The “philosophies” that can be harmful are, upon deeper examination, antithetical to philosophy itself, in that rather than seeking wisdom, they either declare it impossible or make excuses for not needing it. These include solipsism yes, also egotism, and subjectivisms as well as relativisms about both what is real and what is moral, which I argue all boil down to nihilism about at least one or the other of those things. But it’s not just that approach, but also any kind of appeal to anything besides reason, including intuition, authority, or popularity, which I argue all boil down to faith. More indirectly, justificationism entails nihilism too, and both scientism and social constructivism boil down to justification about either morality or reality respectively. And any kind of supernaturalism, or the moral analogue thereof, or generally any supposition about things transcending all experience, including certain sense of “materialism” that don’t just mean phenomenalism, all entail making appeals to faith.

All of these “philosophies” end up saying not to try to figure out what is true or what is good, either because it’s hopeless or because it’s unnecessary. So all of them are really not after wisdom at all — the ability to tell truth from falsehood and good from bad — but instead running away from it. They are not so much philosophy at all, but “phobosophy”, the fear of wisdom. Because trying is hard.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to talk about them, though.

The left is definitionally pro working class.

The problem recounted in the article is that people and organizations that used to be left have drifted right in their old age, and don’t recognize that.

There are still people advocating for the working class, who are to the left of what the establishment considers “the left”.

stupid "those who don't really understand what we're trying to say"

lazy "those who don't really care what we're trying to say"

mean "those who don't really like what we're trying to say"

Do Australian philosophers of science discuss how the discovery of a single white swan could disprove the hypothesis that all swans are black?

(Fun story: an Australian friend in a chat once said something about a black crow, and I feigned surprise about that, and then pretended to remember "oh right your crows are black down there, like the swans", and for a moment had him freaking out that he had just assumed crows everywhere were black but American crows might actually be white and he never realized it).

On this note, I think it would be useful if we had a term besides "rights" for the kinds of things that are all too often called "basic human rights" these days. Goods that, in the present circumstances, a moral society really ought to ensure everyone has reasonable access to, the denial of which, in the present circumstances, is a sign of some systemic societal failure, but which really shouldn't be considered universal, absolute rights in all circumstances. Things like "periodic vacations with pay", which only make sense at all in the context of an industrial capitalist society. Sure, I think that people in industrial capitalist societies really should reasonably all get periodic vacations with pay, but to call that a "basic human right" suggests that primitive hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers and so on, in places and times where the conditions in which offering periodic vacations with pay make sense just didn't exist, were all suffering human rights violations across the board. And that's just silly.

By realizing the triviality of it. Even if solipsism is correct, the solipsist still finds themselves having experiences of something that is seemingly beyond their awareness or control, even if they think that that something is just another part of their own mind. The difference between "the part of my mind I am directly aware of and in control of" and "the part of my mind beyond that" is in practice indistinguishable from the difference between "myself" and "the rest of the world". You've still got to deal with that unknown "other" even if you think it's just an "other part of me", try to figure out how and why it works and how to make it better. And trying to do that cooperatively with other "figments of your imagination" requires granting them equal status as yourself: if the greater part of your mind that's beyond your awareness and control can contain things that superficially seem like you, what's to suppose that "you" yourself aren't just like them, and that that greater you isn't also looking at you through the eyes of those other "figments of your imagination"?

The solipsist may deny that there is really anybody in disagreement at all, but will nevertheless find no traction in convincing what he thinks to be a figment of his imagination who seems to disagree with him that they are not real and so that their take on what else is or isn't real doesn't matter, especially if that supposed figment of his imagination is himself also a solipsist and so thinks that the first person is the actual figment of the imagination. The egotist, likewise, will find no route to moral agreement with someone whom he explicitly thinks is of no moral consideration, especially if that other person is also an egoist and thinks likewise of the first person.

So even if solipsism is true, it makes no practical difference on how to go about life. You need to act the same way anyway.

Who said anything about essentialism? / What does that have to do with anything?

I voted "yes", but honestly the term "natural rights" causes needless confusion.

