5 ms·

This is only redeeming to me really because generally its the philosophers that are presumptuous enough to tell other fields what they should do or think. Nice

This is only redeeming to me really because generally its the philosophers that are presumptuous enough to tell other fields what they should do or think. Nice to see the tables turned on them!

bakuninsbart 5y ago
That's not my experience at all, rather I see a lot of philosophers giving good pointers where their field borders on others, and then being shot down or ignored. I'd actually be interested in an example of this, as I don't think I've encountered it so far, although I'm admittedly not that engaged either. By far the worst offenders of presumptuousness must be old physicists though, followed by old computer scientists. Thinking of Michio Kaku talk about philosophy still makes me physically cringe.
- btilly 5y ago
  Can you provide examples of your "good pointers"? My experience is that the feedback provided by philosophers sounds good to the philosophers, but is actually useless to practitioners. And in technical subjects, like math, computer science and physics, it is important to develop a really good BS filter. That said, I am also sympathetic to http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, so must admit some hostility to the current practice of philosophy.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    > Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten who discovered what they discovered. This is laughable. Most of our culture was once philosophy, and I sure don't know whose. If you define philosophy as “that which has not escaped the realm of theoretical philosophy”, then sure. But we use practical philosophy every day!
    - lmm 5y ago
      All fields were once "philosophy", that's a naming artifact not an insight. What's being claimed is something like: when "natural philosophy" and "philosophy" diverged into distinct fields, "natural philosophy" got the good stuff.
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        “Natural philosophy” has contributed basically nothing to the structure of our society. To our ideas of fairness, and ethics, and how to co-operate with untrustworthy strangers. Its impacts, like medicine, have, but that's like saying trees are responsible for how our society works. So much of this, we just take for granted. Philosophy is either obvious or wrong.
        lmm 5y ago
        Is there any evidence that the-thing-we-call-philosophy-today has actually contributed positively to those things? I've seen it claimed that professional ethicists act less ethically in their daily lives than the average member of the public, and most ethics training classes seem at best useless.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        There is no evidence. The thing we (non-philosophers) call philosophy today is like the thing we call pure mathematics today: it's the philosophy that hasn't been useful, and therefore hasn't been moved into another field like epistemology or philosophy-of-science or probability theory.
  - voidhorse 5y ago
    I think there’s an inherent tension between what philosophers are trying to do and what practitioners in specific fields are trying to do that leads to the bad blood. If you’re a philosopher, you’re generally trying to look at things from a general enough perspective that you might argue for a radical shift in the way we do things and call out the assumptions that are otherwise taken as axioms of the field—the water we swim around in. If you’re a practitioner, you’re focused on swimming. Core axioms and prevailing theory are your presuppositions—you’re just focused on getting things done within the confines of the prevailing theory/framework, perhaps nudging it every so often in particular directions based on new discoveries—its quite rare that a working scientist sparks an actual theoretic revision and becomes the next Einstein (see thomas Kuhn). So yes, philosophers are totally useless when it comes to getting practical stuff done because that’s generally not the space they are attempting to help with or illuminate.
    - btilly 5y ago
      That isn't the problem. The problem is that philosophers believe that they know things from first principles which, in fact, have been falsified by science. Therefore the thing that they are saying is wrong. See https://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/this-philosopher-helped-ensure-there-was-no-nobel-for-relativity https://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/this-philosopher-helpe... for a famous such clash. Please be assured that legions of lesser philosophers have fallen into the same trap.
      - morelisp 5y ago
        > legions of lesser philosophers have fallen into the same trap. I don't know, this case is somewhat infamous, but it really speaks more to the Nobel committee's own biases than the field of philosophy. Bergson was prolific and influential, but also unpopular within many philosophical circles outside of the Francosphere, and also inside it by the time the post-structuralists came along. Anyway, wait until you find out what the legions of lesser scientists have been up to since 1921...
iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
