6 ms·

I think it's elitist to think that philosophers gave us the ability to talk about facts of practical matters. Indeed modern technology (science+engineering) is

I think it's elitist to think that philosophers gave us the ability to talk about facts of practical matters. Indeed modern technology (science+engineering) is an amalgamation of top-down ivory tower-originated ideas and bottom up common sense craftsmen folk practice and knowledge. People knew how to build pyramids before the scientific revolution and before the academic elite people-with-wigs invented ways to deal with induction and laws of motion, falsifiability etc. The enlightenment didn't give us facts and practical common sense. When people say spare me the philosophy, they mean they want to get down to business in a practical way, which they know is possible. Sure, the scientific revolution had a major part of it but a lot of stuff was invented bottom up for practical reasons, as agricultural tools, construction methods, military equipment and not derived from the musings of monks and barons. Rather it was the philosophers who looked at these things and tried to put a theory behind it.

ragnese 6y ago
You don't think there was some amount of "Hmm. The first time we tried to build a pyramid, it failed. Perhaps we can contemplate why it failed."? Or do you think they just kept iterating without any reflection? I don't know the literal answer here, but I think I'd consider the reflection between iterations to probably include a degree of philosophizing, even if it was before the western formalization of the scientific method.
- polynomial 6y ago
  "Hmm, maybe we should make the bottom bigger this time."
strofcon 6y ago
Fair points. I think it's worth noting though that while bottom-up invention creates the horse-drawn plow, philosophy is what attempts to answer the question of its rationality, morality, etc. I don't think the two have to be so divorced as you suggest. :-)
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  I think they are often divorced, as in the philosophers started out on a weird footing, a kind of twisted way of looking at things and in many cases they rediscovered principles that were already in use by common folk. For sure they also produced counterintuitive things, but in a sense the two have converged. The musings which started on what is the good life, what is moral etc lead to discussions of the inner nature of things, the heavens etc. And then I guess somewhat unexpectedly the two were sort of unified: heavens (sky stuff whose study started as a way to try and understand God and his goals with us) and mundane earthly things turned out to be governed by the same laws. The sky is not of fundamentally different nature than our everyday objects. Both consist of the same kinds of elementary particles and obey the same rules. But even today a lot of engineering, biology and medicine is extremely empirical. I mean philosophical medicine led people to derive that we need to do bloodletting etc. While I guess less educated common village folk or indigenous jungle inhabitants had various practices that helped but they didn't know why and weren't derived from ideas like the humors and four elements.
  - GavinMcG 6y ago
    You seem to be talking about/dismissing philosophy as though it's stuck in its very earliest days, one step away intuition.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      No I'm just wondering how much philosophy has drawn from common practical low brow stuff to course-correct and grow in the right direction. What came first, empirical philosophers or the recognition that mundane experiential stuff is useful? I'm just arguing against a sort of waterfall model of philosophers sitting on top of the totem pole and passing down to us what to do. Perhaps that's a straw man though, but some people do seem to think that before Aristotle gave us logic we couldn't follow complex arguments. Indeed, I think it's rather that they formalized already existing argument structures they observed in the agora etc. For sure the abstract tools also turned out to be useful and abstraction is how we got to the moon, not through taller ladders etc. I think it's hard to deny there is a bitter elitist tinge to philosophers that they don't get enough credit, but it's definitely a larger topic than what fits in a comment.
everdrive 6y ago
>People knew how to build pyramids before the scientific revolution and before the academic elite people-with-wigs invented ways to deal with induction and laws of motion, falsifiability etc. If you're suggesting that there was not quite a bit of science and math that went into building the egyptian pyramids, I think you're well off base.
- strofcon 6y ago
  It seems worth noting that there's still been no mention of the ethics of building the pyramids, nor the rationality of doing so, nor the implications for the future, etc. I think that's more the point of the blog post.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Is there any consensus on ethics? What do ethical philosophers do in medical situations? Is there really some ethical training that can objectively tell them when to allow euthanasia or when to allow a certain risky intervention? (if there is we call it laws and regulations) No, of course not. They're simply highly trusted, generally educated people, who we trust to make roughly okay judgment calls based on their instinct and life experience. Ethics isn't a field you can study the same way as biology or anatomy. It's about compromises, staying within the broadly socially-culturally acceptible. Sure the moral intuitions of a society do evolve over time and often due to influential philosophers, but I don't think everyday ethics committees tap into anything deep. It often comes down to an extremely uncertain medical situation where the doctor can provide no useful quantitative probabilities for outcomes and the benefits and risks are really hard to score anyway. So it all comes down to intuition and negotiation and not upsetting the public too much.
