7 ms·

Rarely Asked Questions

69 points by vishal0123 13y ago

brvs 13y ago
Oh my god are developers pompous. So, the problem with Hegel is that he didn't study LISP and startups enough to understand his own thought. If only he were alive to ask for Paul Graham's help! OK my turn! I'm going to post on a social sciences website that Paul Graham doesn't really understand LISP because he hasn't studied... uh, Slavoj Zizek enough.
- ColinWright 13y ago
  Rather than writing snarky criticisms, it would be of value if you could write something constructive. It sounds like you disagree, and possibly have an alternate point of view. Perhaps you could write a well-structured, well-argued, coherent piece, and then post it here so we can learn from it. Brendan Behan once said "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." Perhaps you could be less of a critic, and contribute more. FWIW, I didn't downvote you, so I'm not the only one who feels your "contribution" is not particularly helpful.
  - brvs 13y ago
    Did you read what I'm criticizing? You mustn't have if you're saying I'm "unable to do it myself". How is this quote any more coherent or well-structured or less snarky than my comment was? "Books on philosophy per se are either highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand (e.g. Hegel). It can be interesting to study ancient philosophy, but more as a kind of accident report than to teach you anything useful." Did you mean to post your comment in response to Paul Graham instead?
    - ColinWright 13y ago
      Yes, I read what you are being snarky about. It seems to me that what you have done is said "What a load of crap" without actually adding any value. What you haven't done is provide a clear, well-thought out contrary point of view. I would be interested in reading an incisive, constructive reply, but if all you're going to do is criticize without being informative or constructive, then I guess you really are somewhat like a eunuch in a harem. So here, PG wrote this (and you quoted it): "Books on philosophy per se are either highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand (e.g. Hegel). It can be interesting to study ancient philosophy, but more as a kind of accident report than to teach you anything useful." So he's saying that the study of philosophy doesn't really teach you anything useful, and he says broadly why. You seem to take exception to this, but you don't say why. You don't say what it is that developers, or others, can gain from studying philosophy. You don't provide a counter-argument, or any kind of alternative viewpoint. You simply declare him to be pompous. That seems unconstructive to me. So returning to your comment: Did you read what I'm criticizing? Yes, I did. You mustn't have if you're saying I'm "unable to do it myself". That's an odd deduction, and I don't see how you came to the conclusion. You have provided zero evidence of anything except the fact of your disagreement. I would like to see a well-constructed counter-argument. How is this quote any more coherent or well-structured or less snarky than my comment was? Perhaps it isn't, but it was in the context of the preceeding paragraph which asked for a more complete reply, rather than a snarky dismissal. Will you offer one? I am genuinely interested to see the alternate point of view explained clearly and well.
      - brvs 13y ago
        Sorry, never mind, he's perfectly right. Philosophy has been a waste of time since Socrates and it's provided nothing of value that you can't learn from functional programming and/or starting a business in Silicon valley. Let me sincerely apologize for wasting your time. edit: I'll begin breaking the bad news to my nearest college's philosophy department ASAP.
        ColinWright 13y ago
    - mattmanser 13y ago
      It's worth reading pg's reasons for saying this here: http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html Without that you're not going to understand why he wrote that paragraph and you'll also hopefully see that he's got meat behind his reasoning and that this is an offhand comment referring back to that essay. As someone who also studied philosophy and now can look back, I think he got it right. It also makes this entire thread moot.
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- Svip 13y ago
  Well, well, I sure am disappointed he fails to include Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in his list of history books. /me polishes monocle.
- Tichy 13y ago
  Well usually philosophers just don't use logic properly, which really sticks out if you are trained in logic. So it might not be a coincidence if LISPers are not that impressed by philosophy.
- nawitus 13y ago
  The author appears to think philosophy = ancient philosophy. There's lots of great and insightful modern philosophy. I recommend Nick Bostrom, Marcus Hutter and even that one paper from Scott Aaronson (if one is interested in comp-sci related philosophy).
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    I would even say if you simply consider it as literally "love of wisdom", you would be hard pressed to find anything that's remotely decent and skillfull which doesn't also contain philosophy.
- rdouble 13y ago
  I believe pg was a philosophy major as undergrad so he's speaking from experience. As a philosophy major myself I have to agree - I can't think of any philosophy books I'd recommend, either. Wittgenstein himself encouraged his students to abandon the field.
- jkbyc 13y ago
  Hegel contradicts himself already on the first two or three pages of System der Philosophie 1 while trying to make an impression it all makes sense. I really doubt he knew well what he was talking about. If he was a student I'd send him to study calculus, linear algebra, and mathematical logic with all the proofs and then let him rewrite his work after he learns how to express himself in a clear and concise manner.
- thomasfromcdnjs 13y ago
  Don't worry, you are not alone, I agree 100% Entertaining nonetheless!
- rdl 13y ago
  (Somewhat tangential) Is Slavoj Zizek a "real philosopher", or a troll? I found him through a reference to qanda someone had posted here, and I'm pretty sure it's a troll.
  - rdouble 13y ago
    He does have a PhD in Philosophy from a university in Slovenia. However, he's generally lumped in with the post-*-ist critical theory crowd. When he does his inexplicably popular academic guest lectures he's sponsored by the cultural studies department, not the philosophy department (unless it's a philosophy department with a non-analytical bent, like the New School). He is definitely a troll, though. That's kind of his thing. I think he would even agree with that label. http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/03/why-we-slober-over-slavoj-žižek-or-how-to-be-incomprehensible-and-relevant-at-the- http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/03/why-we-sl...
