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Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

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Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#91

Post by acchow »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #53
jstrieb wrote: post #33

Relevant (deleted, as far as I can tell) tweet: > When I talk to Philosophers on zoom my screen background is an exact replica of my actual background just so I can trick them into having a justified true belief that is not actually knowledge. https://old.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/gggqkv/get...

Hmm. That seems like a better example of the problem than either of the examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem . The cases cited in the article don't seem to raise any interesting issues at all, in fact. The observer who sees the dark cloud and 'knows' there is a fire is simply wrong, because the cloud can serve as evidence of either insects or a fire and he lacks the additional evidence needed to…

The example is also a joke. Many things shown on screens are CGI or AI-generated, so the belief here is not justified.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#94

Post by ninetyninenine »

orbisvicis wrote: post #78

I'm not sure I see the big deal. Justification is on a scale of 0 to 1, and at 1 you are onmiscient. We live in a complicated world; no one has time to be God so you just accept your 0.5 JTB and move on. Or for the belief part, well, "it's not a lie if you believe it". And as for the true bit, let's assume that there really is a cow, but before you can call someone over to verify your JTB, an alien abducts the cow an…

You're view is more inline with the philosophy of science which holds nothing an ever be justified.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Karl_Popper

read The problem of induction and demarcation: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Falsifiability

Basically to some it all up because we aren't "omniscient" nothing can in actuallity ever be known.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#95

Post by roenxi »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #53
jstrieb wrote: post #33

Relevant (deleted, as far as I can tell) tweet: > When I talk to Philosophers on zoom my screen background is an exact replica of my actual background just so I can trick them into having a justified true belief that is not actually knowledge. https://old.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/gggqkv/get...

Hmm. That seems like a better example of the problem than either of the examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem . The cases cited in the article don't seem to raise any interesting issues at all, in fact. The observer who sees the dark cloud and 'knows' there is a fire is simply wrong, because the cloud can serve as evidence of either insects or a fire and he lacks the additional evidence needed to…

Well ... obviously any Gettier-style example will not have enough evidence because someone came to the wrong conclusion. But there is a subtle flaw in your objections to Wikipedia's examples - to have a proper argument you would need to provide a counterexample where there is enough evidence to be certain of a conclusion. And the problem is that isn't possible - no amount of evidence is enough to come to a certain conclusion.

The issue that Gettier & friends is pointing to is that there are no examples where there is enough evidence. So under the formal definition it isn't possible to have a JTB. If you've seen enough evidence to believe something ... maybe you'd misinterpreted the evidence but still came to the correct conclusion. That scenario can play out at any evidence threshold. All else failing, maybe you're having an episode of insanity and all the information your senses are reporting are wild hallucinations but some of the things you imagine happening are, nonetheless, happening.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#96

Post by nanna »

Maybe it shook analytic philosophy, or some subdiscipline thereof, but this really was not registered beyond that within philosophy. Analytic philosophy likes to imagine itself to be philosophy propper, which is nonsense. It's just an over confident, aggressively territorial branch which hogs all the resources, even though the majority of students yearn for the richness and breadth of something more akin to what is today going by the moniker of Post-Kantian Philosophy (formerly Continental or Modern European philosophy).

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#97

Post by kreyenborgi »

The non-bovine examples are in a way more complex (but also more common), since they involve multiple possible causes for an event. In software engineering, bugs and outages and so on are not just caused by lack of testing, but lack of failsafes, lack of fallbacks, coding on a Monday morning, cosmic background radation, too many/few meetings, etc. etc. And it's hard to pinpoint "the cause" (but perhaps we shed some light on a graph of causes, some of which may be "blocked" by other causes standing in the way).

Are there any good examples of gettiers in software engineering that don't rely on understanding causality, where we're just talking about "what's there" not explaining "how it got there"?

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#98

Post by ImHereToVote »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #53
jstrieb wrote: post #33

Relevant (deleted, as far as I can tell) tweet: > When I talk to Philosophers on zoom my screen background is an exact replica of my actual background just so I can trick them into having a justified true belief that is not actually knowledge. https://old.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/gggqkv/get...

Hmm. That seems like a better example of the problem than either of the examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem . The cases cited in the article don't seem to raise any interesting issues at all, in fact. The observer who sees the dark cloud and 'knows' there is a fire is simply wrong, because the cloud can serve as evidence of either insects or a fire and he lacks the additional evidence needed to…

I believe traders call this Lambda.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#99

Post by tedheath123 »

nanna wrote: post #96

Maybe it shook analytic philosophy, or some subdiscipline thereof, but this really was not registered beyond that within philosophy. Analytic philosophy likes to imagine itself to be philosophy propper, which is nonsense. It's just an over confident, aggressively territorial branch which hogs all the resources, even though the majority of students yearn for the richness and breadth of something more akin to what is t…

Which texts would you recommend students read to learn about Post-Kantian philosophy?

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#100

Post by hnick »

throwawayForMe2 wrote: post #48
namuol wrote: post #13

I always come back to this saying: “Debugging is the art of figuring out which of your assumptions are wrong.” (Attribution unknown)

I always thought of what I learned in some philosophy class, that there are only two ways to generate a contradiction. One way is to reason from a false premise, or as I would put it, something we think is true is not true. The other way is to mix logical levels (“this sentence is false”). I don’t think I ever encountered a bug from mixing logical levels, but the false premise was a common culprit.

I'm not sure if it qualifies as mixing logical levels but I once tracked down a printer bug where the PDF failed to print.

The culprit was an embedded TrueType font that had what (I think) was a strange but valid glyph name with a double forward slash instead of the typical single (IIRC whatever generated the PDF just named the glyphs after characters so /a, /b and then naturally // for slash). Either way it worked fine in most viewers and printers.

The larger scale production printer on the other hand, like many, converted to postscript in the processor as one of its steps. A // is for an immediately evaluated name in postscript so when it came through unchanged, parsing this crashed the printer.

So we have a font, in a PDF, which got turned into Postscript, by software, on a certain machine which presumably advertised printing PDF but does it by converting to PS behind the scenes.

A lot of layers there and different people working on their own piece of the puzzle should have been 'encapsulated' from the others but it leaked.

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