12 ms·

Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

83 points by pizu 14y ago

1337biz 14y ago
This sounds a lot like another Scientism dispute, i.e. if all questions of human life can be empirically answered or that there are things beyond testability. It is an exhausting discussion, that goes way deeper than a few snaky comments on contemporary philosophy papers. There is actually a quite good summary on Wikipedia on the conflict: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
- mej10 14y ago
  It sounds to me more like "Let's stop funding some parts of philosophy that aren't really tied to reality, when there are real philosophical problems with practical consequences that we need people working on". * Edit: Made my interpretation a little less inflammatory.
  - unalone 14y ago
    The web site's not loading for me, so unfortunately I can't read the article yet, but your summary sounds worryingly wrongminded to me. Philosophy should not necessarily be a practical endeavor – it concerns itself with being, life, and existence on their most abstract and difficult levels. There is a place for functional philosophy, and plenty of places where modern scientific discoveries can aid a line of philosophical inquiry, but suggesting we scrap Plato and Kant for "practical" thinkers is a dangerous way of thinking. I don't want to comment more until the article loads for me, but there's a place for practical consequence and it's elsewhere.
    - mej10 14y ago
      The example abstracts cited in the article are particularly worrying to me. I would be interested in seeing if someone can explain why those papers are problems that smart people should be working on. To a very pro-science layperson they seem especially absurd.
      - unalone 14y ago
        Well, consider that the very point of philosophy is to approach a seemingly simple question or subject – say, "What should laws be like?" – and then probe deeper and deeper into that question, searching for irregularities that might reveal hidden facets to that question that we don't consider, either due to our own assumptions, social norms, or even in the way the question is phrased. That's what philosophy does really well and really rigorously – and it's why its greatest works are so notoriously frustrating; imagine 800 pages on what it means "to be" that expounds on things like "because we all die in time, time is an essential part of man's being" at extraordinary length. Obviously, that summary I gave is an exaggerated parody – and that's the problem with judging a philosophical paper based on its abstract. "Is there a contradiction with atheists liking Bach?" is a simple question that might reveal very interesting insights at length. Remember that this isn't a magazine article, in which such a question will be insipid and asked only to provoke controversy and sales – in all likeliness, that question is asked to provoke further questions, further examination, that might lead to something truly provocative. But I can't know for sure, because I only have the abstract – and that's all this guy has either, and he knows that's all he has, which means this article is either self-promotion on the author's part, or it's proof that the author doesn't understand philosophy to a worrying extent. Probably a combination of the two. I see a parallel between this discussion and the science vs. religion debates that frustrate reasonable people on either side. You can't enter a debate with another field by starting with the assumption that your side has all the answers, and should therefore be the absolute center of the discussion. You have to be able to acknowledge what the other side is good for, what they can do that you're incapable of, before you start to make any kind of meaningful critique. It's wrong to attack science without acknowledging what science is good at, it's wrong to attack religion without some understanding of what lies at the heart of religious practice, and it's wrong to attack philosophy for its pursuit of deep abstraction when that's precisely what makes philosophy so valuable. Going after philosophy because it generates stupid abstracts is like going after science because it promotes nihilism: when you make that argument, you admit to knowing so little about the field you're attacking that essentially your critiques are invalid by default.
    - jopt 14y ago
      Why? Is this how philosophy is or how it ought to be?
      - fmoralesc 14y ago
        Two different and separate questions people always lump together.
      - unalone 14y ago
        It's how philosophy began and it's how philosophy is in its purest state, which is much different from saying it's the only way for philosophy to be. Generally, I think philosophy is like mathematics in that while its purest application is very obscure and very hard to understand without a whole lot of effort, that pure application results in practical breaththroughs on almost every level of "practical" research. I wish that pure philosophy was taught to more people, just as I wish that we taught kids more than the boring "practical" math that convinces them math sucks and patterns are boring. It's a pursuit that benefits nearly everybody who learns from it: reshapes our mind, teaches us new ways to observe the world. And if we had scientists, psychologists, programmers, and politicians learning philosophy, then there'd be less pressure on the actual philosophers to start studying something practical. For me that's the change that should be made: not more practical philosophy, but more philosophical practice.
        edanm 14y ago
        So this is a great place for me to be educated: what practical applications has philosophy yielded? Btw, I've read your comments on this thread, and it seems like you're very knowledgeable about the field of philosophy, but not particularly knowledgeable about LessWrong. I'm only slightly knowledgeable about philosophy, but I highly recommend you read more of LessWrong - it's an amazing resource of knowledge and of philosophical discussions (albeit with a more practical-minded bent most of the time). Lukeprog, the author of the above post, is a very respected member of that community as far as I know, and I honestly think you are underestimating him.
        memla 14y ago
    - mylittlepony 14y ago
      Philosophy sounds to me a lot like art. They do it mostly for themselves. We can consume it, but it's not really useful.
      - unalone 14y ago
        (cough.) Um, you're talking to an artist whose academic field of study specifically concerns why art, practically speaking, is vital to the well-being of a society. But judging from your username, Mr. Pony, I feel that you assume "art" refers to something different than what I do. The most valuable art is that which provokes a response: art is those creative acts which provoke creative acts in response. Similarly, the best philosophy is that which provokes responses from people who encounter it. That's one of the reasons why the "philosophy should be practical" argument is weird. Philosophy is practical, but its practical outcomes are philosophical in nature: that is, it drives people to consider aspects of life and existence that they wouldn't consider otherwise. Saying philosophy should be scientifically practical is like saying that science should help people find a closer connection with Jesus Christ: science does indeed drive some people to deep religious faith, but science that's only designed to make people think Jesus was an alright dude isn't science so much as it's religious propaganda posing as science. That's what this argument is: scientific propaganda pretending to be philosophy. The thing is, I love science! I really do! Science is amazing! But so is philosophy – so much so that personally I like it much more than I like science. Which is why I'd rather see philosophy stay philosophy, you know? (Incidentally, if you're interested in talking art, please do email me – I enjoy talking about my work, particularly with people skeptical about whether art's practical. :D)