  - dsirijus 13y ago
    He has a talent for getting attention and seems to enjoy it. But to call him a troll would be a great disservice to his work. His ideas are very "flammable" though, so I can understand you seeing him as troll. Perhaps best approach to Žižek is through his film commentaries. Watch The Pervert's Guide To Cinema.
  - mbrock 13y ago
    http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=897&fulltext=1 http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=897&fulltext=1
  - dfc 13y ago
    I am not a philosopher but I used to spend a lot of time with the philosophy grad department. I am under the impression that "cultural critic" is a dead giveaway for not a "real philosopher."
- esamek 13y ago
  PG is being a little disingenuous to philosophy as a discipline. I hold a degree in Philosophy, but play an engineer in real life. These debates on the usefulness of philosophy are a waste of time. There is nothing that philosophy aims to teach other than critical thought and logical deduction. The books that he is telling people to shy away from don't have practical take-aways by themselves. Critical thought into how the subject matter relates to your own experiences and the critical thinking of others (other philosophers) is where the value in reading them lies. I can honestly say that I apply my philosophy degree EVERY SINGLE DAY at my job. I am a Lead UI/UX Engineer & Designer.
drinchev 13y ago
I like "RAQ" acronym. I've always hated "Nerd Stuff", "Technical Questions" and similar titles on pages that answer not so popular questions.
Helpful_Bunny 13y ago
I'm not going to insult one of the patrons of these pages, however, I do note: Paul is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993), ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1995), and Hackers & Painters (O'Reilly, 2004). He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. What I learned from trying to study philosophy is that the place to look is in other fields. If you understand math or history or aeronautical engineering very well, the most abstract of the things you know are what philosophy is supposed to be teaching. It depends what type of Philosophy you're studying. Formal Logic: I can see the argument that with a strong Mathematical background & CS, you've already learned (most) of the tricks (although, this largely misses the point that most of the great Mathematicians of the 20th C also dabbled in the Philosophy of Logic - famously Gödel etc). The other kind of Philosophy inhabits the same mental space as Art (ahhh, Florence!). This is a common issue with American Nationals, as American (and to some degree, British) philosophy is mired in Behaviorism, Philosophy of the Mind (which does make me cry a little inside when they don't keep up with neuroscience or even know anything about Complex Systems Theory) and other schools. Ethics and Morality? Reaching those Creative spaces of the Sublime and so forth? Aesthetics? All fields I assumed the author would be interested in, given his Artistic leanings, and all fields that Philosophy is very useful to read on. And, as a friendly note: I'm not sure aeronautical engineering can teach you much on that, barring of course: if you build it wrong, Death is certainly going to be the Horizon you hit.
- eshvk 13y ago
  > Philosophy of the Mind (which does make me cry a little inside when they don't keep up with neuroscience or even know anything about Complex Systems Theory) Can you explain more on this? I understand more neuroscience/complex systems than I do philosophy; back in school, I became skeptical of the meaningfulness of the research done in complex systems. I would be curious as to what you think it can contribute to philosophy.
  - Helpful_Bunny 13y ago
    I'm unsure of how technical to make this, or what your background is, however: Let's take a "classic" of Dennett's[1], against the "brain in a vat"[2]; from what you know about feedback loops or dynamical systems would the proposition of imagining a 'brain in a vat' ever make sense to you? (Note: it's not merely a Matrix style imagining, you have to prove it's not happening - you may well consider this a pointless experiment, of course). I suspect not. That is to say, if you learned about Complex Systems prior to reading the debate over 'brain in a vat', the entire argument would probably strike you as absurd (I may be projecting here, feel free to say otherwise). This is where I presume Paul is coming from: "Well obviously no, what a waste of time". However, proving it logically is precisely what a lot of Philosophers have spent time doing (as opposed to wiring the brain up, not something that was technically possible until very recently). There's value in the logic of it, and the thought, because it is such a common human misconception (that the mind / consciousness is separate to the body, or the world or the universe). Does that make sense? [1]http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.html http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.ht... [2]http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/#H5 http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/#H5
anonymous 13y ago
> Can you add macros to python Yes https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy
jobigoud 13y ago
One issue I've found with studying history piecewise like this (basically how history is taught in school…) is that you don't get a good global picture of an era. What was happening in China at the time of the Roman Empire ?
- prof_hobart 13y ago
  Is getting a good global picture a particularly high priority in most historical studies, particularly more ancient civilisations? There's little if any overlap between the two (unless you're thinking of things like the effect of steppe tribes moving from the east into Europe), so I'm not sure you'd get a better understanding of either Roman or Chinese history by treating them as a single story. If you are personally particularly interested in that, isn't the answer to simply read both a book about Rome and one about China from a similar time period?
stiff 13y ago
