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Comment by elt895 | Hacker News Reader

Are there other philosophy- or history-grounded sources that are comparable? If so, I’d love some recommendations. Yudkowsky and others have their problems, but their texts have an interesting points, are relatively easy to read and understand, and you can clearly see which real issues they’re addressing. From my experience, alternatives tend to fall into two categories: 1. Genuine classical philosophy, which is usually incredibly hard to read and after 50 pages I have no idea what the author is even talking about anymore. 2. Basically self help books that take one or very few idea and repeat them ad nouseam for 200 pages.

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Likely the best resource to learn about philosophy is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [0]. It's meant to provide a rigorous starting point for learning about a topic, where 1. you won't get bogged down in a giant tome on your first approach and 2. you have references for further reader.

Obviously, the SEP isn't perfect, but it's a great place to start. There's also the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy [1]; however, I find its articles to be more hit or miss.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu

[1] https://iep.utm.edu

I've read Bertrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy" and it's the first ever philosophy book that I didn't drop after 10 pages, because of 2 things: 1- He's logic (or at least has the same STEM kind of logic that we use), so he builds his reasoning logically and not via bullshit associations like plays on words or contrived jumps. 2- He's not afraid to tell "this philosopher said that, it was an error", which is extremely new compared to other scholars who don't feel authorized to criticise even obvious errors. Really recommend!

I don't know if there's anything like a comprehensive high-level guide to philosophy that's any good, though of course there are college textbooks. If you want real/academic philosophy that's just more readable, I might suggest Eugene Thacker's "The Horror of Philosophy" series (starting with "In The Dust Of This Planet"), especially if you are a horror fan already.

It's not a nice response but I would say: don't be so lazy. Struggle through the hard stuff.

I say this as someone who had the opposite experience: I had a decent humanities education, but an abysmal mathematics education, and now I am tackling abstract mathematics myself. It's hard. I need to read sections of works multiple times. I need to sit down and try to work out the material for myself on paper.

Any impression that one discipline is easier than another probably just stems from the fact that you had good guides for the one and had the luck to learn it when your brain was really plastic. You can learn the other stuff too, just go in with the understanding that there's no royal road to philosophy just as there's no royal road to mathematics.

People are likely willing to struggle through hard stuff if the applications are obvious.

But if you can't even narrow the breadth of possible choices down to a few paths that can be traveled, you can't be surprised when people take the one that they know that's also easier with more immediate payoffs.

When you've read that passage in the math book twenty times, you eventually come to the conclusion that you understood it (even if in some rare cases you still didn't).

When "struggling through" a philosophy book, that doesn't happen in my experience. In fact, if you look up what others thought that passage means, you'll find no agreement among a bunch of people who "specialize" in authors who themselves "specialized" in the author you're reading. So reading that stuff I feel I have to accept that I will never understand what's written there and the whole exercise is just about "thinking about it for the sake of thinking". This might be "good for me" but it's really hard to keep up the motivation. Much harder than a math book.

I agree with the phenomenon you are talking about, but for mathematics, beyond calculation, the situation isn't really different (and no wonder since you'll quickly end up in the philosophy of mathematics).

You can take an entire mathematical theory on faith and learn to perform rote calculations in accordance with the structure of that theory. This might be of some comfort, since, accepting this, you can perform a procedure and see whether or not you got the correct result (but even this is a generous assumption in some sense). When you actually try to understand a theory and go beyond that to foundations, things become less certain. At some point you will accept things, but, unless you have enough time to work out every proof and then prove to yourself that the very idea of a proof calculus is sound, you will be taking something on faith.

I think if people struggle with doing the same thing with literature/philosophy, it's probably just because of a discomfort with ambiguity. In those realms, there is no operational calculus you can turn to to verify that, at least if you accept certain things on faith, other things must work out...expect there is! Logic lords over both domains. I think we just do a horrible job at teaching people how to approach literature logically. Yes, the subtle art of interpretation is always at play, but that's true of mathematics too and it is true of every representational/semiotic effort undertaken by human beings.

As for use, social wit and the ability to see things in new lights (devise new explanatory hypotheses) are both immediate applications of philosophy and literature, just like mathematics has its immediate operational applications in physics et al.

At the risk of being roasted for recommending pop-culture things, the podcast Philosophize This is pretty good for a high-level overview. I'm sure there are issues and simplifications, and it's certainly not actual source material. The nice part is it's sort of a start-to-finish, he goes from the start of philosophy to modern day stuff, which helps a ton in building foundational understanding without reading everything ever written.

I don't have an answer here either, but after suffering through the first few chapters of HPMOR, I've found that Yudk and others tech-bros posing as philosophers are basically like leaky, dumbed-down abstractions for core philosophical ideas. Just go to the source and read about utilitarianism and deontology directly. Yudk is like the Wix of web development - sure you can build websites but you're not gonna be a proper web developer unless you learn HTML, CSS and Javascript. Worst of all, crappy abstractions train you in some actively bad patterns that are hard to unlearn

It's almost offensive - are technologists so incapable of understanding philosophy that Yudk has to reduce it down to the least common denominator they are all familiar with - some fantasy world we read about as children?

I'd like what the original sources would have written if someone had fed them some speak-clearly pills. Yudkowsky and company may have the dumbing-down problem, but the original sources often have a clarity problem. (That's why people are still arguing about what they meant centuries later. Not just whether they were right - though they argue about that too - but what they meant.)

Even better, I'd like some filtering out of the parts that are clearly wrong.

Have you considered that the ideas that philosophy discusses are very complex, and words are not a sufficient medium to describe those ideas?

That's why you have people arguing over what someone meant. Dumbing it down or trying to write something unambiguous doesn't actually make it better.

I will grant you that the ideas are complex. But if words are not a sufficient medium, then we can't think clearly about the ideas.

Original philosophers have the right to define their own terms. If they can't define them clearly, then they probably aren't thinking clearly enough about their ideas to be able to talk to the rest of us about them. (Unless they consider it more important to sound impressive and hard to understand. But if that's the case, we can say "wow, you sound impressive" and then ignore them.)

I think this accurately channels Paul Graham's attempt to divide the world into "science/tech" and "illegible". But it's a little ridiculous to also divide the world into, "things I understand" and "things I don't", and state that anyone who speaks of the latter should not be permitted to talk to "the rest of us" until they figure out how to move themselves into your "things I understand" category.

The top scientists in AI can't explain how their models make certain decisions (at least not deterministically). Computer code is notoriously gibberish to outsiders. 90% of programmers probably couldn't explain what their job is to people outside of the field. If they can't explain it clearly, should they also be forbidden from speaking publicly until they can?

Is it possible that you lack the background to understand philosophy, and thus philosophers should rightly ignore your demands to dumb down their own field? Why should philosophers even appeal to people like you, when you seem so uninterested in even learning the basics of their field?

No, I don't regard all of philosophy (or all of non-science) as "illegible".

Nor do I regard the line as being "things I understand". I'm not (usually) that arrogant. But if, say, even other computer programmers can't tell for sure what you're saying, the problem is probably you.

HPMOR is not supposed to be rigorous. It’s supposed to be entertaining in a way that rigorous philosophy is not. You could make the same argument about any of Camus’ novels but again that would miss the point. If you want something more rigorous yudkowsky has it, bit surprising to me to complain he isn’t rigorous without talking about his rigorous work.

I really have no interest in reading any more of that guy’s “work”

Totally fair but why comment on something you arent interested in understanding

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