FriedrichN 6y ago
It is only since recent times that philosophy has been separated from the other arts and sciences, just as with most sciences today. Not too long ago science, theology, philosophy were often practiced alongside each other or even seen as the same thing. The pyramids were made with science for a religious (philosophical) purpose by the elite (priests, Pharaohs). The utility of philosophy is that we create a shared lexicon and set of ideas to make sense of the world and be able to create new things in the world and communicate them to one another.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  I'll give it to you with the pyramids. As for later ages, I'm not sure about this but I assume serfs and village folks didn't really interact with monks and elites. So they kinda did their thing and built various contraptions and came up with ways to manage their crops... But perhaps the local priest had a bridging effect? I wonder how much the codex writing isolated high class actually openly looked at common folk practice to learn from or they were too proud for that. I mean I can see for example that religions have lots of practical rules on agriculture or rules of animal slaughtering and so on, so you may be right that it wasn't so divided from early on. This is one of those topics where I feel things are complicated. The relations of high and low culture and knowledge and the transmission of ideas between elite musings and common mundane practice is something that really interests me but I don't even know how to learn more about this.
  - ARandomerDude 6y ago
    > I'm not sure about this but I assume serfs and village folks didn't really interact with monks and elites. This was actually a recurring complaint among the monks, and several groups (called "Orders") were created whose job it was to interface with the common man. A person who did so was called a "Friar." I highly recommend the book Medieval Christianity by Kevin Madigan (Yale University Press, 2015) if you're interested in this topic.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  > The utility of philosophy is that we create a shared lexicon and set of ideas to make sense of the world and be able to create new things in the world and communicate them to one another. Honest question: What "new things" has philosophy created?
xamuel 6y ago
It's easy to turn a blind eye to the benefits we've gotten from philosophy, it sounds like a bunch of truisms and we think surely we would've just figured that easy stuff out ourselves without the philosophers. But suppose you were plopped down in ancient times before Aristotle invented formal logic. Would you have invented it yourself because it's so obvious and a no-brainer and you're so practical? Well, if you think so, then why did it take so long for mankind to do so? Aristotle is practically yesterday, in geological terms.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  But people did lots of really smart stuff before Aristotle. Also, the Maya and Aztecs didn't have Aristotle's logic but built an empire and had calendars etc. Sure they were not as advanced at the "meeting time", but who knows where they would have arrived after a few hundred or a few thousand more years. How much were the high brow elites piggybacking and surfing on top of discoveries and chaotic societal processes that they rather described than created themselves?
  - thelastwave 6y ago
    That's Aristotle all over, no originality of thought, but just riding the wave of his zeitgeist.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      Were the Greeks that original in some definite way that later stuff is derivative but they aren't? Is the divergence of the vector field of knowledge positive at the Greeks? Do they pump out more than they ingested from their prior generations? Indeed a lot of the heavy lifting is done by later generations in picking out the good stuff from everything, and we know "90% of everything is crap". Aristotle was right and influential because we the later generations pick him of all his contemporaries because we evaluate his ideas to be good. And we discard a lot of bullshit where he was wrong and made up things without any basis. Is my analysis here original? Surely not. We all stand on the shoulders of giants etc. But the point is precisely this, that we propagate the best ideas forward, in a discourse, and this is an active process and requires our judgment. Sure this idea itself is also not my radically novel insight. But I wouldn't count on seeing absolutely novel insight in all HN comments.
nathias 6y ago
