terrorists or Velikovskians or homeopaths, they’re also the only people who can figure out if something basic and unquestionable is wrong, and make this possibility well-known enough that normal people start becoming willing to consider it.”
Most people however have neither the IQ nor the experience to actually have coherence for almost anything at the 4th or 5th order.
Usually only in one area of their life like work or a hobby do anyone actually have the attention and focus to get to that level of coherency - and worldwide that’s extremely rare as most people aren’t secure enough to have the time and resources to gain the experience needed.