One person's rights consists in either their own permission (liberty rights) or someone else's obligation to them (claim rights). Permission and obligation are deontic-logical states. Calling rights "natural" often suggests that the rights are supposed to be features of the natural, i.e. physical, world, things that "exist" out there somewhere to be found. But moral naturalism has major ontological problems. There can be moral objectivism without being naturalistic or even descriptivist at all, like Hare's universal prescriptivism, or my own similar metaethics. On that account, there can be things that are objectively permissible and obligatory regardless of what humans may or may not say they are, and those permissions and obligations can constitute rights that people objectively do or do not have independent of anybody's opinions. Calling them "natural rights" is fine, so long as these nuances are understood, but far too often they're not, and the name just leads to needless confusion instead.

Academia can easily rob us of spontaneity, freshness, and fun. — Iamthatiam

It's not academia that has made it un-fun. I had a great time studying philosophy at university. It's the inability to find a continuation of that same atmosphere that I enjoyed there somewhere outside of there that has made it un-fun.

I want to elaborate more on why, but I fear that it will not be a fun experience to do so here.

Good choice, and glad to hear you’re making sure efforts to help other people. I expect that that will make your own life feel more meaningful and worth living too.

it's very hard to keep oneself exploratory and collaborative when someone is going to come along and treat it like a fight anyway. — fdrake

I know I’m super late to the game here but I just wanted to :up: :clap: this.

Not in your version perhaps. However, you seem to have changed the original ( no source citation given ) to align with your own 3 'wants' related to the 'stupid, lazy and mean'. — Amity

I wrote the OP. I am clarifying for you what it was about. It was not about just applying the project management triangle to philosophy writing. It was about making an analogy between that original project management triangle, and some thoughts I had about that writing advice about “stupid, lazy, and mean”. That, like you can only achieve two out of “good, fast, cheap”, you can likewise only reach two out of “stupid, lazy, and mean”.

Wow. Still a lot going on here about that book.
So, rather than continue with the Triangle topic, I decided to take a look at the Summary.

http://www.geekofalltrades.org/codex/summary.php

Looks like a lot of time and effort has gone into a wide scope of philosophy. But as to its quality and if it meets the goal of the author, that would seem to be an open question.

The thread title is about a tool which focuses on 3 constraints with regard to a quality product.
Philosophy Writing Management where there are apparent trade offs in 1.Time 2. Cost and 3.Scope.

This is likened to the problems of reaching an audience who are imagined to be 1. Stupid 2. Lazy or 3. Mean. — Amity

I’m glad the conversation has since moved on past my book and I don’t want to bring it back to that. But I want to clarify on the actual topic of this thread that the OP is not just applying the Project Management Triangle to philosophy—the three constraints aren’t time, cost, and scope—but rather supposing that the three difficult audiences we are advised to reach in philosophy, the “stupid, lazy, and mean”, are mutually limiting like the three constraints of the project management triangle. That you can only pick two out of three. Not that they are the same three.

I have not seen arguments written from scratch. — boethius

I think you have not read much of it then. I’ve seen very little indication that you’ve read anything at all of it.

The reason to seek out where these "original to me" ideas have been discussed before is to scrutinize their formulation (maybe someone not only thought of the idea but had made it better and more precise) and, more importantly, with a writer or textual reference you can then much better search for who has criticized that argument. — boethius

I have done that.

On this point, you did not provide your formulation from scratch of your pragmatic maxim, nor cited Pierce. It's these gaps that need to be filled one way or another, otherwise it's no longer possible to follow your argument as there is critical information missing. If you look carefully at your writing there is lot's of these gaps that need either an argument from scratch, a citation or then simply stating a new assumption. — boethius

Where in the text I say “pragmatism”, I say what argument I am calling that.

Also, I do have a reference to Peirce in the current version anyway.

If you look carefully at your writing there is lot's of these gaps that need either an argument from scratch, a citation or then simply stating a new assumption. — boethius

It would help if someone would point out where it looks like that, because that would be some kind of oversight or just careless writing. I am intended to spell everything out from scratch.

I say that: if you don't cite authors you mention, myself and other readers simply cannot get much insight to your relation to those authors. It is simply adding confusion. — boethius

You were complaining that I DIDN’T mention someone nonspecific in a nonspecific part of one essay. You talk like if I had studied that vague general area I would necessarily have included mention of whoever you’re thinking of wherever you’re thinking. But I have studied, and I’m not psychic, so unless you say what writing of whom is relevant to what part of my writing, I don’t know if you’re talking about someone I just didn’t think was relevant to mention or maybe something I actually haven’t studied.

