There are so many resources for learning available today, the virtue of scholarship has never in human history been so easy to practice.
Indeed.
I followed the links to In Defense of Objective Bayesianism by Jon Williamson and Bayesian Epistemology by Luc Bovens and Stephan Hartmann. They were expensive and unreviewed and my book reading heuristics generally require three independent suggestions before I start taking a book seriously.
A cheaper trick was to search the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for Bovens, Hartmann, and Williamson which lead to a nest of articles, some of which mentioned several of them. I listed and prioritized them using ad hoc scoring (points for mentioning each person and a good title). Hartmann jumped out because he had wider ranging interests and was tapped to co-author the encyclopedia article "Models In Science". To reduce the trivial inconvenience of starting to read, I reproduce the suggested reading list with my ad hoc numerical priorities right here:
(2.8) Epistemic Paradoxes
(2) Evidence
In general I'm very sympathetic to this point of view, and there are some good examples in your post.
One bad example, in my opinion, is Eliezer's recent procrastination post vs. the survey of "scientific research on procrastination." I read the chapter, and it appears to mostly cite studies that involved casual surveys, subjective description, and fuzzy labeling. Although there are many valid scientific endeavors that involve nothing but categorization (it is interesting to know how many species of tree frog there are and what they look and sound like even if we do not make any predictions beyond what is observed), categorization should at least be rigorous enough that we can specify what we expect to see with a modicum of precision.
When a biologist says that frogus neonblueicus has neon blue spots and chirps at 500 Hz, she will give you enough information that you can go to Costa Rica and check for yourself whether you have found one of the rare neonblueicus specimens. Although there will be some controversies around the edges, your identification of any particular frog will not correlate with your political biases or personal problems, and repeated observation of the ...
I very much agree with your final sentence.
Do you think Eliezer's post is more precise and useful than the controlled experiments published in peer-reviewed journals described in the book I linked to? I find that most writing on psychology is necessarily pretty soft, because the the phenomena it is trying to describe are vastly more complicated than those of the hard sciences.
Now, that link is a must-read. I got through the whole first chapter before I could look away, and I'll be going back for the rest.
I have nothing against psychology or psychologists or social science in general -- AP Psych was my second favorite class in high school, my mom has a master's degree in it, my bachelor's degree is in political science, etc. It's noble, hard work, and we even have a little bit of knowledge to show for it.
As for the "controlled experiments" described in the book you linked to, I'm afraid I missed them, for which I apologize. I only saw descriptive papers. Maybe a page reference when you get a chance? Or just link directly to one or two of the studies or the abstracts?
Because it seems to me psychology is necessarily soft because it doesn't want to turn into thirty years of neurobiology before it can talk about human behaviour.
I hear this sentiment echoed a lot, and I have to admit to either not understanding it or strongly disagreeing with it.
Claiming that psychology has nothing useful to say about human behavior until it can be fully cashed out in neurobiology strikes me as mistaken in many of the same ways that claiming that ballistics has nothing useful to say about missile trajectories until it can be fully cashed out in a relativistic understanding of gravity is.
Yes, our missiles don't always hit where we want them to, even after thousands of years of work in ballistics. But a deeper understanding of gravity won't help with that. If we want to improve our practical ability to hit a target, we have to improve our mastery of ballistics at the level of ballistics.
That isn't quite as true for psychology and neurobiology, granted: the insights afforded by neurobiology often do improve our practical ability to "hit a target." (Most strikingly in the last few decades, they have allowed us to develop an enormously powerful medical te...
It is dangerous to assume that casually studying the leading textbook in a soft field will usually make you smarter.
However, enough rationality training will have alarm bells ringing when reading soft textbooks and studies. That in itself - "this field is overpopulated with concepts and undermeasured" - is marginally more useful than knowing nothing about the field.
If you haven't already, you should try reading postmodern philosophy. An uninterrupted wall of alarm bells. :)
I was a philosophy student for my brief attempt at tertiary education - I know what you mean. Our lecturer would describe the text as 'dense' - more aptly, I thought, the author is dense.
An anecdote from that class: after a lecture on Wittgenstein, a student asked the lecturer if the rest of the semester's lectures were to be canceled.
There is an obvious one, actually - a frequent (perhaps inaccurate) interpretation of the last parts of the Tractatus is as a denial of the possibility of any real philosophy (including Wittgenstein's).