> generally its the philosophers that are presumptuous enough to tell other fields what they should do or think I'm sorry but in my experience, this is not at all a one-way street. It is very common for me to hear engineers and other STEM-types to complain about modern art or about the supposedly obscurantist, sophistic style of various disciplines of the liberal arts. However, these complaints rarely come from Engineers who take an active interest in the fields they criticize. Admittedly I'm mainly speaking about general people I work with or whom I (sadly often) encounter on the internet. But there are some eminent names who are just as guilty. In addition to Kaku, as bakuninsbart mentioned, I could also bring up, off the top of my head, Stephen "philosophy is dead" Hawking and Richard "Shakespeare would have been better if he were educated" Dawkins. I think I could come up with many more examples if I started looking. On the other hand, we fortunately also have people like Murray Gell-Man, who has gotten us to quote from the most experimental book in all of English-language literature every time we talk about elementary sub-atomic particles.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  Based upon minimal, but seemingly enough observation, I'd add Kraus to the list of philistines.
- normac2 5y ago
  > supposedly obscurantist, sophistic style of various disciplines of the liberal arts. Would you say there is absolutely no kernel of truth to this? Check out, say, the abstract to this paper [1]. Is there nothing obscurantist about it? If you acknowledge that it's obscurantist to some degree, would you say that it's rare and I just cherry-picked a bad one? I'm a STEM person, and I have trouble understanding why some people find this stuff to be just reasonable academic work with nothing dysfunctional, pedantic or sophistic about the writing style. It just seems so extremely obvious to me, that it makes me wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous systems that are wired a bit differently, and I'm falling prey to the typical mind fallacy. It's hard to believe that if I studied this stuff deeply enough and with an open mind, it would no longer seem obscure. [1] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/ https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/
at_a_remove 5y ago
Goodness yes. When I was in physics, there were a lot of these philosophers who had some kind of real problem with (special) relativity, like it had swerved and driven over their dog on purpose. I'm not talking about the spackling of idiots who were under the impression that Michelson-Morley was performed precisely once, but folks who just found it antithetical to their personal outlooks, aside from the space opera types whose dreams are cruelly crushed underfoot by c (no exotic matter has yet called Lazarus forth from his tomb). Normally, one could dispel them with some holy water and a copy of Dr. Will's Was Einstein Right? but some had a tenacity to them which had long transformed from a virtue to a vice.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ChrisSD 5y ago
  It's funny because of the number of physicists who loudly proclaim philosophy is either dead or at least useless (while also extolling the virtues of their own philosophy of science, with bonus points for mangling Popper).
- quantum_mcts 5y ago
  Also physicist. My beef is more with philosophy-of-science folks in particular. They think that we, physicists, really need them and their insights about how to do physics properly. For example they really like this meme: reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/gjz24v Which is totally dishonest. (I tried to counter that with this https://imgur.com/a/zwDhfxJ https://imgur.com/a/zwDhfxJ , but that's not memey enough.)
  - bangkoksbest 5y ago
    It's not a coincidence that the left side (more positive to philosophy) and Born (whose quotes are more neutral) are also continental European, while the three critical examples (can add in Krauss, Hawking, and many others) come from Anglo-Americans. There's too often a pettiness in the latter (to an extent, also in your post) in which what look like fairly limited and contemporaneous gripes about academics in another field is given the trappings of some historically unbound and universal insight. There's no inherent tension between science and philosophy; even Meermin's "shut up and calculate" is a philosophical position (instrumentalism), to say nothing of the philosophical, scientific and mathematical contributions of e.g. Poincaré, Helmholtz, Mach, Duhem, Peirce, Leibniz, Von Neumann, Jaynes etc. Even modern Anglo-American physicists contribute to and draw a lot from philosophy, e.g. Wheeler and Paul Anderson.
diegocg 5y ago
There are philosophy schools (eg. philosophical materialism, not very well known outside spanish speaking countries https://www.fgbueno.es/ing/gbm.htm https://www.fgbueno.es/ing/gbm.htm) that not only they don't that, they consider philosophy as a second grade knowledge, where first grade knowledge come from sciences and techniques, and philosophy works with the concepts and ideas that come from them. Philosophy itself, in fact, was born when people took the concepts used in geometry and started using them to build systems of ideas (quite the opposite of the widespread view of philosophy as the "origin" of science)
- morelisp 5y ago
  > Philosophy itself, in fact, was born when people took the concepts used in geometry and started using them to build systems of ideas What? Philosophy and geometry both date to prehistory and we find them co-evolving in the west through many separate ideological movements. It's ridiculous to talk about which one came first. Moreover, when people talk of "concepts used in geometry" as a distinct thing they usually mean Euclidean or at oldest Pythagorean - earlier than that and geometry is considerably more numerical and difficult to distinguish from any other math or astronomy. But philosophy significantly predates that kind of geometric concept - "Know thyself" is hardly a mathematical directive!
Rd6n6 5y ago
“The only think I know is that I know nothing” -philosophers

