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Personally I find it amusing Hossenfelder is now invoking the need for learning philosophy of science, given how hostile she's been to it before. See for instan
by SiempreViernes 7y ago
Personally I find it amusing Hossenfelder is now invoking the need for learning philosophy of science, given how hostile she's been to it before. See for instance
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-unbearable-lightness-of-philosophy.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-unbearable-ligh...
that begins with: "Philosophy isn’t useful for practicing physicists. On that, I am with Steven Weinberg and Lawrence Krauss who have expressed similar opinions."
Though to be fair, she clarifies that she wishes philosophy wasn't so useless, and that:
"Philosophers in that area are necessarily ahead of scientists. But they also never get the credit for actually answering a question, because for that they’ll first have to hand it over to scientists. Like a psychologist, thus, the philosopher of physics succeeds by eventually making themselves superfluous. It seems a thankless job. There’s a reason I preferred studying physics instead.
Many of the “bad philosophers” are those who aren’t quick enough to notice that a question they are thinking about has been taken over by scientists. That this failure to notice can evidently persist, in some cases, for decades is another institutionalized problem that originates in the lack of communication between both fields."
This is the sort of reasoning that got me reading Hossenfelder in the first place, not the conspiratorial posts she writes now... :(
- Psyladine 7y ago>Like a psychologist, thus, the philosopher of physics succeeds by eventually making themselves superfluous. Yes, my doctor too has a thankless job of treating disease & injury in me, where once he succeeds, he has no purpose in life.
- bordercases 7y agoHis purpose is the next patient! A better analogy is "once my doctor successfully advocates for better health habits and I achieve them, they are purposeless."
- guerrilla 7y agoI believe that was the point, phrased in sarcasm. Philosophers move on to the next thing after they hand problems to science.
- jjmorrison 7y agoI thought the article was not great. But the fact that she's changed her mind on the topic makes me like her a lot more. How can we learn more if we don't change our mind?
- ssivark 7y agoNothing wrong with changing one’s mind. But need to be thorough enough to provide a rigorous rebuttal of the arguments made by one’s past self :-)
- SiempreViernes 7y agoI wasn’t very convinced by the 2016 text either, but the point is more that she’s gone from that clearly stated position to mentioning the importance of ”philosophy of science” in her attacks on current practice without much evidence (that is, not writing about it) that there has been any shift of conviction. It looks more like Hossenfelder found something discarded in the shed and temporarily use it as a club in want of something better. A slight intellectual dsihonesty.
- yunesj 7y ago> How can we learn more if we don't change our mind? I think it's also possible to learn without having strongly held beliefs about the subject beforehand. This alternative reminds me of Descartes (don't assimilate knowledge until you are sure of it's veracity) and Bayes (keep track of degree of belief about traditionally non-probabilistic things). Maybe such an approach would help getting trapped in local optima. E.g., I'd imagine it would be hard to climb out of the theist energy well once your world view were based on it.
- crimsonalucard 7y agoThe philosophy of science is different from philosophy. The philosophy of science is really a meta field for science while philosophy itself encompasses things the philosophy of religion and other things core to the human experience. When studying something of scientific nature the human experience like religion, art or that kind of thing is the domain of the humanities and entertainment and not of the universe in general.
- fredgrott 7y agohmm some of the original co founders of quantum had the opposite view that philosophy in all its forms might be of use