        mylittlepony 14y ago
        You shouldn't make assumptions based on usernames, at least not in HN, where we value anonymity and privacy. A life without art would be quite empty indeed, everyone does art and consume art in some way or another, and in the same way everyone does philosophy (eg: thinking about the existence, the meaning of life, etc) at some point, we can't really avoid it. But I don't see the point in having people dedicating their lives to philosophy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is hardly any progress. In school I learned that every philosopher, to understand other philosophers, must walk the same path they walked, and every philosopher creates its own path from zero. So what's the point? There is never any progress, other than what they can grab from science. I think it was Aristotheles who decided planets where perfect spheres, because that made more sense. I know, at that time there was little to no science, and everything was mixed up. But I see philosophers are still doing that. The other day I saw a video about determinism by a philosophy professor in a university. The guy didn't fully understand quantum mechanics, he just overheard everything was random at that level, and made stupid conclusions. That's the image I have about philosophy.
  - naveensundar 14y ago
    Who will decide what has practical consequences?
    - mej10 14y ago
      There are many open problems in ethics and metaethics (i.e. what is right and wrong, is that even a thing, etc) that seem (to me) to have pretty clear practical consequences. I think many of the problems could be phrased in a way to convince most people (that think about this kind of thing) as well.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    I've found that the little bits of bullshit philosophy I've accrued over the years find second lives as ideals with practical consequences. By the time you reach Hegel it's all getting a bit silly; and there's a lot of early philosophy that can be dumped because we can directly interrogate reality on things that previous philosophers cannot. It's like raging about maths or fundamental science. Turing's paper is a work which must be so far outside the ordinary fellow's experience as to be nearly an insult. It also invented the modern computer as a side-effect.
  - anonymouz 14y ago
    Other classic (and similarly short-sighted) ideas along those lines would be: "Stop (all) basic research while there's still applied science to be done." "We shouldn't be spending money on space exploration while there are still people that are starving/homeless/poor." "Why are people working on a cure for <<insert non-terminal disease>>, when we still don't have a cure for cancer?"
    - mej10 14y ago
      I am really curious: did you read the example abstracts in the post? If so, can you help me understand why things like that should be funded?
      - unalone 14y ago
        If you opened any scientific journal, picked only the articles that seemed the least "relevant" to the mainstream, and quoted their abstracts without delving into the interesting, by which I mean actual, parts of their research, you could probably make scientific study seem stuffy, over-intellectual, and completely unworthy of serious study. Hell, look at the critics of scientific education who say things like "Why does my kid need to study fruit flies? What if I want my kid to study humanity instead?" You'd respond that not only does that argument miss the value of studying fruit flies, but it misses the deeper reason why we study science at all.
      - afarrell 14y ago
        I would imagine that the article about how atheists experience and connect with religion-inspired works would be relevant to someone trying to design a marketing strategy for a movie based on the Christian musical Les Miserables.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  I first came across it in Hayek. I'm still thinking it through myself (as you'll see from my self-linking below). My sympathies like with positivism, but I feel that it too has limits. To me the question is not merely which is correct? It's: which should we subscribe to according to what situation? So for example, I consider that for the systems we manage and face as professionals, we should be Newtonian-Cartesian positivists[1]. We strive to achieve a state of total understanding and predictability. It's a lie, of course[2]. But a useful lie. It creates incentives that accepting an incomprehensible universe do not create. Whereas for some situations, accepting that while it may be in principle deterministic for in practice unpredictable (chaotic) is an important step[3]. [1] http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/ http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/ [2] http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reigning-in-chaos/ http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign... , especially the comments. [3] http://chester.id.au/2012/12/07/review-the-essence-of-hayek-1/ http://chester.id.au/2012/12/07/review-the-essence-of-hayek-...
guard-of-terra 14y ago
Why "train" philosophers? When I imagine a "trained philosopher" I see a person who uses a lot of smart-sounding quotes but cannot choose between the right saying and the wrong saying. It's all the same to him, a material that he absorbed and now outputs. Challenge philosophers. Confront them. Let them take on each other.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  So, you imagine what a philosopher does, and then tell this imaginary philosopher what to do? Doesn't that strike you as awful presumptuous?
  - EliRivers 14y ago
    Well, we have to imagine philosopher; the philosopher Form can only be known to us through our experiences with "philosophers" we encounter, from which we can build an idea of the true Form philosopher :p
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      Except this fellow hasn't even left the cave, he's yelling at the shadow of a shadow of a philosopher.
- argv_empty 14y ago
  Ok. When I imagine a "trained philosopher," I see someone who has spent a lot of time on studying others ideas, proposing their own ideas and challenging/defending these ideas. Should I imagine what you imagine instead?
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    No, you don't have you. But for me, "training" is an activity that makes you good at a narrow and specialized work. "Education" makes you able to work within the boundaries of all knowledge in the area. But philosopher is got to break these boundaries so I don't have a word for that.
ajb 14y ago
Notably absent from this guy's syllabus is anything concerning ethics, morality, values, or right and wrong. In all the fields he cites - even, to a large extent, psychology - values are exogenous.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > Notably absent from this guy's syllabus is anything concerning ethics, morality, values, or right and wrong. That's because all morality is relative, one of the few things philosophy got right. The universe is morally neutral, which means that, to the degree that we fully grasp reality, to the same degree we discover that morality is a human invention, malleable across time and place. Not to discount notions of morality, only to say that nature doesn't care what our thoughts are on the subject.