Key word "what seems like novel thoughts". The reason to put in a lot of work to find and then really get into where those thoughts are not novel, is that you will benefit from those existing arguments and debates about it. You can then either simply reference those formulations if you see no need to improve them or then reformulate them. — boethius

If I have a thought that, after a pretty extensive study of philosophy, seems novel to me in light of everything I’m aware of having gone before, how can I know that it is not novel without someone telling me, or somehow being certain that I have read absolutely everything that there is to read?

The latter is impossible, and impractical to ever try to approximate, especially since this isn’t my paid full-time job, so I can only rely on someone letting me know if the thoughts I think are novel actually aren’t. By refusing to even comment on those particulars, you’re effectively saying “come back when you’ve read absolutely everything there is to read”.

We still do not know exactly your goal with the book or audience — boethius

I have clarified that already. Primarily people like I was 20 years ago. People interested in philosophy, including those not yet very familiar with it, who I expect will not find what they are looking for in the existing corpus of it, because after a decade of study I still hadn’t.

You can forego citation by building the arguments you want to take form pragmatism from scratch. — boethius

This is what I’m doing. I never expect the reader to always be familiar with some prior philosophy already. I always try to build up all of the arguments from scratch. I only mention other philosophers to show that I am aware when an idea is not original. Half the time, the ideas I’m putting forward were original to me, and I later became aware that others had already written on the same topic.

In the case of Pragmatism, I had my own version of something like the Pragmatic Maxim, and was later told by someone I shared that thought with about Pragmatism, and read up about it, and found Peirce closest to my own thoughts. I’m not trying to defend exactly Peirce or anyone else though, so going into depth about them would just be pointless showing off that doesn’t advance the purpose of my writing.

Sushi was previously accusing me precisely of “showing off”, so just going into unnecessary depth on everything that I know about every philosopher I mention would just be more of that. I mention the details I think are necessary to mention to make the point I’m making, and no more. If you think there’s an important detail I’m omitting that’s relevant to a given point I’m making, TELL ME what it is. Don’t just tell me I’m missing something and leave me guessing as to what.

Nor I, nor any of your other advisers here, want you to "do what we say". We don't care what you do. You ask advice, we provide our advice, you use it or you don't. There's simply no point in trying to "prove our advice is wrong"; if it's wrong, don't use it. Now, it's constructive to try to understand the advice better (so to better to decide to use it or not), but it's not constructive to argue with advice of this kind; you're just tiring your advisers and making them lose interest, which only harms yourself. — boethius

You seem too quick to impute argument where there is none. If I ask for more detail on a critique, that’s not arguing. If I say I don’t think a particular critique is worth acting on and why, that’s not arguing. It sound like the only response you want is “ok I’ll do that” or else silence, and you take anything else as “argument”. That’s exactly where the “don’t talk back just do what I say” attitude comes across.

It also wouldn't help you if I provided you those details, as a few details about some thinkers is not a substitute to understanding those thinkers. My advice is not to quickly search for some citations so that you can cosmetically sprinkle them into your book and give the illusion you have grappled with all the nuance and life force those thinkers bring to bear; my advice is to actually do that grappling. — boethius

See, here you are assuming that because I have not mentioned something I am not aware of it. I have studied a lot of philosophy. Not the most that can possibly be studies, I don’t think I know more about it than absolutely everybody else about every facet of it, but enough to have what seem to be novel thoughts about it that take into account lots of priority work. I‘m not looking for cosmetic citations to sprinkle in, that is exactly the kind of useless advice I don’t want. I want any substantive omissions I might have made to be pointed out to me by people whose education may cover bits and pieces mine didn’t. Instead, you at least just point me in the broad direction of some more studying you think I need to do, without explanation of what it is in that reading will be relevant to my writing. Like I shouldn’t ever write a single word down until I have memorized absolutely every book ever written. Nobody does that.

If I thought this was something good enough for academic publishing, I wouldn’t be here. I’m trying to do the best I can in the circumstances I find myself in. Saying it’s just not good enough and to go study more is no help at all. Saying where specifically and why so I can focus on improving in.

You’re saying, essentially, be absolutely perfect or give up. And you won’t even name a specific flaw that makes it short of perfect. I’m sure they are there, but how will I get rid of them if you won’t say where they are?

a one dimensional triangle — Amity

Triangles are necessarily two-dimensional.

