4 ms·

Oh yes, rando on Hacker News is far more educated about philosophy of science than an actual philosopher! Surely he knows about Popper (duh!).

psyc 10y ago
You may or may not be "right" in this particular case, but in general it's stupid to assume philosophers in the HN audience won't be drawn out to comment on such an article.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  I have a degree in philosophy and did quite a bit of my work in philosophy of science. I feel qualified to smugly dismiss lisper's comment as an example of the well-known phenomenon of tech people on HN assuming that mastery and understanding in one field translates to mastery and understanding in all fields, sight unseen. For example, defining just what is and is not "science" or "the scientific method" is something that scientists and philosophers of science have been working on for centuries. But this thread is full of HN randos basically chiming in with "here's my grade-school textbook's definition, guess we don't need all those so-called experts, lol". The level of not just ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, HN users routinely display in this kind of conversation is frankly staggering.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    So why didn't the author even mention falsification?
    - twblalock 10y ago
      Because many philosophers of science reject Popper's views as unrepresentative of the way science is done by real people in the real world. The Wikipedia page for falsifiability enumerates some of these criticisms.
      - mirimir 10y ago
        Well, then those real people aren't doing science.
        twblalock 10y ago
        This is the No True Scotsman fallacy, and a rather obvious example of it.
        mirimir 10y ago
        OK, so what do you consider to be science with hypotheses that can't be falsified? Edit: Much cosmology and some theoretical physics seem pretty iffy to me, but at least there's the possibility of falsifiable hypotheses.
        alayne 10y ago
        http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/socialresearch/falsificationism.htm http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/socialresearch/f...
        mirimir 10y ago
        Interesting, but it doesn't mention Kuhn. Also, there's seems to be some attachment to the idea that truth can be proven.
  - lisper 10y ago
    > is something that scientists and philosophers of science have been working on for centuries That's true. But that does not mean that the problem is unsolvable, and it does not mean that the problem has not been solved. It has. Popper solved it.
  - powera 10y ago
    I took one class in the philosophy of science in college, and feel qualified to smugly dismiss the article. The article makes the point that knowing what something is and defining it are different. He then repeats that claim about 55 times, and says nothing else about science at all, certainly nothing about attempting to define the scientific method. (I don't really want to spend time arguing about Popper or Lakatos here. But that's not relevant to the content of the article at all.)
  - rbancroft 10y ago
    I first thought the article was a bit of a fluff piece, but after seeing this thread and the misunderstanding and over-simplification, it does seem apropos and worth discussing. The toolkit that makes a scientist does not necessarily make a philosopher of science and vice-versa. Thankfully I am neither so I can see both sides :) (and the comments section on the nytimes site is a mixed bag as well)
lisper 10y ago
He may know about Popper, but he clearly has not understood Popper or he would not have written this article. For example, he would have understood why this: "When a scientist tests a hypothesis and finds that its predictions do not quite match available observations, there is always the option of forcing the hypothesis to fit the data." is a straw man.
dang 10y ago
It's good to push back against glib dismissals, but please don't do it with snarky attacks. That's considerably worse, and degrades the thread for everybody.
- jonsterling 10y ago
  I really wonder how "snarky attack that pushes back against glib dismissal" is somehow worse than "snarky attack which glibly dismisses the work of a professional philosopher". Do you have any clarification of your opinion?
  - dang 10y ago
    It's worse because personal attack (such as name-calling) toward a fellow community member is more destructive of the community. Both are bad, though.
    - jonsterling 10y ago
      I suppose with respect to this particular community, I am most likely to take a position similar to that of Ra's al Ghul toward Gotham in Batman Begins... By the way, do you mean that it is better for a HN member to attack an outsider (who has not consented to be subjected to the usual HN nonsense), than it is for a HN member to attack another? Anyway, thanks for the clarification---personally, I believe the dogmatic “We are hackers, therefore we can easily grasp any topic in 20 minutes which it has taken an expert a lifetime to learn!” nonsense which is so prevalent here (as I am sure you have observed) is worse, and deserves to be smacked down. I'll end my participation in this convo here, though, since I don't think there's anything to be gained for anyone in continuing it.
      - dang 10y ago
        > "I'll end my participation in this convo here, though" Perhaps I'm oversensitive, but when people do this it usually strikes me as a presumptuous attempt to seize the last word in an argument. There's no need to announce that one's participation is ending; one can simply end it. I don't want to end mine, because your comments raise points that have been on my mind lately about this community. > "the usual HN nonsense" > "nonsense which is so prevalent here" These fall under the trope of 'dissing the community while being part of it'. There's something unbecoming about that. It feels like a status move, a way of putting oneself above others. If you're commenting here, you're as much part of the community as anyone else is. People post such supercilious putdowns of the community all the time and have done for years, but it has slowly dawned on me that it's a kind of vandalism—like smashing windows in a neighborhood—that subliminally communicates that no one much cares about this place. (Yes I buy the Broken Windows Theory.) Somebody needs to stand up for the opposite position: that this is a community worth making better, not a swimming pool to pee in. I guess that makes it my job to do. I'm sure you wouldn't smash windows, pee in a pool, or throw litter out the car window, so please don't do their online forum equivalents here. (When I say 'you', I don't just mean you personally, I mean all of us in your position, which is almost everyone here, including me.) > deserves to be smacked down No one could agree with you more strongly than I about the badness of being shallowly dismissive of others' work, and how important it is to have a culture of resisting that. But the sad fact is, there are worse layers than that in the layer cake of incivility—and if you go around smacking others down, you're doing one of them. That's incongruent with your case that people should be more considerate of others, much as it would be to point out how someone's manners need improving by socking them.