  - unalone 14y ago
    Right – which is why philosophy is more than just "the study of nature", and why in fact it's important that philosophy continues to examine questions like "if morality is relative, then is there a practical or even a deeper argument for morality's purpose that doesn't revolve around divine judgment?" Nothing's more frustrating than people who take a very shallow summary of a very fascinating philosophical inquiry and using it to argue that entire swathes of philosophy are irrelevant as a result. The whole "moral relativism" thing was never as cut-and-dried as most Internet Moral Relativists think it is; it's an intricate discussion that deserves prolonged consideration, not a pithy "watch me prove you wrong!" zinger in an Ayn Rand novel.
    - lutusp 14y ago
      Yes, but my reply was to a post which argued that morality was being given too little weight. On the contrary -- too much weight, if anything, to the degree that some misguided souls are able to picture philosophy as a secular replacement for religion.
      - unalone 14y ago
stiff 14y ago
I guess this might be stunning to some people, but even as early as before 1980 there existed people who did great science, and in some cases even great philosophy, and, oh horror, they did not always knew the Bayes theorem, decision theory or too much neuroaesthetics and they were not even very rational in their private lifes. Instead, they became completely immersed in their narrow, precisely-defined field of inquiry and had the completely irrational drive that is neccessary to persist the years of labour it often takes to repeatedly subject ones beliefs to the trials of experiment and revise them times and times again. This kind of insight is not possible if you study game theory on one day, and mathematical logic on the other, and this is even without touching on the huge amount of often conflicting assumptions that underly each of those distinct fields and the ignorance of which often leads people like philosophers to nonsense conclusions.
unalone 14y ago
The argument is absurd. Claiming that universities are "poisoning minds" by teaching Aristotle and Descartes in 101 Intro to Philosophy courses is just silly. Those same universities teach modern philosophy courses that deal with the intersection of science and philosophy – judging by my one or two philosophy friends, philosophers are much more interested in the practical discoveries of psychology, math, and science than practitioners in those fields are interested in the most challenging branches of philosophy, which is a damn shame. The reason Aristotle and Descartes are taught, the reason the roots of philosophical study are so important, is that philosophy at its highest is the process of directing inquiry at that which is not yet examined. Plato's Laws and Aristotle's Poetics mark some of the earliest attempts made by man to reason about the world simply through observation and lengthy reasoning. Descartes' work is even more breathtaking, in a sense, in that Descartes took the process of philosophers before him and developed a formalized explanation of how that process worked, then insisted that we could not fully understand the universe unless we applied this process to slowly revealing it. It was the birth of modern science, and it followed a profound philosophical insight. Philosophy is a conversation that goes back thousands of years. Modern philosophy is so fascinating that of course there's a temptation to skip right to it – in my personal studies, I bounce back and forth between contemporary writers and writers from other centuries and millennia, letting the former refine my understanding of the latter and the latter provide context for the former. But the process of philosophy's development is important to teach, not to mention a somewhat exhilarating story when told properly. Those contemporary articles the author scorns are proof that you can take two or three sentences from anything and make it sound much worse than it is. Yes, some of those subjects have been debated for years and years – that's a feature, not a bug. Philosophy's purpose is to search not for an answer to the surface questions (and when you're doing it right, everything becomes a surface question) but to dive deeper into questions of what lies beneath those questions, what assumptions we make when we use certain words or claim certain beliefs. We'll stop asking those questions when culture shifts enough that those questions cease making sense to ask – and if they do, it will be in large part because philosophy has helped reveal some unseen truths that led to a reorientation of society. Look, Hacker News loves this stuff because people here are largely surface-oriented people. We love practical results, we love making things that directly affect a population's lives. LessWrong is best known for its connection to Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bright guy who's interested in putting an end to forms of death. This article's written by somebody who works for a Singularity institution. Those are what a lot of us think of when we think of philosophy – attempting to answer questions as old as mankind by devising a technical "solution" to them. Like plugging leaks and whatnot. You have to understand that this isn't philosophy's sole purpose – in fact, this is a shallower purpose than philosophy's real one, which is to constantly search for deeper underlying truth. Philosophers should be aware of scientific developments, especially psychological ones, but only inasmuch as those developments completely invalidate a part of their studies, which isn't frequent. Philosophers aren't writing for the everyman; they're writing to continue a certain lofty ivory-tower discussion that slowly trickles down, through conceptual artists and writers and thinkers, to more practical-minded makers, down slowly towards people with more "mass-market" appeal, until what started as a very high-minded concept has shifted our way of thinking entirely. Now, is that the only place philosophers should exist? No! The more philosophers, the more philosophy-oriented practitioners in whatever field, the better. But the solution is not for philosophy to become more scientific, it's for science to turn more philosophical. Insist that scientists and programmers and psychologists study philosophy. Teach philosophy to business majors. Remind students that inquiry lies at the heart of all understanding, all breakthroughs, and that therefore it's useful for nearly anything you'll undertake in your life. But don't critique philosophy for its approach. That sort of pure inquiry is still necessary, it's more difficult than ever – the geniuses of the 20th century are far more frustrating than the geniuses of ancient Greece and Europe – and it's under attack from many fronts, ranging from the blatantly anti-intellectual to the more subtly-so like this one. The architect Christopher Alexander, who I greatly admire and whose work combines philosophical inquiry with practical reasoning with a fantastic mathematical rigor, makes the argument that what we typically think of as "practical" will never be enough to fully understand the nature of how the universe is organized. We can figure it out part by tiny part, but that's insufficient for thought or practice on any significant scale. He's a critic of our reliance on physics and constructing physical scientific models, not because they aren't the most cutting-edge way we know to study the universe – they are! no question about it! – but because they have their blind spots, just as every practice of inquiry throughout history has had its blind spots. For him, there is a practical intersection between math and philosophy, science and spirituality, that could be said to favor each side in a different way. But to emphasize one over any other simply because we value its "results" more would be just as disastrous as to favor the other instead. Each type of study is good at a very particular thing, and we should let it be good at that thing without insisting that it bow its head to the demands of the others. The result of his thinking, incidentally, is that he comes out criticizing modern philosophy as well, but for much sounder and more incisive reasons than lukeprog does in this article.