What an examplary heap of common sense ignorance. Yes philosophers gave us the ability to talk about facts rationally and to consider facts as facts in the first place. It is easy to dismiss the labor of countless lives of philosophers who worked their whole life on problems that you now by the privilege of your modernity can consider trivial. Yes, now that the work has been done and distributed by art and education and has become part of the common sense, now its easy to dismiss and replace it with your own ignorant impromptu kind of philosophy. Philosophy isn't what you think of topdown or bottom up, but Enlightenment was much more of a bottom up process where individuals prosecuted their whole lives have made efforts that benefits us all to this day. Philosophy is above all an insistence on seeking the truth for its own sake, which today is desperately lacking in every pore of our society, software not excluded.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  I think this is also kind of a tribalistic debate. Note how you are saying "philosophers gave us". How about not labeling people but activities? We definitely have to step back sometimes, look at the big picture, think about principles and connections to other things and pursue understanding instead of producing the next widget. But I'd argue many practical people do that. Many data structures and algorithms were invented by practical people who stepped back and did it instead or some learned mathematician deriving it from a quest for truth. But that also happens of course. It's an entirely different question whether real-life, currently living professional philosophy graduates would be of great use in the software industry. Perhaps some would be but I'm not so sure. Are there for example lots of philosophers applied in hospitals for example to help doctors? Perhaps some ethicists. But I don't think they drive medical practice in a substantial way.
  - nathias 6y ago
    You don't need philosophy for data structures and algorithms, you need it to prevent you from being stuck in your local maximum, in all areas. That's why philosophy is useful in fields that aren't just practice but also in some way discovery (which software work is and medical work isn't, except for perhaps diagnostics etc.).
GavinMcG 6y ago
You're talking about whether philosophers discovered facts. Let's assume they didn't. The point of the post is that philosophers work on how to talk about facts. > When people say spare me the philosophy, they mean they want to get down to business in a practical way, which they know is possible. Yes. This is the problem: oftentimes, they are dismissing the second-order effects or non-practical concerns, and the idea of the post is that it takes philosophers to stand up for those other aspects of what's going on. It's the knee-jerk dismissal (which you're engaging in, it seems like) that philosophers push back against.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  I'm not sure if it takes professional philosophers though. It perhaps needs visionary, deeply reflective domain experts. You might call that philosophy and therefore the person, in part, a philosopher, but it's not in the original spirit. But I agree we can benefit from some "philosophical products" to enhance our thinking. The common sense framework sometimes sends us into a corner and dead end from which we can only come out via philosophy.
  - GavinMcG 6y ago
    I think it's entirely in the original spirit. Read the conclusion of the post: > The lesson is that they are you. Whenever you hear someone ranting about something you take for granted as wonderful and praiseworthy, and you're wondering why they don't leave well enough alone so we can all get back to our incestuous cheerleading, just remember: we went from the Dark Ages to our reeeeasonably enlightened society today by questioning our most cherished beliefs. > So keep questioning them. The entire point is that there's nothing specially reserved to them, and that instead of dismissing philosophy, you and I and the rest of us need to engage in it, by questioning things, and looking for the second-order, and the non-obvious, and the non-practical.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      This is a bit of a bait and switch or motte and bailey. Now you're arguing that people should do philosophy. The original argument was that we need philosophers, as in we need to take professionally trained philosophy graduates more seriously and bring them into the software industry so they can help us make better software. The first is probably useful, everyone benefits from a broad range of knowledge and activity. Including sport, novels, humanities, philosophy, natural sciences, computer science, people management and psychology, etc. It doesn't necessarily mean we need graduates of all these fields in the software shop. I suspect part of this push comes from a certain resentment from philosophy majors that their expertise is not valued much and they can't find jobs. But for all but the richest places like Google, it is totally ridiculous that a software company could employ philosophers and pay their salaries for coming up with publishable articles according to the academic standards they learned at university. Most software places are already annoyed how unpractical and far removed from the ground the CS graduates are compared to day to day practice. Them hiring philosophers is completely out of the question. When I read philosophers takes on AI for example (eg Precht's new book), it's painful. It's as if their philosophy is still stuck at decades ago. They are asking the wrong questions, answer them clumsily, not using mathematical tools right or misunderstanding them, taking simple and well-understood things to be profound new insights and thinking that something is simple when it's actually really hard. Philosophers (as in these actual real-life current humans) tend to invent problems for themselves completely orthogonal to what would actually be interesting and complex to investigate, probably out of fear that they are not technically adept/trained enough to engage with the details. There's a component of tech-envy here that makes this type of discussion quite heated and tribal.

ragnese 6y ago

You don't think there was some amount of "Hmm. The first time we tried to build a pyramid, it failed. Perhaps we can contemplate why it failed."? Or do you think they just kept iterating without any reflection? I don't know the literal answer here, but I think I'd consider the reflection between iterations to probably include a degree of philosophizing, even if it was before the western formalization of the scientific method.

polynomial 6y ago
"Hmm, maybe we should make the bottom bigger this time."

strofcon 6y ago

Fair points. I think it's worth noting though that while bottom-up invention creates the horse-drawn plow, philosophy is what attempts to answer the question of its rationality, morality, etc. I don't think the two have to be so divorced as you suggest. :-)

bonoboTP 6y ago
I think they are often divorced, as in the philosophers started out on a weird footing, a kind of twisted way of looking at things and in many cases they rediscovered principles that were already in use by common folk. For sure they also produced counterintuitive things, but in a sense the two have converged. The musings which started on what is the good life, what is moral etc lead to discussions of the inner nature of things, the heavens etc. And then I guess somewhat unexpectedly the two were sort of unified: heavens (sky stuff whose study started as a way to try and understand God and his goals with us) and mundane earthly things turned out to be governed by the same laws. The sky is not of fundamentally different nature than our everyday objects. Both consist of the same kinds of elementary particles and obey the same rules. But even today a lot of engineering, biology and medicine is extremely empirical. I mean philosophical medicine led people to derive that we need to do bloodletting etc. While I guess less educated common village folk or indigenous jungle inhabitants had various practices that helped but they didn't know why and weren't derived from ideas like the humors and four elements.
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  You seem to be talking about/dismissing philosophy as though it's stuck in its very earliest days, one step away intuition.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    No I'm just wondering how much philosophy has drawn from common practical low brow stuff to course-correct and grow in the right direction. What came first, empirical philosophers or the recognition that mundane experiential stuff is useful? I'm just arguing against a sort of waterfall model of philosophers sitting on top of the totem pole and passing down to us what to do. Perhaps that's a straw man though, but some people do seem to think that before Aristotle gave us logic we couldn't follow complex arguments. Indeed, I think it's rather that they formalized already existing argument structures they observed in the agora etc. For sure the abstract tools also turned out to be useful and abstraction is how we got to the moon, not through taller ladders etc. I think it's hard to deny there is a bitter elitist tinge to philosophers that they don't get enough credit, but it's definitely a larger topic than what fits in a comment.

everdrive 6y ago

>People knew how to build pyramids before the scientific revolution and before the academic elite people-with-wigs invented ways to deal with induction and laws of motion, falsifiability etc. If you're suggesting that there was not quite a bit of science and math that went into building the egyptian pyramids, I think you're well off base.

strofcon 6y ago
It seems worth noting that there's still been no mention of the ethics of building the pyramids, nor the rationality of doing so, nor the implications for the future, etc. I think that's more the point of the blog post.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Is there any consensus on ethics? What do ethical philosophers do in medical situations? Is there really some ethical training that can objectively tell them when to allow euthanasia or when to allow a certain risky intervention? (if there is we call it laws and regulations) No, of course not. They're simply highly trusted, generally educated people, who we trust to make roughly okay judgment calls based on their instinct and life experience. Ethics isn't a field you can study the same way as biology or anatomy. It's about compromises, staying within the broadly socially-culturally acceptible. Sure the moral intuitions of a society do evolve over time and often due to influential philosophers, but I don't think everyday ethics committees tap into anything deep. It often comes down to an extremely uncertain medical situation where the doctor can provide no useful quantitative probabilities for outcomes and the benefits and risks are really hard to score anyway. So it all comes down to intuition and negotiation and not upsetting the public too much.