I think the problem with philosophy is that language and words only go this far and we humans get tired fast when just thinking hard inside our heads without any interaction with the external world and no real-world problem to solve. I believe it was the book "The Three Pillars of Zen" that illustrated this effect by comparing the posture of Rodins Thinker [1] with the posture of a meditator [2]. So not only do we run circles around our own concepts that are most likely grounded in the unconscious, but we also get very tired, irritated and depressed from it, that's at least my experience. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinker [2] http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/cob/img/buddha.jpg http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/cob/img/buddha.jpg
- spitx 13y ago
  Perhaps I haven't followed you to a T. What specific problems or arguments in philosophy are not easily illustratable, using plain language? I do understand that some thoughts and experiences of the human order may not be easily captured or made intelligible by language. I guess you could slot the experience of a color-blind person in that category. Especially in the past when testable apparatuses have not yet been developed to even diagnose that such a medical condition does indeed exist. However I fail to understand why most philosophical arguments cannot be made intelligible to laymen. René Descartes' "Brain In The Vat" argument is quite easily comprehendable. It is my opinion (and very often found to be true) that most obtuse arguments (philosophical or otherwise) are indeed "highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand." In fact I think PG is being charitable. I wonder if the "highly technical stuff" that doesn't lend itself to the peer review of more than a handful of scholars is even valid and credible in the first place. I know that I am going down the slippery slope of If-I-and-most-non-scholarly-people-of-above-average-intelligence-cannot-grasp-an-argument-then-it-must-be-patently-invalid-and-thus-hogwash. However at times I wonder if it is indeed possible that the scholarship of even a fraction of the world's most esteemed scholars (in various fields) actually has some validity and truth value associated with it. Since nearly all of it is produced in academia and thus only subjected to the scrutiny of academic peers. I wonder if it is just a nice formal product of a large volume of essentially meaningless cogitation that passed the consensus of equally unworthy peers. This has to be true especially in the more arcane disciplines where there is little oversight or cross-disciplinary activity. I'm sure there is a name for this phenomenon. Something on the lines of "legitimacy by consensus".
micheljansen 13y ago
For those interested in a broad account of history that does not try to explain what happened, but why things happen, I highly recommend Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel"[1]. It resonates well with the hacker's desire to understand what makes the world tick :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
jfdimark 13y ago
My favourite history book that I've recently read: Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography - amazing work of scope, depth and human understanding. I also studied philosophy as a degree and agree there are no really great introductions. I finished my degree somewhat disengaged with the subject and haven't pursued it seriously since. My favourite book though was John Rawls' A Theory of Justice.
Jd 13y ago
Riffs: <<Why don't more painters have hacking jobs?>> I think pg is right in highlighting age here. Generally speaking you need to get started young. Beyond this, there is a natural synchronicity in all "arts" when engaged at a high level, which is why the renaissance produced true "renaissance men." The trick is to start early but resist the all too common impulse to mediocrity in the context of specialization -- pg's association with elite institutions certainly helps here. <<What should I read to learn more about history?>> I find pg slightly misguided here. One of the world's best historians was my former advisor (Martin van Creveld), and his technique was to find a subject that he could fall in love with and immerse himself in it passionately for a year or two (ultimately however long it took him to write a book about that subject). I think a strong passion for a particular subject can make up for the otherwise dense and uninteresting material. Looking for books that make things "exciting" is a recipe for an understanding of history that is as piecemeal as one's own reading habits. <<Couldn't you add something equivalent to Lisp macros to languages like Perl or Python?>> Yes, of course. One could also quote the apocryphal McCarthy / Norwig story here. <<How can I avoid turning into a pointy-haired boss?>> Starts off generally correct and "startups" are certainly one solution to this problem, but I'm not sure they are the only solution. For instance, this basically assumes that your startup can exist as a flat organizational structure with only hyper-intelligent and interesting people. But what if, heaven forbid, you need to add a customer service division? The truth is that really smart people generally don't want to be middle managers in large firms. The work isn't that interesting, and the compensation is to a certain degree adjusted more highly to compensate people for walking around in suits and clucking their tongues all day. Rather than pointing finger with the negative stereotype ("pointy-haired boss"), I think it is more appropriate to think of these people as corporate trash men, compensated more highly because of a generally undesirable job (after all, managing Dilbert and Dogbert probably isn't a recipe for life long engagement). <<I'm about to become a teacher. How can I be a good one?>> Agree. Probably a lot that could be added here about how to engage personally with students, although this goes beyond mere "teaching" to "mentorship" <<Two startups want to hire me. Which should I choose?>> Perhaps strangely, I generally disagree with the principle that you should go with the startup that is more likely to succeed. I think you should find the subject that you are personally most passionate about and pursue it with all the passion you have. Since you give a sh*t (a rather rare things these days), you will naturally become very good at that particularly area. Only then find startups in your particular area of interest. They should all want to hire you. Then, of course, you will pick the one that matches your passion, which should be the one that is executing most successfully towards their stated goal. <<How can I become really good at Lisp programming?>> I'm not very good at Lisp... <<What philosophy books would you recommend?