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Meanwhile, you mention ethical philosophy in the context of a mail security extension and get downvoted to hell. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25119305 h

Meanwhile, you mention ethical philosophy in the context of a mail security extension and get downvoted to hell. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25119305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25119305 Philosophy is doing a bad job of explaining its importance to the world. Philosophy nerds care about it, but everyone else thinks it's stupid.

slx26 6y ago
Lots of people enjoy "philosophical" discussions and certainly derive value from them. What they might not like is the "philosophy" that's continually throwing around author names, complicated words, and kinda leaves the average person feeling stupid talking around "proper philosophers". If you want to educate people, start with the layman explanations, and only at the end annotate the complicated words. It's not like people don't understand the general concept of things like "utilitarianism", it's simply that they don't use that word in their day to day, so they don't associate the concept to the word. As to your other comment, well, that included a rather oversimplified example of utilitarianism, which many utilitarians will not even share. It's very easy to make naive utilitarian calculations, and in many cases there's too much uncertainty to even make calculations. You can only say that naive utilitarianism is easier than deontology. No offense intended, but maybe some people were downvoting you for this.
trhway 6y ago
> everyone else thinks it's stupid. As far as i see the philosophy fails to correctly abstract and incorporate modern advances in scientific knowledge and technological development. While such abstraction and incorporation naturally would take time and make philosophy lagging behind, the majority of philosophy don't even bother to do it and dismisses the reality outright, a very stupid thing to do. The philosophy's role of being a guiding science on the bleeding edge of scientific exploration of the world have been lost by the "philosophers" as the hard work of understanding of scientific reality was replaced by pseudo-scientific hand-waiving. That hand-waiving is easily noticeable even by casual observer and results in total loss of respect. More than 30 years ago a freshman at University i had a great interest in philosophy, the new market capitalism in USSR resulted in great availability of books, including philosophical one, and we had a blast. With years as my knowledge grew, i started to see the philosophy's failure to provide both - a well build abstraction as well as exploration guidance - and started to see it only just as temporary mind crutches, a band-aid for the lack of knowledge, like those Ancient Greeks' myths. And Plato today would have got Deep NN PhD and would be sitting at Google as a senior manager or director pulling $5M+ a year.
- errantmind 6y ago
  How would you discuss and constructively criticize the scientific method itself without philosophy? Philosophy is a superset of science and while it is less constrained overall, I wouldn't say it is useless. You say philosophy has a failure to provide a "well build abstraction as well as exploration guidance" but how would that work? Philosophy is a large subject area, but I'll take the liberty to say it isn't required to be straight forward with concrete answers, more so to provoke thinking about what makes something straight forward and concrete.

slx26 6y ago

Lots of people enjoy "philosophical" discussions and certainly derive value from them. What they might not like is the "philosophy" that's continually throwing around author names, complicated words, and kinda leaves the average person feeling stupid talking around "proper philosophers". If you want to educate people, start with the layman explanations, and only at the end annotate the complicated words. It's not like people don't understand the general concept of things like "utilitarianism", it's simply that they don't use that word in their day to day, so they don't associate the concept to the word. As to your other comment, well, that included a rather oversimplified example of utilitarianism, which many utilitarians will not even share. It's very easy to make naive utilitarian calculations, and in many cases there's too much uncertainty to even make calculations. You can only say that naive utilitarianism is easier than deontology. No offense intended, but maybe some people were downvoting you for this.

trhway 6y ago

> everyone else thinks it's stupid. As far as i see the philosophy fails to correctly abstract and incorporate modern advances in scientific knowledge and technological development. While such abstraction and incorporation naturally would take time and make philosophy lagging behind, the majority of philosophy don't even bother to do it and dismisses the reality outright, a very stupid thing to do. The philosophy's role of being a guiding science on the bleeding edge of scientific exploration of the world have been lost by the "philosophers" as the hard work of understanding of scientific reality was replaced by pseudo-scientific hand-waiving. That hand-waiving is easily noticeable even by casual observer and results in total loss of respect. More than 30 years ago a freshman at University i had a great interest in philosophy, the new market capitalism in USSR resulted in great availability of books, including philosophical one, and we had a blast. With years as my knowledge grew, i started to see the philosophy's failure to provide both - a well build abstraction as well as exploration guidance - and started to see it only just as temporary mind crutches, a band-aid for the lack of knowledge, like those Ancient Greeks' myths. And Plato today would have got Deep NN PhD and would be sitting at Google as a senior manager or director pulling $5M+ a year.

errantmind 6y ago
How would you discuss and constructively criticize the scientific method itself without philosophy? Philosophy is a superset of science and while it is less constrained overall, I wouldn't say it is useless. You say philosophy has a failure to provide a "well build abstraction as well as exploration guidance" but how would that work? Philosophy is a large subject area, but I'll take the liberty to say it isn't required to be straight forward with concrete answers, more so to provoke thinking about what makes something straight forward and concrete.