lutusp 14y ago
> We have experimental psychology now. Yes -- apparently a big improvement over philosophy, until you take a closer look: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/11/final-report-stapel-affair-point.html http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/11/final-repo... A quote: "The blame goes far beyond Diederik Stapel and the three Dutch universities where he worked as a social psychologist. In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."
marcuskaz 14y ago
it's spelled "perl"
- elehack 14y ago
  Umm, no, it isn't. He's talking about Judea Pearl, the developer of Bayesian networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judea_Pearl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judea_Pearl
  - marcuskaz 14y ago
    it was a joke. why so serious?
zackmorris 14y ago
Philosophy and I parted ways in college when it became apparent that my own opinion meant less than someone else's. I look at philosophy as it's taught now like an introductory art class, where you learn how to draw lines and circles and shade things. Once you have a certain repertoire, focussing purely on technique becomes a waste of time, sort of the antithesis of art. Modern philosophy is touching things up in photoshop and calling it art. I wish that philosophy was more about existentialism. Exploring what all of this really means and how it fits into your life. I've already diminished my argument by focussing on one narrow segment of philosophy. Then again, if philosophy is so fragile that any talk of improving it is met with hostility, maybe it's not all it's cracked up to be. And "modern" sciences like mathematics and probability don't have much to do with philosophy in my book.
- cthaley 14y ago
  Yes, this is quite an interesting feature of philosophy, and I would say, an interesting feature of the world: that some opinions are more valuable than others. Nietzsche's argument against the existence of God has become a common argument against any and all truth. Zarathustra tells his disciples: "If there were gods, how could I stand not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods." Therefore do not study philosophy.
br1anberg 14y ago
this is worse than that ayn rand post a while back
- dbaupp 14y ago
  In what way? (Genuine question.)
ElCongelador 14y ago
So the author argues for some kind of long in the tooth peculiar positivism? Had he studied just some 20th century philosophy and its problems (from positivism to analytic philosophy to post-analytic), he wouldn't make such tiresome arguments.
- KarmaKaiser 14y ago
  The thing I find odd is that I've followed Luke for some years and he's remarkably well read on these topics and assuredly know of the complications with this stance. I find his Scientific Narrative argument (Science has solved other problems, why should X be the last to fall?) problematic but he seems to lean heavily on it.
gadders 14y ago
The modern mis-use of the term philosopher is annoying. A philosopher isn't a philosophy professor. A philosopher is someone who lives by and espouses there own belief system.
nachteilig 14y ago
Tying philosophy to usefulness in STEM disciplines is a terrible idea. Reading Kant doesn't "too much respect for failed philosophical methods"--if you read him properly it helps teach solid thinking that might even lead you to reject some of what he says.
sharkbot 14y ago
I see a lot of criticism that lukeprog is "shallow" or "surface-oriented" on the topic of philosophy. While I don't believe he has formal training, the guy had a long-running blog and podcast covering a number of philosophical topics, including interviews with professional philosophers: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=1911 http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=1911 I think lukeprog has done much to provide himself with an unbiased philosophical education.
cthaley 14y ago
Poor Plato, it seems the only sin of which he is accused, and for which he is pilloried, is that of having lived a long time ago. But for all of the comments, I can find no arguments against any thesis in Plato. And this is noteworthy. Not just because it indicates that Plato is here just a straw man and that few (if any) of his assailants here have read him, and so of course, have no grounds to criticize. But more importantly, because, Plato does not have some set of theses which even could be toppled or made irrelevant. Plato does not work like that. Philosophy does not (usually) work like that. Plato does not promulgate, he investigates. He is still taught not so much because his answers are still relevant, but because his questions are. The original article implicitly acknowledges this point when the author guesses that philosophers trained in "modern" disciplines might "get farther" than Plato on the big questions—to which one might reply: and how shall they know the big questions? Someone here pointed out that this wholesale dismissal of philosophy is a category mistake (a welcome reference to Aristotle), and I agree. If you will forgive my speaking too broadly, the difficulty many non-philosophers seem to have with philosophy is simply that they do not know what it is—and more importantly, that they have never done it. I do not fault them for this (and I'll readily admit that our academies are very much at fault here, as the professionalization of philosophy has done no favors for philosophers or non-philosophers) but one ought to have, if not enough humility, at least enough love for truth to motivate silence, study, or wonder in the face of the unknown—not slander. Philosophy (and especially Plato's philosophy) is not the sort of thing for which one uses a textbook. If you recall the Phaedrus (and if you don't recall the Phaedrus, you probably should not be commenting on philosophy) you'll remember that Plato has an argument against books. He worries that books will codify doxa in such a way as to stifle inquiry—a worry that was clearly warranted, as evidenced by this thread. Thus he preferred dialogues to dissertations, and precisely because the individual appropriation of knowledge, and the harmonizing of the person with reality, is what really counts—not knowing (or believing) a bunch of stuff. It is important to remember that Plato, even when making myths, is imminently and always practical. Those who advocate that contemporary science is better equipped than philosophy to answer the big questions, because science "examines reality, etc." fail to recognize that "reality" itself is big question. In my own experience, I have often found it amusing how quickly some "scientists" dismiss philosophy, while I've met very few philosophers who would do the same for science. It is fine if one wants to ignore philosophy, but it is hubris to dismiss it simply because it does not do what one wants it to do.