This is only redeeming to me really because generally its the philosophers that are presumptuous enough to tell other fields what they should do or think. Nice to see the tables turned on them!

bakuninsbart 5y ago

That's not my experience at all, rather I see a lot of philosophers giving good pointers where their field borders on others, and then being shot down or ignored. I'd actually be interested in an example of this, as I don't think I've encountered it so far, although I'm admittedly not that engaged either. By far the worst offenders of presumptuousness must be old physicists though, followed by old computer scientists. Thinking of Michio Kaku talk about philosophy still makes me physically cringe.

btilly 5y ago
Can you provide examples of your "good pointers"? My experience is that the feedback provided by philosophers sounds good to the philosophers, but is actually useless to practitioners. And in technical subjects, like math, computer science and physics, it is important to develop a really good BS filter. That said, I am also sympathetic to http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, so must admit some hostility to the current practice of philosophy.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  > Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten who discovered what they discovered. This is laughable. Most of our culture was once philosophy, and I sure don't know whose. If you define philosophy as “that which has not escaped the realm of theoretical philosophy”, then sure. But we use practical philosophy every day!
  - lmm 5y ago
    All fields were once "philosophy", that's a naming artifact not an insight. What's being claimed is something like: when "natural philosophy" and "philosophy" diverged into distinct fields, "natural philosophy" got the good stuff.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      “Natural philosophy” has contributed basically nothing to the structure of our society. To our ideas of fairness, and ethics, and how to co-operate with untrustworthy strangers. Its impacts, like medicine, have, but that's like saying trees are responsible for how our society works. So much of this, we just take for granted. Philosophy is either obvious or wrong.
      - lmm 5y ago
        Is there any evidence that the-thing-we-call-philosophy-today has actually contributed positively to those things? I've seen it claimed that professional ethicists act less ethically in their daily lives than the average member of the public, and most ethics training classes seem at best useless.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        There is no evidence. The thing we (non-philosophers) call philosophy today is like the thing we call pure mathematics today: it's the philosophy that hasn't been useful, and therefore hasn't been moved into another field like epistemology or philosophy-of-science or probability theory.
- voidhorse 5y ago
  I think there’s an inherent tension between what philosophers are trying to do and what practitioners in specific fields are trying to do that leads to the bad blood. If you’re a philosopher, you’re generally trying to look at things from a general enough perspective that you might argue for a radical shift in the way we do things and call out the assumptions that are otherwise taken as axioms of the field—the water we swim around in. If you’re a practitioner, you’re focused on swimming. Core axioms and prevailing theory are your presuppositions—you’re just focused on getting things done within the confines of the prevailing theory/framework, perhaps nudging it every so often in particular directions based on new discoveries—its quite rare that a working scientist sparks an actual theoretic revision and becomes the next Einstein (see thomas Kuhn). So yes, philosophers are totally useless when it comes to getting practical stuff done because that’s generally not the space they are attempting to help with or illuminate.
  - btilly 5y ago
    That isn't the problem. The problem is that philosophers believe that they know things from first principles which, in fact, have been falsified by science. Therefore the thing that they are saying is wrong. See https://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/this-philosopher-helped-ensure-there-was-no-nobel-for-relativity https://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/this-philosopher-helpe... for a famous such clash. Please be assured that legions of lesser philosophers have fallen into the same trap.
    - morelisp 5y ago
      > legions of lesser philosophers have fallen into the same trap. I don't know, this case is somewhat infamous, but it really speaks more to the Nobel committee's own biases than the field of philosophy. Bergson was prolific and influential, but also unpopular within many philosophical circles outside of the Francosphere, and also inside it by the time the post-structuralists came along. Anyway, wait until you find out what the legions of lesser scientists have been up to since 1921...

iworshipfaangs2 5y ago

> generally its the philosophers that are presumptuous enough to tell other fields what they should do or think I'm sorry but in my experience, this is not at all a one-way street. It is very common for me to hear engineers and other STEM-types to complain about modern art or about the supposedly obscurantist, sophistic style of various disciplines of the liberal arts. However, these complaints rarely come from Engineers who take an active interest in the fields they criticize. Admittedly I'm mainly speaking about general people I work with or whom I (sadly often) encounter on the internet. But there are some eminent names who are just as guilty. In addition to Kaku, as bakuninsbart mentioned, I could also bring up, off the top of my head, Stephen "philosophy is dead" Hawking and Richard "Shakespeare would have been better if he were educated" Dawkins. I think I could come up with many more examples if I started looking. On the other hand, we fortunately also have people like Murray Gell-Man, who has gotten us to quote from the most experimental book in all of English-language literature every time we talk about elementary sub-atomic particles.

