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Comment by ohyes | Hacker News Reader

Bullshit. How do you think your computer functions? You don't get high level programming languages without philosophy. Where do you think natural sciences came from?

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>Where do you think natural sciences came from?

Alchemy. But that's no reason to still respect alchemists.

Alchemy is a good example. Alchemists dabbled in chemisty but they also took for granted that chemistry has deep symbolic and semantic meaning. Figure it out and chemistry will crack.

It turned out to not be the case, time after time.

There's no inherent meaning in how substances interact. There are laws, they're consistent but devoid of any meaning, on human level.

That's why I'm deeply scetical towards any New Age-style ideas.

The body of results from alchemy resulted in the narrow, useful part of it becoming formalized as chemistry. The body of results from string theory (or many worlds interpretations) is non-existent.

How long was alchemy a serious field of study? Thousands of years, right? String theory is 75 years old.

If you understand alchemy you have all the reasons to respect them

I still respect Isaac Newton, even tho he was an Alchemist and searched for Atlantis... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studie...

I think of philosophers as basically being 1000 Shakespearean monkeys. The world would be better served by 1000 scientists.

Peeling back a level, science is a belief system based on observations. What is a valid observation - if I say I saw it once that is not valid, if I say look in this place or way and you can see it too, well, that is. But what if I say "look in this place and way and you will see this kind of thing once out of a billion trials, and all the other things that are seen are not real"? Science admits that view, and I would not disagree but I am aware that this is a choice - a philosophical view that I have adopted as part of the assumptions that I make to use the belief system that we currently call science. This system is different from the versions of science that were in use 100 years ago, and is changing now with the rejection of intervalism (p=0.05). So bring in 1000 scientists and let them do some philosophy, because to do anything that's what they have to do.

Science is not a belief system, it's a method of verifying beliefs and turning them into knowledge.

Is the practice of science fixed? Do scientists use, unwaveringly, the methods of their predecessors? Why do the methods and practices of science vary over time?

Methods vary in philosophy, in science they improve.

I can hear the pattering of tiny feet on the heads of pins....

I fail to see the relevance of any of your questions to the topic at hand, so rather than playing the Socratic method, how about you just lay out your argument.

What are we talking about with "philosophy"? And what is "physics"? Are physicists featureless spheres unable to be "philosophers"? https://www.edge.org/conversation/a-philosophy-of-physics

What "philosophers" are we talking about here? Lakatos? Chomsky? Newton? Logicians? Or do we have some composite postmodern blowhard in mind? (Like any industry's products, philosophy's product quality varies with factors like producer. So specifics are important.)

There's a bias in physics culture against philosophy. (It's no doubt elsewhere too, but very apparent in physics.) But fortunately, there's many exceptions who like to take a step back and think about what they're doing.

Not if the scientists are working on string theory. I'd rather have philosophers 100:1 in that case.

Thank you for explaining your philosophy of science.

Shorter version with nothing lost: "Thank you for explaining your science."

> The world would be better served by 1000 scientists.

Why?

"The world would be better served" carries a lot of cultural baggage.

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