>> Very tricky topic and a bit "recursive," in that pg references "what philosophy is supposed to be teaching" without defining it -- this in itself obviously a "philosophical" question. Also, it's not at all clear from the response what pg has actually read. There are quite obviously a lot of genres of philosophy. Some of them, even if you consider them complete nonsense (like books of canon law derived from dogmatic theological principles), are extraordinarily useful to read if you care about understanding the progress of history, inclusive of why dogmatic patterns of thinking about particular subjects dominate at many period in time. That said, I think everyone should at the very least have a basic knowledge of the Socratic dialogues, which are an excellent process in stimulating the mind and evaluating one's own presuppositions -- the approach of the majority of people is anything but the "examined life," and the only process of moving beyond the basic assumptions of a particular age is to examine them in the light of reason. <<I want to start a startup, but I don't know how to program. How long will it take to learn?>> Generally agree with pg, but I think the plethora of online learning aids means that it is better to learn the fundamentals on your own or in a week long course (i.e. how to build your first rails app), then "apprentice" yourself at a very low wage until you grasp the fundamentals. Also, I don't think this is a question merely of "smarts" but of an engineering/builder disposition, which some people simply don't have. I don't think "answering phones" is going to help you get that disposition. This actually leads to a general critique of pg's "philosophy." Startups may be a very good solution to some problems, but are are certainly not a panacea for all problems. Ipso facto, it is important to more carefully define the problem scope and characteristics before defining the solution.
RivieraKid 13y ago
But it would be hard to do that without creating a notation for parse trees; and once you do, your language has become a skin on Lisp, in much the same way that in OS X, the Mac OS became a skin on Unix. TIL Julia is a skin on Lisp. It can be interesting to study ancient philosophy, but more as a kind of accident report than to teach you anything useful. Couldn't agree more, ancient philosophy (and most of contemporary philosophy) is a complete waste of time.
- KenoFischer 13y ago
  > TIL Julia is a skin on Lisp. It actually is more so than you might imagine. If you have julia installed try `julia --lisp` ;).
elorant 13y ago
Why don't more painters have hacking jobs? Most painters I know are Luddites. Especially well-established ones. They think that resisting technology gives them some kind of higher moral ground point of view. They believe that technology sucks people into an alternate reality where they lose contact with the real world and thus become insensitive to the problems of modern societies.
- spitx 13y ago
  I'd love to pick up a book that deals with this issue: why and when painters - and more generally artists - have come to adopt this anti-technological outlook. Was it a fear that the pervasiveness of technology would make their craft(s) obsolete? This sort of thinking is rife even within artistic circles. Artists whose medium is photography are like the ugly lepers of the visual art world. I find this anti-technological bent in modern Western cultural life particularly unsettling. Don't take what I'm saying to an extreme; I have nothing against consumable art in its many forms. However I think the cultural life of cities in the West - in its various forms (art, theatre, cinema, classical music, architecture) are ruled by cohorts who wholly constitute the anti-technological fringe. They live for abstraction and something about that makes them virulently anti-technological. Suggest a book or essay that addresses this issue in great depth.
  - mbrock 13y ago
    Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is about exactly this. Some random quotes: "The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start." “We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.” “This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.” “The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That’s impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barrier of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is – not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. When this transcendence occurs in such events as the first airplane flight across the ocean or the first footsteps on the moon, a kind of public recognition of the transcendent nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence should also occur at the individual level, on a personal basis, in one's own life, in a less dramatic way.”
joshuaellinger 13y ago
It is not exactly a history book but Guns, Germs, and Steel should be on the reading list. It starts at the dawn of modern humans and explains a lot about how the world is organized. It started with a simple question from a New Guinea native to an anthropologist of European descent: "Why do you guys have all the loot?" Hint -- it's not because of smarts.
brudgers 13y ago
<More Riffs on PG on Philosophy> Philosophy is wasted on the young. The great tragedy of Socrates death is that the democracy had a point. If it's any consolation, Socrates was not just a man, Socrates was old. Academic Philosophy is not as interesting as LISP. Don't hold that against them, for millennia philosophers have suffered ignorance of the lambda calculus. The current fascination with Brainfuck is but a passing paradigm. DSL's show Wittgenstein wrong about private languages. This would prove to Wittgenstein on his own terms that he had misused language and accidentally slipped into philosophy. C. S. Pierce was a working scientist. He shipped his side project. When the academics got ahold of it, we got psychology. The PHB is a side-effect. When philosophy gets back to basics and focuses on thinking clearly, a LISP will be part of the curriculum. Arc as a 100 year language is a dip-shit exit.
graue 13y ago
Regarding adding macros to Python, the new language Julia, which is fairly Python-like in appearance, has them: http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/ Like Lisp, Julia is completely homoiconic. Zach Allaun at Hacker School, formerly a Clojure guy, has been doing lots of cool stuff with its macros, like this one to make tail-call optimization available (not natively a feature of Julia): http://blog.zachallaun.com/post/jumping-julia http://blog.zachallaun.com/post/jumping-julia The infix syntax serves to make Julia macros a bit uglier and more complex than Lisp ones, but they still provide the same power. Edit: Here's a link to the Julia docs on metaprogramming: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/metaprogramming/ http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/metaprogramming/