:up: :clap:

You get that I’m just using the terms from that mnemonic right? I’m not actually thinking “gotta make this easy for the stupid people” or anything like that. Just trying to make it as accessible as I can. I think in terms of people I care about like my parents or my girlfriend when I’m imagining particular people trying to read this. (And they definitely don’t already agree with me, especially not my parents).

There is basically nothing uncontroversial in philosophy. — boethius

True, but every argument starts with premises the reader is expected to likely agree with, otherwise it can’t get off the ground at all. A good philosophical argument starts with something trivially agreeable and derives something controversially substantial from it. That it is what I mean to do.

You responded to my criticism by first arguing with it (which you have done with everyone offering you advice, which is just tiresome) — boethius

This attitude of “don’t talk back just do what I say” is tiresome. I’m not just going to blindly attempt to guess at what someone wants me to do without first talking to them and making sure I understand what they’re saying and that it is well-justified. In your case, all you mentioned was that the ideas trace back to non-specific ancient Greeks, and I didn’t see the value in just mentioning that in passing in the text; it didn’t seem to provide anything that would be of value to the reader, to be more of just a “by the way” aside along the path to the point being made.

then eventually you accepted it and integrated it by mentioning "oh, some Greeks thought about these things"; but that's simply not serious: which Greeks? what did they say? what did they get right, wrong, miss entirely?. — boethius

I am here asking people I expect to be my peers to help point me at details like that, that would be useful to include and that I have missed. You neither demonstrated what would be useful about mentioning them nor provided any particular details to include.

I am not posting about my book here to “show off my genius” or something like you seem to think. Quite the contrary, I am posting about it hoping that both those less educated than me will tell me what’s difficult to follow so I can try to write better there, and those MORE educated than me will tell me what I’ve missed. You basically told me THAT I missed something, but didn’t say anything actionably specific about what it was.

In contrast, another commenter pointed out that my “logic of moods” has prior work by an author I’d never heard of, who is now on my reading list to be looked into when I can.

Which ancient Greeks do you think I have not read yet? (I probably have). Which details of their work do you think need mention in the place you were critiquing? I can’t very well just start writing everything I know about ancient Greek philosophy there in the hopes of satisfying your critique, and I obviously already wrote every detail I thought was relevant to that passage before, so if you think some other details need mentioning that I didn’t think warranted inclusion, I need you to say which.

Instead, you seem to just assume I am completely unfamiliar with the entire broad area you mention, like if I just go study that (again) I will see what it is that I need to include. But I already studied plenty in that area, and included what I thought was relevant, so I need you to tell me: what in particular did I miss and why is it relevant to mention there?

It should not be us that tells you what ideas you have that are totally novel, it should be you the author that has more knowledge of your subject than we the reader, and so can just tell us what's new and explain why it's new (why previous thinkers got so far but no further). — boethius

In the book, I say when I think I am making a novel addition and where I am aware of previous thinkers having had the same ideas before. What I am asking from the forum is both whether any of the ideas I thought were new actually have previous work I’m not familiar with (from readers more educated than me), and whether the previous work I am mentioning is new to the reader (from readers less educated than me).

The rest of your post reads like a shallow attempt to “take me down a peg” from some hubris you supposed I have, and isn’t worth responding to. (Honestly, a lot of the harshest criticism seems to be from people who seem to think I think I’m smarter than I should think I am, when I’m here specifically hoping that other people at least as smart as me will help me to be better than I am. In the book itself I’m trying to be as humble and self-debasing as I can, not making bold proclamations of indisputable truth but just saying what seems like a strong argument in this or that direction and why it seems strong to me, trying to show sympathy to every position and then gently explain where and why I diverge. Yet apparently that is also a fault, so I need to both be bolder and more assertive and also better realize how dumb I really am and go git gud before I open my mouth?)

The thing that a philosophical zombie, if it existed, would lack: the having of a first-person phenomenal experience, not merely the performance of third-person observable behavior.

The panpsychists says everything has that experience just like everything has behavior, and it's the differences in quality of both of those things between different things that matters.

(And therefore philosophical zombies are impossible).

That is, again, exactly what I reorganized to do. Instead of starting off with attacks, I start off with the most boring uncontroversial common sense that almost everybody probably already agrees with, and the promise that after elaborating on the implications of that I expect to arrive at a position that almost everybody probably already disagrees with.

