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First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com

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Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#61

Post by kstenerud »

yters wrote: post #40
kstenerud wrote: post #4

The author begins by accurately portraying the general ignorance of the study of philosophy, and how this attitude greatly diminishes the perceived value of such studies. I was in agreement until the post took a sharp turn into veiled conspiracies, where those in authority are seemingly fully aware of how incompetent or corrupt authority can be undermined by questions, and actively seek to stamp out independent thoug…

In most dictatorships the intellectuals are all killed because they undermine the status quo.

What does this have to do with the blog post?

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#62

Post by [deleted] »

F_J_H wrote: post #5

From the article: This is a key point to understand: philosophy, as a discipline, does not provide answers. Well, notwithstanding the fact that it certainly provides some answers, philosophy is more oriented towards learning how to come up with answers, and more importantly, learning how to recognize if the answer you’ve come up with is right or wrong. I have forgotten much of what my first year philosophy professor…

[deleted]

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#63

Post by [deleted] »

pjscott wrote: post #32
mikeryan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philosophy doesn't answer the question, it teaches you which questions to ask.

Question: "Which questions should we ask?" Does philosophy answer this question? Or perhaps questions of the form "What questions should we ask in circumstances [FILL IN THE BLANK]?"

[deleted]

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#64

Post by vecter »

jchrisa wrote: post #60
vecter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. Could you elaborate on why you think analytic philosophy better prepared you for a career as an Erlang programmer than a computer science degree?

The biggest thing I learned in Philosophy, is how not to skip steps. Even the most mundane thing can have a ton of interesting questions hiding inside it. The best way to not skip steps is to train your mind to be in a state of perpetually acknowledging your ignorance. This is hard to do, and I wouldn't consider myself great at it, but the fact that I've identified this as a goal is something I credit to some of the…

Sounds like studying math or theoretical computer science would've accomplished the same :)

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#65

Post by yummyfajitas »

sophacles wrote: post #30
yummyfajitas wrote: post #14

The author makes an unjustified claim: I don't know what the tariff for higher education at UNLV is nowadays, but you can be damn sure that every $50,000-a-year Philosophy major at Harvard is subsidizing a hell of a lot of electron microscopes for the glamorous—and much less profitable—Molecular Biology majors. This is nonsense. The materials scientist who bought a $1M electron microscope received a grant for roughly…

Ahh yes, classic argument technique: reply to nonsense with nonsense[1]! Fantastic move. Oh wait.. there is one thing tho, which I presume you're OK with: it's a total logical fallacy. The nonsense here is the perfectly reasonable part of overhead, like that it covers electricity for the microscope, legal, hr, accounting and so on offices that need to be done for any organization, buildings to house the stuff, people…

Other organizations may rip off the government much worse than universities. So what?

It does not change the fact that science grants are subsidizing the rest of the university.

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#66

Post by jchrisa »

vecter wrote: post #64
jchrisa wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing I learned in Philosophy, is how not to skip steps. Even the most mundane thing can have a ton of interesting questions hiding inside it. The best way to not skip steps is to train your mind to be in a state of perpetually acknowledging your ignorance. This is hard to do, and I wouldn't consider myself great at it, but the fact that I've identified this as a goal is something I credit to some of the…

Sounds like studying math or theoretical computer science would've accomplished the same :)

Perhaps, but it is nice that Philosophy is so general. Another side effect of studying it is that it's made me hungry for different perspectives. For most questions, there's a bigger context that can raise potentially more interesting questions.

My favorite take on the subject is James Carse's lecture at The Long Now: http://longnow.org/seminars/02005/jan/14/religious-war-in-li...

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#67

Post by sophacles »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #65
sophacles wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh yes, classic argument technique: reply to nonsense with nonsense[1]! Fantastic move. Oh wait.. there is one thing tho, which I presume you're OK with: it's a total logical fallacy. The nonsense here is the perfectly reasonable part of overhead, like that it covers electricity for the microscope, legal, hr, accounting and so on offices that need to be done for any organization, buildings to house the stuff, people…

Other organizations may rip off the government much worse than universities. So what? It does not change the fact that science grants are subsidizing the rest of the university.

Hey look, another logical fallacy: The strawman.

I was not just talking of government contracts. When large companies contract with other companies they don't quote overhead rates, but internal to any company I've ever heard of, the standard overhead to account in a bid is 2-4x the cost of resources.

