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This Saturday 7th, 7pm, at the Overcoming Bias meetup at 1195 Andre Ave., Mountain View CA 94040.

Do any of you live in the Bay Area or Pittsburgh and want to have a meetup? I will be in the Bay Area the coming weekend, and in Pittsburgh most other times in the foreseeable future.

I don’t have time to write, but apparently Katla has time for all kinds of marginally valuable activities. Here are her latest thoughts:

So apparently Katja has been learning about all kinds of fascinating philosophy stuff for like seven months. Am I the only one to notice that she hasn’t mentioned any of it here? Yes, she’s entitled to spend less time here now that she has more impressive avenues for failing to get her writing read. And it makes sense she would have less time to blog about other topics. But given that she purportedly spends all her time reading and writing about philosophy, I’d expect her to have the odd thing to post on it.

So I asked her what’s up with this. She said that since she’s reading like Ramsay and Quine and people who have been dead for years, presumably anything she has to say about them in her first half hour of thinking about it has already been said. Which just goes to show that she’s completely unfamiliar with philosophy, and strengthens my hypothesis that the whole story is a ruse to hide the fact that she’s run out of interesting things to blog about.

But more amusingly, notice that she doesn’t apply this argument to all the other things she feels entitled to have opinions on. I’m pretty sure she knows that people have studied psychology extensively before. Written about the very issues she writes about. And she hasn’t read them. Same goes for ethics, and public policy, and almost everything that she writes about. She’s nowhere near the cutting edge of these topics. She doesn’t even study them seriously. What’s the difference? Probably just that she doesn’t have to go and have lunch with the psychologists.

Here’s a logical argument for you. Either you readers are familiar with old philosophy or you are not. If you’re not, what does it matter to you whether someone else already wrote something long ago? You haven’t read it. What does it matter to you if what you read here is wrong? You’re probably wrong anyway, so you’re not going to get any wronger. And if you can’t even tell wrong philosophy from right philosophy by reading it, what hope have you got?

If on the other hand you do know about old philosophy, then you get to set Katja straight on it. Which will be fun for you, funny for the rest of us, and even funnier for the rest of us because she will insist on claiming is valuable for her too.

Sounds like win win! What could go wrong? Oh yeah, some philosophers might laugh at you. What a true intellectual. All about interesting ideas. All about saying what needs saying. Really all over that, except when there’s some hint that your status could suffer a teensy weensy bit. At least you’re on the mark about people being hypocrites.

Some plausible premises that have been kicking around in my head for a while, and lately found each other:

• When we don’t have concepts for things, we can hardly think about them. When I learn new concepts, I often notice them applying everywhere where before I didn’t even notice anything missing. This is a partial explanation sometimes given for us having few memories from childhood; we don’t have the concepts to think explicitly about our experiences when we are very young, and without that it is hard to record them in memory.
• We don’t invent our own concepts very much; we mostly inherit them from our society. How many concepts that you have did you invent? If it is very few, this is probably not just because society has already found all the useful concepts and given them to you. If you lived a thousand years ago, my guess is that society wouldn’t have given you concepts like ‘subjective probability’ or ‘tragedy of the commons’ or ‘computation’. And no matter how nerdy you are, you probably wouldn’t have made them up. After all, a whole bunch of people did live then, and they didn’t make them up.
• It’s hard to share your feelings in much detail with other people. We can all learn to use the same word ‘angry’ when a person has marked external symptoms of anger. But it’s hard for an angry person to tell you anything very nuanced about how exactly they feel.
• I find it hard to remember what emotions and things like that feel like. e.g. right now I’m not really sure what anger feels like. I know what it would be in response to, and that it’s kind of  bad, but sometimes enjoyable. And that it might cause snide remarks or energetic ball kicking and that sort of thing.

Hypothesis: We have relatively few concepts for the world inside our heads, because it’s not very shared, and we get concepts mostly from other people. This means it is hard to think about the world inside our heads, and so also hard to remember. (This is all relative to the world outside our heads, and relative to how we would be if we could show one another inside our heads more).