Episode 43: Wisdom and Virtue
So last time we took a look at the theory of Schwartz and Sharpe, which was an important theory for linking wisdom to virtue and positive psychology. We saw the deep connections between wisdom and the cultivation and practice of virtue. We made some criticisms of Schwartz and Sharpe; I argued that they should include sophia and not just phronesis (if you remember those, they were invoking Aristotle's two notions of wisdom and giving priority to phronesis; I think you need, as Aristotle argued, both sophia and phronesis in order to be virtuous).
I also argued that I thought their attempt to explain phronesis with expertise was confused, and we should put that aside. We took from that some ideas about the developmental aspect (that's of course central to Aristotle; remember he brought the developmental dimension to wisdom, how much wisdom is becoming a virtuous person). I think other things are lacking in the theory, and we'll come back to that.
There wasn't much discussion about the connection between wisdom and meaning in life but we then passed to taking a look at a theory that took very seriously the connection between wisdom and virtue, and this is the seminal theory work of Baltes and Staudinger. We took a look at the idea of the meta-heuristics pragmatic for orchestrating mind and virtue in excellence. They talked about the fundamental pragmatics of life; I pointed out to you that a way of making sense conjointly of the invocation of meta-heuristics and both senses of pragmatics is the idea that this capacity for relevance realization (obviously, improved in some fundamental way). I think there's integral connections between wisdom and intelligence via the notion of rationality that we've already been developing together.
Then we took a look at the five criteria: there were clear indications of propositional knowledge, procedural knowledge, the contextualism I argued can best be seen as perspectival knowing, I argued against their notion of relativism and argued instead for humility and fallibilism (sorry, that was maybe too harsh; I think it's pretty clear that many of the seminal figures of wisdom, figures from the past, were not moral relativist or relativists in any way, so I strongly recommend replacing relativism with fallibilism and humility), and then finally the fifth criteria is that wisdom is applicable to domains in which there is uncertainty. Of course as I've already argued, a huge aspect of our life and our cognition (because of ill-definedness, combinatorial explosion, etc.) is strongly presupposing relevance realization.
John Vervaeke has a lecture series on YouTube called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I thought it was great, so I'm arranging a lecture club to discuss it here on Less Wrong. The format is simple: each weekday I post a comment that's a link to the next lecture and the summary (which I plan on stealing from the recap at the beginning of the next lecture), and then sometimes comment beneath it with my own thoughts. If you're coming late (even years late!) feel free to join in, and go at whatever pace works for you.
(Who is John Vervaeke? He's a lecturer in cognitive science at the University of Toronto. I hadn't heard of him before the series, which came highly recommended to me.)
I split the lecture series into three parts: the philosophical, religious, and cultural history of humankind (25 episodes) related to meaning, the cognitive science of wisdom and meaning (20 episodes), and more recent philosophy related to the meaning crisis specifically (5 episodes). Each episode is about an hour at regular speed (but I think they're understandable at 2x speed). I am not yet aware of a good text version of the lectures; I also have some suspicion that some important content is not in the text itself, and so even if I transcribed them (or paid someone to) it'd still be worth watching or listening to it.
I think the subject matter is 1) very convergent with the sort of rationality people are interested in on LW, and 2) relevant to AI alignment, especially thinking about embedded agency.
Discussion: