4 ms·

This is the new anti-intellectualism. Highly technical people displaying complete unwillingness to engage with philosophical problems, understand why they are p

by ahelwer 10y ago

This is the new anti-intellectualism. Highly technical people displaying complete unwillingness to engage with philosophical problems, understand why they are problems, why they are difficult, and how their first-pass solution is massively flawed.

burke 10y ago
I don't disagree with this in general principle, but "how many straws can you remove from a bale" points pretty transparently to the failed mapping between our black-and-white language and the shades-of-grey world. It's a shallow insight and to refer to it as an "unsolved problem" feels very strange to me. What depth am I missing?
- ikeboy 10y ago
  Decent discussion and links in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686000
Numberwang 10y ago
What's really anti-intellectual is pretending something is profound when it is not. Ideas need to deliver, just as problem solving does.
- DanBC 10y ago
  Philosophy does deliver. It's important in, for example, medical ethics. That has a profound effect on your life.
ramblerman 10y ago
> This is the new anti-intellectualism When the go to response claims persecution vs actually responding to the matter at hand you don't really win me over. I have to a agree with OP that questions of this nature have a high degree of 'intellectual masturbation' to them, and usually have answers that are unfalsifiable.
rimantas 10y ago
No, that's just the very bad problem. Normaly we'd use several different words to describe various amount of hay. This is problem is on par with "have you already stopped to beat your wife?" Pseudo-intelectualism is just another form of anti-intelectualism.
sklivvz1971 10y ago
Not anti-intellectualism at all, and not even anti-philosophy. If I'm anti- anything, I am against those philosophers who refuse to make disprovable assertions and instead use rhetoric and non-formal logic to make their points. The reason is simple, their stuff comes and goes. They contradict each other -- and often do not accept scientific fact simply because they do not understand it. Philosophy was once the only way to investigate some particularly hard problems, such as "where do we come from?" or "what is the mind?". With recent scientific and technological advances, we actually got some fact-based answers there. Cosmology, standard model, evolutionary biology, neuroscience are evidence-based sciences that override, and often contradict, most philosophical speculations of the past. A lot of philosophers simply do not have the domain knowledge anymore. I know that some argue that those sciences are philosophy, but, frankly, that's stretching reality. Last point, my dislike for philosophers is not a "new" position. See what Richard Feynman had to say about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8aWBcPVPMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8aWBcPVPMo

by ahelwer 10y ago

burke 10y ago

I don't disagree with this in general principle, but "how many straws can you remove from a bale" points pretty transparently to the failed mapping between our black-and-white language and the shades-of-grey world. It's a shallow insight and to refer to it as an "unsolved problem" feels very strange to me. What depth am I missing?

ikeboy 10y ago
Decent discussion and links in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686000

Numberwang 10y ago

What's really anti-intellectual is pretending something is profound when it is not. Ideas need to deliver, just as problem solving does.

DanBC 10y ago
Philosophy does deliver. It's important in, for example, medical ethics. That has a profound effect on your life.

ramblerman 10y ago

> This is the new anti-intellectualism When the go to response claims persecution vs actually responding to the matter at hand you don't really win me over. I have to a agree with OP that questions of this nature have a high degree of 'intellectual masturbation' to them, and usually have answers that are unfalsifiable.

rimantas 10y ago

No, that's just the very bad problem. Normaly we'd use several different words to describe various amount of hay. This is problem is on par with "have you already stopped to beat your wife?" Pseudo-intelectualism is just another form of anti-intelectualism.

sklivvz1971 10y ago

Not anti-intellectualism at all, and not even anti-philosophy. If I'm anti- anything, I am against those philosophers who refuse to make disprovable assertions and instead use rhetoric and non-formal logic to make their points. The reason is simple, their stuff comes and goes. They contradict each other -- and often do not accept scientific fact simply because they do not understand it. Philosophy was once the only way to investigate some particularly hard problems, such as "where do we come from?" or "what is the mind?". With recent scientific and technological advances, we actually got some fact-based answers there. Cosmology, standard model, evolutionary biology, neuroscience are evidence-based sciences that override, and often contradict, most philosophical speculations of the past. A lot of philosophers simply do not have the domain knowledge anymore. I know that some argue that those sciences are philosophy, but, frankly, that's stretching reality. Last point, my dislike for philosophers is not a "new" position. See what Richard Feynman had to say about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8aWBcPVPMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8aWBcPVPMo