Some really good points here — especially the one about abstract, “pure” constructs having infinite degrees of freedom, to the point of being useless.
It makes me wonder whether a “thought experiment” is almost a contradiction in terms. And if literary fiction is a better thinking device than a thought experiment, then perhaps history is even better still, given that those situations actually happened and we’ve seen their consequences unfold.
A theory I have about academic philosophy is that the most cited concepts will tend to be those most optimized to promote controversy, discussion, confusion, and thus the least philosophically valuable. You've highlighted one way that this can happen. A bad paper gives an under-specified moral problem in such a way as to goad the reader into assuming different background assumptions than another reader would. The readers then argue, generating attention and sometimes more papers. They cite the bad paper. Even if one of them has written a strictly better treatment of the topic, it’ll never outreproduce the the controversializing one.
Agreed, and I think this affects academia more broadly actually. I’ve noticed in stats/ML there can often be an incentive to be the first to introduce a new object, or framework, or problem, even if you don’t do it “right.” Then in the future if people work on something similar they have to cite you
Great post! A few random thoughts in no particular order:
(1) Can't remember if I've told you this, but before I met you I was dabbling in the 40-80 books/year range, and then you mentioned reading 100 books/year, and it was like finding out a sub-4 minute was possible, and now I'm that guy in RegLab who reads too much.
(2) I was part of a 4-person book club during COVID with some former students, and it was wonderful. We read Le Guin, Butler, Robinson, etc.
Dude! Let me know how you like Stoner! And if you enjoy it, spread it to everyone else at reglab - by hook or by crook we’ll get this novel back on top.
Hilarious that I got you to 100 books/year, especially because I’m not reading that volume anymore. My fiction intake is maybe ~15-20 per year, and my nonfiction something similar. My nonfiction information diet is generally much more scrambled now. I read many more short essays and wikipedia articles, just because I find them more information dense.
I have also been falling out of love with thought experiments in recent years but this gets at the problem from a whole different angle to how I was thinking about it. Good stuff.
There must be some ideas which are poor replicators in themselves, and poorly signal that they have infinite depth, though they do. Such ideas require additional aesthetics built around it to direct attention towards it.
Some really good points here — especially the one about abstract, “pure” constructs having infinite degrees of freedom, to the point of being useless.
It makes me wonder whether a “thought experiment” is almost a contradiction in terms. And if literary fiction is a better thinking device than a thought experiment, then perhaps history is even better still, given that those situations actually happened and we’ve seen their consequences unfold.
This is also a fun article on a related topic: https://substack.com/@markmanson/note/p-194183403?r=g8t8f&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
A theory I have about academic philosophy is that the most cited concepts will tend to be those most optimized to promote controversy, discussion, confusion, and thus the least philosophically valuable. You've highlighted one way that this can happen. A bad paper gives an under-specified moral problem in such a way as to goad the reader into assuming different background assumptions than another reader would. The readers then argue, generating attention and sometimes more papers. They cite the bad paper. Even if one of them has written a strictly better treatment of the topic, it’ll never outreproduce the the controversializing one.
Agreed, and I think this affects academia more broadly actually. I’ve noticed in stats/ML there can often be an incentive to be the first to introduce a new object, or framework, or problem, even if you don’t do it “right.” Then in the future if people work on something similar they have to cite you
Great post! A few random thoughts in no particular order:
(1) Can't remember if I've told you this, but before I met you I was dabbling in the 40-80 books/year range, and then you mentioned reading 100 books/year, and it was like finding out a sub-4 minute was possible, and now I'm that guy in RegLab who reads too much.
(2) I was part of a 4-person book club during COVID with some former students, and it was wonderful. We read Le Guin, Butler, Robinson, etc.
(3) Your post reminded me of something I tweeted in 2018: https://x.com/derekouyang/status/1050629940704473090
(4) I just happened to have Stoner recommended to me by an RF and started it today.
Dude! Let me know how you like Stoner! And if you enjoy it, spread it to everyone else at reglab - by hook or by crook we’ll get this novel back on top.
Hilarious that I got you to 100 books/year, especially because I’m not reading that volume anymore. My fiction intake is maybe ~15-20 per year, and my nonfiction something similar. My nonfiction information diet is generally much more scrambled now. I read many more short essays and wikipedia articles, just because I find them more information dense.
Do you ever post reviews of what you’re reading?
Last year I finally got into the habit of writing at least a short review of every book I read on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6179509-derek-ouyang
I have also been falling out of love with thought experiments in recent years but this gets at the problem from a whole different angle to how I was thinking about it. Good stuff.
Says the guy who makes us read Omelas. Tsk tsk
There must be some ideas which are poor replicators in themselves, and poorly signal that they have infinite depth, though they do. Such ideas require additional aesthetics built around it to direct attention towards it.