Astral Codex Ten

Continental philosophy

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Continental philosophy

Article

Continental philosophy is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 29, 2021 and November 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “He wishes we abandoned our overly-rational ways in favor of humanities, Continental philosophy, and the humanistic social sciences”; “in such an intellectual and polymathic Continental philosophy way”. It most often appears alongside Soviet, 80,000 Hours, Abel.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: January 29, 2021
  • Last seen: November 17, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Contra Weyl On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
The effective altruism movement, which largely grew directly out of the rationalist movement, seeks to maximize the efficacy with which charitable donations are directed using standard rationalist methods. It is a tight-knit community that strongly privileges rationalist approaches over all other forms of knowledge-making (such as from the humanities, continental philosophy, or humanistic social sciences) and tends to dismiss input not formulated in rationalist terms. The community also has a strong and explicitly stated view that its activities uniquely contribute to the achievement of “the good”: of their top five recommendations of most productive careers by a leading community organization, two suggest being a researcher or support staff within the movement, and two others recommend working on the AI alignment problem (see the next point). Until recently, much of the analysis and funding emerging from the community has pointed towards a focus on extremely unlikely but potentially catastrophic risks, such as alien, asteroid or biological catastrophes.
Trying to be charitable to Weyl, I think he's thinking of the EA movement as trying to perfectly quantify exactly how many lives can be saved per dollar, then following that number off a cliff. I can see how a ten-minute scan of the movement could get that impression, but I think even a thirty-minute one would correct the misimpression. EA does the quantification as a guide to other forms of reasoning. There is no way to perfectly calculate the devastation of a potential pandemic that hasn't happened yet. But once you make even a weak effort, you notice that all the numbers are really really big. And once you make an effort to quantify the importance of the cause du jour supported by the humanities and continental philosophy, sometimes you notice that under every set of reasonable assumptions it's smaller than the other number. And of course you supplement this with lots of trying to understand the complicated unquantifiable issues involved - under no circumstance do you skip that step - but you're just trying to do an analysis that has some contact with some reality-based number and isn't entirely dependent on the popular mood about something. I think this successfully achieves the difficult balance between model-laden technicalities and messy real life, and whatever form of reasoning Weyl was using to let him dismiss biological risks without doing any modeling failed to achieve that balance.
Inline links: as a guide to other forms of reasoning
And would Weyl's suggestions really help prevent populist backlashes? He wishes we abandoned our overly-rational ways in favor of "humanities, Continental philosophy, and the humanistic social sciences" - isn't that usually code for stuff like queer theory, postcolonial theory, and postmodernism? Are working-class Trump supporters really banging on their keyboards when they read about effective altruism, shouting "YOU NEED TO STOP TRYING TO BE OBJECTIVE AND FACT-BASED, AND BE MORE OPEN TO INSIGHTS FROM QUEER THEORY AND POSTMODERNISM"?
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 17, 2023 · Original source
Philosopher / theologian Rene Girard’s famous book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning isn’t directly about Barack Obama being the Antichrist. It’s an ambitious theory-of-everything for anthropology, mythography, and the Judeo-Christian religion. After solving all of those venerable fields, it will, sort of, loop back to Barack Obama being the Antichrist. But it’ll do it in such an intellectual and polymathic Continental philosophy way that we can’t even get mad.
Inline links: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning