Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

lesswrong.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 129 posts

Re: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

#21

Post by fmoralesc »

jopt wrote: post #19
unalone wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 philosoph…

Why? Is this how philosophy is or how it ought to be?

Two different and separate questions people always lump together.

Re: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

#22

Post by lutusp »

> 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-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."

Re: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

#23

Post by unalone »

jopt wrote: post #19
unalone wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 philosoph…

Why? Is this how philosophy is or how it ought to be?

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.

Re: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

#25

Post by lutusp »

ajb wrote: post #9

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.

> 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.

Re: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

#26

Post by unalone »

mej10 wrote: post #17
anonymouz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 >, when we still don't have a cure for cancer?"

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?

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.

Re: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

#27

Post by argv_empty »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #4

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.

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?

Re: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

#28

Post by edanm »

unalone wrote: post #23
jopt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Is this how philosophy is or how it ought to be?

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…

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.

Re: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

#29

Post by unalone »

lutusp wrote: post #25
ajb wrote: post #9

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.

> 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 mor…

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.

Re: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

#30

Post by mylittlepony »

unalone wrote: post #5
mej10 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 philosoph…

Philosophy sounds to me a lot like art. They do it mostly for themselves. We can consume it, but it's not really useful.
Post reply on HN