69 points by vishal0123 13y ago

brvs 13y ago

Oh my god are developers pompous. So, the problem with Hegel is that he didn't study LISP and startups enough to understand his own thought. If only he were alive to ask for Paul Graham's help! OK my turn! I'm going to post on a social sciences website that Paul Graham doesn't really understand LISP because he hasn't studied... uh, Slavoj Zizek enough.

ColinWright 13y ago
Rather than writing snarky criticisms, it would be of value if you could write something constructive. It sounds like you disagree, and possibly have an alternate point of view. Perhaps you could write a well-structured, well-argued, coherent piece, and then post it here so we can learn from it. Brendan Behan once said "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." Perhaps you could be less of a critic, and contribute more. FWIW, I didn't downvote you, so I'm not the only one who feels your "contribution" is not particularly helpful.
- brvs 13y ago
  Did you read what I'm criticizing? You mustn't have if you're saying I'm "unable to do it myself". How is this quote any more coherent or well-structured or less snarky than my comment was? "Books on philosophy per se are either highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand (e.g. Hegel). It can be interesting to study ancient philosophy, but more as a kind of accident report than to teach you anything useful." Did you mean to post your comment in response to Paul Graham instead?
  - ColinWright 13y ago
    Yes, I read what you are being snarky about. It seems to me that what you have done is said "What a load of crap" without actually adding any value. What you haven't done is provide a clear, well-thought out contrary point of view. I would be interested in reading an incisive, constructive reply, but if all you're going to do is criticize without being informative or constructive, then I guess you really are somewhat like a eunuch in a harem. So here, PG wrote this (and you quoted it): "Books on philosophy per se are either highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand (e.g. Hegel). It can be interesting to study ancient philosophy, but more as a kind of accident report than to teach you anything useful." So he's saying that the study of philosophy doesn't really teach you anything useful, and he says broadly why. You seem to take exception to this, but you don't say why. You don't say what it is that developers, or others, can gain from studying philosophy. You don't provide a counter-argument, or any kind of alternative viewpoint. You simply declare him to be pompous. That seems unconstructive to me. So returning to your comment: Did you read what I'm criticizing? Yes, I did. You mustn't have if you're saying I'm "unable to do it myself". That's an odd deduction, and I don't see how you came to the conclusion. You have provided zero evidence of anything except the fact of your disagreement. I would like to see a well-constructed counter-argument. How is this quote any more coherent or well-structured or less snarky than my comment was? Perhaps it isn't, but it was in the context of the preceeding paragraph which asked for a more complete reply, rather than a snarky dismissal. Will you offer one? I am genuinely interested to see the alternate point of view explained clearly and well.
    - brvs 13y ago
      Sorry, never mind, he's perfectly right. Philosophy has been a waste of time since Socrates and it's provided nothing of value that you can't learn from functional programming and/or starting a business in Silicon valley. Let me sincerely apologize for wasting your time. edit: I'll begin breaking the bad news to my nearest college's philosophy department ASAP.
      - ColinWright 13y ago
  - mattmanser 13y ago
    It's worth reading pg's reasons for saying this here: http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html Without that you're not going to understand why he wrote that paragraph and you'll also hopefully see that he's got meat behind his reasoning and that this is an offhand comment referring back to that essay. As someone who also studied philosophy and now can look back, I think he got it right. It also makes this entire thread moot.
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Svip 13y ago
Well, well, I sure am disappointed he fails to include Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in his list of history books. /me polishes monocle.
Tichy 13y ago
Well usually philosophers just don't use logic properly, which really sticks out if you are trained in logic. So it might not be a coincidence if LISPers are not that impressed by philosophy.
nawitus 13y ago
The author appears to think philosophy = ancient philosophy. There's lots of great and insightful modern philosophy. I recommend Nick Bostrom, Marcus Hutter and even that one paper from Scott Aaronson (if one is interested in comp-sci related philosophy).
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  I would even say if you simply consider it as literally "love of wisdom", you would be hard pressed to find anything that's remotely decent and skillfull which doesn't also contain philosophy.
rdouble 13y ago
I believe pg was a philosophy major as undergrad so he's speaking from experience. As a philosophy major myself I have to agree - I can't think of any philosophy books I'd recommend, either. Wittgenstein himself encouraged his students to abandon the field.
jkbyc 13y ago
Hegel contradicts himself already on the first two or three pages of System der Philosophie 1 while trying to make an impression it all makes sense. I really doubt he knew well what he was talking about. If he was a student I'd send him to study calculus, linear algebra, and mathematical logic with all the proofs and then let him rewrite his work after he learns how to express himself in a clear and concise manner.
thomasfromcdnjs 13y ago
Don't worry, you are not alone, I agree 100% Entertaining nonetheless!
rdl 13y ago
(Somewhat tangential) Is Slavoj Zizek a "real philosopher", or a troll? I found him through a reference to qanda someone had posted here, and I'm pretty sure it's a troll.
- rdouble 13y ago
  He does have a PhD in Philosophy from a university in Slovenia. However, he's generally lumped in with the post-*-ist critical theory crowd. When he does his inexplicably popular academic guest lectures he's sponsored by the cultural studies department, not the philosophy department (unless it's a philosophy department with a non-analytical bent, like the New School). He is definitely a troll, though. That's kind of his thing. I think he would even agree with that label. http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/03/why-we-slober-over-slavoj-žižek-or-how-to-be-incomprehensible-and-relevant-at-the- http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/03/why-we-sl...
- dsirijus 13y ago
  He has a talent for getting attention and seems to enjoy it. But to call him a troll would be a great disservice to his work. His ideas are very "flammable" though, so I can understand you seeing him as troll. Perhaps best approach to Žižek is through his film commentaries. Watch The Pervert's Guide To Cinema.
- mbrock 13y ago
  http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=897&fulltext=1 http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=897&fulltext=1
- dfc 13y ago
  I am not a philosopher but I used to spend a lot of time with the philosophy grad department. I am under the impression that "cultural critic" is a dead giveaway for not a "real philosopher."
esamek 13y ago
PG is being a little disingenuous to philosophy as a discipline. I hold a degree in Philosophy, but play an engineer in real life. These debates on the usefulness of philosophy are a waste of time. There is nothing that philosophy aims to teach other than critical thought and logical deduction. The books that he is telling people to shy away from don't have practical take-aways by themselves. Critical thought into how the subject matter relates to your own experiences and the critical thinking of others (other philosophers) is where the value in reading them lies. I can honestly say that I apply my philosophy degree EVERY SINGLE DAY at my job. I am a Lead UI/UX Engineer & Designer.

