The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician (2001) | Hacker News Reader

The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician (2001)

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Sander's knew no one would read his philosophy if they weren't paid. Nothing to say. Just reality?

I was honestly expecting the mysterious Philosopher to be an MD. Why? I have met too many wealthy physicians who later in life take up a serious interest in Philosophy. My dermatologist in High school would pop my pustules while quoting his Philosophy. Yes--our family had great union insurance. Well one day, he looked down at me with his face shield on, and said_______Every time I think I came up with something new, I would later find out someone beat me to it.

I gained respect for him that day. I noticed he became humbler in life, and not so judgmental.

Every time I think I came up with something new, I would later find out someone beat me to it.

Happens a lot to scientists who move to a new field. It means that you are not stupid and that you are not familiar with the literature. But you have to be familiar with what is being done to be productive.

My intuition is that this happens more in philosophy than other fields. I, an amateur, have thought of multiple questions and arguments which I later come to find have already been explored in the literature. I've seen students in undergrad classes anticipate moves made by famous philosophers. I hate telling this to my friends who are pursuing graduate studies in philosophy, but I think the explanation for this is that philosophy is just easier than more technical fields like math and physics.

  I, an amateur, have thought of multiple questions and arguments which I later come to find have already been explored in the literature. I've seen students in undergrad classes anticipate moves made by famous philosophers.

It's bizarre to me that you treat this as an indication of philosophy's easiness and not its difficulty.

Why should it indicate difficulty and not easiness? A similar feat would be completely beyond me in math. Even though I minored in math as an undergrad, I have almost no understanding of the questions and arguments being discussed in the professional mathematics literature. I'm never going to stumble across one of my personal ideas in the Annals of Mathematics. It requires so much dedicated time and effort to even understand what is being said.

The professional philosophy literature, on the other hand, is much more accessible. Philosophers treat familiar questions like "Do we have free will?", "What does it mean to do the right thing?", "What does it mean to know something?", etc, in a qualitative manner. After a minimal investment to understand some of the jargon, most philosophy papers are quite readable. It's the kind of enterprise that a layman might actually be able to make an intelligent contribution to.

This is one of those cases where the answer is just another question. Why was Sanders so passionate about this? What did it mean to him? His brief biography doesn't really say much:

http://www.marcsandersfoundation.org/about/founder/

And what went unsaid went with him to his grave.

Well, except that his son probably has some idea.

Existential crisis ("what does it all mean?") is one of the most common mental illnesses of all time. Pascal and Newton had it, and plenty of regular people do too.

> And then, just like that, it was over. But not before Sanders made an appeal to leave his anonymity intact. "Now that you have discovered that I am Ammonius," he wrote, "I know that you will think it your job to inform the world." He had chosen to remain anonymous, he explained, so that his "failure to become a professional philosopher" would not come to light and thus tempt professional philosophers to "simply dismiss the idea of reviewing my work out of hand because the work was known to be by a devoted amateur."

Very interesting. I've always thought that if I were to become good enough in a certain field to become "famous", then for all of my other passions, I would go anonymous. I've noticed there's a tendency people have to immediately disparage the work of someone who is really good at something if that work is not what they are well known for.

I'm not sure if there's a word or phrase for this phenomenon, but I'm pretty sure the tendency to disparage "polymath types" is a manifestation of envy and jealousy; how could one person possibly master two completely different things? Being great at one thing should be sufficient for anyone; being great at two is just unfair.

But the truth doesn't care about fairness. There are plenty of truths in the world that society is unwilling to acknowledge simply because of their implications (see Paul Graham's "What you can't say" for a fantastic exposition of this concept). Many believe that it's improbable for one person to be good at many different things (as though being "good at things" is independent for each different thing). I strongly disagree. I think that if someone has the tools or mindset to become very good at one thing, they are also very likely to be good at something else as well. That's why I don't like criticisms that are based on "well he's a physicist; he doesn't know about..." or "she's only an expert in neuroscience; who cares what she thinks about such-and-such".

People always want to include the background or history of a person in their analysis of that person's creations. Instead, I would rather all my work be evaluated purely on its own merit, without any extraneous knowledge biasing the reviewer.

I think you're right, but I also have some sympathy for the "dismiss the amateur" practice which you might come to share if you think of it as an optimization problem: if the cost of detecting bullshit is high, and the the cost of being taken in by bullshit is high, then heuristics like "has this person been validated by an appropriate pedigree" can be a smart solution when resources are limited. Especially in a field like philosophy, so richly infused with bullshit already.

I had a class with Trenton Merricks and I remember him bringing this up. Such a strange story.

I could see myself doing something equally as silly as this if I had the money to burn.

I was thinking the same thing. It's fun to speculate on your own genius while attempting to also be humble. Interesting blog post though.

Nice story.

Interesting to consider if people would regard this as doxxing now.

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