WHY ARE GOOD PHILOSOPHY GROUPS RARE?
Everyone, it seems, would like to create a quality philosophy group. But the problems faced are these:
1 – We all have an all-too-high opinion of whatever method of categorization, understanding, and decidability we discover. The Dunning-Kruger effect is more exaggerated in ethics, morality, politics and philosophy than any other discipline – for evolutionary reasons. We advocate for our reproductive strategy (gender, reproductive desirability, social class, and personality traits). We negotiate for and make excuses for our value to others in cooperation in reproduction, production, and commons.
2 – It takes about six to ten years of studying philosophy, science, economics, and politics, and history to say much of anything at all that isn’t ridiculously uninformed. It takes the study of law to know why philosophy is in general ridiculous. Religion, philosophy and literature are carriers for inspirational ideation: reported preference. economics, law, and history are carriers for demonstrated preference. And social science if it has done anything, has confirmed for us the vast difference between reported preference and demonstrated preference.
3 – Most philosophical argument seeks to outwit through various means of deception, other attempts to outwit previous forms of deception.
4 – The difference between cunning (outwitting – immoral), negotiating (trading – ethical ), and deciding (truth – moral ) is a substantial difference in informational content, and symmetry of information used in decisions.
5 – While public forums are good for learning how to debate the ignorant, incompetent, well-meaning, and those on a productive journey, – and possibly finding fellow travellers – they are actually pretty poor forums for finding and debating with people who possess knowledge, for the simple reason that you must bear a high costs of filtering in exchange for immediacy of discourse.
(I work in public as an experiment and it’s been useful pretty much because through repetition it helps me speak to less sophisticated audiences and find advocates.)
Cheers