Since one would naturally cover the Tractatus before The Philosophical Investigations or other works, a rather juvenile response would be exactly that anecdote.
Oh, Hegel. I remember a lecture where the professor read from Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik like it was a holy scripture. When he was finished, he looked up and said: "With this, everything is said". I didn't understand anything, it was a jungle of words like being and not-being and becoming and how one thing becomes the other. I said that I didn't understand anything, and what did the lecturer reply with a smile? "It's good you don't understand it!" I seriously had the intense urge to shout at him, but instead I just didn't show up anymore.
Though I agree with you strongly, I think we should throw the easy objection to this out there: high-quality, thorough scholarship takes a lot of time. Even for people who are dedicated to self-improvement, knowledge and truth-seeking (which I speculate this community has many of), for some subjects, getting to the "state of the art"/minimum level of knowledge required to speak intelligently, avoid "solved problems", and not run into "already well refuted ideas" is a very expensive process. So much so that some might argue that communities like this wouldn't even exist (or would be even smaller than they are) if we all attempted to get to that minimum level in the voluminous, ever-growing list of subjects that one could know about.
This is a roundabout way of saying that our knowledge-consumption abilities are far too slow. We can and should attempt to be widely, broadly read knowledge-generalists and stand on the shoulders of giants; climbing even one, though, can take a dauntingly long time.
We need Matrix-style insta-learning. Badly.
getting to the "state of the art"/minimum level of knowledge required to speak intelligently, avoid "solved problems", and not run into "already well refuted ideas" is a very expensive process.
So is spending time and effort on solved problems and already well refuted ideas.
In my experience, Ph.D. dissertations can be a wonderful resource for getting an overview of a particular academic topic. This is because the typical -- and expected -- pattern for a dissertation is to first survey the existing literature before diving into one's own research. This both shows that the doctoral candidate has done his/her homework, and, just as importantly, brings his/her committee members up to speed on the necessary background. For example, a lot of my early education in Bayesian methods came from reading the doctoral dissertations of Wray Buntine, David J. C. MacKay, and Radford Neal on applications of Bayesian methods to machine learning. Michael Kearns' dissertation helped me learn about computational learning theory. A philosophy dissertation helped me learn about temporal logic.
Of course, this requires that you already have some background in some related discipline. My background was in computer science when I read the above-mentioned dissertations, along with a pretty good foundation in mathematics.
LessWrong often makes pretty impressive progress in its discussions; I would be thrilled to see that progress made beginning at the edge of a field.
I sincerely doubt that the discussions which began on the leading edge would return anywhere near the same amount of progress as those which start in the scholarly middle. After all, those problems are on the edge because they're difficult to solve given the intellectual tools we have today. Though Less Wrong is often insightful, I suspect it's the result not of discovering genuinely new tools, but of applying known tools in ways most readers haven't seen them used. For Less Wrong to make progress with a problem that a lot of smart people have been thinking about in detail for a long time either requires that the entire field is so confused that no one has been able to think as clearly about it as we can (probably hubristic), or that we have developed genuinely new intellectual techniques that no one has tried yet.
Voted up, but I think that there are LOTS of fields that are that confused. Possibly every field without regular empirical tests (e.g. chemistry, engineering, computer science, applied physics, boxing) is that confused.
i ghost write papers for lazy rich undergrads at prestigious institutions and my experience has been that the soft sciences are a muddle of garbage with obscenely little worth given the billions of dollars poured into them that could be saving lives.
comments by gwern and Desertopa upvoted, their links read.
How long can this go on before the whole thing* comes crashing down? Those of us who are Americans are ruled mostly by people who were "lazy rich undergrads at prestigious institutions" and then became lazy rich graduate students getting J.D.s or M.B.A.s from prestigious institutions, having been admitted based on their supposed undergraduate accomplishments.
The only thing to hope for, it seems, is that our supposed leaders are still getting cheat sheets from underpaid, unknown smart people.
* My impression is that higher education in the hard sciences in America is still excellent.
I think that most people just don't believe that philosophy has any value. I used to believe that it didn't, gradually concluded that it did, but then gradually concluded that yes, 99.9% of it really is worthless such that even reading contemporary famous people or summaries of their arguments (though not discussing such arguments with your epistemic peers who are familiar with them, and not reading pre-WWII philosophers) really is a waste of time.
I agree that 99.9% of philosophy is very close to worthless. Its signal-to-noise ratio is much lower than in the sciences or in mathematics.