And that means both the reader AND their regular opponents who they probably jump to the conclusion I am. I expect a fideist to jump to the conclusion that I am a nihilist, but they hey look I’m also against nihilism, and vice versa. Hoping that if I can make clear that I neither agree with their usual opponents nor with them, I can intrigue them as to what other possibility I think there is.

In the reorganized Commensurablism, before any of the Against essays, I also lay out how I expect both of those sides get to where they are from the places we agree. Using my technical definitions of these terms for short here:


I expect the fideist reasons:

Not nihilism (and I agree)

Not nihilism = Objectivism (and I agree)
Objectivism = Transcendentalism (here I disagree)
Transcendentalism => Fideism (and I agree)

also

Not nihilism => Not cynicism (and I agree)
Cynicism = Criticism (here I disagree)
Not criticism = Fideism (and I agree)

Therefore fideism (here I disagree)


And I expect the nihilist reasons:

Not fideism (and I agree)

Not fideism = Criticism (and I agree)
Criticism = Cynicism (here I disagree)
Cynicism => Nihilism (and I agree)

also

Not fideism => Not transcendentalism (and I agree)
Transcendentalism = Objectivism (here I disagree)
Not objectivism = Nihilism (and I agree)
Therefore nihilism (here I disagree)


I then proceed in the various Against essays to distinguish those things I think they equate with each other, and why I am against one side of that equation but not the other.

I can’t speak for concrescence, but prehension and epochal make perfect sense to me without having heard them before, just based on their roots.

I’m only superficially familiar with with Whitehead. What neologisms did he coin?

It helps to also acknowledge when it’s about to get technical or unclear, and offer a quick ‘layman’s’ version so those who either already get what you’re saying, or don’t have time to get into the details and are prepared to take your word for it at this time, can skip to something more intriguing. — Possibility

One of the main things I was hoping to get was feedback on exactly where people got stuck like this, so I could know where I need to change it, take slower smaller steps, give more examples, clarify what I do or don’t mean, etc.

Likewise, making an attempt to understand and sympathise with a dissenting position, rather than give all the reasons why you’re against it, will go a long way towards engaging readers who aren’t already on your side of the debate. — Possibility

That is exactly why I reordered the opening essays. Instead of starting off attacking the biggest opponents first and then their usual opponents in turn, before explaining where I stand between them, now I start with an overview of my whole general philosophy and the ways it agrees with other general philosophies. Then the places I think those other philosophies take those shared premises and each reach different wrong conclusions from them, and how I think it’s possible to reconcile the premises of all those different philosophies without reaching any of their mutually contrary wrong conclusions. Only then do I start going in to all the different possibilities of wrongness thereby avoided.

Words are used different ways in different contexts, and acknowledging that isn’t abusing language.

Many philosophers frequently use “consciousness” to refer to something entirely besides the kind of functional states you’re quoting above. The whole debate about “where consciousness comes from”, whether philosophical zombies are possible, etc, hinges on that use of the word.

I don’t think that that is a very useful use of the word. That’s not a thing of any practical importance to talk about. The important thing is the kind of thing you’re talking about. But people are nevertheless asking about the other thing, asking where does it come from, in between rocks they presume don’t have it and humans who they each know first hand do have it, and could something otherwise just like a human somehow not have it.

The panpsychist waves away that problem by saying that that thing they’re asking about is just a trivial thing that everything has. We know first hand that we have it, we grant that things similar to us have similar versions of it, so why not just grant that very different and simpler things just have very different and simpler versions of it.

What matters then is just those differences, which brings us back around to the important thing, the one you’re talking about.

I believe in freewill and so when I decide to move my arm the atoms have to move. Otherwise who decides what an entity does? — Andrew4Handel

Where does that “free will” come from? If it’s some function of your brain, then since your brain is made of atoms it’s the behaviors of those atoms that add up to your behaviorally free will. If it’s just indeterminism, the atomic scale is less deterministic than the macroscopic scale, and it is still the indeterminism of your atoms that adds up to the indeterminism of your actions.

(There are, again, multiple things to talk about here, all being referred to by the same name.)

The atoms don’t have separate experiences; their experiences are tiny parts of your experience, just like their behaviors are a tiny part of your behavior.

