Philosophy that can be "taken seriously by computer scientists"

lukeprog

I've long held CMU's philosophy department in high regard. One of their leading lights, Clark Glymour, recently published a short manifesto, which Brian Leiter summed up as saying that "the measure of value for philosophy departments is whether they are taken seriously by computer scientists."

Selected quote from Glymour's manifesto:

Were I a university administrator facing a contracting budget, I would not look to eliminate biosciences or computer engineering. I would notice that the philosophers seem smart, but their writings are tediously incestuous and of no influence except among themselves, and I would conclude that my academy could do without such a department... But not if I found that my philosophy department retrieved a million dollars a year in grants and fellowships, and contained members whose work is cited and used in multiple subjects, and whose faculty taught the traditional subject well to the university’s undergraduates.

Also see the critique here, but I'd like to have Glymour working on FAI.

Selected quote from Glymour's manifesto:

Were I a university administrator facing a contracting budget, I would not look to eliminate biosciences or computer engineering. I would notice that the philosophers seem smart, but their writings are tediously incestuous and of no influence except among themselves, and I would conclude that my academy could do without such a department... But not if I found that my philosophy department retrieved a million dollars a year in grants and fellowships, and contained members whose work is cited and used in multiple subjects, and whose faculty taught the traditional subject well to the university’s undergraduates.

Also see the critique here, but I'd like to have Glymour working on FAI.

The manifesto has a nice paragraph where Glymour lists the contributions of many mathematical philosophers. This might be relevant to UDT:

Philosophers and statisticians alike want to posit probabilities over sentences, but how would that work with a language adequate to science and mathematics, say first order logic? Haim Gaifman told us, and worked out the implications for what is and what is not learnable.

This is pretty much unrelated but do you think maybe you could write a short post about the relevance of algorithmic probability for human rationality? There's this really common error 'round these parts where people say a hypothesis (e.g. God, psi, etc) is a prior unlikely because it is a "complex" hypothesis according to the universal prior. Obviously the "universal prior" says no such thing, people are just taking whatever cached category of hypotheses they think are more probable for other unmentioned reasons and then labeling that ... (read more)

10lukeprog15y

Yup. This is why I was so surprised in January 2011 that Less Wrong had never before mentioned formal philosophy, which is the branch of philosophy most relevant to the open research problems of Friendly AI. See, for example, Self-Reference and the Acyclity of Rational Choice or Reasoning with Bounded Resources and Assigning Probabilities to Arithmetical Statements.

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Philosophy that can be "taken seriously by computer scientists"

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Philosophy that can be "taken seriously by computer scientists"

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