How to Do Philosophy

Sometimes we find ourselves working with schemas that clearly have elements of truth, but that for some reason don't seem to hold up well empirically. Often times this is because the schema we have in our heads is more broadly defined than the underlying phenomenon.

A good example of this is the phenomenon of prodigies. We know there are some people in society who are exceptionally talented in certain areas, and we call these people prodigies. We then have certain schemas that we apply to these prodigies in our quest for wisdom.

But even though prodigies clearly exist, our schemas often seem to not hold up so well. For example, studies have shown that child prodigies are often not significantly more successful than the rest of us when they grow up. And similarly, many prodigious adults were completely unremarkable as children. Why is this? How is it possible for such exceptional children not to make anything of themselves, and for such exceptional adults to have been completely average as children?

Malcolm Gladwell observes that the reason for this is because when we describe child prodigies, we are describing people who are gifted at learning. Whereas when we describe adult prodigies, we are actually describing people are gifted at doing.

Because we are applying one set of sensemaking tools to both groups, our schemas tend to not hold up so well even though they are based on an underlying truth. The solution to this is to create one set of schemas for understanding and dealing with child prodigies, and another set of schemas for understanding and dealing with adult prodigies.

There are often areas where we engage in fuzzy thinking, and apply one toolset to multiple distinct phenomena. Philosophers and thinkers can create enormous value by identifying distinct phenomena, and giving suggestions for how to think about each one.

PG actually does this in his essay How to Make Wealth. He observes that money and wealth are not the same thing so we should think about them differently. Specifically, that money is sort of an abstraction of wealth, but for various reasons we can benefit from thinking about wealth on a lower level. Providing the sort of disambiguation that this essay does is really valuable, which is why this is arguably the most useful of all the PG essays.

It seems like with math we start with something we know is true but not necessarily useful (like just the concept of a line) and then we abstract our way to usefulness. This is opposed to philosophy, which generally takes the stance that all models are false but some models are useful. In philosophy we usually start with something that is useful in certain situations but not necessarily universally true, and then we disambiguate our way down toward truthfulness. I don't really see a problem with philosophy as long as it is empirically useful under at least in certain conditions.

I feel there are two major issues with philosophy today:

1. No "philosophical method" the same way there is a scientific method, which means philosophy doesn't really build on each other from one philosopher to the next.

2. No real way to categorize ideas the same way you can categorize physics research, which makes it hard to find prior art. So even though Malcolm Gladwell and PG make really good arguments, there is no guarantee that people in the future will use these arguments. As opposed to science where is something is proven true it becomes the basis for future works.

lol.

I am big PG fan, but the non-startup articles don't appeal to me, this in particular.

Yes.

pg: Are there any philosophical texts that you'd recommend?

Two points:

1. I'm actually very surprised at how many Ayn Rand fans there are on this site. For a fringe philosophy that has fewer followers than Scientology there seems to be an unusually high concentration here. I am a big Ayn Rand fan, so this is a pleasant surprise for me.

2. Ayn Rand's book Intorduction to Objectivist Epistemology is the most interesting book on the theory of concept formation I've read. I have not come across anything that I found more plausible. One of the most appealing parts of it was that she tied concept formation to a similar process as algebra.

Specifically to the point of this article, I would certainly say that it changes the way you think. The chapters on definitions and concept hierarchy make your thinking radically more efficient. Even if you're a programmer and have no interest in philosophy I'd say it's definitely worth a read.