“Philosophical beliefs” aren’t beliefs in any normal sense, nor in any useful sense, afaics. This is question #1 in the survey; what could any answer possibly mean?
Philosophy is Actually Bad, and everyone should stop it.
Many lay people apparently adopt “Philosophy!” as a quasi-religion, just as others adopt “Science!” as a quasi-religion.
This is a cultural/social phenomenon worthy of investigation. Studying it sociologically might be meaningful where “experimental philosophy” surveys aren’t.
One interesting phenomenon is that members of “Philosophy!” often (usually?) view it explicitly as the alternative to “Science!”, which they reject. (Along with “God!” which presumably is where they came from.)
I get the impression that “Philosophy!” isn’t an organized subculture. People adopt it individually, and most are uninterested in joining community around it?
Where does the content come from? Undergrad intro phil courses? Blog posts rehashing the Greeks?
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Is this a surprising outlier, or have things gotten worse than I thought? (Elsevier Science Direct peer-reviewed publication: gene for ESP discovered, N=10). sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Ah, hmm, I see? Elsevier is expanding into the lucrative New Age quackery market? They’re going to face stiff competition from established players, and risk their main market positioning, though.
OTOH, maybe they can see the writing on the wall: scientific publishing is over.
Why does this happen? Explanation #1: scientists don’t understand statistics. Definitely true, but doesn’t explain the magnitude or directionality of the effect, I think, and efforts to correct it don’t seem to help much. Stats are hard but scientists aren’t that dumb…
Explanation #2: distorted career incentives to publish “positive” results lead scientists, consciously or unconsciously, into misuse of methods (garden of forking paths, etc.)
Definitely true, but who is setting those incentives and why? Mostly other scientists…
Whoa! So De Gandillac, who supervised the PhDs of all the significant pomo pioneers, was concerned with the preeminent value of technological progress, as advocated by Nicholas of Cusa (who I knew only as a the name of some vague Medieval theologian)…
Now imagining de Gandillac reading Derrida's _Of Grammatology_ and thinking "Oh god, what did I do to deserve this, another pomo thesis, my field is Medieval philosophy of technology but somehow I am personally responsible for the collapse of Western civilization"
Why had I heard of Nicholas of Cusa?
Figured out: he’s discussed repeatedly in Thomas Kuhn’s _The Copernican Revolution_ as one of Copernicus’ inspirations.
(This book is much less well-known than his _Scientific Revolutions_, but it is excellent and should be more widely read)
🧛🏻♀️🥀🍷 I will publish this first love scene of the novel on May Day, next Saturday, for the date's traditional associations en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day
🧛🏻♀️📕 The new chapter of my vampire novel won't make much sense out of context, so if you think you might want to read it, you could try reading the book from the beginning now.
I know almost nothing about Stoicism. Advocates: what book or long article makes the stronghold case that it has substantive and significant content?
(From a distance, it appears to be a hope that something with desired properties must exist, with no demonstration that it does.)
I infer this from observing that criticism of Stoicism is usually met with No-True-Scottsman-ing: “That’s an ignorant misunderstanding of Stoicism; the real thing is totally different.” What is this real thing?
This feels similar to the pattern around Critical Rationalism. When anyone says “there’s no there there, you haven’t got a thing,” there’s a chorus of “You don’t understand, it’s totally the answer to everything, there’s a conspiracy to deny its awesomeness.”
In order to do the things everyone does, you have to say the things everyone says. Unless you are willing to be a weirdo—which may exclude you from doing things anyway.
This explains the otherwise puzzling fact that the only part of the otherwise dead trad MSM anyone is willing to pay for is culture war opinions. Saying the correct thing about this morning’s outrageous noodle incident is genuinely worth paying $thousands/year for social cred.
Someone pointed out recently that what you get from most of the top-by-revenue substacks is access to correct culture war opinions a few hours ahead of the mob. Pay for them so you can sound superior. (The others are all financial advice, which also has obvious dollar value.)