83 points by pizu 14y ago

This sounds a lot like another Scientism dispute, i.e. if all questions of human life can be empirically answered or that there are things beyond testability. It is an exhausting discussion, that goes way deeper than a few snaky comments on contemporary philosophy papers. There is actually a quite good summary on Wikipedia on the conflict: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

mej10 14y ago
It sounds to me more like "Let's stop funding some parts of philosophy that aren't really tied to reality, when there are real philosophical problems with practical consequences that we need people working on". * Edit: Made my interpretation a little less inflammatory.
- unalone 14y ago
  The web site's not loading for me, so unfortunately I can't read the article yet, but your summary sounds worryingly wrongminded to me. Philosophy should not necessarily be a practical endeavor – it concerns itself with being, life, and existence on their most abstract and difficult levels. There is a place for functional philosophy, and plenty of places where modern scientific discoveries can aid a line of philosophical inquiry, but suggesting we scrap Plato and Kant for "practical" thinkers is a dangerous way of thinking. I don't want to comment more until the article loads for me, but there's a place for practical consequence and it's elsewhere.
  - mej10 14y ago
    The example abstracts cited in the article are particularly worrying to me. I would be interested in seeing if someone can explain why those papers are problems that smart people should be working on. To a very pro-science layperson they seem especially absurd.
    - unalone 14y ago
      Well, consider that the very point of philosophy is to approach a seemingly simple question or subject – say, "What should laws be like?" – and then probe deeper and deeper into that question, searching for irregularities that might reveal hidden facets to that question that we don't consider, either due to our own assumptions, social norms, or even in the way the question is phrased. That's what philosophy does really well and really rigorously – and it's why its greatest works are so notoriously frustrating; imagine 800 pages on what it means "to be" that expounds on things like "because we all die in time, time is an essential part of man's being" at extraordinary length. Obviously, that summary I gave is an exaggerated parody – and that's the problem with judging a philosophical paper based on its abstract. "Is there a contradiction with atheists liking Bach?" is a simple question that might reveal very interesting insights at length. Remember that this isn't a magazine article, in which such a question will be insipid and asked only to provoke controversy and sales – in all likeliness, that question is asked to provoke further questions, further examination, that might lead to something truly provocative. But I can't know for sure, because I only have the abstract – and that's all this guy has either, and he knows that's all he has, which means this article is either self-promotion on the author's part, or it's proof that the author doesn't understand philosophy to a worrying extent. Probably a combination of the two. I see a parallel between this discussion and the science vs. religion debates that frustrate reasonable people on either side. You can't enter a debate with another field by starting with the assumption that your side has all the answers, and should therefore be the absolute center of the discussion. You have to be able to acknowledge what the other side is good for, what they can do that you're incapable of, before you start to make any kind of meaningful critique. It's wrong to attack science without acknowledging what science is good at, it's wrong to attack religion without some understanding of what lies at the heart of religious practice, and it's wrong to attack philosophy for its pursuit of deep abstraction when that's precisely what makes philosophy so valuable. Going after philosophy because it generates stupid abstracts is like going after science because it promotes nihilism: when you make that argument, you admit to knowing so little about the field you're attacking that essentially your critiques are invalid by default.
  - jopt 14y ago
    Why? Is this how philosophy is or how it ought to be?
    - fmoralesc 14y ago
      Two different and separate questions people always lump together.
    - unalone 14y ago
      It's how philosophy began and it's how philosophy is in its purest state, which is much different from saying it's the only way for philosophy to be. Generally, I think philosophy is like mathematics in that while its purest application is very obscure and very hard to understand without a whole lot of effort, that pure application results in practical breaththroughs on almost every level of "practical" research. I wish that pure philosophy was taught to more people, just as I wish that we taught kids more than the boring "practical" math that convinces them math sucks and patterns are boring. It's a pursuit that benefits nearly everybody who learns from it: reshapes our mind, teaches us new ways to observe the world. And if we had scientists, psychologists, programmers, and politicians learning philosophy, then there'd be less pressure on the actual philosophers to start studying something practical. For me that's the change that should be made: not more practical philosophy, but more philosophical practice.
      - edanm 14y ago
        So this is a great place for me to be educated: what practical applications has philosophy yielded? Btw, I've read your comments on this thread, and it seems like you're very knowledgeable about the field of philosophy, but not particularly knowledgeable about LessWrong. I'm only slightly knowledgeable about philosophy, but I highly recommend you read more of LessWrong - it's an amazing resource of knowledge and of philosophical discussions (albeit with a more practical-minded bent most of the time). Lukeprog, the author of the above post, is a very respected member of that community as far as I know, and I honestly think you are underestimating him.
        memla 14y ago
  - mylittlepony 14y ago
    Philosophy sounds to me a lot like art. They do it mostly for themselves. We can consume it, but it's not really useful.
    - unalone 14y ago
      (cough.) Um, you're talking to an artist whose academic field of study specifically concerns why art, practically speaking, is vital to the well-being of a society. But judging from your username, Mr. Pony, I feel that you assume "art" refers to something different than what I do. The most valuable art is that which provokes a response: art is those creative acts which provoke creative acts in response. Similarly, the best philosophy is that which provokes responses from people who encounter it. That's one of the reasons why the "philosophy should be practical" argument is weird. Philosophy is practical, but its practical outcomes are philosophical in nature: that is, it drives people to consider aspects of life and existence that they wouldn't consider otherwise. Saying philosophy should be scientifically practical is like saying that science should help people find a closer connection with Jesus Christ: science does indeed drive some people to deep religious faith, but science that's only designed to make people think Jesus was an alright dude isn't science so much as it's religious propaganda posing as science. That's what this argument is: scientific propaganda pretending to be philosophy. The thing is, I love science! I really do! Science is amazing! But so is philosophy – so much so that personally I like it much more than I like science. Which is why I'd rather see philosophy stay philosophy, you know? (Incidentally, if you're interested in talking art, please do email me – I enjoy talking about my work, particularly with people skeptical about whether art's practical. :D)
      - mylittlepony 14y ago
        You shouldn't make assumptions based on usernames, at least not in HN, where we value anonymity and privacy. A life without art would be quite empty indeed, everyone does art and consume art in some way or another, and in the same way everyone does philosophy (eg: thinking about the existence, the meaning of life, etc) at some point, we can't really avoid it. But I don't see the point in having people dedicating their lives to philosophy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is hardly any progress. In school I learned that every philosopher, to understand other philosophers, must walk the same path they walked, and every philosopher creates its own path from zero. So what's the point? There is never any progress, other than what they can grab from science. I think it was Aristotheles who decided planets where perfect spheres, because that made more sense. I know, at that time there was little to no science, and everything was mixed up. But I see philosophers are still doing that. The other day I saw a video about determinism by a philosophy professor in a university. The guy didn't fully understand quantum mechanics, he just overheard everything was random at that level, and made stupid conclusions. That's the image I have about philosophy.
- naveensundar 14y ago
  Who will decide what has practical consequences?
  - mej10 14y ago
    There are many open problems in ethics and metaethics (i.e. what is right and wrong, is that even a thing, etc) that seem (to me) to have pretty clear practical consequences. I think many of the problems could be phrased in a way to convince most people (that think about this kind of thing) as well.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  I've found that the little bits of bullshit philosophy I've accrued over the years find second lives as ideals with practical consequences. By the time you reach Hegel it's all getting a bit silly; and there's a lot of early philosophy that can be dumped because we can directly interrogate reality on things that previous philosophers cannot. It's like raging about maths or fundamental science. Turing's paper is a work which must be so far outside the ordinary fellow's experience as to be nearly an insult. It also invented the modern computer as a side-effect.
- anonymouz 14y ago
  Other classic (and similarly short-sighted) ideas along those lines would be: "Stop (all) basic research while there's still applied science to be done." "We shouldn't be spending money on space exploration while there are still people that are starving/homeless/poor." "Why are people working on a cure for <<insert non-terminal disease>>, when we still don't have a cure for cancer?"
  - mej10 14y ago
    I am really curious: did you read the example abstracts in the post? If so, can you help me understand why things like that should be funded?
    - unalone 14y ago
      If you opened any scientific journal, picked only the articles that seemed the least "relevant" to the mainstream, and quoted their abstracts without delving into the interesting, by which I mean actual, parts of their research, you could probably make scientific study seem stuffy, over-intellectual, and completely unworthy of serious study. Hell, look at the critics of scientific education who say things like "Why does my kid need to study fruit flies? What if I want my kid to study humanity instead?" You'd respond that not only does that argument miss the value of studying fruit flies, but it misses the deeper reason why we study science at all.
    - afarrell 14y ago
      I would imagine that the article about how atheists experience and connect with religion-inspired works would be relevant to someone trying to design a marketing strategy for a movie based on the Christian musical Les Miserables.
jacques_chester 14y ago
I first came across it in Hayek. I'm still thinking it through myself (as you'll see from my self-linking below). My sympathies like with positivism, but I feel that it too has limits. To me the question is not merely which is correct? It's: which should we subscribe to according to what situation? So for example, I consider that for the systems we manage and face as professionals, we should be Newtonian-Cartesian positivists[1]. We strive to achieve a state of total understanding and predictability. It's a lie, of course[2]. But a useful lie. It creates incentives that accepting an incomprehensible universe do not create. Whereas for some situations, accepting that while it may be in principle deterministic for in practice unpredictable (chaotic) is an important step[3]. [1] http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/ http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/ [2] http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reigning-in-chaos/ http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign... , especially the comments. [3] http://chester.id.au/2012/12/07/review-the-essence-of-hayek-1/ http://chester.id.au/2012/12/07/review-the-essence-of-hayek-...

