[svat]

What is his life's work / major insight that he's referring to here?

> I had found— and partly invented— a prodigious explanation- device that reliably devoured difficulties, day after day. The insights (if that is what they were) that I had struggled so hard to capture in my dissertation and my first book have matured and multiplied, generating answers to questions, solutions to problems, rebuttals to objections, and— most important— suggestions for further questions to ask with gratifying consilience. I just turn the crank and out they pour, falling into place like the last pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps my whole perspective is a colossal mistake— some of my critics think so— and perhaps its abundant fruits are chimeras.

[tempaway11751f]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_drafts_model

[JonChesterfield]

Plausibly that described in the previous paragraph under distributed understanding, where he takes the consensus of some nominally informed group to be truth. See "Reddit as reality" for the failure mode of that strategy.

[svat]

I don't think so -- as he tells it, the "distributed understanding" is a shortcut he's using in his later life (if something is important someone will tell/explain it to him), which he contrasts with the diligence/conscientiousness he had earlier. The distributed understanding is a working style, orthogonal to the insight/program he's talking about.

[jibalt]

Have you considered the possibility that you're wrong? Because that's definitely not it. Consider that, as you acknowledged, you don't even know who he is, so you certainly aren't familiar with his work.

[jrlocke]

I think, broadly, it's that a theory of mind should be informed by empirical evidence, by scientific research, and that liberal doses of the those will dissolve away many of the classic problems in philosophy of mind.

[jibalt]

You can find numerous discussions of his dissertation and first book on line.