6 ms·

Let’s make this testable. Tell me what percentage of technical people, defined however you like, generally view philosophy as a waste of time. (This could even

by xpe 3y ago

Let’s make this testable. Tell me what percentage of technical people, defined however you like, generally view philosophy as a waste of time. (This could even be a thought experiment for now.) Of these people how many of them come to their conclusion based on careful reasoning? Based on broad knowledge of philosophy? My prior expectation would be that these numbers are very low. I would expect that people who dismiss philosophy do so from a position of relative ignorance. This is not blame; the broader context matters: educational curricula, teaching quality, life experience, curiosity, competing interests, etc. Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. How much applied computer science is worth reading? If you put a typical example of it in front of me (the code professionals write for example), I’m probably going think it is a hot mess. It becomes more bearable if I interpret it as a sequence of economically and culturally constrained suboptimal decisions. The same goes for philosophy.

lisper 3y ago
> I would expect that people who dismiss philosophy do so from a position of relative ignorance. That's entirely possible. It's even possible that my assessment is based on ignorance. I am certainly not an expert in the philosophical literature, and even more certainly not an expert in it recently. The last time I looked seriously at the philosophical literature at all was decades ago and maybe things have changed. But I am an expert in science, and computer science in particular (I have a Ph.D.) and so I can say with some authority that the philosophy literature that I looked at back in the day exhibited a profound ignorance of basic results in CS and math, and also a pretty profound lack of common sense. I found a lot of papers that were tackling non-problems that were based on false assumptions, the moral equivalent of fake proofs that 1=0 where the object of the game is to spot the flaw in the reasoning. And spotting the flaw in the reasoning wasn't even challenging. It was just obvious. It also seems to me that a lot of what is nowadays called philosophy is just pretty transparent cover for religious apologetics. Now, as you say, I could be wrong. I'm not an expert. If I'm wrong, I welcome being enlightened. But if you want to take that on I think you will find that I am not completely clueless. I suggest you start with citing an example other than Dennett or Maudlin of someone you think is doing good work in philosophy nowadays.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Shouldn't you be aware that mathematics and computer "science" are closer to philosophy than actual (empirical) sciences ? Yours sounds more like the now very tired "two cultures" argument, sounds like you are discussing more the sociology side of things than anything ? (Would you throw out the baby of science with the bathwater of non-replicating papers ?) And wasn't Wittgenstein (et al.) the one that specifically recentered philosophy around the questions of language, trying to prune the accumulated historical bullshit that philosophy has a much harder difficulty to get rid of than (empirical) sciences ?
  - lisper 3y ago
    > Shouldn't you be aware that mathematics and computer "science" are closer to philosophy than actual (empirical) sciences ? OK. So what? The problem is that as philosophy moves closer to math it moves into the math department, and as it moves closer to empiricism it moves into the various sciences. The philosophy department is left with the dregs. That is what I claim results in a lot of pooh-pooh-able work. > Yours sounds more like the now very tired "two cultures" argument, sounds like you are discussing more the sociology side of things than anything ? Perhaps, but my focus here is much narrower. Snow was talking about everything that isn't science, and I'm talking only about those things that are commonly labelled "philosophy" for the last 300 years or so. Before that, science had not yet broken away from "natural philosophy" as a field in its own right. I'm not questioning the value of the arts. > And wasn't Wittgenstein (et al.) the one that specifically recentered philosophy around the questions of language, trying to prune the accumulated historical bullshit that philosophy has a much harder difficulty to get rid of than (empirical) sciences ? Maybe he was, I don't know. It's possible that I'm being unfair to him by focusing on the Tractatus, which has always struck me as just such obvious bullshit that it astonishes me that anyone can read it as anything other than some kind of practical joke. But what I do know is that I don't see a lot of references to Wittgenstein when I read modern papers about natural language processing, and so his work doesn't seem to have had much impact. It's possible that this is because his work had so much impact that it's considered common knowledge, kind of like Turing doesn't always get referenced when the halting problem gets mentioned because everyone Just Knows. And it's not just Wittgenstein. I don't see any philosophers having much impact on the world outside of university philosophy departments. That is what I am criticizing, not Wittgenstein per se. Tractatus was just an example.

by xpe 3y ago

lisper 3y ago

> I would expect that people who dismiss philosophy do so from a position of relative ignorance. That's entirely possible. It's even possible that my assessment is based on ignorance. I am certainly not an expert in the philosophical literature, and even more certainly not an expert in it recently. The last time I looked seriously at the philosophical literature at all was decades ago and maybe things have changed. But I am an expert in science, and computer science in particular (I have a Ph.D.) and so I can say with some authority that the philosophy literature that I looked at back in the day exhibited a profound ignorance of basic results in CS and math, and also a pretty profound lack of common sense. I found a lot of papers that were tackling non-problems that were based on false assumptions, the moral equivalent of fake proofs that 1=0 where the object of the game is to spot the flaw in the reasoning. And spotting the flaw in the reasoning wasn't even challenging. It was just obvious. It also seems to me that a lot of what is nowadays called philosophy is just pretty transparent cover for religious apologetics. Now, as you say, I could be wrong. I'm not an expert. If I'm wrong, I welcome being enlightened. But if you want to take that on I think you will find that I am not completely clueless. I suggest you start with citing an example other than Dennett or Maudlin of someone you think is doing good work in philosophy nowadays.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
Shouldn't you be aware that mathematics and computer "science" are closer to philosophy than actual (empirical) sciences ? Yours sounds more like the now very tired "two cultures" argument, sounds like you are discussing more the sociology side of things than anything ? (Would you throw out the baby of science with the bathwater of non-replicating papers ?) And wasn't Wittgenstein (et al.) the one that specifically recentered philosophy around the questions of language, trying to prune the accumulated historical bullshit that philosophy has a much harder difficulty to get rid of than (empirical) sciences ?
- lisper 3y ago
  > Shouldn't you be aware that mathematics and computer "science" are closer to philosophy than actual (empirical) sciences ? OK. So what? The problem is that as philosophy moves closer to math it moves into the math department, and as it moves closer to empiricism it moves into the various sciences. The philosophy department is left with the dregs. That is what I claim results in a lot of pooh-pooh-able work. > Yours sounds more like the now very tired "two cultures" argument, sounds like you are discussing more the sociology side of things than anything ? Perhaps, but my focus here is much narrower. Snow was talking about everything that isn't science, and I'm talking only about those things that are commonly labelled "philosophy" for the last 300 years or so. Before that, science had not yet broken away from "natural philosophy" as a field in its own right. I'm not questioning the value of the arts. > And wasn't Wittgenstein (et al.) the one that specifically recentered philosophy around the questions of language, trying to prune the accumulated historical bullshit that philosophy has a much harder difficulty to get rid of than (empirical) sciences ? Maybe he was, I don't know. It's possible that I'm being unfair to him by focusing on the Tractatus, which has always struck me as just such obvious bullshit that it astonishes me that anyone can read it as anything other than some kind of practical joke. But what I do know is that I don't see a lot of references to Wittgenstein when I read modern papers about natural language processing, and so his work doesn't seem to have had much impact. It's possible that this is because his work had so much impact that it's considered common knowledge, kind of like Turing doesn't always get referenced when the halting problem gets mentioned because everyone Just Knows. And it's not just Wittgenstein. I don't see any philosophers having much impact on the world outside of university philosophy departments. That is what I am criticizing, not Wittgenstein per se. Tractatus was just an example.