guard-of-terra 14y ago

Why "train" philosophers? When I imagine a "trained philosopher" I see a person who uses a lot of smart-sounding quotes but cannot choose between the right saying and the wrong saying. It's all the same to him, a material that he absorbed and now outputs. Challenge philosophers. Confront them. Let them take on each other.

jacques_chester 14y ago
So, you imagine what a philosopher does, and then tell this imaginary philosopher what to do? Doesn't that strike you as awful presumptuous?
- EliRivers 14y ago
  Well, we have to imagine philosopher; the philosopher Form can only be known to us through our experiences with "philosophers" we encounter, from which we can build an idea of the true Form philosopher :p
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    Except this fellow hasn't even left the cave, he's yelling at the shadow of a shadow of a philosopher.
argv_empty 14y ago
Ok. When I imagine a "trained philosopher," I see someone who has spent a lot of time on studying others ideas, proposing their own ideas and challenging/defending these ideas. Should I imagine what you imagine instead?
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  No, you don't have you. But for me, "training" is an activity that makes you good at a narrow and specialized work. "Education" makes you able to work within the boundaries of all knowledge in the area. But philosopher is got to break these boundaries so I don't have a word for that.

ajb 14y ago

Notably absent from this guy's syllabus is anything concerning ethics, morality, values, or right and wrong. In all the fields he cites - even, to a large extent, psychology - values are exogenous.

