✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Why I'm not a philosopher

gleech.org · 4,555 words · saved by 4 readers

It’s simple: The greatest nontechnical minds in history have all failed to work out the nature of the world just by thinking about it, and so would I. … Alright alright it’s not simple. Aside from the pursuit of truth, which it is manifestly bad at: why do philosophy? Where does this leave us? I find myself piling up many kinds of philosophy one should be doing - e.g. negative philosophy against bad philosophy, practical ethics, schemes for handling moral uncertainty, logic, population ethics, existential risk. But then I remember the left tail, of very harmful philosophers. The relatively small active effort on many questions (at most a few hundred careers, and more often much less than one) is a good argument for it not being impossible to solve philosophical questions. (Less-likely impossible in proportion to neglect.) Also there’s the importance of non-perverse philosophy for making a future artificial intelligence; it doesn’t need to be right or definite, but it needs to land in

Resolution (2021) I have been flip-flopping on this post every few months for 4 years. I've cracked it at last: the median philosophy degree does nothing for the world. But the tails are heavy. Is the left tail (Rousseau, Marx, Freud, Zhu Hongdeng, Inazō, Schmitt, half of bioethics ) as heavy as the right tail (Mozi, Santideva, Smith, Bentham, Ramsey, Singer, Sen, Bostrom)? 1 I think it's difficult to know your own potential, and also surprisingly difficult to know which tail one is in. So my actual answer to the statement in the title is: because I am not confident I'm exceptional, and not co

Explore this link on the map →

saved by

related reading