FriedrichN 6y ago

It is only since recent times that philosophy has been separated from the other arts and sciences, just as with most sciences today. Not too long ago science, theology, philosophy were often practiced alongside each other or even seen as the same thing. The pyramids were made with science for a religious (philosophical) purpose by the elite (priests, Pharaohs). The utility of philosophy is that we create a shared lexicon and set of ideas to make sense of the world and be able to create new things in the world and communicate them to one another.

bonoboTP 6y ago
I'll give it to you with the pyramids. As for later ages, I'm not sure about this but I assume serfs and village folks didn't really interact with monks and elites. So they kinda did their thing and built various contraptions and came up with ways to manage their crops... But perhaps the local priest had a bridging effect? I wonder how much the codex writing isolated high class actually openly looked at common folk practice to learn from or they were too proud for that. I mean I can see for example that religions have lots of practical rules on agriculture or rules of animal slaughtering and so on, so you may be right that it wasn't so divided from early on. This is one of those topics where I feel things are complicated. The relations of high and low culture and knowledge and the transmission of ideas between elite musings and common mundane practice is something that really interests me but I don't even know how to learn more about this.
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  > I'm not sure about this but I assume serfs and village folks didn't really interact with monks and elites. This was actually a recurring complaint among the monks, and several groups (called "Orders") were created whose job it was to interface with the common man. A person who did so was called a "Friar." I highly recommend the book Medieval Christianity by Kevin Madigan (Yale University Press, 2015) if you're interested in this topic.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
> The utility of philosophy is that we create a shared lexicon and set of ideas to make sense of the world and be able to create new things in the world and communicate them to one another. Honest question: What "new things" has philosophy created?

xamuel 6y ago

It's easy to turn a blind eye to the benefits we've gotten from philosophy, it sounds like a bunch of truisms and we think surely we would've just figured that easy stuff out ourselves without the philosophers. But suppose you were plopped down in ancient times before Aristotle invented formal logic. Would you have invented it yourself because it's so obvious and a no-brainer and you're so practical? Well, if you think so, then why did it take so long for mankind to do so? Aristotle is practically yesterday, in geological terms.

bonoboTP 6y ago
But people did lots of really smart stuff before Aristotle. Also, the Maya and Aztecs didn't have Aristotle's logic but built an empire and had calendars etc. Sure they were not as advanced at the "meeting time", but who knows where they would have arrived after a few hundred or a few thousand more years. How much were the high brow elites piggybacking and surfing on top of discoveries and chaotic societal processes that they rather described than created themselves?
- thelastwave 6y ago
  That's Aristotle all over, no originality of thought, but just riding the wave of his zeitgeist.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Were the Greeks that original in some definite way that later stuff is derivative but they aren't? Is the divergence of the vector field of knowledge positive at the Greeks? Do they pump out more than they ingested from their prior generations? Indeed a lot of the heavy lifting is done by later generations in picking out the good stuff from everything, and we know "90% of everything is crap". Aristotle was right and influential because we the later generations pick him of all his contemporaries because we evaluate his ideas to be good. And we discard a lot of bullshit where he was wrong and made up things without any basis. Is my analysis here original? Surely not. We all stand on the shoulders of giants etc. But the point is precisely this, that we propagate the best ideas forward, in a discourse, and this is an active process and requires our judgment. Sure this idea itself is also not my radically novel insight. But I wouldn't count on seeing absolutely novel insight in all HN comments.

nathias 6y ago

What an examplary heap of common sense ignorance. Yes philosophers gave us the ability to talk about facts rationally and to consider facts as facts in the first place. It is easy to dismiss the labor of countless lives of philosophers who worked their whole life on problems that you now by the privilege of your modernity can consider trivial. Yes, now that the work has been done and distributed by art and education and has become part of the common sense, now its easy to dismiss and replace it with your own ignorant impromptu kind of philosophy. Philosophy isn't what you think of topdown or bottom up, but Enlightenment was much more of a bottom up process where individuals prosecuted their whole lives have made efforts that benefits us all to this day. Philosophy is above all an insistence on seeking the truth for its own sake, which today is desperately lacking in every pore of our society, software not excluded.