The rest of what you’re talking about are behavioral details, which then correspond to experiential details. The experience of something without a nervous system is not much to speak of. Consciousness proper — ACCESS consciousness— is a reflexive (self-oriented) behavior and correspondingly, self-experience, self-awareness.

I don't think consciousness can exist without a subject and so I think that limits what kind of things could be conscious. — Andrew4Handel

What is to stop considering any thing as the subject?

That’s basically the thesis of panpsychism: all objects are also subjects.

Objects from rocks to humans vary wildly in their behaviors, though, so of course subjects from rocks to humans vary wildly in their experiences, and the experience of a rock is no more interesting than its behavior.

A vice is a negative quality. What else would you call them?

Why would anyone want to 'reach the absolute worst audience' or even those with 2 out of 3 of the qualities ? — Amity

It’s more that I would like to reach anybody who has any of those three vices. I want to spell things out as slowly, simply, and easily as possible for people who find the subject difficult. I want to be clear, to people who feel defensive, that I am not meaning the horrible thing they jump to the conclusion that I mean, but something much more agreeable. And I want to get through all that as quickly as possible so it doesn’t drag on longer than necessary and bore people away before they can get through it all.

But both of those first two things take words to do, which thus sacrifices the third thing. So you could get back the third thing by instead sacrificing one of the first two things... or the other. But one way or another it seems like you can’t do all three of those at once.

This distinction Pfhorrest made of 'phenomenal consciousness' seems very useful to this end. It's exactly that that I want to understand your beliefs about. It's not a distinction which makes any sense to me, not something distinct which requires a name, — Isaac

For my part, I think in a completely sane world we wouldn't need a name for it, because phenomenal consciousness is a trivial thing about which there isn't really much to say. The only reason to name it at all is because, in the existing historical arguments about philosophy of mind, it's become clear that people are conflating two different things, and that conflation is the source of much confusion. Separate the two things, and it becomes clear that one is a trivial philosophical non-problem (yeah, there's a first person perspective of anything, so what?), and the other becomes an interesting non-philosophical problem (for psychologists, neuroscientists, AI engineers, etc, to work on).

FWIW I think that most if not all philosophical progress is made in this way. Sort out the different questions that are all mistakenly conflated as one question, figure out what you want an answer to each of them for, what would count as an answer, how to go about figuring one out, etc, and you end up with several different questions that are either trivial or no longer philosophical. The philosophical work was all in getting to that point where everything that isn't a non-philosophical question is rendered trivial, and special sciences can take over.

(For instance, I think similarly about free will. Incompatibilists and compatibilists are talking about two different things. The kind of thing incompatibilists are on about is trivial; electrons "have free will" of the kind they're on about, and that doesn't really mean anything as significant as it sounds. But the kind compatibilists are talking about, while much less philosophically "deep" in a way, is much more interesting, in that special sciences can then go on to do interesting empirical investigations about it. Philosophy's place is in elucidating that difference.)

Oh okay that’s good. I know the project management triangle is old but I thought your “brilliant” was sarcastic.

I’m not just directly applying that same triangle though, but making an analogous one.

You seem less than earnest.

This thread isn’t supposed to be about me or my book, but whatever, if that’s all anyone wants to talk about...

I’m only looking at form because that’s all anyone has given me feedback on.

And I did break it down one piece at a time. That’s why I started a new thread for each chapter, and waited for each to die before posting another.

Most of what I asked for feedback on was which parts were genuinely novel to people vs what was old hat, so I could later focus on what actually warranted in depth discussion of the substance when it came to that stage.

The few things that did garner preemptive argument about the substance were, disappointingly, the most old-hat parts of it, the boring groundwork. When I finally got to the interesting details, nobody was paying attention anymore.

Sushi et al seem to be suggesting that that’s for stylistic reasons that make nobody want to pay attention through the setup to the payoff, hence this diversion into style.

This thread is about style generally through, not about my book in particular.

The Project Management Triangle assumes that people would like their projects done as well as possible, as quickly as possible, and at as little cost as possible, but shows that attaining all three of those desires simultaneously is not possible. Faster will lower quality or else raise costs, cheaper will lower quality or else take longer, and better will take longer or else cost more.

There is no need for lengthy disclaimers to be able to write clearly and concisely so as to avoid misinterpretation. — Amity

If the few words you use to write clearly and concisely could admit of multiple possible interpretations, you will need to spell out in more depth what interpretations you do or don’t mean to avoid misinterpretation, which sacrifices brevity; or else you could regain brevity by instead explaining things less step-by-step, instead sacrificing accessibility.

Sounds like basically the same reason who wrote your history. To make some minor contribution to the field. I didn’t find what I was looking for in my philosophical studies, so I decided to make it, for those who came after me. I don’t care about money and I don’t think academic recognition is a reasonable expectation. I’d just like it to be interesting food for thought for someone, something that helps others along in the same quest I was on that lead me to here.

Specifically, while there’s tons of great research in specialized areas of professional philosophy, I haven’t found very much connecting all of that together into a unified whole, or bridging between that professional research and lay people. Most of my attempted contributions are in making those connections.

I’m trying to get people here to read it basically to sanity-check that it is readable and successfully communicates the things I’m trying to communicate. It’s hard to tell if you’re making any sense if the only person you can bounce things off is yourself.

I think it’s important in many philosophical contexts not to argue over what the “correct” definition is, but to explore the relevant questions about each definition as separate questions.

In that light, I see phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness not as two different ways of thinking about the same thing, but two separate things. Access consciousness is trivially accounted for by functionalism, and is weakly emergent from simpler mechanical functions. Phenomenal consciousness is not a different take on that same thing, but a different thing entirely, and it is with regards to that only that I am a panpsychist.

Everything has phenomenal consciousness, it doesn’t emerge from anything that doesn’t have it, and it doesn’t just not exist, though it’s pretty trivial and unimportant.

Only some things have access consciousness, which emerges from simpler functions that are not access conscious in a philosophically trivial way, although the end product of that holds all the interesting important details about consciousness as we usually mean it.

Most of what I want to say here has already been said by others, but just to be clear about myself:

The original idea is not to actually assume bad things about your real audience, but to write with even the worst of audiences in mind, to make your writing better.

I am saying that perhaps it is just not possible to reach the absolute worst audience, and trying to do so requires sacrifices in aspects that would otherwise have helped to reach other segments of the audience.

The Project Management Triangle I am comparing it to is this:



The original idea (and my modification) are not opposite the principle of charity but complimentary to it: be charitable, but beware that others won’t be. (Also be patient but beware that others won’t be, etc).

I didn’t reference that Yablo paper because I didn’t get this directly from there but verbally from multiple old professors, and a Google search showed multiple written sources using that phrase, so I figured it was just common knowledge among philosophy professors these days.

This thread isn’t supposed to be about my book or the arguments surrounding it, though it was inspired by those conversations, but not in the way that’s been implied. I was already trying to write for a “stupid, lazy, and mean” audience from the beginning, so this isn’t an insult to anybody who has commented there. But as I have gotten conflicting advice from multiple different sources, it struck me to remember that you can’t please everyone, which inspired this idea. I think my writing is currently weak against the lazy (because they’re uninterested in the topic and don’t care to look for what’s going to be of interest to them later). But looking for ways to fix that kept exposing vulnerabilities against the stupid or the mean (saying things early on to pique interest, but consequently without the setup necessary for someone to understand them correctly). That made me think of the Project Management Triangle, how trying to increase speed can lower quality or raise costs, etc... hence this thread.

You seemed to miss the part where I was sucking it up and trying to heed his advice anyway despite being advised by ithers not to, until he commented not on the work, but on me personally. I don’t expect to be coddled, but I expect not to be personally attacked.

Whoever taught you this is an idiot. — boethius

You are referring to advice intended for commercial writing, not philosophical writing. — boethius

It was literally taught by many of my philosophy professors, and if you google “lazy stupid and mean” together with “philosophy” and “writing” you’ll find plenty if hand-outs from professors at various universities advising exactly that in those words.

I think the delivery is very important. If anyone ever takes my maxim as implying that they’re not trying hard enough rather than just encouraging them not to give up completely, then I’d feel I owed them an apology. It’s not my or anyone’s place to tell anyone that they’re not trying hard enough at their own lives, even if we think it’s true, even if we would try harder in their place. We are not them, we can’t accurately judge how hard is enough. But we can remind them that some effort has better odds than no effort.

It’s the difference between encouragement and berating. Between “you can succeed, I believe in you” and “it’s your fault you haven’t succeeded yet.”