lutusp 14y ago
> Notably absent from this guy's syllabus is anything concerning ethics, morality, values, or right and wrong. That's because all morality is relative, one of the few things philosophy got right. The universe is morally neutral, which means that, to the degree that we fully grasp reality, to the same degree we discover that morality is a human invention, malleable across time and place. Not to discount notions of morality, only to say that nature doesn't care what our thoughts are on the subject.
- unalone 14y ago
  Right – which is why philosophy is more than just "the study of nature", and why in fact it's important that philosophy continues to examine questions like "if morality is relative, then is there a practical or even a deeper argument for morality's purpose that doesn't revolve around divine judgment?" Nothing's more frustrating than people who take a very shallow summary of a very fascinating philosophical inquiry and using it to argue that entire swathes of philosophy are irrelevant as a result. The whole "moral relativism" thing was never as cut-and-dried as most Internet Moral Relativists think it is; it's an intricate discussion that deserves prolonged consideration, not a pithy "watch me prove you wrong!" zinger in an Ayn Rand novel.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    Yes, but my reply was to a post which argued that morality was being given too little weight. On the contrary -- too much weight, if anything, to the degree that some misguided souls are able to picture philosophy as a secular replacement for religion.
    - unalone 14y ago

stiff 14y ago

I guess this might be stunning to some people, but even as early as before 1980 there existed people who did great science, and in some cases even great philosophy, and, oh horror, they did not always knew the Bayes theorem, decision theory or too much neuroaesthetics and they were not even very rational in their private lifes. Instead, they became completely immersed in their narrow, precisely-defined field of inquiry and had the completely irrational drive that is neccessary to persist the years of labour it often takes to repeatedly subject ones beliefs to the trials of experiment and revise them times and times again. This kind of insight is not possible if you study game theory on one day, and mathematical logic on the other, and this is even without touching on the huge amount of often conflicting assumptions that underly each of those distinct fields and the ignorance of which often leads people like philosophers to nonsense conclusions.

unalone 14y ago

The argument is absurd. Claiming that universities are "poisoning minds" by teaching Aristotle and Descartes in 101 Intro to Philosophy courses is just silly. Those same universities teach modern philosophy courses that deal with the intersection of science and philosophy – judging by my one or two philosophy friends, philosophers are much more interested in the practical discoveries of psychology, math, and science than practitioners in those fields are interested in the most challenging branches of philosophy, which is a damn shame. The reason Aristotle and Descartes are taught, the reason the roots of philosophical study are so important, is that philosophy at its highest is the process of directing inquiry at that which is not yet examined. Plato's Laws and Aristotle's Poetics mark some of the earliest attempts made by man to reason about the world simply through observation and lengthy reasoning. Descartes' work is even more breathtaking, in a sense, in that Descartes took the process of philosophers before him and developed a formalized explanation of how that process worked, then insisted that we could not fully understand the universe unless we applied this process to slowly revealing it. It was the birth of modern science, and it followed a profound philosophical insight. Philosophy is a conversation that goes back thousands of years. Modern philosophy is so fascinating that of course there's a temptation to skip right to it – in my personal studies, I bounce back and forth between contemporary writers and writers from other centuries and millennia, letting the former refine my understanding of the latter and the latter provide context for the former. But the process of philosophy's development is important to teach, not to mention a somewhat exhilarating story when told properly. Those contemporary articles the author scorns are proof that you can take two or three sentences from anything and make it sound much worse than it is. Yes, some of those subjects have been debated for years and years – that's a feature, not a bug. Philosophy's purpose is to search not for an answer to the surface questions (and when you're doing it right, everything becomes a surface question) but to dive deeper into questions of what lies beneath those questions, what assumptions we make when we use certain words or claim certain beliefs. We'll stop asking those questions when culture shifts enough that those questions cease making sense to ask – and if they do, it will be in large part because philosophy has helped reveal some unseen truths that led to a reorientation of society. Look, Hacker News loves this stuff because people here are largely surface-oriented people. We love practical results, we love making things that directly affect a population's lives. LessWrong is best known for its connection to Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bright guy who's interested in putting an end to forms of death. This article's written by somebody who works for a Singularity institution. Those are what a lot of us think of when we think of philosophy – attempting to answer questions as old as mankind by devising a technical "solution" to them. Like plugging leaks and whatnot. You have to understand that this isn't philosophy's sole purpose – in fact, this is a shallower purpose than philosophy's real one, which is to constantly search for deeper underlying truth. Philosophers should be aware of scientific developments, especially psychological ones, but only inasmuch as those developments completely invalidate a part of their studies, which isn't frequent. Philosophers aren't writing for the everyman; they're writing to continue a certain lofty ivory-tower discussion that slowly trickles down, through conceptual artists and writers and thinkers, to more practical-minded makers, down slowly towards people with more "mass-market" appeal, until what started as a very high-minded concept has shifted our way of thinking entirely. Now, is that the only place philosophers should exist? No! The more philosophers, the more philosophy-oriented practitioners in whatever field, the better. But the solution is not for philosophy to become more scientific, it's for science to turn more philosophical. Insist that scientists and programmers and psychologists study philosophy. Teach philosophy to business majors. Remind students that inquiry lies at the heart of all understanding, all breakthroughs, and that therefore it's useful for nearly anything you'll undertake in your life. But don't critique philosophy for its approach. That sort of pure inquiry is still necessary, it's more difficult than ever – the geniuses of the 20th century are far more frustrating than the geniuses of ancient Greece and Europe – and it's under attack from many fronts, ranging from the blatantly anti-intellectual to the more subtly-so like this one. The architect Christopher Alexander, who I greatly admire and whose work combines philosophical inquiry with practical reasoning with a fantastic mathematical rigor, makes the argument that what we typically think of as "practical" will never be enough to fully understand the nature of how the universe is organized. We can figure it out part by tiny part, but that's insufficient for thought or practice on any significant scale. He's a critic of our reliance on physics and constructing physical scientific models, not because they aren't the most cutting-edge way we know to study the universe – they are! no question about it! – but because they have their blind spots, just as every practice of inquiry throughout history has had its blind spots. For him, there is a practical intersection between math and philosophy, science and spirituality, that could be said to favor each side in a different way. But to emphasize one over any other simply because we value its "results" more would be just as disastrous as to favor the other instead. Each type of study is good at a very particular thing, and we should let it be good at that thing without insisting that it bow its head to the demands of the others. The result of his thinking, incidentally, is that he comes out criticizing modern philosophy as well, but for much sounder and more incisive reasons than lukeprog does in this article.

