

Scott Aaronson on Philosophical Progress - nabla9
http://intelligence.org/2013/12/13/aaronson/

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jere
Scott Adams: "Passion is bullshit...My own experience is that when stuff
works, I get really excited about it. Passion follows success.

Scott Aaronson: " The obvious thing to say is that, as a student, you should
follow your talents and passions, rather than following the generic advice of
some guy on the Internet who doesn’t even know you personally!"

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dasil003
Aaronson's talking about a much narrower field than Adams though. While
success _might_ beget passion in the case of science, I think that would
happen in childhood and the seed would already be planted. If you make it to
adulthood and pursue a career in theoretical science then I think you must
have a very deep well of not only passion, but probably obsession to have any
success at all.

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bsirkia
This article reminds me of "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance",
specifically when the author explains that he really struggled with the idea
that as we learn more, we gain a better understanding of how little we know.
As Aaronson says, "the subquestions aren’t nearly as small as they originally
looked", and Prisig had a tough time reconciling the idea that as humanity's
body of knowledge grew, the number of answered questions grew even faster.

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eli_gottlieb
>One final note: none of the positive or hopeful things that I said about
philosophy apply to the postmodern or Continental kinds. As far as I can tell,
the latter aren’t really “philosophy” at all, but more like pretentious brands
of performance art that fancy themselves politically subversive, even as they
cultivate deliberate obscurity and draw mostly on the insights of Hitler and
Stalin apologists.

As someone who regularly rereads about the Sokal Hoax for laughs, I had to
stop myself breaking down here.

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thenerdfiles
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47805860/Scott-
Aaronson-...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47805860/Scott-Aaronson-on-
Philosophical-Progress.md.ogg)

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thenerdfiles
Does "formal intelligence" mean that construction is involved in its
development?

