Notes on professional philosophy

(Alternative title: why I am also not a philosopher)

Thus imagine someone whose only pleasure is to count blades of grass in various geometrically shaped areas such as park squares and well-trimmed lawns. He is otherwise intelligent and actually possesses unusual skills, since he manages to survive by solving difficult mathematical problems for a fee. The [Aristotelian] definition of the good forces us to admit that the good for this man is indeed counting blades of grass, or more accurately, his good is determined by a plan that gives an especially prominent place to this activity.

Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 432

It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do. There is a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement towards the building of elaborate theories, and a move back again towards the consideration of simple and obvious facts. McTaggart says that time is unreal, Moore replies that he has just had his breakfast. Both these aspects of philosophy are necessary to it.

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

Analytic philosophy suffers from a triple failure of confidence, especially among younger philosophers. People are not confident it can solve its own problems, not confident that it can be modified so as to do better on that first score, and not confident its problems are worth solving in the first place…. The game the original leading lights thought they were playing has long ago been ceded and no one dares think they are going to do better.

Liam Bright, The End of Analytic Philosophy

I studied philosophy for three years, my closest friends were philosophy students, and for many years, one of my most prized yardsticks of my skills as a person (barely consciously so, and not something I endorsed — but it grew like a weed, and all the more prized for its secretive, stubborn nature) was my skill at philosophy.

I am not a philosopher now, and I don’t think I’ll become one; when I think of my friends pursuing professional philosophy, I feel some mixture of dismay, confusion, and one-second-behind lagging fear (like the lurch of missing a stair, or delay in parsing a joke — is this a jibe I’ve been left out of? the new in-group signal I don’t get?).

What changed my mind?¹

What is the business of professional philosophy? What should it be?

What do philosophers do, and should they do it? Some hasty sketches and suggestions:

1. Find truth, man.
   1. The world is very confusing, there are tons of fundamental questions we don’t understand — what’s knowledge, what is personal identity and does it matter, how should one live morally, are rights a thing, should you cooperate in these situations, what decision theory is best, how should we reason under uncertainty, etc.
2. Conceptual clean-up
   1. Concepts scaffold (and limit) our thoughts in various ways; bad concepts proliferate by default; your ontology and your assumptions mean you miss things. The point is to change the world. The point is to see differently.
   2. Philosophers are the conceptual janitors (and the engineers) of the world; hey, you think of X like this, but you should think of it like that. Your building blocks are A and B, but you’re missing C. Actually, look at this thing slant and watch it make sense.
   3. Some of this philosophy reminds me of defamiliarisation — take the familiar and watch it become strange…
3. Analysis
   1. Arguably the big 20th century project of analytic philosophy was conceptual analysis — setting out the boundaries of our concepts, often hoping for sets of necessary and sufficient conditions, but also admitting of family concepts.
   2. This project failed.
   3. But it’s attractive, right? Who wouldn’t want to make sense of these terms, as scientifically/morally/legally loaded as they are?
4. Historicising — why do we think like this? What’s the genealogy of our concepts?
5. Forward-looking, plans and pragmatism
   1. How ought one live? In this situation, and this? How ought one think?
6. Play/skilful posturing
   1. Like ice skating, say: an activity that humans are good at, that expresses something important to our nature. Ostentatiously unproductive, and essential.
7. Defensively
   1. To avoid bad philosophy, which accrues by default.
8. Tools for thought/personal gain/”self-help”
   1. A bag of tricks to reason with, seeing more clearly.
   2. Also: Stoic self-help airport books.
9. Formal puzzling, an aesthetic endeavour
   1. The way e.g. theoretical physics or number theory is a big pile of beautiful work

I don’t think philosophy has had much purchase on many important questions. I’m sympathetic to (1) and (3) and (5), mostly — and I respect (2), though it’s hard to think smart people should spend their time on it — and by my lights, philosophy’s not made much progress here. (We’ve thrown many smart people at it for many years. This is not a very productive field. It seems largely to be squabbling in dark and dusty corners, about problems so far removed from anything that could possibly matter. It’s a game, emphasising the artificiality implications of the word. Etc etc, you get it.)

But this is a straw man. What about the philosophers that get it?

So I’ve dunked on most professional philosophy: this isn’t novel. What about the people that get it? Am I saying FHI was a mistake, GPI a doomed endeavour? Should today’s great philosophers throw in the towel and start working on US AI policy?

Well, maybe. The track record of this kind of philosophy seems hard to assess. Some scattered thoughts:

1. Early big-picture futurism — Bostrom and his acolytes etc — seems very fruitful to me. (And I also think there was much less shovel-ready work to do, much more confusion and uncertainty, a smaller field, etc — all factors that push towards doing philosophy).
2. Similarly, the early work on EA and longtermism seems really excellent to me.
3. On priors, it would be pretty surprising if we’d exhausted all the useful crucial considerations to be found. It’s been, what, 10-15 years? We’ve tried maybe, I don’t know, 50ish people at it? (I don’t know the actual figure, and it’ll depend a lot on where you draw the boundaries, how much you count summer researchers, etc). There probably is more FHI-ish fruit out there.
4. The track record of post-FHI philosophising, relative to the quality of the people involved, seems underwhelming to me.
   1. There are exceptions and notable papers, and different people have different taste, of course. I found work on fanaticism clarifying; my friends have different highlights.
   2. My sense is that philosophy-style work done by non-philosophers, or outside the academy, has been more useful overall. (I think this trend has continued: Forethought do good philosophy-ish work.)
5. In many ways, the work of very talented philosophers on EA- or longtermism- or AI safety-adjacent topics seems like the greatest loss to me.
   1. They’re so close. They get the topics and the focus, they have the skills for careful thought in abundance.
   2. And yet!
6. Idk man, should I even be commenting on this?
   1. It’s hard to predict what’s important in advance; ex ante great bets often look underwhelming ex post, especially if you’re taking a hits-based approach and hunting for the unlikely great outcomes; who am I to criticise these people, anyway?

What should one do instead of philosophy?

I think doing philosophy is a lot of fun. It’s puzzles and problems and no easy answers; it’s methodologically flexible enough to admit of vibes-based reasoning and history and the personal essay format and formalisation and debate bro-ing it out, Spock-brained rationalism and just doing maths, and also poetry and ordinary language and care; it’s full of smart, interesting, largely earnest people. Frankly, it has great aesthetics. At its best, it’s something like: truth-seeking, caring earnestly about getting things right; attention to detail; a love of inquiry, open-mindedness; caring about hard questions; a belief that the truth will also be beautiful²; finding ways to say things well; seeing more clearly; intellectual progress in the collegial way, where you advance understanding by reading and thinking and talking to each other, and writing down what you find out.

Other virtues: its detachment or disinterest in what seems locally pressing or important, which I think can result in novel, trail-blazing work; happiness with marginal conclusions; in some sense, its purity. The combination of what’s true, beautiful, and right. Abstracting away from other considerations, something-like pure thought.³

Like many endeavours, philosophy is heavy-tailed. Some exceptional philosophers have had extraordinary careers, and I’m glad they did philosophy.⁴

I think some of the virtues and attachments of the discipline breed a kind of exceptionalism in young people who are good at philosophy, which makes it much harder for them to evaluate if they should do philosophy. (“Oh, well, I know only the best of the best make it, I know only the top grad students from the top 5 programs have a shot. But I’m pretty plausibly one of them, you know.”) But it seems just so hard to tell in advance, a matter of luck as well as skill. And anyway, to even have the shot on goal you want, you have to go through 4-6 years of working within a frame with different goals and values to your own.

It’s kind of a tragedy when brilliant young people do professional philosophy. I think it’s almost grass-counting, except we should imagine that there are all kinds of neat unsolvable puzzles with the grass, or exciting formalisms to play with, and there’s a conference on how you should think about infinite series of grasses, too, and the other grass-counters have these clearly crazy views on the minutiae of grass-counting that you need to refute.

There’s an anecdote I’ve told people, though I worry I’m misremembering it, but anyway: I have the memory of lingering at the end of a tutorial with my philosophy professor, a kind man very clearly smarter than me, enjoying all the professional success you could hope for within academic philosophy. I somewhat sheepishly asked about philosophy grad school. He said quite frankly and clearly, well, he’d be happy to support me in applying, but if I could imagine enjoying other work, then I should find other work. (I could imagine enjoying other work, and I did.) I think he was right.

My suspicion is that professional philosophy makes it harder to do really useful work, at least by my lights. Prima facie, this seems like it needn’t be the case: I think there is lots of important, useful work to be done in macrostrategy and futurism and even, whisper it, the far-flung reaches of ethics and decision theory, and this work shares many similarities with philosophy. But it seems that professional philosophy makes doing this harder.

(My guesses at why: well, you have to publish; the discipline valorises puzzle-solving and games with words rather than fuzzy big-picture things; it’s aesthetically less clean and neat; sometimes it touches the real world; none of your grad student friends will talk about it with you; it’s socially lower-status. And philosophy is close enough, in skills and values and aims, that I think it’s easy to get swept up in it, or to stop looking for other goals. But they really do diverge.⁵)

I think many people who are good at philosophy and care somewhat about impact have philosophy in their top 2 or 3 careers. The thought is, go do the thing you’re exemplary at and love, and pick the important topics within it. But I think philosophy has this adverse effect on how one thinks and what one thinks about, and so I want these people to have it as more like a top 10 option.

Is this all just sour grapes?

This is a reasonable objection. I think philosophy, being good at philosophy, whatever that means, has, for me, the biggest disconnect between how important I think it is, and how much I care about being good at it. I still feel bad for not being better at philosophy.⁶ Maybe I’m just railing against it because I think it would’ve been a mistake for me to privilege doing philosophy, and I’m wrong about how relevant this could be to other people.

So, apply the necessary scepticism. But I really think it’s not just sour grapes: I really do worry that very clever people are anchored on doing philosophy. And I think professional philosophy doesn’t make it easy to do good work, and many other similar kinds of work can be done for much more impact. (Do that macrostrategy! Hell, even do the US policy stuff, do the “thinking through thorny decisions” — I claim “getting a job that requires thought” actually has lots of the same fun properties as doing philosophy. It’s not like grantmaking involves much a priori reasoning or paper-reading or high-flying abstract thought, and I think it’s pretty similarly intellectually satisfying.)

I’m with Cato on this one, but for different reasons. And try not to feel too bad about it: once we’ve solved the world’s problems, we can go back to the truth mines and inquire into the fundamental nature of Knowledge.