5 ms·

Why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy?

11 points by fnordsensei 11y ago

stray 11y ago
Do you mean why are so many smart people uninterested in what you find interesting? Maybe it has something to do with being called idiots for not knowing all the nuances of a field that can't even define itself.
charonn0 11y ago
I read the article, but I still don't know why Bill Nye is supposed to be wrong, or how philosophy is not "asking pointlessly 'deep' questions, plucking an answer out of thin air".
- solipsism 11y ago
  I don't think philosophy is very useful, except for having a good understanding of logic, which we don't need a full liberal arts department for. That said, there's no denying Bill Nye obviously doesn't understand what "I think therefore I am" means. For one thing, it has nothing to do with "thinking about existence" or whatever he said.
  - fnordsensei 11y ago
    I studied philosophy for a year, and I find it to be one of the most universally useful things I've studied. It's the process that is useful, not necessarily the content. The subject matter which you apply it to varies greatly in usefulness, but the process of thinking and deconstructing that you acquire as a skill while doing it is tremendously helpful everywhere else.
    - peterashford 11y ago
      Yes - and I think you hit on why people who don't do Philosophy fail to understand it. They see discussions about Metaphysics and think that's the point, whereas the point is how you justify positions, what's a good argument, what's bad. All of Metaphysics is useless, for example, but knowing WHY it's useless is invaluable =)
      - solipsism 11y ago
        The parts of Philosophy that everyone should know and study, especially in science and engineering fields, are often part of a Philosophy department, but they aren't the controversial parts. These courses could easily exist independent of a Philosophy department. My Philosophy of Science course, pertinent to my field of study, being offered by the same department as my Hellenistic Philosophy course, not pertinent to any field of study except Philosophy, is silly. Same goes for my Discrete Mathematics + Symbolic Logic course.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  Philosophy is why we have democracy today with checks and balances....over millennia people discussed and argued about the best kinds of governments to have, how to find good leaders, and how to avoid problems. That's just one example out of many.
  - charonn0 11y ago
    Philosophy provides no basis for objectively deciding what is the best system of government or who would make the best leaders. If it did then why are there competing systems that are at least as effective at governing a population, even if not as popular with the population?
    - ktRolster 11y ago
      There's no objective definition of 'best'
CM30 11y ago
Dunning-Kruger effect to some degree. A lot of people well versed in at least one field tend to end up thinking they're also well versed in everything else as well, so you get a fair few scientists who think they also know everything about the humanities and social sciences. Or people well renowned in one field of science thinking they know a ton about a completely unrelated one (see, many 'Intelligent Design' advocates). There's also a certain amount of disdain towards it from scientists who seem to think philosophy has been replaced by science in general. Which is perhaps true in some things, but not so much in a lot of others.
tetraverse 11y ago
There's been centuries of philosophizing and what's that contributed to humanity - nothing. Science has provided clean water and protection against most pathogens. I'm with the science guy anyday.
- drdeca 11y ago
  I don't know that I'd say philosophy has contributed nothing. iirc the philosophy of science or epistemology or something has had some influence on how science is done, and I think that might have had some practical contribution. Don't uh, quote me on that though.
- routerl 11y ago
  > There's been centuries of philosophizing and what's that contributed to humanity Socrates and Plato introduced the idea that morality isn't just about doing what your society expects of you. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and others developed the notion that governments ought to be accountable to their citizens. Frege and Russell formalized logic (as mathematicians) and argued that its structures were not merely syntactic constructs (contrary to Boole) but somehow reflected the nature of reality and/or rational thought (a strictly philosophical discussion). Popper conclusively killed the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific reasoning and replaced it with falsifiability, the now dominant foundation of all scientific endeavour. Newton was a philosopher whose philosophising caused physics to became its own discipline. Similar trajectories apply to psychology, linguistics, and sociology, just over the past ~200 years. Einstein credited his ruminations on Kant's metaphysics with giving him the conceptual insights to develop general relativity [1]. Historically, once a philosophical line of enquiry becomes sufficiently developed, we just stop calling it philosophy and give it a new name. This tends to happen once the methodological and conceptual questions are more or less settled, so that empiricism can finally be brought to bear on these problems.[2] > I'm with the science guy anyday. It's absurd to think of science and philosophy as mutually exclusive or somehow opposed to each other. Modern scientists are doing philosophy any time they do anything other than gather or analyse data. Field foundational and methodological questions are, by and large, precisely the kinds of questions philosophy has addressed for centuries. [1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/ [2] Here's a computational neuroscientist going into more detail about that: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-science-and-philosophy https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-scien...
burfog 11y ago
Everybody already knows everything worth knowing about philosophy. This includes people who know nothing about it. :-)
- drdeca 11y ago
  Do you mean that what is worth knowing about it is relative to the person knowing, or that there is nothing worth knowing about it? Is knowing that people study it "knowing something about it"? Because, I find that knowing that people study it helps me understand the actions of others.
mannykannot 11y ago
Perhaps philosophy's problem here are that it doesn't present its case very well, and this article provides us with an example of that. Instead of explaining the relevance of philosophy, it picks apart Bill Nye's poor arguments. You don't have to be a philosopher to see that the existence of poor arguments against philosophy does not, in itself, establish the relevance of current academic philosophy.
mbrodersen 11y ago
Smart people make dumb decisions all the time. They are just better at convincing themselves/others that their (wrong) decisions are right. So why should philosophy be different? All people (independently of intelligence) make decisions using their values/emotions first. And then defend those decisions (more or less well) using their intelligences.

