Venkatesh Rao

I read more Venkatesh Rao at work and I’m starting to put him in the same box as the writer Gwern Branwen. They both have very elaborate style of writing that has a nice quality that it provokes thoughts, but the actual line of reasoning is usually rather far-fetched. It feels like they are trying to impress you with their verbal intelligence. I think I recently read Paul Graham bash philosophy in general for striving to be uselessly abstract.

Topics of PhilosophyPhilosophy are so far above the ground that no definition can even remotely be agreed upon different philosophers, which basically prevents genuine conversation and building on top of other’s ideas. Basically it amounts to playing with words, which in the best case evokes similar thoughts in the people reading it as the author was thinking. Ie, it’s the act of reading philosophy that can make you smarter or wiser, but not really the content in any book of philosophy. Personally I’ve loathed philosophy since end of high school when I felt I figured the utter lack of practicality in any of it.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/6he/what_are_lesswrongs_thoughts_on_venkatesh_rao/ (gwern actually posted in the comments, but not the quote below which was by another person)

Venkatesh Rao is a fun writer, but I wouldn’t take his ideas very seriously. He tends to rely on broad associations, and tells “grand stories” using fuzzy categories, without a lot (or usually any) statistics to back up his rather broad and extraordinary claims. He also tends to name-drop famous philosophers, representing their ideas in ways one might generously call “heterodox”.In other words, he seems like a well-read and verbally intelligent “narrative-builder” like Freud or Marx, and about as accurate.

My initial take after about 10 hours of reading is that he’s a incredibly erudite verbal thinker who is awesome for (1) pointing to books that I may actually buy and read, (2) breaking me out of “one model thinking” on topics I didn’t even realize I was using only one model to think about.