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gokfar comments on 2012: Year in Review - Less Wrong
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I have just read the Hacker News discussion of Luke's Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant. Ouch.
One thing that strikes me there (and that I have observed elsewhere), is the inability of many people to separate philosophy from its history. They assert that to hope to have more than a surface understanding, you must read all those long dead people. This is certainly true when one does original historical research, but completely useless in most other situations, where it is more productive to seek curated input.
Most other fields are much more reasonable. For instance, nobody in their right mind would try to teach Newtonian mechanics with Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. This book is just no longer relevant to the teaching and advancement of modern science. Newtonian mechanics are not exactly true to begin with, and we now have better material than the original book to study it. We could see that as a criticism of Newton, but really, that's a praise. He advanced Science so well that others were able to build on his foundations, and advance even further!
This should be as obvious as causal graphs: When A causes B and B causes C, the knowledge of A is completely irrelevant to C as soon as we know B. Conversely, when old work has been captured, assimilated, refined, and transformed into brutally efficient mechanisms of learning, there is no need to refer to them any more. Why this line of thinking doesn't seem to apply to philosophy is beyond me.
(Disclaimer: I am not very familiar with how Philosophy or Physics are usually taught.)
Physics students begin by studying Newtonian mechanics. Teaching has a form different from the original, but the mathematical formalisms remain. Philosophy students begin by studying Aristotelian logic (or whatever). If philosophy were taught without original work, would Luke's criticism not hold? Isn't that already largely the case?
Not that I disagree with the conclusion, but the argument can be turned around remarking that obsolete formalisms are useful toys in both disciplines.
Now I wonder if teaching NM is detrimental to Physics research...
Newtonian mechanics is not obsolete. It is just founded on assumptions that sometimes break down, but sometimes they don't break down. There's still plenty of stuff you can do with Newtonian mechanics, e.g. build bridges. And any future theory of physics is constrained by the fact that in certain limits it has to reduce to Newtonian mechanics, so it still serves to substantially control what future physics can look like.
This is not true of obsolete formalisms in philosophy, which might be founded on fundamental confusions about how words work or whatever.
Tangent to the discussion, this is interesting to me:
What is the reason for this? what limits?
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Egan%27s_law
Newtonian mechanics still correctly predicts the behavior of things that are big and slow, e.g. bowling balls. Therefore, in the limit as things become big and slow, any future theory of physics has to reduce to Newtonian mechanics.
Alternatively and more specifically, special relativity is constrained by the fact that it has to reduce to Newtonian mechanics in the limit as the speed of light tends to infinity, and quantum mechanics is constrained by the fact that it has to reduce to Newtonian mechanics in the limit as Planck's constant tends to zero. Physicists call this idea taking the classical limit.
Conceded, NM have applications beyond its use as a learning tool. But that should be considered relative to the discipline as whole.
The usefulness of ancient philosophy (very low) relative to modern philosophy (low) seems comparable to that of ancient physics (medium) to modern physics (high). The assessment I am least certain of here is that of modern philosophy.