For progress to be by accumulation and not random walk, read great books (2010)

It's still a dumb warning, but at least it's being applied in the dumbest way possible.

What do you mean by that?

And to your reasoning for it’s importance, it’s quite optimistic to think it would have made a.difference but nonetheless every bit would have been worth the effort. What a nightmare!

Which philosophers are you referring to? I'd agree with "many" but "most" is an empirical claim I'd not be brave enough to make. Do you perhaps mean to say "economics isn't a natural science"?

Case in point: there is tons of kuhnians running around that think of science as a consent-seeking endeavor with agreed upon principles. They recognise that any hard delineation between say econ not being a science but physics being one, usually kicks out a lot of progress in physics as not scientific. Especially those theoretical physics whose predictions are extremely fruitful bbut where experimental data is out of reach right now.

Obviously you can get great in the field of physics or mathematics without reading Plato, but you really shouldn’t, because the works and thoughts of Plato are the foundation of our free society. And that’s just Plato, you really should enrich your life by reading classics of your field as well as philosophy, classic literature, arts and history.

In my country we have a word to describe this, it’s called “dannelse”, and I can’t find an English word for it. The closest thing I’ve been able to come up with to describe it is: ”give people a broad, general basis for developing their talents to the maximum and growing into strong, open and multi-faceted individuals who can assume their responsibility in society to the full.”. In my country, you can’t attend the university without a minimum foundation of classical philosophy, because you can’t do science if you don’t understand how knowledge is obtained, but I’ve never met an actual scientist who didn’t actually delve deeper into those aspects of life, because they offer so much in return.

Another example is programming. Who would you rather hire? Someone who is self taught, or someone who’s educated in best practices and patterns? The latter, because they won’t repeat the mistakes of the past 25 years. Every science is like this, and if you don’t educte yourself on the past, you’re really just wasting your time, making someone else’s mistake.

The real irony of the original story is that it excludes history from this. History happens to be my field, and unlike most other sciences, our classical works are mostly full of lies. Because they weren’t written to keep track of history, but to further the authors political agenda at the time. We use them only because we have to.

They should. Not to get the technical details, but to understand the spirit and the spiritual adventure that got them their fancy degrees and labs. And also to not be uncultivated technocrats.

>But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.

The fact they were "white men" doesn't mean anything, except if you're racist. Or anti-racist racist, which is also fashionable.

I'm as anti-colonialism as they come, but in Europe and the US the majority of the population ethnicity-wise and the founders were also "white" so why would they study something else? Those "white men" built their culture. In Africa and Asia, they can (and do) study their own people on those matters (e.g. Confucius, Lao Tse, Zuo Qiuming for China, and so on).

Besides, Philosophy, like literature is not some path towards "progress", as it's not a technical endeavour. It's a collection of ways of thinking about society, culture, ontology, ethics, politics, and so on. Those complement each other, they don't obsolete them. And often the best discoveries come earlier, rather than later. At worst, the philosophy of an era might not fit the cultural fashions of another. But that doesn't make the philosophy obsolete (and those fashions would change themselves with time).

And unlike with Physics, where you can use some random textbook to learn that f=ma without reading Newton, in Philosophy the full wording and context matters as well. What you're left with when you distill it is like Cliff Notes to War and Peace as opposed to the book itself (or "Functional programming for dummies in 24 hours" book as opposed to the "SICP" to use a CS inspired example).

Philosophy is more of a dialogue with great minds of the past and present, rather than some kind of "advance" or "progress" of the kind idealized in some views of science.

If you want to engage in a dialogue, it would be a good idea to try to figure out what the other people in the dialogue thought and said.

If you're trying to make better predictions, create more accurate models of the world, or build better bridges, you might not care what anyone else thought or said except in so far as they help you with your project. But that's usually not what philosophers are after.

Also, if you are ignorant of philosophers of the past, you are likely to reinvent the wheel or get bogged down in issues already covered at length by minds far greater than your own.

Finally, reading, analyzing, and discussing the philosophers of the past is great training in philosophy. It is in some respects analogous to doing exercises in mathematics, or maybe participating in a programming contest.

Economics absolutely does not do this. Philosophy might, depending on the program, approximate it for a very loose understanding of “primary teaching text”. But philosophy isn't even in principal a discovery-of-the-correct-in-a-falsifiable-domain process (it once included that, but that part since had been split out of philosophy as empirical science.)

> But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.

No, they don't; economics doesn't usually expect neophytes to read non-current texts at all, and philosophy might have you read ancient texts (or excerpts therefrom) early on, but only explicitly critically, not “as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.”

> Surely that is a point worth reconsidering.

It would be, were it true.

My understanding is that economics programs rarely bother to require a student to dive much into history anymore. There's little time spent understanding the many schools, their development, what they get right/wrong, or how they continue to provide helpful models of understanding reality. Instead, they seek to present economics as a science with an obtainable universal theory/model of everything, free of subjective value judgments--but a half-decent study of the history of the development of political economy would, much to the chagrin of the neoclassicalists who changed the term to economics, would quickly disabuse the students of such a notion.

As a former student who studied philosophy 20 years ago, there was zero suggestion that the dead white men's words were written on clay tablets by the gods. There was vociferous debate on those dead white men's words, none of which were divine, and then more debate when we found out what the next dead white man said to counter the first, and so on, until we started encountering notable dead (and sometimes not-dead!) white (and not-white!) men (and women!). Reading contemporary thinkers first would have been a rather frustrating and utterly counterproductive pedagogy because students wouldn't understand what newer thinkers were reacting and responding to if they didn't already understand what came before. I've never personally encountered a philosophy professor--or philosopher, for that matter--who even suggested anything in philosophy was written as if by the gods themselves (who very frequently are doubted to even exist, or don't figure prominently in notable works).

I don't think those three (or all dead white men in general) exist on an equal footing. An educated person should read Darwin, even though modern evolutionary theory has moved beyond. I think Galen and Hippocrates are less important, although I must admit I say that out of ignorance, as I know little about them besides their names, the existence of the Hippocratic Oath, and the general sense that Galen is not at all relevant to modern medicine.

The thing about reading historical stuff is that in trying to learn something, it is useful to know how the first human who understood it learned it, as well as how some people think you should approach it today.

Some things developed in the past have been completely overturned and are clearly obsolete, but some have not - calculus, Newtonian mechanics, etc.

Now let's consider psychology. Psychology itself lacks any real first principles. Different people, and sometimes even the same people, will act in different ways in the same scenario. At best it's a probabilistic science which introduces major and complex issues, when done perfectly. And it's not done perfectly. Outside of flawed logic, these sort of sciences also seem to attract unusually flawed scientists. For instance it's now completely clear that the Stanford Prison Experiment was literally fake. The students were coached on how to behave by the 'researcher', and saw the experiment as literally playing improv with one another. The 'mental breakdown' that caused the experiment to be cancelled after 6 days was fake. And we've now been teaching that experiment to kids for some 50 years, and ongoing. And it's not just older experiments of course. Recent research has shown that some 50-60% of major psychological studies in reputable journals cannot be replicated. You simply cannot build upon this in any meaningful way and to try to do so would turn the field into an even greater mockery of anything that purports to be science.