The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

#71

Post by wallace_f » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 5:43 AM UTC

bobthechef wrote: post #65

halfjew222 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! If you look at the levels of reported 'imposter syndrome', there is a noted rise over the last few years. I'm assuming here that you are aware of imposter syndrome and perhaps have felt it at times yourself. I certainly have. To our peers, we pretend we know more than we do to feign this confidence that has almost emerged as necessary since there are so many that can do our jobs as programmers. This feigned con…

Huh? I think you have the wrong thread. Besides, pretending to be more competent than you are is fraud. Sounds like "imposter syndrome" as you have defined it is really the guilt of being a fraud, and frankly, it's well deserved because it's true. You should feel guilty for doing evil things. You should feel like an imposter when you are an imposter. The antidote is the courage not to be a fraud and not to be an impo…

Can you relax? Assuming good faith is a rule of HN.

What are you trying to accomplish with such an extremely accusatory, and disparaging comment towards a user that--as is obvious in their posts here--is personally struggling.

I'm not convinced they are acting in bad faith, and they are certainly not evil, blaming anyone, cowardly, etc, as you assumed.

Try to be nice, and ask yourself what value you are adding to others.

Re: The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

#72

Post by scythe » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 7:28 AM UTC

antidesitter wrote: post #58

0db532a0 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collective subjectivism does not lead to universal truth even closely. There is no universal truth, but only your personal experience and perception. This is true both for things which you see, and also for morality. In Wittgenstein’s world, your subjective morality is neither true nor false.

> There is no universal truth, but only your personal experience and perception. Is that a universal truth?

The actual early-Wittgenstein retort to this question is to reference the saying/showing distinction. "That there are no universal truths is not a true proposition, but it is shown by there being no truth which is universal." Or something like that.

The late-Wittgenstein retort is to tell a better joke.

Re: The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

#73

Post by mbrock » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 8:33 AM UTC

loganfrederick wrote: post #56

It's interesting and informative that a lot of the commenters here have positive reviews or experiences with Wittgenstein. I have not read any of his work but remember Paul Graham had a mixed take on Wittgenstein in his essay "How to Do Philosophy". Wittgenstein helped shake up philosophical thought, but his later focus on philosophy of language led his followers to turn philosophy into a field of jargon. http://www.…

Whether philosophy has been a useless waste of time is a commonly recurring question. I think it's asked from a kind of historically privileged position, since we have already mostly gotten it over with, so to speak.

Another perspective is that these naive thoughts have a curious tendency to pop up, and philosophy as the work of critiquing and developing such thoughts is a crucial part of intellectual culture. There's a fascinating case in the history of AI research, as described by Hubert Dreyfus:

> When I was teaching at MIT in the 1960s, students from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory would come to my Heidegger course and say in effect: ‘‘You philosophers have been reflecting in your armchairs for over 2000 years and you still don’t understand intelligence. We in the AI Lab have taken over and are succeeding where you philosophers have failed.’’ But in 1963, when I was invited to evaluate the work of Alan Newell and Herbert Simon on physical symbol systems, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, these pioneering researchers had learned a lot, directly and indirectly, from us philosophers: e.g., Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a ‘universal characteristic’ (a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed), Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Wittgenstein’s postulation of logical atoms in his Tractatus. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.

> But I began to suspect that the insights formulated in existentialist armchairs, especially Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, were bad news for those working in AI laboratories—that, by combining representationalism, conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a research program, AI researchers had condemned their enterprise to reenact a failure. Using Heidegger as a guide, I began looking for signs that the whole AI research program was degenerating. I was particularly struck by the fact that, among other troubles, researchers were running up against the problem of representing significance and relevance—a problem that Heidegger saw was implicit in Descartes’ understanding of the world as a set of meaningless facts to which the mind assigned values, which John Searle now calls function predicates.

Re: The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

#74

Post by watwut » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 8:35 AM UTC

codeulike wrote: post #64

watwut wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't philosopher seek truth and knowledge rather then one-on-one competition of quick wit and reaction?

If you never bounce ideas off of anyone else, its too easy to lead yourself down the path of convincing yourself that you are right.

Sure, but that is still better in long term writing format then debate, because debate favors more of quick reaction, showmanship and various rhetorical tactics that have zero to do with seeking knowledge. Debates are fun, but they are not for testing ideas.