a9h74j 5y ago
Based upon minimal, but seemingly enough observation, I'd add Kraus to the list of philistines.
normac2 5y ago
> supposedly obscurantist, sophistic style of various disciplines of the liberal arts. Would you say there is absolutely no kernel of truth to this? Check out, say, the abstract to this paper [1]. Is there nothing obscurantist about it? If you acknowledge that it's obscurantist to some degree, would you say that it's rare and I just cherry-picked a bad one? I'm a STEM person, and I have trouble understanding why some people find this stuff to be just reasonable academic work with nothing dysfunctional, pedantic or sophistic about the writing style. It just seems so extremely obvious to me, that it makes me wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous systems that are wired a bit differently, and I'm falling prey to the typical mind fallacy. It's hard to believe that if I studied this stuff deeply enough and with an open mind, it would no longer seem obscure. [1] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/ https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/

at_a_remove 5y ago

Goodness yes. When I was in physics, there were a lot of these philosophers who had some kind of real problem with (special) relativity, like it had swerved and driven over their dog on purpose. I'm not talking about the spackling of idiots who were under the impression that Michelson-Morley was performed precisely once, but folks who just found it antithetical to their personal outlooks, aside from the space opera types whose dreams are cruelly crushed underfoot by c (no exotic matter has yet called Lazarus forth from his tomb). Normally, one could dispel them with some holy water and a copy of Dr. Will's Was Einstein Right? but some had a tenacity to them which had long transformed from a virtue to a vice.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ChrisSD 5y ago
It's funny because of the number of physicists who loudly proclaim philosophy is either dead or at least useless (while also extolling the virtues of their own philosophy of science, with bonus points for mangling Popper).
quantum_mcts 5y ago
Also physicist. My beef is more with philosophy-of-science folks in particular. They think that we, physicists, really need them and their insights about how to do physics properly. For example they really like this meme: reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/gjz24v Which is totally dishonest. (I tried to counter that with this https://imgur.com/a/zwDhfxJ https://imgur.com/a/zwDhfxJ , but that's not memey enough.)
- bangkoksbest 5y ago
  It's not a coincidence that the left side (more positive to philosophy) and Born (whose quotes are more neutral) are also continental European, while the three critical examples (can add in Krauss, Hawking, and many others) come from Anglo-Americans. There's too often a pettiness in the latter (to an extent, also in your post) in which what look like fairly limited and contemporaneous gripes about academics in another field is given the trappings of some historically unbound and universal insight. There's no inherent tension between science and philosophy; even Meermin's "shut up and calculate" is a philosophical position (instrumentalism), to say nothing of the philosophical, scientific and mathematical contributions of e.g. Poincaré, Helmholtz, Mach, Duhem, Peirce, Leibniz, Von Neumann, Jaynes etc. Even modern Anglo-American physicists contribute to and draw a lot from philosophy, e.g. Wheeler and Paul Anderson.

diegocg 5y ago

There are philosophy schools (eg. philosophical materialism, not very well known outside spanish speaking countries https://www.fgbueno.es/ing/gbm.htm https://www.fgbueno.es/ing/gbm.htm) that not only they don't that, they consider philosophy as a second grade knowledge, where first grade knowledge come from sciences and techniques, and philosophy works with the concepts and ideas that come from them. Philosophy itself, in fact, was born when people took the concepts used in geometry and started using them to build systems of ideas (quite the opposite of the widespread view of philosophy as the "origin" of science)

morelisp 5y ago
> Philosophy itself, in fact, was born when people took the concepts used in geometry and started using them to build systems of ideas What? Philosophy and geometry both date to prehistory and we find them co-evolving in the west through many separate ideological movements. It's ridiculous to talk about which one came first. Moreover, when people talk of "concepts used in geometry" as a distinct thing they usually mean Euclidean or at oldest Pythagorean - earlier than that and geometry is considerably more numerical and difficult to distinguish from any other math or astronomy. But philosophy significantly predates that kind of geometric concept - "Know thyself" is hardly a mathematical directive!

Rd6n6 5y ago

“The only think I know is that I know nothing” -philosophers