Second, your completely illogical reasoning ignores a basic fact that universities are a proven model of getting research done at a much lower rate than companies (e.g. national labs, contractors and so on), and that model includes having some portion of science grants ending up helping subsidize other parts of the university.

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#68

Post by sophacles »

rflrob wrote: post #45
sophacles wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh yes, classic argument technique: reply to nonsense with nonsense[1]! Fantastic move. Oh wait.. there is one thing tho, which I presume you're OK with: it's a total logical fallacy. The nonsense here is the perfectly reasonable part of overhead, like that it covers electricity for the microscope, legal, hr, accounting and so on offices that need to be done for any organization, buildings to house the stuff, people…

Regardless of whether 40-70% of grant money going to overhead is reasonable, there is still the point that most science is funded by medium-large scale grants, and no doubt some of that overhead goes towards maintaining facilities used for teaching Molecular Biology undergrads. I'm not sure what fraction of a humanities professor comes from the University vs. outside funding agencies, but it's at least a commonly hel…

A couple of things here that suggest that there may be more going on than your simplistic explanation (but no i don't have numbers):

1. Humanities (e.g. arts programs) along with sports are large generators of alumni donations. These are certainly large chunks of money that aren't even considered "science funding saves the world" type thinking.

2. Humanities and other non-science programs contribute to the overall prestige of a school. Whether or not this is deserved is different from the truth of it -- a good reputation is good for all forms of grants.

3. A simple thought analysis on how much overhead a humanities professor really needs compared to his science counterparts shows there is a huge lack of cost from the humanities groups: no equipment to house and power, no labs (but books, galleries etc, i don't know where more money would be needed: a good lab building or a good library), fewer RAships (but roughly equal numbers of TAships), no need for extra infrastructure to be built (cooling towers for compute clusters, etc), no need for special legal teams to cover the risks, no need for special accounting to sate the governments crazy reporting needs, no need for non-academic staff (programmers, lab specialists, etc). Im sure there are others.

Basically, from the universities I've worked at, the vast majority of overhead goes to general building/grounds maintenance, specialized services for the groups bringing grants, student programs, general infrastructure, and sure, some to the humanities, why not -- all those LAS majors probably don't pay tuition at all.

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#69

Post by brudgers »

davesims wrote: post #48
brudgers wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When philosophy starts coming up with answers, we start calling it something else, e.g. what we call "psychology" grew out of philosophy over time as modern theories of the mind evolved from Kant to James who was trained as a physician and exposured to the empirically grounded Pragmaticism of Peirce (who was himself a working scientist).

That's one way of looking at it, and certainly the scientific community would like to think so -- as if Kant and James did a bit of theoretical work that the scientists fleshed out in practice. But this is really quite naive, and when you look at the particulars, really one discipline has very little to do with the other. James certainly did lay the foundation for modern psychology, but to the extent that he did he w…

One might make a case about James being a scientist, however that's the sort of after the fact revision which Kuhn describes in Structure of Scientific Revolution.

But there is no way to make that claim about Kant and Critique of Pure Reason. The logic underpinning such an argument - that Kant's view of the mind does not match popular current scientific theories and therefor does not constitute science - would also place Newton's Principia outside the realm of Physics.

To suppose that the thrust of Kant's categories do not underpin modern psychology one would have to be the most radical of behaviorists. Modern psychology readily accepts that a person's experience of the world is largely shaped by the features of their mind - e.g. reframing.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reframing]

As for what psychologists claim as their epistemological basis, I suspect that the rate at which psychologists would claim James as a predecessor is significantly greater than the rate at which planetary astronomers who would claim Giordano Bruno's work as their epistemological base.

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#70

Post by wvoq »

brudgers wrote: post #69
davesims wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one way of looking at it, and certainly the scientific community would like to think so -- as if Kant and James did a bit of theoretical work that the scientists fleshed out in practice. But this is really quite naive, and when you look at the particulars, really one discipline has very little to do with the other. James certainly did lay the foundation for modern psychology, but to the extent that he did he w…

One might make a case about James being a scientist, however that's the sort of after the fact revision which Kuhn describes in Structure of Scientific Revolution. But there is no way to make that claim about Kant and Critique of Pure Reason. The logic underpinning such an argument - that Kant's view of the mind does not match popular current scientific theories and therefor does not constitute science - would also p…

Perhaps a better example here is the work of the empirical psychologists Fechner, Weber, Helmholtz, Wundt &c., respectively influenced by and reacting to Mach and Kant.
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