A) love to see some serious philosophy on hacker news! Well argued, and impressively interdisciplinary. Of course, this also means I’ve just gotta nitpick.
B) The analytic mindset (worldview, even) rears its head yet again, with the same old “I’ll ask a question, list the possible answers, and select the best one” paradigm as always. It’s an understandable urge of course, but when it comes to philosophy it’s often applied to questions we should not feel quite so confident about our answers to.
More specifically: the idea that worldviews exist as a thing is, IMHO, what the Churchlands (famous philosophy of mind duo in their 90s) would pejoratively call a “folk psychology” concept, a category that also includes Free Will, True Belief, Conscious Awareness, and other things that we feel like should exist but don’t really have a scientific way to phrase, much less prove the existence of.
In this case, what makes it so obvious that worldviews exist in a “high dimensional space” that’s not simply the vector space representing each persons entire cognitive apparatus? You can construct models for this like you can construct models for anything, but the article talks like there really is an underlying structure that we just need to find, both for Personality and Worldview. This quickly leads us astray; rather than starting with political/philosophical/sociological goals and constructing one or more models accordingly, shes seemingly trying to build an argumentative decision tree and arrive at an ultimate conclusion. And it’s not that I don’t like her approach therein, I just don’t think that conclusion exists.
This brings me to the most provocative part of the essay, the discussion (and quick dismissal) of postmodernism. Sure, some artists and Foucaultians can be read as having embraced the “there’s no true reality, all knowledge is derived only from power” thesis discussed here, but I think that’s mostly done for rhetorical and/or political effect. I prefer the “Standpoint Theory”/“Feminist Epistemolgy” phrasing: as imperfect cognitive apparatuses, we are all necessarily and inherently biased. This isn’t to say that we should abandon the (folk?) concept of “truth”, because it’s obviously insanely useful on an instrumental level, and hard to imagine a world-without on a metaphysical one; rather, it’s just to say that we should be realistically humble therein.
*TL;DR:* there is no such thing as worldview or personality to discover, only to engineer. This essay is a great start on that, but seemingly too ambitious in scope.
C) this quote made me throw up in my mouth a lil:
the old vicissitudes of hard work, discovery, improvement, and fecundity.
Let’s abandon some vicissitudes, y'all. Tradition for its own sake is how you get vague synonyms for “good” lumped in with “fecundity”!
B) The analytic mindset (worldview, even) rears its head yet again, with the same old “I’ll ask a question, list the possible answers, and select the best one” paradigm as always. It’s an understandable urge of course, but when it comes to philosophy it’s often applied to questions we should not feel quite so confident about our answers to.
More specifically: the idea that worldviews exist as a thing is, IMHO, what the Churchlands (famous philosophy of mind duo in their 90s) would pejoratively call a “folk psychology” concept, a category that also includes Free Will, True Belief, Conscious Awareness, and other things that we feel like should exist but don’t really have a scientific way to phrase, much less prove the existence of.
In this case, what makes it so obvious that worldviews exist in a “high dimensional space” that’s not simply the vector space representing each persons entire cognitive apparatus? You can construct models for this like you can construct models for anything, but the article talks like there really is an underlying structure that we just need to find, both for Personality and Worldview. This quickly leads us astray; rather than starting with political/philosophical/sociological goals and constructing one or more models accordingly, shes seemingly trying to build an argumentative decision tree and arrive at an ultimate conclusion. And it’s not that I don’t like her approach therein, I just don’t think that conclusion exists.
This brings me to the most provocative part of the essay, the discussion (and quick dismissal) of postmodernism. Sure, some artists and Foucaultians can be read as having embraced the “there’s no true reality, all knowledge is derived only from power” thesis discussed here, but I think that’s mostly done for rhetorical and/or political effect. I prefer the “Standpoint Theory”/“Feminist Epistemolgy” phrasing: as imperfect cognitive apparatuses, we are all necessarily and inherently biased. This isn’t to say that we should abandon the (folk?) concept of “truth”, because it’s obviously insanely useful on an instrumental level, and hard to imagine a world-without on a metaphysical one; rather, it’s just to say that we should be realistically humble therein.
*TL;DR:* there is no such thing as worldview or personality to discover, only to engineer. This essay is a great start on that, but seemingly too ambitious in scope.
C) this quote made me throw up in my mouth a lil:
Let’s abandon some vicissitudes, y'all. Tradition for its own sake is how you get vague synonyms for “good” lumped in with “fecundity”!