Re: The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

#75

Post by codeulike » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 8:54 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #74

codeulike wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you never bounce ideas off of anyone else, its too easy to lead yourself down the path of convincing yourself that you are right.

Sure, but that is still better in long term writing format then debate, because debate favors more of quick reaction, showmanship and various rhetorical tactics that have zero to do with seeking knowledge. Debates are fun, but they are not for testing ideas.

I agree with that, but when Wittgenstein says 'discussions' I take that to mean any sort of dialogue, e.g. online

Re: The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

#76

Post by 0db532a0 » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 12:58 PM UTC

halfjew222 wrote: post #49

0db532a0 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collective subjectivism does not lead to universal truth even closely. There is no universal truth, but only your personal experience and perception. This is true both for things which you see, and also for morality. In Wittgenstein’s world, your subjective morality is neither true nor false.

What would you say of a hypothetical claim that was ideally translated to all languages that everyone, when asked, unforced, agreed that it was an accurate description of their subjective experience? I'm digging underneath Wittgenstein's ideas of subjective morality a little bit. Humor me here and let me know what you think. I'm truly curious.

What if there is only one person left in the universe?

Re: The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

#77

Post by vertline3 » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

mbrock wrote: post #27

mrleiter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely! He even explicitly stated that in a letter to Norman Malcolm, dated November 1944 [0]: "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life" [0] https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=f...

I enjoy Richard Rorty's writings along similar lines, like in his essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids": "I decided to major in philosophy. I figured that if I became a philosopher I might get to the top of Plato's 'divided line' - the place 'beyond hypotheses' where the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of the wise and good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids. It seemed obvious to me th…

I guess in math they found it just gets more complex, as you go deeper? eventually you need new tools, upon new tools? Is this like philosophy? you just find you need more tools? I'm no expert. And that's why I'm putting question marks around.

Re: The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

#78

Post by contravariant » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 2:55 AM UTC

vertline3 wrote: post #77

mbrock wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy Richard Rorty's writings along similar lines, like in his essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids": "I decided to major in philosophy. I figured that if I became a philosopher I might get to the top of Plato's 'divided line' - the place 'beyond hypotheses' where the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of the wise and good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids. It seemed obvious to me th…

I guess in math they found it just gets more complex, as you go deeper? eventually you need new tools, upon new tools? Is this like philosophy? you just find you need more tools? I'm no expert. And that's why I'm putting question marks around.

Often in maths you build higher and higher abstractions until you've finally succeeded in an abstraction high enough to encode the very axioms you started with, at which point you're back where you started, if a little wiser for the journey.

At this point I'm fairly sure going deeper (or higher) in mathematics is a dead end, you should instead try to go sideways, to the 'ground level' questions that aren't answered yet, or to the questions that aren't yet mathematical.

Re: The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

#79

Post by woodandsteel » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 1:40 AM UTC

sramsay wrote: post #19

I've been a big fan of Wittgenstein since college, and have at this point read just about all of his work. I might suggest that people new to Wittgenstein start neither with the Tractatus nor with Philosophical Investigations , but with the Blue and Brown Books (you want the Blue part). These are lecture notes toward what would later become the PI . They're way less systematic than the big two, but they'll give you a…

There are other ways of doing philosophy than the type that Wittgenstein was rejecting. And in fact they are the basis of things like modern science, technology, and liberal democracy.

Re: The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

#80

Post by woodandsteel » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 1:43 AM UTC

0db532a0 wrote: post #42

halfjew22 wrote: post #13

https://youtu.be/ermZKgG4htU >But what is most strikingly original about Wittgenstein’s account in the Tractatus is his drawing out of the implications – which are to a degree disturbing – of this conception. One implication is for values. If I think or claim that the car is in the garage, then, built into that claim is the idea that this may be true or false. But when I think that, say, slavery is morally wrong, I t…

Collective subjectivism does not lead to universal truth even closely. There is no universal truth, but only your personal experience and perception. This is true both for things which you see, and also for morality. In Wittgenstein’s world, your subjective morality is neither true nor false.

Your position assumes something like cartesian dualism, which is itself based on a series of universal claims, and furthermore has been rejected by most philosophers of the last century, including Wittgenstein himself.