Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
I agree this is a problem. In retrospect, reading Yudkowsky's Sequences was far more valuable to me than reading various pre-1900 philosophers' works firsthand. https://twitter.com/PradyuPrasad/status/1757745612072894477
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bigjaymes.eth 🎩
@bigjaymes
It’s a good point, but also it can be useful to see where ideas started and how they progressed. The context is often relevant and can be eye-opening. Eg. it’s useful to understand how Newton created a model that explained/predicted a lot of things correctly, but was ultimately wrong as a description of reality.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
I agree in theory, but in practice it feels like I only got a surface level understanding of "what scientific progress feels like" out of that: "we believed naive stuff, then we observed more and thought harder, now we believe better stuff" Far more helpful was just personally living through a major ideological shift.
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Jackson 🎩🍖
@jacks0n
The diff is measurement: what progress in philosophy is objectively measurable as progress? Contemporary summary is pragmatic but comes almost necessarily injected with ideological payload / lense on past works. What philosopher views their pov as regression? “You can only trust a book if the author is dead” - ??
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@opensailor
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billyTRILLions
@billyshipp
Yes, in many cases the history of something is just that, history. Interesting for understanding the process, but not for understanding the best way to answer particular questions
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Beantown 🍖🎩
@beantown
Really intruiging...Philosophical inquiries often address questions that are abstract, normative, and foundational, like the nature of knowledge, ethics, existence, reasoning. Many of these ?s remain relevant across time; insights of ancient philosophers can still provoke thought and contribute to contemporary debates.
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bigjaymes.eth 🎩
@bigjaymes
I guess it’s a question of opportunity cost in terms of how one decides to spend their time learning. But yes no doubt that directly experiencing a step forward in any field is going to be the most beneficial.
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