11 points by fnordsensei 11y ago

stray 11y ago

Do you mean why are so many smart people uninterested in what you find interesting? Maybe it has something to do with being called idiots for not knowing all the nuances of a field that can't even define itself.

charonn0 11y ago

I read the article, but I still don't know why Bill Nye is supposed to be wrong, or how philosophy is not "asking pointlessly 'deep' questions, plucking an answer out of thin air".

solipsism 11y ago
I don't think philosophy is very useful, except for having a good understanding of logic, which we don't need a full liberal arts department for. That said, there's no denying Bill Nye obviously doesn't understand what "I think therefore I am" means. For one thing, it has nothing to do with "thinking about existence" or whatever he said.
- fnordsensei 11y ago
  I studied philosophy for a year, and I find it to be one of the most universally useful things I've studied. It's the process that is useful, not necessarily the content. The subject matter which you apply it to varies greatly in usefulness, but the process of thinking and deconstructing that you acquire as a skill while doing it is tremendously helpful everywhere else.
  - peterashford 11y ago
    Yes - and I think you hit on why people who don't do Philosophy fail to understand it. They see discussions about Metaphysics and think that's the point, whereas the point is how you justify positions, what's a good argument, what's bad. All of Metaphysics is useless, for example, but knowing WHY it's useless is invaluable =)
    - solipsism 11y ago
      The parts of Philosophy that everyone should know and study, especially in science and engineering fields, are often part of a Philosophy department, but they aren't the controversial parts. These courses could easily exist independent of a Philosophy department. My Philosophy of Science course, pertinent to my field of study, being offered by the same department as my Hellenistic Philosophy course, not pertinent to any field of study except Philosophy, is silly. Same goes for my Discrete Mathematics + Symbolic Logic course.
ktRolster 11y ago
Philosophy is why we have democracy today with checks and balances....over millennia people discussed and argued about the best kinds of governments to have, how to find good leaders, and how to avoid problems. That's just one example out of many.
- charonn0 11y ago
  Philosophy provides no basis for objectively deciding what is the best system of government or who would make the best leaders. If it did then why are there competing systems that are at least as effective at governing a population, even if not as popular with the population?
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    There's no objective definition of 'best'

CM30 11y ago

Dunning-Kruger effect to some degree. A lot of people well versed in at least one field tend to end up thinking they're also well versed in everything else as well, so you get a fair few scientists who think they also know everything about the humanities and social sciences. Or people well renowned in one field of science thinking they know a ton about a completely unrelated one (see, many 'Intelligent Design' advocates). There's also a certain amount of disdain towards it from scientists who seem to think philosophy has been replaced by science in general. Which is perhaps true in some things, but not so much in a lot of others.

tetraverse 11y ago

There's been centuries of philosophizing and what's that contributed to humanity - nothing. Science has provided clean water and protection against most pathogens. I'm with the science guy anyday.

drdeca 11y ago
I don't know that I'd say philosophy has contributed nothing. iirc the philosophy of science or epistemology or something has had some influence on how science is done, and I think that might have had some practical contribution. Don't uh, quote me on that though.
routerl 11y ago
> There's been centuries of philosophizing and what's that contributed to humanity Socrates and Plato introduced the idea that morality isn't just about doing what your society expects of you. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and others developed the notion that governments ought to be accountable to their citizens. Frege and Russell formalized logic (as mathematicians) and argued that its structures were not merely syntactic constructs (contrary to Boole) but somehow reflected the nature of reality and/or rational thought (a strictly philosophical discussion). Popper conclusively killed the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific reasoning and replaced it with falsifiability, the now dominant foundation of all scientific endeavour. Newton was a philosopher whose philosophising caused physics to became its own discipline. Similar trajectories apply to psychology, linguistics, and sociology, just over the past ~200 years. Einstein credited his ruminations on Kant's metaphysics with giving him the conceptual insights to develop general relativity [1]. Historically, once a philosophical line of enquiry becomes sufficiently developed, we just stop calling it philosophy and give it a new name. This tends to happen once the methodological and conceptual questions are more or less settled, so that empiricism can finally be brought to bear on these problems.[2] > I'm with the science guy anyday. It's absurd to think of science and philosophy as mutually exclusive or somehow opposed to each other. Modern scientists are doing philosophy any time they do anything other than gather or analyse data. Field foundational and methodological questions are, by and large, precisely the kinds of questions philosophy has addressed for centuries. [1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/ [2] Here's a computational neuroscientist going into more detail about that: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-science-and-philosophy https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-scien...

burfog 11y ago

Everybody already knows everything worth knowing about philosophy. This includes people who know nothing about it. :-)

drdeca 11y ago
Do you mean that what is worth knowing about it is relative to the person knowing, or that there is nothing worth knowing about it? Is knowing that people study it "knowing something about it"? Because, I find that knowing that people study it helps me understand the actions of others.

mannykannot 11y ago

Perhaps philosophy's problem here are that it doesn't present its case very well, and this article provides us with an example of that. Instead of explaining the relevance of philosophy, it picks apart Bill Nye's poor arguments. You don't have to be a philosopher to see that the existence of poor arguments against philosophy does not, in itself, establish the relevance of current academic philosophy.

mbrodersen 11y ago

Smart people make dumb decisions all the time. They are just better at convincing themselves/others that their (wrong) decisions are right. So why should philosophy be different? All people (independently of intelligence) make decisions using their values/emotions first. And then defend those decisions (more or less well) using their intelligences.