This brings to mind Eliezer's comment that "...if there’s any centralized repository of reductionist-grade naturalistic cognitive philosophy, I’ve never heard mention of it."
But reductionist-grade naturalistic cognitive philosophy is probably an even larger sub-field of philosophy than the formal epistemology I mentioned above. Names that come immediately to mind are: John Bickle, Pat & Paul Churchland, Paul Thagard, Tim Schroeder, William Calvin, Georg Northoff, Thomas Metzinger.
There's some good philosophy out there. Unfortunately, you normally only encounter it after you've spent quite a while studying bad philosophy. Most people are introduced to philosophy through Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel, and might never suspect a neurophilosopher like John Bickle exists.
Which reminds me of the old Bertrand Russell line:
Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.
I don't know what percentage of writing that gets called "philosophy" is worthwhile but it isn't that hard to narrow your reading material down to relevant and worthwhile texts. It's really weird to see comments like this here because so much of what I've found on Less Wrong are ideas I've seen previously in philosophy I've read. Moreover, a large fraction of my karma I got just by repeating or synthesizing things I learned doing philosophy- and I'm not the only one whose gotten karma this way.
I find it particularly perplexing that you think it's a good idea to only read pre-WWII philosophers as their ideas are almost always better said by contemporary authors. One of my major problems with the discipline is that it is mostly taught by doing history of philosophy- forcing students to struggle with the prose of a Plato translation and distilling the philosophy from the mysticism instead of just reading Bertrand Russell on universals.
Agreed. I was just being lazy.
I already didn't believe in the Copenhagen Interpretation because of a Philosophy of Physics course where my professor took Copenhagen to be the problem statement instead of a possible solution. That whole sequence is more or less something one could find in a philosophy of physics book- though I don't myself think it is Eliezer's best series.
Before coming here my metaethics were already subjectivist/anti-realist. There's about a century's worth of conceptual distinctions that would make the Metaethics Sequence clearer- a few of which I've made in comments leading to constructive discussion. I feel like I'm constantly paraphrasing Hume in these discussions where people try to reason their way to a terminal value.
There is Philosophy of Math, where there was a +12 comment suggesting the suggestion be better tied to academic work on the subject. My comments were well upvoted and I was mostly just prodding Silas with the standard Platonist line plus a little Quine.
History and Philosophy of Science comes up. That discussion was basically a combination of Kuhn and Quine (plus a bunch of less recognizable names who talk about the same things).
Bayesian epistem...
Classical Greek ethicists propounded values that were in many ways similar to modern ones. Ancient Greece is the time period in which works like the Illiad were put to writing, and those demonstrate some values that are quite foreign to us.
Nietzsche gives one take on this distinction, when he contrasts "good vs. bad" or "master" moralities with "good vs. evil" or "slave" moralities. An evil man is one with evil goals; a bad man is one who is inept at achieving his goals.
Another contrast is that if the Greeks or the Romans had been utilitarians, they would never have been average utilitarians, and I don't think they would even have been total utilitarians. They might have been maximum utilitarians, believing that a civilization's measure was the greatness of its greatest achievements and its greatest people. Americans must have at least briefly believed something like this when they supported the Apollo program.
(I must be overgeneralizing any time I am speaking of the morals of both Athens and Sparta.)
In another debate with Bill Craig, atheist Christopher Hitchens gave this objection: "Who designed the Designer? Don’t you run the risk… of asking 'Well, where does that come from? And where does that come from?' and running into an infinite regress?" But this is an elementary misunderstanding in philosophy of science. Why? Because every successful scientific explanation faces the exact same problem. It’s called the “why regress” because no matter what explanation is given of something, you can always still ask “Why?”
IMO, it is perfectly reasonable to object with: "Who designed the Designer?".
The logic being objected to is: it takes a big complex thing to create another big complex thing. Observing that Darwinian evolution makes big complex things from scratch is the counter-example. The intuition that a complex thing (humans) requires another complex thing to create it (god) is wrong - and it does tend to lead towards an escalator of ever-more-complex creators.
Simplicity creating complexity needs to happen somewhere, to avoid an infinite regress - and if such a principle has to be invoked somewhere, then before the very first god is conjoured seems like a good place.
Checking with the "common sense atheism" link quite a few people are saying similar things in the comments.
timtyler,
Hitchens did not mention complexity or simplicity as you propose. And he did not mention evolution as you propose. If you read the Hitchens quote, you will see he only gave the why-regress objection, which is just as valid against any scientific hypothesis as it is against a theistic one.
There are ways to make the "Who designed the Designer?" objection stick, but Hitchens did not use one of them. If you read the Hitchens quote, you'll see that he explicitly gave the why-regress objection that could be just as accurately be given to any scientific hypothesis ever proposed.
Here, let's play Quick Word Substitution. Let's say a physicist gives a brilliant demonstration of why his theory of quarks does a great job explaining a wide variety of observed subatomic phenomena. Now, Hitchens objects:
"But what explains the quarks? Don’t you run the risk… of asking 'Well, where does that come from? And where does that come from?' and running into an infinite regress?"
Hitchens explicitly gave the why-regress objection that is just as potent against scientific explanations as it is against theistic explanations.
More specifically it is completely rational to use that argument against theists, because one of their arguments for god is that the world is too complex not to have been designed; so in that circumstance you are just pointing out that their claim is just pushing the complexity back one step. If the world is so complex that it needs a designer, then so is god.
(And apparently also personal and omnibenevolent, for some reason).
Well, if it's eternal and sufficiently powerful, a kind of omnibenevolence might follow, insofar as it exerts a selection pressure on the things it feels benevolent towards, which over time will cause them to predominate.
After all, even humans might (given enough time in which to act) cause our environment to be populated solely with things towards which we feel benevolent, simply by wiping out or modifying everything else.
The canonical Christian Hell might also follow from this line of reasoning as the last safe place, where all the refugees from divine selection pressure ended up.
Granted, most Christians would be horrified by this model of divine omnibenevolence; the canonical version presumes an in-principle universal benevolence, not a contingent one.
This post reminded me of this quote from Bertrand Russell's epic polemic A History of Western Philosophy:
It is noteworthy that modern Platonists, almost without exception, are ignorant of mathematics, in spite of the immense importance that Plato attached to arithmetic and geometry, and the immense influence that they had on his philosophy. This is an example of the evils of specialization: a man must not write on Plato unless he has spent so much of his youth on Greek as to have had no time for the things that Plato thought important.
I'm not going to argue that scholarship is not tremendously valuable, but in the kind of live discussions that are mentioned here, I'm not sure if it helps that much against the kind of 'dark arts' techniques that are employed. In live-discussions, someone can always refer to some information or knowledge that the opponent may not have handy ('Historians have established this fact ...'), and only some of that can be counter-acted by scholarship.
This is why, in more than 1000 posts on my own blog, I've said almost nothing that is original. Most of my posts instead summarize what other experts have said, in an effort to bring myself and my readers up to the level of the current debate on a subject before we try to make new contributions to it.
Foundational knowledge is more vital in the hard sciences than in psychology, which confronts you immediately with questions about what is the foundation. You have to make at least a tentative decision about which framework you're going to get up to speed o...
On the topic of scholarship, I'd like to mention that if one takes the notion of surviving cryopreservation seriously, it's probably a good idea to read up on cryobiology. Have at least a basic understanding of what's going to happen to your cells when your time comes. There is a rich and complex field behind it which very few individuals have much grasp on.
If the bug bites you to do so, you may even be able to go into the field and make some breakthroughs. Huge advances have been made in recent decades by very small numbers of cryonics-motivated scientist...
Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory. But these cannot be the only fields you study...
Charlie Munger speaks of a "latticework of mental models". A good mix, though somewhat skewed to investing, is found here
Scholarship: Thumbs up.
Classic Scholarship: Thumbs down http://brainstormers.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/sobre-ler-os-classicos/
Just in case someone forgot all the Teacher Pasword, Cached Thoughts, and related posts from which I got the link to the above text.
diegocaleiro:
Classic Scholarship: Thumbs down http://brainstormers.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/sobre-ler-os-classicos/
That article is very poorly argued. Your argument is more or less correct in those fields where the progress of scholarship has a monotonous upward trend, in the sense that knowledge is accumulated without loss, and all existing insights continuously improved. This is true for e.g. Newtonian physics, and indeed, nobody would ever read Newton's original works instead of a modern textbook except for historical interest.