bonoboTP 6y ago
I think this is also kind of a tribalistic debate. Note how you are saying "philosophers gave us". How about not labeling people but activities? We definitely have to step back sometimes, look at the big picture, think about principles and connections to other things and pursue understanding instead of producing the next widget. But I'd argue many practical people do that. Many data structures and algorithms were invented by practical people who stepped back and did it instead or some learned mathematician deriving it from a quest for truth. But that also happens of course. It's an entirely different question whether real-life, currently living professional philosophy graduates would be of great use in the software industry. Perhaps some would be but I'm not so sure. Are there for example lots of philosophers applied in hospitals for example to help doctors? Perhaps some ethicists. But I don't think they drive medical practice in a substantial way.
- nathias 6y ago
  You don't need philosophy for data structures and algorithms, you need it to prevent you from being stuck in your local maximum, in all areas. That's why philosophy is useful in fields that aren't just practice but also in some way discovery (which software work is and medical work isn't, except for perhaps diagnostics etc.).

GavinMcG 6y ago

You're talking about whether philosophers discovered facts. Let's assume they didn't. The point of the post is that philosophers work on how to talk about facts. > When people say spare me the philosophy, they mean they want to get down to business in a practical way, which they know is possible. Yes. This is the problem: oftentimes, they are dismissing the second-order effects or non-practical concerns, and the idea of the post is that it takes philosophers to stand up for those other aspects of what's going on. It's the knee-jerk dismissal (which you're engaging in, it seems like) that philosophers push back against.

bonoboTP 6y ago
I'm not sure if it takes professional philosophers though. It perhaps needs visionary, deeply reflective domain experts. You might call that philosophy and therefore the person, in part, a philosopher, but it's not in the original spirit. But I agree we can benefit from some "philosophical products" to enhance our thinking. The common sense framework sometimes sends us into a corner and dead end from which we can only come out via philosophy.
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  I think it's entirely in the original spirit. Read the conclusion of the post: > The lesson is that they are you. Whenever you hear someone ranting about something you take for granted as wonderful and praiseworthy, and you're wondering why they don't leave well enough alone so we can all get back to our incestuous cheerleading, just remember: we went from the Dark Ages to our reeeeasonably enlightened society today by questioning our most cherished beliefs. > So keep questioning them. The entire point is that there's nothing specially reserved to them, and that instead of dismissing philosophy, you and I and the rest of us need to engage in it, by questioning things, and looking for the second-order, and the non-obvious, and the non-practical.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    This is a bit of a bait and switch or motte and bailey. Now you're arguing that people should do philosophy. The original argument was that we need philosophers, as in we need to take professionally trained philosophy graduates more seriously and bring them into the software industry so they can help us make better software. The first is probably useful, everyone benefits from a broad range of knowledge and activity. Including sport, novels, humanities, philosophy, natural sciences, computer science, people management and psychology, etc. It doesn't necessarily mean we need graduates of all these fields in the software shop. I suspect part of this push comes from a certain resentment from philosophy majors that their expertise is not valued much and they can't find jobs. But for all but the richest places like Google, it is totally ridiculous that a software company could employ philosophers and pay their salaries for coming up with publishable articles according to the academic standards they learned at university. Most software places are already annoyed how unpractical and far removed from the ground the CS graduates are compared to day to day practice. Them hiring philosophers is completely out of the question. When I read philosophers takes on AI for example (eg Precht's new book), it's painful. It's as if their philosophy is still stuck at decades ago. They are asking the wrong questions, answer them clumsily, not using mathematical tools right or misunderstanding them, taking simple and well-understood things to be profound new insights and thinking that something is simple when it's actually really hard. Philosophers (as in these actual real-life current humans) tend to invent problems for themselves completely orthogonal to what would actually be interesting and complex to investigate, probably out of fear that they are not technically adept/trained enough to engage with the details. There's a component of tech-envy here that makes this type of discussion quite heated and tribal.