drinchev 13y ago

I like "RAQ" acronym. I've always hated "Nerd Stuff", "Technical Questions" and similar titles on pages that answer not so popular questions.

Helpful_Bunny 13y ago

I'm not going to insult one of the patrons of these pages, however, I do note: Paul is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993), ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1995), and Hackers & Painters (O'Reilly, 2004). He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. What I learned from trying to study philosophy is that the place to look is in other fields. If you understand math or history or aeronautical engineering very well, the most abstract of the things you know are what philosophy is supposed to be teaching. It depends what type of Philosophy you're studying. Formal Logic: I can see the argument that with a strong Mathematical background & CS, you've already learned (most) of the tricks (although, this largely misses the point that most of the great Mathematicians of the 20th C also dabbled in the Philosophy of Logic - famously Gödel etc). The other kind of Philosophy inhabits the same mental space as Art (ahhh, Florence!). This is a common issue with American Nationals, as American (and to some degree, British) philosophy is mired in Behaviorism, Philosophy of the Mind (which does make me cry a little inside when they don't keep up with neuroscience or even know anything about Complex Systems Theory) and other schools. Ethics and Morality? Reaching those Creative spaces of the Sublime and so forth? Aesthetics? All fields I assumed the author would be interested in, given his Artistic leanings, and all fields that Philosophy is very useful to read on. And, as a friendly note: I'm not sure aeronautical engineering can teach you much on that, barring of course: if you build it wrong, Death is certainly going to be the Horizon you hit.

eshvk 13y ago
> Philosophy of the Mind (which does make me cry a little inside when they don't keep up with neuroscience or even know anything about Complex Systems Theory) Can you explain more on this? I understand more neuroscience/complex systems than I do philosophy; back in school, I became skeptical of the meaningfulness of the research done in complex systems. I would be curious as to what you think it can contribute to philosophy.
- Helpful_Bunny 13y ago
  I'm unsure of how technical to make this, or what your background is, however: Let's take a "classic" of Dennett's[1], against the "brain in a vat"[2]; from what you know about feedback loops or dynamical systems would the proposition of imagining a 'brain in a vat' ever make sense to you? (Note: it's not merely a Matrix style imagining, you have to prove it's not happening - you may well consider this a pointless experiment, of course). I suspect not. That is to say, if you learned about Complex Systems prior to reading the debate over 'brain in a vat', the entire argument would probably strike you as absurd (I may be projecting here, feel free to say otherwise). This is where I presume Paul is coming from: "Well obviously no, what a waste of time". However, proving it logically is precisely what a lot of Philosophers have spent time doing (as opposed to wiring the brain up, not something that was technically possible until very recently). There's value in the logic of it, and the thought, because it is such a common human misconception (that the mind / consciousness is separate to the body, or the world or the universe). Does that make sense? [1]http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.html http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.ht... [2]http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/#H5 http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/#H5

anonymous 13y ago

> Can you add macros to python Yes https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy

jobigoud 13y ago

One issue I've found with studying history piecewise like this (basically how history is taught in school…) is that you don't get a good global picture of an era. What was happening in China at the time of the Roman Empire ?

prof_hobart 13y ago
Is getting a good global picture a particularly high priority in most historical studies, particularly more ancient civilisations? There's little if any overlap between the two (unless you're thinking of things like the effect of steppe tribes moving from the east into Europe), so I'm not sure you'd get a better understanding of either Roman or Chinese history by treating them as a single story. If you are personally particularly interested in that, isn't the answer to simply read both a book about Rome and one about China from a similar time period?

stiff 13y ago

I think the problem with philosophy is that language and words only go this far and we humans get tired fast when just thinking hard inside our heads without any interaction with the external world and no real-world problem to solve. I believe it was the book "The Three Pillars of Zen" that illustrated this effect by comparing the posture of Rodins Thinker [1] with the posture of a meditator [2]. So not only do we run circles around our own concepts that are most likely grounded in the unconscious, but we also get very tired, irritated and depressed from it, that's at least my experience. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinker [2] http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/cob/img/buddha.jpg http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/cob/img/buddha.jpg

spitx 13y ago
Perhaps I haven't followed you to a T. What specific problems or arguments in philosophy are not easily illustratable, using plain language? I do understand that some thoughts and experiences of the human order may not be easily captured or made intelligible by language. I guess you could slot the experience of a color-blind person in that category. Especially in the past when testable apparatuses have not yet been developed to even diagnose that such a medical condition does indeed exist. However I fail to understand why most philosophical arguments cannot be made intelligible to laymen. René Descartes' "Brain In The Vat" argument is quite easily comprehendable. It is my opinion (and very often found to be true) that most obtuse arguments (philosophical or otherwise) are indeed "highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand." In fact I think PG is being charitable. I wonder if the "highly technical stuff" that doesn't lend itself to the peer review of more than a handful of scholars is even valid and credible in the first place. I know that I am going down the slippery slope of If-I-and-most-non-scholarly-people-of-above-average-intelligence-cannot-grasp-an-argument-then-it-must-be-patently-invalid-and-thus-hogwash. However at times I wonder if it is indeed possible that the scholarship of even a fraction of the world's most esteemed scholars (in various fields) actually has some validity and truth value associated with it. Since nearly all of it is produced in academia and thus only subjected to the scrutiny of academic peers. I wonder if it is just a nice formal product of a large volume of essentially meaningless cogitation that passed the consensus of equally unworthy peers. This has to be true especially in the more arcane disciplines where there is little oversight or cross-disciplinary activity. I'm sure there is a name for this phenomenon. Something on the lines of "legitimacy by consensus".

micheljansen 13y ago

For those interested in a broad account of history that does not try to explain what happened, but why things happen, I highly recommend Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel"[1]. It resonates well with the hacker's desire to understand what makes the world tick :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

jfdimark 13y ago

My favourite history book that I've recently read: Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography - amazing work of scope, depth and human understanding. I also studied philosophy as a degree and agree there are no really great introductions. I finished my degree somewhat disengaged with the subject and haven't pursued it seriously since. My favourite book though was John Rawls' A Theory of Justice.

Jd 13y ago

Riffs: <<Why don't more painters have hacking jobs?>> I think pg is right in highlighting age here. Generally speaking you need to get started young. Beyond this, there is a natural synchronicity in all "arts" when engaged at a high level, which is why the renaissance produced true "renaissance men." The trick is to start early but resist the all too common impulse to mediocrity in the context of specialization -- pg's association with elite institutions certainly helps here. <<What should I read to learn more about history?>> I find pg slightly misguided here. One of the world's best historians was my former advisor (Martin van Creveld), and his technique was to find a subject that he could fall in love with and immerse himself in it passionately for a year or two (ultimately however long it took him to write a book about that subject). I think a strong passion for a particular subject can make up for the otherwise dense and uninteresting material. Looking for books that make things "exciting" is a recipe for an understanding of history that is as piecemeal as one's own reading habits. <<Couldn't you add something equivalent to Lisp macros to languages like Perl or Python?>> Yes, of course. One could also quote the apocryphal McCarthy / Norwig story here. <<How can I avoid turning into a pointy-haired boss?>> Starts off generally correct and "startups" are certainly one solution to this problem, but I'm not sure they are the only solution. For instance, this basically assumes that your startup can exist as a flat organizational structure with only hyper-intelligent and interesting people. But what if, heaven forbid, you need to add a customer service division? The truth is that really smart people generally don't want to be middle managers in large firms. The work isn't that interesting, and the compensation is to a certain degree adjusted more highly to compensate people for walking around in suits and clucking their tongues all day. Rather than pointing finger with the negative stereotype ("pointy-haired boss"), I think it is more appropriate to think of these people as corporate trash men, compensated more highly because of a generally undesirable job (after all, managing Dilbert and Dogbert probably isn't a recipe for life long engagement). <<I'm about to become a teacher. How can I be a good one?>> Agree. Probably a lot that could be added here about how to engage personally with students, although this goes beyond mere "teaching" to "mentorship" <<Two startups want to hire me. Which should I choose?>> Perhaps strangely, I generally disagree with the principle that you should go with the startup that is more likely to succeed. I think you should find the subject that you are personally most passionate about and pursue it with all the passion you have. Since you give a sh*t (a rather rare things these days), you will naturally become very good at that particularly area. Only then find startups in your particular area of interest. They should all want to hire you. Then, of course, you will pick the one that matches your passion, which should be the one that is executing most successfully towards their stated goal. <<How can I become really good at Lisp programming?>> I'm not very good at Lisp... <<What philosophy books would you recommend?>> Very tricky topic and a bit "recursive," in that pg references "what philosophy is supposed to be teaching" without defining it -- this in itself obviously a "philosophical" question. Also, it's not at all clear from the response what pg has actually read. There are quite obviously a lot of genres of philosophy. Some of them, even if you consider them complete nonsense (like books of canon law derived from dogmatic theological principles), are extraordinarily useful to read if you care about understanding the progress of history, inclusive of why dogmatic patterns of thinking about particular subjects dominate at many period in time. That said, I think everyone should at the very least have a basic knowledge of the Socratic dialogues, which are an excellent process in stimulating the mind and evaluating one's own presuppositions -- the approach of the majority of people is anything but the "examined life," and the only process of moving beyond the basic assumptions of a particular age is to examine them in the light of reason. <<I want to start a startup, but I don't know how to program. How long will it take to learn?>> Generally agree with pg, but I think the plethora of online learning aids means that it is better to learn the fundamentals on your own or in a week long course (i.e. how to build your first rails app), then "apprentice" yourself at a very low wage until you grasp the fundamentals. Also, I don't think this is a question merely of "smarts" but of an engineering/builder disposition, which some people simply don't have. I don't think "answering phones" is going to help you get that disposition. This actually leads to a general critique of pg's "philosophy." Startups may be a very good solution to some problems, but are are certainly not a panacea for all problems. Ipso facto, it is important to more carefully define the problem scope and characteristics before defining the solution.

