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Ron Maimon's user avatar
Ron Maimon's user avatar
Ron Maimon
  • Member for 11 years, 10 months
  • Last seen more than 1 year ago
  • New York City
About

I consider myself a logical positivist, although I have never read the logical positivists. I read a little philosophy from time to time, always by skimming (so as to avoid having an aneurysm from getting pissed off). I believe the field is bankrupt intellectual fraud, with a handful of honest practitioners who didn't achieve any progress, because they are drowned out by impressive sounding political clowns. The honest folks are Russell, Carnap, Dennett, and I can't think of anybody else.

The problem with philosophy is not that the questions are bad, nor that they have no answers. The problem is that the mechanism philosophers use to sift through the answers over historical time is political persuasion, and this mechanism doesn't work. The result of political decisions is that obscuratist frauds like Hegel get credit for deep thoughts, and honest folks are marginalized and dismissed. Therefore, I don't see much point in attentively reading the works of philosophers, as their training is of negative value.

But maybe the internet can make some progress in this field.

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