= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Bugmaster comments on Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (510)
When you say things like "More machine learning, more physics, more game theory, more math", what I hear is, "more of anything that's not philosophy".
For example, Machine Learning alone is a topic whose understanding requires a semi-decent grounding in math, computer science, and practical programming. That's at least a year of study for someone with an IQ over 150, and probably something like three or four years for the rest of us. And that's just one topic; you list others as well. It sounds like you want us to just stop doing philosophy altogether, and stick to the more useful stuff.
Imagine people who are trying to write books, without knowing the alphabet. They keep trying for ages, but produce nothing that other person could unambiguously read.
So someone comes and says: "You should learn alphabet first."
And they respond: "We are interested in writing books, not learning alphabet. The more time we spend learning alphabet, the less time we will have for actually writing books. We desire to become writers, not linguists." (Famous writers are high status, linguistics is considered boring by most.)
Similarly it seems to me that many philosophers are too busy discussing deep topics about the world, so they don't have time to actually study the world. To be fair, they do study a lot -- but mostly the opinions of people who used the same strategy, decades and centuries ago. Knowing Plato's opinions on X is higher status than knowing X.
This would be acceptable in situations where science does not know anything about X, so the expert's opinion is the best we can have. But in many topics this simply isn't true. Learning what we already know about X is the cost of ability to say something new and correct about X. The costs are higher than 2000 years ago, because the simple stuff is already known.
Mathematicians also cannot become famous today for discovering that a^2+b^2=c^2 in a right-angled triangle. They also have to study the simple stuff for years, before they are able to contribute something new. Computer programmers also cannot make billions by writing a new MS DOS, even if it were better than original. Neither do they get paid for quoting Dijkstra correctly. Philosophers need to work harder than centuries ago, too.
Are truth, meaning, beauty and goodness about the world? They are just not susceptible to straightforward empirical enquiry. People study Plato on the Good, because there aren't good-ometers.
(If Plato is not at least a little bit a good-ometer, there is no point in studying Plato for that purpose either.)
Beauty is about the world. More precisely, about humans. What makes humans perceive X as beautiful?
Required knowledge about the world: What happens in our brains? (Neuroscience, psychology, biology.) Do our beauty judgements change across cultures or centuries? (Sociology, anthropology, art history.) Do monkeys feel something similar? (Biology, ethology.)
It might prove helpful to look at humans etc. to understand the things that trigger the topic of beauty, in the sense that you might learn interesting related ideas in greater detail by studying these things. But the detailed conditions of triggering the topic are not necessarily among them, so "What makes humans perceive X as beautiful?" may be a less useful question than "What are some representative examples of things that are perceived by humans as beautiful?". The world gives you detailed data for investigation, but you don't necessarily care about the data, the ideas it suggests might make the original data irrelevant at some point.
Not in any sense that leadds to straightforward empiricism.
That knowledge about the world is necessary is not in doubt. The issue is whether it is sufficient.
We agree about the first sentence. And the knowledge about the world also helps to form a qualified opinion about the second one.
I have no problem with students of philosophy learning Plato's opinions and the related science, if they want to write a book about Beauty. (I just imagine them more likely to do the former part and ignore the latter.)
A lot of this seems to be imagination-driven.
We imagine that our imagination has all the answers. In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they are not.
Well...yes. Meaning, Beauty, and Goodness are all squarely in the domain of neuroscience/psychology. Truth is in the domain of the sciences, and its sister Tautology is in Mathematics. A philosopher who wishes to say meaningful things about any of the above needs to be well versed in all these things.
Plato - by no fault of his own of course - wasn't well versed in any of them, which is why his thinking feels so clumsy and child-like to modern thinkers.
And the fact that we remember Plato today, rather than many other ancient philosophers who were a lot...less wrong...is an accident of history.
I wonder what happened to Justification? I justified my claim that Good is not in the domain of science by pointing out that it is not empriically detectable, thar we don't have good-ometers. You just gainsaid that, without offering a counterargument.
The world is complicated.
The only time I've ever read a vague four-word sentence that deserves an upvote. Such things tickle me.
Yeah, it sucks that you can't do good philosophy without knowing a ton of other stuff, but that's life. We don't listen to electrical engineers when they complain about needing to know nitty-gritty calculus, and that's a year of study for someone with an IQ over 150. Sometimes fields have prerequisites.
