this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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@YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM @sneerclub Au contraire: my brother-in-law is a retired philosophy professor, so Voice of Experiece here says: all philosophers are 99% FULL of shit, no exceptions.
(They try to use tools we have no actual understanding of—language and mind—to understand external reality. So they often get bogged down in self-serving rationalizations that appeal to their cognitive biases. There, I'm doing it too!)
Well I can’t speak to your experience with your brother, but I spoke of “philosophers” plural, and contrasted that with - quote - “a software course [our friend here] took one time”. Perhaps your brother isn’t great with mind and language, but that doesn’t mean that even he is so incompetent that he can’t do better than our target here. For all that philosophers plural, or this one philosopher, have hit stumbling blocks along the way, they have made an attempt to more than simply stipulate a wildly counter-intuitive and pragmatically tendentious meaning for this complicated word “belief” (indeed: “doxa”).
I don’t know where you get the idea that “we” have “no actual understanding” of language and mind, however, because at least philosophers (as well as their interdisciplinary friends in some of the sciences) have quite a lot of understanding of language and mind, and especially language. Since the innovations of Gottlob Frege, for example, the interpretation of semantics according to a logic of truth has been extremely helpful in clarifying how sentences bear relations to not just external but reality in general. Linguists have done extensive work on the pragmatics of language, which fills out this picture to make sense not just of propositional but questioning and commanding sentences.
These are just examples, there is obviously also a lot more.