psyc 10y ago

You may or may not be "right" in this particular case, but in general it's stupid to assume philosophers in the HN audience won't be drawn out to comment on such an article.

ubernostrum 10y ago
I have a degree in philosophy and did quite a bit of my work in philosophy of science. I feel qualified to smugly dismiss lisper's comment as an example of the well-known phenomenon of tech people on HN assuming that mastery and understanding in one field translates to mastery and understanding in all fields, sight unseen. For example, defining just what is and is not "science" or "the scientific method" is something that scientists and philosophers of science have been working on for centuries. But this thread is full of HN randos basically chiming in with "here's my grade-school textbook's definition, guess we don't need all those so-called experts, lol". The level of not just ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, HN users routinely display in this kind of conversation is frankly staggering.
- mirimir 10y ago
  So why didn't the author even mention falsification?
  - twblalock 10y ago
    Because many philosophers of science reject Popper's views as unrepresentative of the way science is done by real people in the real world. The Wikipedia page for falsifiability enumerates some of these criticisms.
    - mirimir 10y ago
      Well, then those real people aren't doing science.
      - twblalock 10y ago
        This is the No True Scotsman fallacy, and a rather obvious example of it.
        mirimir 10y ago
        OK, so what do you consider to be science with hypotheses that can't be falsified? Edit: Much cosmology and some theoretical physics seem pretty iffy to me, but at least there's the possibility of falsifiable hypotheses.
      - alayne 10y ago
        http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/socialresearch/falsificationism.htm http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/socialresearch/f...
        mirimir 10y ago
        Interesting, but it doesn't mention Kuhn. Also, there's seems to be some attachment to the idea that truth can be proven.
- lisper 10y ago
  > is something that scientists and philosophers of science have been working on for centuries That's true. But that does not mean that the problem is unsolvable, and it does not mean that the problem has not been solved. It has. Popper solved it.
- powera 10y ago
  I took one class in the philosophy of science in college, and feel qualified to smugly dismiss the article. The article makes the point that knowing what something is and defining it are different. He then repeats that claim about 55 times, and says nothing else about science at all, certainly nothing about attempting to define the scientific method. (I don't really want to spend time arguing about Popper or Lakatos here. But that's not relevant to the content of the article at all.)
- rbancroft 10y ago
  I first thought the article was a bit of a fluff piece, but after seeing this thread and the misunderstanding and over-simplification, it does seem apropos and worth discussing. The toolkit that makes a scientist does not necessarily make a philosopher of science and vice-versa. Thankfully I am neither so I can see both sides :) (and the comments section on the nytimes site is a mixed bag as well)

lisper 10y ago

He may know about Popper, but he clearly has not understood Popper or he would not have written this article. For example, he would have understood why this: "When a scientist tests a hypothesis and finds that its predictions do not quite match available observations, there is always the option of forcing the hypothesis to fit the data." is a straw man.

dang 10y ago

It's good to push back against glib dismissals, but please don't do it with snarky attacks. That's considerably worse, and degrades the thread for everybody.

jonsterling 10y ago
I really wonder how "snarky attack that pushes back against glib dismissal" is somehow worse than "snarky attack which glibly dismisses the work of a professional philosopher". Do you have any clarification of your opinion?
- dang 10y ago
  It's worse because personal attack (such as name-calling) toward a fellow community member is more destructive of the community. Both are bad, though.
  - jonsterling 10y ago
    I suppose with respect to this particular community, I am most likely to take a position similar to that of Ra's al Ghul toward Gotham in Batman Begins... By the way, do you mean that it is better for a HN member to attack an outsider (who has not consented to be subjected to the usual HN nonsense), than it is for a HN member to attack another? Anyway, thanks for the clarification---personally, I believe the dogmatic “We are hackers, therefore we can easily grasp any topic in 20 minutes which it has taken an expert a lifetime to learn!” nonsense which is so prevalent here (as I am sure you have observed) is worse, and deserves to be smacked down. I'll end my participation in this convo here, though, since I don't think there's anything to be gained for anyone in continuing it.
    - dang 10y ago
      > "I'll end my participation in this convo here, though" Perhaps I'm oversensitive, but when people do this it usually strikes me as a presumptuous attempt to seize the last word in an argument. There's no need to announce that one's participation is ending; one can simply end it. I don't want to end mine, because your comments raise points that have been on my mind lately about this community. > "the usual HN nonsense" > "nonsense which is so prevalent here" These fall under the trope of 'dissing the community while being part of it'. There's something unbecoming about that. It feels like a status move, a way of putting oneself above others. If you're commenting here, you're as much part of the community as anyone else is. People post such supercilious putdowns of the community all the time and have done for years, but it has slowly dawned on me that it's a kind of vandalism—like smashing windows in a neighborhood—that subliminally communicates that no one much cares about this place. (Yes I buy the Broken Windows Theory.) Somebody needs to stand up for the opposite position: that this is a community worth making better, not a swimming pool to pee in. I guess that makes it my job to do. I'm sure you wouldn't smash windows, pee in a pool, or throw litter out the car window, so please don't do their online forum equivalents here. (When I say 'you', I don't just mean you personally, I mean all of us in your position, which is almost everyone here, including me.) > deserves to be smacked down No one could agree with you more strongly than I about the badness of being shallowly dismissive of others' work, and how important it is to have a culture of resisting that. But the sad fact is, there are worse layers than that in the layer cake of incivility—and if you go around smacking others down, you're doing one of them. That's incongruent with your case that people should be more considerate of others, much as it would be to point out how someone's manners need improving by socking them.