What you fail to understand, however, is that in many fields there is no such monotonous upward trend. This means that in the old classics you'll often find insight that has been neglected and forgotten, and you'll also find ideas that have fallen out of fashion and ideological favor, and been replaced with less accurate (and sometimes outright delusional) ones. Almost invariably, these insights and ideas are absent from modern texts, even those dealing specifically with the old authors, and there is often nothing comparable being written nowadays that could open your eyes to the errors of the modern consensus.
As a rule of thumb, the softer and more ...
We still read Shakespeare today partly because Shakespeare was great when he wrote; but partly because Shakespeare was a master of individual phrases and of style, and literature departments today are dominated by postmodernists who believe there is no such thing as substance, and therefore style is all that matters.
Shakespeare's centrality in English Lit curricula comes from it's historic place in the Western canon. Post-modernists are distinguished in particular by their opposition to any kind of canon.
Another reason to be familiar with the canonical works in a culture is precisely because they're canonical. It's like a common currency. By now, English-speaking culture is so rooted in Shakespeare that you'd be missing out if you didn't recognize the references.
Any idiot knows by Act II what will happen.
We do now! But apparently, the original Elizabethan audiences went in expecting a happy ending -- and were shocked when it turned out to be a tragedy. Tricky fellow, that Willy S.
Reading the masters (the little I've done of it) has taught me the following things:
Plato's ideas were, at least, new. And (per 2) they're the most influential ideas ever to be put on paper. There's value in seeing that for yourself.
One counterpoint:
In The Failures of Eld Science, Eliezer's character points out that most scientists were never trained to recognize and navigate a genuine scientific controversy; instead, we hand our undergraduates the answers on a silver platter and have them do textbook problems. He proposes that if scientists had first had to think through and defeat phlogiston themselves, they would have been less stymied by the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Similarly, I think I'm better off for having encountered some of the grand old systems of philosophy in their earliest and most viral forms, without all the subsequent criticisms and rebuttals attached. Of course I ran the risk of getting entrapped permanently in Plato or Nietzsche, but I learned things about rationality and about myself this way, and I don't think I would have learned those had I started by reading a modern digest of one or the other (with all the mistakes pointed out). (Of course, I have since read modern critiques and profited from them.)
On the other hand, some Great Books schools like to teach higher mathematics by having the students read Euclid, and I agree that's insane and not worth all the extra effort.
On the whole I'd agree that most of the time it's better to focus on high-quality up-to-date summaries/textbooks than high-quality classical sources.
But I'd suggest a few caveats:
1) It is much easier to find high-quality classics than it is to find high-quality contemporary stuff. Everyone knows who Darwin was, I don't even know how to find a good biology textbook, and I personally got a lot more out of reading and thinking about Darwin than by reading my high school biology textbook. This is a consideration for students and autodidacts, less so for smart and well-informed teachers who know how to find the good stuff.
2) Many summarizers are simply not as smart as the greats, and don't pick up on a lot of good stuff the classics contain. This is less important for a survey that has only a small amount of time to spend on each topic, but if you want deep understanding of a discipline, you will sometimes have to go beyond the available summaries.
3) The ancients are the closest we have to space aliens; people who live in a genuinely different world with different preconceptions.
in Harry Potter slash
Upvoted because it gives us hope that we'll see those Harry/Draco scenes in MoR after all.
I think some justification would be helpful for your readers, especially those who don't know about your relatively high personal efficacy :-)
You asserted something similar and with more original content right next door and I think your implicit justification was spelled out a while ago in the article For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books. I'm curious if these links capture the core justification well, or is more necessary to derive your conclusions?
It feels like lots of details deployed to justify your advice to "read the classics" and lots of the details deployed to justify the advice "avoid the classics" are basically compatible and some more nuanced theory should be available that is consistent with the totality of the facts like "In cases X and Y read the classics, and in case N and M avoid them" and perhaps the real disagreement is about the nature of the readership and which case better describes the majority of them... or the most important among them?
For example, I think maybe people in their late 20's or older who were clicky while young and are already polymaths might be helped reading the classics in d...
Why did my post appear correctly in the editor, but when posted to the site, lose the spaces just before an apparently random selection of my hyperlinks?
I am not going to dispute the contention that "knowing more is good". However, I think people's opinions are often worth hearing, and I think people with interesting ideas about politics/philosophy or religion often don't say what they are thinking because they have some idea that "I need to complete several volumes of recommended reading before my opinions matter" - which they don't. I have had really interesting conversations with younger people (18ish) who produce fascinating ideas - they don't know that their pet-theory of a better political system is ...