RivieraKid 13y ago

But it would be hard to do that without creating a notation for parse trees; and once you do, your language has become a skin on Lisp, in much the same way that in OS X, the Mac OS became a skin on Unix. TIL Julia is a skin on Lisp. It can be interesting to study ancient philosophy, but more as a kind of accident report than to teach you anything useful. Couldn't agree more, ancient philosophy (and most of contemporary philosophy) is a complete waste of time.

KenoFischer 13y ago
> TIL Julia is a skin on Lisp. It actually is more so than you might imagine. If you have julia installed try `julia --lisp` ;).

elorant 13y ago

Why don't more painters have hacking jobs? Most painters I know are Luddites. Especially well-established ones. They think that resisting technology gives them some kind of higher moral ground point of view. They believe that technology sucks people into an alternate reality where they lose contact with the real world and thus become insensitive to the problems of modern societies.

spitx 13y ago
I'd love to pick up a book that deals with this issue: why and when painters - and more generally artists - have come to adopt this anti-technological outlook. Was it a fear that the pervasiveness of technology would make their craft(s) obsolete? This sort of thinking is rife even within artistic circles. Artists whose medium is photography are like the ugly lepers of the visual art world. I find this anti-technological bent in modern Western cultural life particularly unsettling. Don't take what I'm saying to an extreme; I have nothing against consumable art in its many forms. However I think the cultural life of cities in the West - in its various forms (art, theatre, cinema, classical music, architecture) are ruled by cohorts who wholly constitute the anti-technological fringe. They live for abstraction and something about that makes them virulently anti-technological. Suggest a book or essay that addresses this issue in great depth.
- mbrock 13y ago
  Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is about exactly this. Some random quotes: "The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start." “We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.” “This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.” “The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That’s impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barrier of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is – not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. When this transcendence occurs in such events as the first airplane flight across the ocean or the first footsteps on the moon, a kind of public recognition of the transcendent nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence should also occur at the individual level, on a personal basis, in one's own life, in a less dramatic way.”

joshuaellinger 13y ago

It is not exactly a history book but Guns, Germs, and Steel should be on the reading list. It starts at the dawn of modern humans and explains a lot about how the world is organized. It started with a simple question from a New Guinea native to an anthropologist of European descent: "Why do you guys have all the loot?" Hint -- it's not because of smarts.

brudgers 13y ago

<More Riffs on PG on Philosophy> Philosophy is wasted on the young. The great tragedy of Socrates death is that the democracy had a point. If it's any consolation, Socrates was not just a man, Socrates was old. Academic Philosophy is not as interesting as LISP. Don't hold that against them, for millennia philosophers have suffered ignorance of the lambda calculus. The current fascination with Brainfuck is but a passing paradigm. DSL's show Wittgenstein wrong about private languages. This would prove to Wittgenstein on his own terms that he had misused language and accidentally slipped into philosophy. C. S. Pierce was a working scientist. He shipped his side project. When the academics got ahold of it, we got psychology. The PHB is a side-effect. When philosophy gets back to basics and focuses on thinking clearly, a LISP will be part of the curriculum. Arc as a 100 year language is a dip-shit exit.

graue 13y ago

Regarding adding macros to Python, the new language Julia, which is fairly Python-like in appearance, has them: http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/ Like Lisp, Julia is completely homoiconic. Zach Allaun at Hacker School, formerly a Clojure guy, has been doing lots of cool stuff with its macros, like this one to make tail-call optimization available (not natively a feature of Julia): http://blog.zachallaun.com/post/jumping-julia http://blog.zachallaun.com/post/jumping-julia The infix syntax serves to make Julia macros a bit uglier and more complex than Lisp ones, but they still provide the same power. Edit: Here's a link to the Julia docs on metaprogramming: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/metaprogramming/ http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/metaprogramming/