lutusp 14y ago

> We have experimental psychology now. Yes -- apparently a big improvement over philosophy, until you take a closer look: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/11/final-report-stapel-affair-point.html http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/11/final-repo... A quote: "The blame goes far beyond Diederik Stapel and the three Dutch universities where he worked as a social psychologist. In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."

marcuskaz 14y ago

it's spelled "perl"

elehack 14y ago
Umm, no, it isn't. He's talking about Judea Pearl, the developer of Bayesian networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judea_Pearl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judea_Pearl
- marcuskaz 14y ago
  it was a joke. why so serious?

zackmorris 14y ago

Philosophy and I parted ways in college when it became apparent that my own opinion meant less than someone else's. I look at philosophy as it's taught now like an introductory art class, where you learn how to draw lines and circles and shade things. Once you have a certain repertoire, focussing purely on technique becomes a waste of time, sort of the antithesis of art. Modern philosophy is touching things up in photoshop and calling it art. I wish that philosophy was more about existentialism. Exploring what all of this really means and how it fits into your life. I've already diminished my argument by focussing on one narrow segment of philosophy. Then again, if philosophy is so fragile that any talk of improving it is met with hostility, maybe it's not all it's cracked up to be. And "modern" sciences like mathematics and probability don't have much to do with philosophy in my book.

cthaley 14y ago
Yes, this is quite an interesting feature of philosophy, and I would say, an interesting feature of the world: that some opinions are more valuable than others. Nietzsche's argument against the existence of God has become a common argument against any and all truth. Zarathustra tells his disciples: "If there were gods, how could I stand not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods." Therefore do not study philosophy.

br1anberg 14y ago

this is worse than that ayn rand post a while back

dbaupp 14y ago
In what way? (Genuine question.)

ElCongelador 14y ago

So the author argues for some kind of long in the tooth peculiar positivism? Had he studied just some 20th century philosophy and its problems (from positivism to analytic philosophy to post-analytic), he wouldn't make such tiresome arguments.

KarmaKaiser 14y ago
The thing I find odd is that I've followed Luke for some years and he's remarkably well read on these topics and assuredly know of the complications with this stance. I find his Scientific Narrative argument (Science has solved other problems, why should X be the last to fall?) problematic but he seems to lean heavily on it.

gadders 14y ago

The modern mis-use of the term philosopher is annoying. A philosopher isn't a philosophy professor. A philosopher is someone who lives by and espouses there own belief system.

nachteilig 14y ago

Tying philosophy to usefulness in STEM disciplines is a terrible idea. Reading Kant doesn't "too much respect for failed philosophical methods"--if you read him properly it helps teach solid thinking that might even lead you to reject some of what he says.

sharkbot 14y ago

I see a lot of criticism that lukeprog is "shallow" or "surface-oriented" on the topic of philosophy. While I don't believe he has formal training, the guy had a long-running blog and podcast covering a number of philosophical topics, including interviews with professional philosophers: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=1911 http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=1911 I think lukeprog has done much to provide himself with an unbiased philosophical education.

cthaley 14y ago

Poor Plato, it seems the only sin of which he is accused, and for which he is pilloried, is that of having lived a long time ago. But for all of the comments, I can find no arguments against any thesis in Plato. And this is noteworthy. Not just because it indicates that Plato is here just a straw man and that few (if any) of his assailants here have read him, and so of course, have no grounds to criticize. But more importantly, because, Plato does not have some set of theses which even could be toppled or made irrelevant. Plato does not work like that. Philosophy does not (usually) work like that. Plato does not promulgate, he investigates. He is still taught not so much because his answers are still relevant, but because his questions are. The original article implicitly acknowledges this point when the author guesses that philosophers trained in "modern" disciplines might "get farther" than Plato on the big questions—to which one might reply: and how shall they know the big questions? Someone here pointed out that this wholesale dismissal of philosophy is a category mistake (a welcome reference to Aristotle), and I agree. If you will forgive my speaking too broadly, the difficulty many non-philosophers seem to have with philosophy is simply that they do not know what it is—and more importantly, that they have never done it. I do not fault them for this (and I'll readily admit that our academies are very much at fault here, as the professionalization of philosophy has done no favors for philosophers or non-philosophers) but one ought to have, if not enough humility, at least enough love for truth to motivate silence, study, or wonder in the face of the unknown—not slander. Philosophy (and especially Plato's philosophy) is not the sort of thing for which one uses a textbook. If you recall the Phaedrus (and if you don't recall the Phaedrus, you probably should not be commenting on philosophy) you'll remember that Plato has an argument against books. He worries that books will codify doxa in such a way as to stifle inquiry—a worry that was clearly warranted, as evidenced by this thread. Thus he preferred dialogues to dissertations, and precisely because the individual appropriation of knowledge, and the harmonizing of the person with reality, is what really counts—not knowing (or believing) a bunch of stuff. It is important to remember that Plato, even when making myths, is imminently and always practical. Those who advocate that contemporary science is better equipped than philosophy to answer the big questions, because science "examines reality, etc." fail to recognize that "reality" itself is big question. In my own experience, I have often found it amusing how quickly some "scientists" dismiss philosophy, while I've met very few philosophers who would do the same for science. It is fine if one wants to ignore philosophy, but it is hubris to dismiss it simply because it does not do what one wants it to do.