You could do good programming without knowing too much physics. You could probably do good physics without knowing too much machine learning, assuming you have someone in your department who does know machine learning. You could do good biology with chemistry alone, though that requires minimal physics, as well.
But lukeprog's curriculum / reading list suggests that you can't do good philosophy without knowing math, machine learning, physics, psychology, and a bunch of other subjects. If that is true, then virtually no one can do good philosophy at all, because absorbing all the prerequisites will take a large portion of most people's lifetimes.
It doesn't really take that long to learn things. But good philosophy already looks like this - my favorite political philosophy professor threw out references to computing, physics, history, etc. assuming students would get the references or look them up. Much like pride is the crown of the virtues, philosophy should be the crown of the sciences.
And we independently observe that almost no one can do good philosophy at all, so the theory checks out.
Nothing better than a hypothesis that makes correct empirical predictions!
Besides the sciences that Luke Mentioned, don't forget people also need to learn the subsets of philosophy which actually are consistent and compatible with science. In the case of philosophy of mind, I began a list here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/58d/how_not_to_be_a_na%C3%AFve_computationalist/
What seems needed is a groups of creative 150IQ people willing to take the MegaCourse and create good philosophy as fast as possible, so we can use it for whatever purposes. Probably that group should, like the best intellectual groups examineds by Domenico de Masi in his "Creativity and Creative Groups", get a place to be togheter, and work earnestly and honestly.
Finally, they must be sharp in avoiding biases, useless discussions, and counterfactual intuitions.
This gets more likely every minute....
Yes, some subjects are just hard. But there are limits to this. How much one needs is a function of how much one wants to focus on a particular subject. So for example most physicists probably need three semesters of calc, linear algebra, and stats, at minimum. But only some of the physicists will need group theory, while others will need additional stats, and others will need differential geometry. But almost no physicist will need all of these things. Similarly, some degree of specialization may make sense if one wants to do philosophy.
That's in fact already the case: the moral philosopher has a read a lot more about the history of moral philosophy, and same for the person studying epistemology, or other basic aspects of things. So to some extent the issue isn't the amount of learning that is required, but a disagreement with what is required, and how cross-disciplinary it should be.
Correction: you don't. Those of us who teach EEs (really, any class of engineers), do.
Sure, but the curriculum doesn't actually change in response to engineering students complaining about the difficulty of their calculus classes. That's because the stuff in those classes actually applies, in easy-to-see ways. There's almost a 1:1 match between the sylllabi of engineering math classes and the math that engineering classes end up needing. (This is not a coincidence.)
This is not correct. Compare a vector calculus book from fifty years ago with the relevant sections of Stewart.
Agreed!
What? Surely lots of electrical engineers have IQ less than 150 (the average being approximately 126 ETA: actually that's the average for EE PhD student, but still). How did they pass their calculus courses?
I assume they meant that an EE with IQ > 150 would require a year; many places distribute their calculus courses over two years, and some students require longer.
Propositional and predicate calculus is routinely taught in undergraduate philosophy programs. Does taking the time to acquire such skills make people 'less philosophical'? Bugmaster, it sounds like you're buying into the meme that true philosophy must avoid being too rigorous; if a paper consists mostly of equations or formalized proofs, it's somehow less philosophical even if contentwise it's nothing but an exegesis of Kant. This deep error is responsible not only for a lot of the philosophical laziness lukeprog takes issue with, but also for our conception of philosophical fields like metaphysics as being clearly distinguishable from theoretical physics, or of philosophy of mind as being clearly distinguishable from theoretical neuroscience. Define your academic fields however you otherwise want, but don't define them in terms of how careful they're allowed to become!
My comment wasn't about philosophy, but about all those other topics: math, physics, machine learning, etc. They are very rigorous, and will take a lot of time to understand properly, even at an undergraduate level. There are only so many hours in the day; and while you are sitting there debugging your linked list code or whatever, you're not doing philosophy.
My point is that if students do as lukeprog suggests, and study all those other topics first, they won't have any time left for philosophy at all -- assuming, of course, that they actually try to understand the material, not just memorize a few key points.