Elijah Millgram: evaluation

Transcript context

…We’re going to get to your work on John Stuart Mill and Nietzsche and your current project on the lives of philosophers, but I’d like to start with a few just very basic questions about philosophy. What do you think is the most underrated tool in the rationality toolbox for practical reasoning? This is really, really basic, but I think people don’t pay attention to their own experience. They pay attention to experience when they are trying to figure out what’s going on factually, but when they’re trying to figure out what to do, they discount experience as an input. This is true among the professional philosophers, and I think it’s true of just anybody. The tacit ideology is that people are supposed to know what they want already and then they try to figure out how to get it, but you learn what’s important and what matters from experience. And if you don’t pay attention to your own experience, you’ll go off marching in some direction that you in the end are going to find probably really disappointing. Yes, everyone somehow in the end pays attention, but it’s really underrated. If people in trying to assess their own preferences are underweighting their own experience, in relative terms, what are they then overweighting? Social conformity pressures?…

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