Which group of people giving modern training in philosophy should we judge the field by? If they can't use it correctly in such a basic case then who can?

No. The fact that they were wrong is almost irrelevant.

The faculty denounced the students without evidence, judged the case thought their emotions and their preconceived notions and refused to change their minds as new evidence emerged. Imagine having an academic discussion on a difficult ethical issue with such a teacher...

And none of that would have changed even, even if there somehow was a rape-focused conspiracy among the students of that university. (Thought the problem would have been significantly less obvious.)

I'm not sure what you are talking about. I have to admit, I mostly wrote my comment based on my recollections and it's a case 20 years ago I barely paid attention to until after the bizzaire conclusion. But looking trough Wikipedia's articles on the case[1] it doesn't seem I'm that far from the truth.

I guess I should have limited my statement about resisting mob justice to the economists at that university as the other departments merely didn't sign on to the public letter of denunciation?

Its weird that Wikipedia doesn't give you a percentage of signatories of the letter of 88 from the philosophy department, but several of the notable signatories are philosophers.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_Duke_lacros...

Edit: Just found some articles claiming that a chemistry professor by the name of Stephen Baldwin was the first to write to the university newspaper condemning the mob.

Yeh, probably.

Imagine that you're living in a big scary world, and there's someone there telling you that being scared isn't particularly useful, that if you slow down and think about the things happening to you, most of your worries will become tractable and some will even disappear. It probably works at first. Then they sic Roko's Basilisk on you, and you're a gibbering lunatic 2 weeks later...

Well, maybe. It seems at least adjacent to the stuff that's been making a lot of people rich lately.

I think the argument is that philosophy hasn't advanced much in the last 1000 years, but it''s still 10,000 years ahead of whatever is coming out of the rationalist camp.

Nature abhors a vaccum. After the October revolution, the genuine study of humanities was extinguished in Russia and replaced with the mindless repetition of rather inane doctrines. But people with awakened and open minds would always ask questions and seek answers.

Those would, of course, be people with no formal training in history or philosophy (as the study of history where you aren't allowed to question Marxist doctrine would be self-evidently useless). Their training would be in the natural sciences or mathematics. And without knowing how to properly reason about history or philosophy, they may reach fairly kooky conclusions.

Hence why Rationalism can be though as the same class of phenomena as Fomenko's chronology (or if you want to be slightly more generous, Shafarevich's philosophical tracts).

Yep. Though I'd rather generalize that to "The ethical teachings of Rationalists (Shut up and calculate!) can lead you to insane behavior."

And you wouldn't even need to know about the cult to reach that conclusion. One should be able to find crazy stuff by a cursory examination of the "Sequences" and other foundational texts. I think I once encountered something about torture and murder being morally right, if it would prevent mild inconvenience to a large enough group of people.

Oh I don't mean to imply reading some classical lit prepares you for a career producing novel works in philosophy, simply that if one wants to understand themselves, others, and the world better they don't need to go to university to do it. They can just read.

I took a few philosophy classes. I found it incredibly valuable in identifying assumptions and testing them.

Being Christian, it helped me understand what I believe and why. It made faith a deliberate, reasoned choice.

And, of course, there are many rational reasons for people to have very different opinions when it comes to religion and deities.

Being bipolar might give me an interesting perspective. Everything I’ve read about rationalists misses the grounding required to isolate emotion as a variable.

> It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do some of that these days.

An AI can neither write about what you are thinking in your place nor substitute for a particularly smart critic, but might still be useful for rubber-ducking philosophical writing if used well.

I don't think that is similar at all. People want to understand the world better, they don't want to learn how to build it from first principles.