This discussion has been largely philosophy-based, which is understandable given the site's focus. But are people interested in knowing something about many different fields? Below is my attempt at different levels of liberal arts education. I have been working on either taking a class or reading a textbook in each of these areas, preferably a textbook for the people that will be majoring in this subject (I have 3 more to do). Then if I can retain it, I can know the basic vocabulary to communicate with people in almost any field, and also look for common t...
Seems to me you're asking the wrong question. I say, don't ask if there is a omnipotent God, that is making an unwarranted narrowing assumption. Why should it be either/or? Lots and lots of room in between the 'omnipotent God' theory and the 'no god at all' theory for 'medium potent god(s) theories.
And 'medium potent god' theories are not only inherently more likely than either of the extremes, they seem a lot more fruitful and interesting to think about, in terms of possible consequences.
I say, ask if there are beings of ANY kind that are mor...
Updated link to Piers Steel's meta-analysis on procrastination research (at least I think it's the correct paper): http://studiemetro.au.dk/fileadmin/www.studiemetro.au.dk/Procrastination_2.pdf
In another debate with Bill Craig, atheist Christopher Hitchens gave this objection: "Who designed the Designer? Don’t you run the risk… of asking 'Well, where does that come from? And where does that come from?' and running into an infinite regress?" But this is an elementary misunderstanding in philosophy of science.
I agree that Hitchens should have looked to see what answers theists give to that question. (And he might have; since theists usually respond instead by saying that God is eternal, meaning outside of time and cause and effect, a...
One way to avoid formatting problems is to write your article in an external word processor (such as Microsoft Word) and then copy/paste it into the Website:LessWrong.com article entry field. (You cannot add the summary break this way, so that must be done afterward.)
Eliezer Yudkowsky identifies scholarship as one of the Twelve Virtues of Rationality:
Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own. Each field that you consume makes you larger... It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality: Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory. But these cannot be the only fields you study...
I think he's right, and I think scholarship doesn't get enough praise - even on Less Wrong, where it is regularly encouraged.
First, consider the evangelical atheist community to which I belong. There is a tendency for lay atheists to write "refutations" of theism without first doing a modicum of research on the current state of the arguments. This can get atheists into trouble when they go toe-to-toe with a theist who did do his homework. I'll share two examples:
The lesson I take from these and a hundred other examples is to employ the rationality virtue of scholarship. Stand on the shoulders of giants. We don't each need to cut our own path into a subject right from the point of near-total ignorance. That's silly. Just catch the bus on the road of knowledge paved by hundreds of diligent workers before you, and get off somewhere near where the road finally fades into fresh jungle. Study enough to have a view of the current state of the debate so you don't waste your time on paths that have already dead-ended, or on arguments that have already been refuted. Catch up before you speak up.
This is why, in more than 1000 posts on my own blog, I've said almost nothing that is original. Most of my posts instead summarize what other experts have said, in an effort to bring myself and my readers up to the level of the current debate on a subject before we try to make new contributions to it.
The Less Wrong community is a particularly smart and well-read bunch, but of course it doesn't always embrace the virtue of scholarship.
Consider the field of formal epistemology, an entire branch of philosophy devoted to (1) mathematically formalizing concepts related to induction, belief, choice, and action, and (2) arguing about the foundations of probability, statistics, game theory, decision theory, and algorithmic learning theory. These are central discussion topics at Less Wrong, and yet my own experience suggests that most Less Wrong readers have never heard of the entire field, let alone read any works by formal epistemologists, such as In Defense of Objective Bayesianism by Jon Williamson or Bayesian Epistemology by Luc Bovens and Stephan Hartmann.
Or, consider a recent post by Yudkowsky: Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting. The post attempts to make progress against procrastination by practicing single-subject phenomenology, rather than by first catching up with a quick summary of scientific research on procrastination. The post's approach to the problem looks inefficient to me. It's not standing on the shoulders of giants.
This post probably looks harsher than I mean it to be. After all, Less Wrong is pretty damn good at scholarship compared to most communities. But I think it could be better.
Here's my suggestion. Every time you're tempted to tackle a serious question in a subject on which you're not already an expert, ask yourself: "Whose giant shoulders can I stand on, here?"
Usually, you can answer the question by doing the following:
There are so many resources for learning available today, the virtue of scholarship has never in human history been so easy to practice.