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Paul Litvak's avatar

Curious to connect this perspective with David Chapman's recent writings on the badness of philosophy, e.g. here (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/philosophy-doesnt-work).

More broadly I wonder what Bentham's Bulldog makes of a meta-observation, which is that super smart philosophers make extremely compelling arguments on both sides of every controversial issue. If I'm a not-so-good reasoner, I can look at that and throw my hands up and give up on the whole enterprise, instead opting for my basic intuitions, which I can be sure some philosopher will take up and defend more than adequately. I'm sure there is some brilliant philosopher somewhere who has a very compelling argument against shrimp welfare, even if most of the people replying to the recent essay on that topic didn't offer any such arguments.

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Dominik's avatar

1) As a decent chess player I like the chess analogy. I can only confirm what your friend said: when calculating/evaluating a position I am constantly thinking about things that sub 2000 players wouldn't even consider

2) I know you are not a fan of history of philosophy, but this all shows how right Plato was when he came up with the allegory of the cave thousands of years ago

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