Awesome. A lot of people revile Steve Sailer, but I think he's one of the best essayists writing today.<p>This quote in particular elegantly sums up the history of philosophy:<p>"To this day, most philosophers suffer from Plato's disease: the assumption that reality fundamentally consists of abstract essences best described by words or geometry. (In truth, reality is largely a probabilistic affair best described by statistics.)"<p>It's not so much the world that's probabilistic, though, as the human mind and the thoughts and abstractions we impose on the world. Hume was the first philosopher to explicitly argue that the mind works this way, and modern research has supported him.<p>I think that, as Sailer briefly suggests, there is value in studying the works of skeptical philosophers like Hume: it gives you the tools to see through the kind of bullshit that philosophy is full of. Because you don't just see it in philosophy. It's there whenever people argue about politics or religion, and whenever a dreamy computer scientist rambles about "objects" and "types" and whatnot. It's useful to able to refute these arguments by recognizing their meaninglessness.