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Not down-voting you, because it's an interesting comment, but:

> far smarter than software engineers, by comparison.

This is just a dumb, specious statement. Would expect better from a philosopher ;)

Also, would be interested why you think:

> Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field.

What makes it bogus?

I hear (but is it true?) that for a philosopher to build a career, it is important to be thought as very smart by other philosophers --- and that this is much more so than in other fields, such as the sciences. If it's true, it would explain why appearing smart is stressed.

> And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison

Comparing a software engineer to someone contributing to the advancement of an entire field is not really a fair comparison. This is like comparing someone who has a job in "compliance and ethics" to someone making advancement in quantum computing.

It's also bogus. If there is one theme repeated over and over, from Aristotle to modern-day philosophers, it's that a philosopher is so much smarter than any other group, and that it's a humble sacrifice to go work in a field that won't pay very well.

The vast majority of philosophers don't advance the field in any meaningful way.

> The vast majority of philosophers don't advance the field in any meaningful way.

The vast majority of people in any field don't advance the field in any meaningful way.

(Agree with both yourself and the OP: with great respect for philosophers, comparisons of 'relative smartness' of one field over another is not helpful or particularly meaningful.)

I'm comparing people of equal experience in either field. A philosophy undergraduate is, in my experience, much more intelligent than their engineering counterpart. This probably has to do with the fact that in philosophy, writing clear arguments is of primary import.

Whereas in engineering, most examinations are problem sets -- where the worst that can happen is a clever gotcha' (see whiteboard interviews).

Your argument is that the top philosophers are smarter than Carmack. That seems suspect.

Haha, there's no comparison. The top philosophers are smarter than our Supreme Court Justices. And those are certainly smarter than Carmack.

And I'm a huge Carmack fanboy.

Hah. I've met a philosophy majors, and most of them just seemed to want to play word games, rather than try to help build understanding or work together in a conversation towards truth.

I don't care of the smartness of any group, but I'd take the methods of rationality over whatever is taught in philosophy any day of the week. You can see sillysaurus3 trying to actually get to the bottom of your statement, and he's being a much better logician than you are.

As a biochemist I'm also allergic to the field of ethics, because it tends to be worried hand-wringing by people who have no technical understanding of the field.

I mean, for the sake of argument I'd like to entertain that hypothesis. How do you propose to prove it? Or at least show some persuasive evidence.

To define "smart", you'd have to ask a philosopher. QED.

Jokes aside, my personal opinion is that we have a lot of hubris on the average, and a lot of us probably consider ourselves smarter than we are. Or at least could do with an attitude that generates an openness to learning, which being humble does.

For this reason alone, it might be interesting to consider that there might be a smarter lot out there. And a bunch of people who are sort of smart in the same way as developers are (deductive reasoning, parsing problems very finely, etc) to boot.

Obviously I can't prove it, but we can look at a few metrics: academic performance, influential ideas, impact on society. I think Carmack would lose on all these fronts.

How have modern philosophers impacted society? (Show your work.)

It seems obvious that Carmack's ideas have been far more influential than most philosophers' ideas, but admittedly this is difficult to measure. Impact on society isn't, though.

“Every mathematician believes that he is ahead of the others. The reason none state this belief in public is because they are intelligent people.”

Gorsuch, for example, often bases his arguments and decisions[1] on the moral framework of Dworkin[1] and Singer[2], just to name two of the biggest modern moral philosophers, regularly. If you don't think that SCOTUS decisions have more and longer-lasting social impact than Doom and the Oculus Rift, then we have some foundational disagreements.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/trump-b...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Dworkin

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer

>Gorsuch, for example, often bases his arguments and decisions[1] on the moral framework of Dworkin[1] and Singer[2], just to name two of the biggest modern moral philosophers, regularly.

I don't think that changing Dworkin's or Singer's mind on an issue would proceed to strongly affect Gorsuch's views. I think he'd just find another philosopher to cite, because his ultimate views are political rather than moral.

Gorsuch always manages to contort his opinion to match up with his politics. Being highly educated is orthogonal to being a good person.

>Whereas in engineering, most examinations are problem sets -- where the worst that can happen is a clever gotcha'

Methinks you don't know much about engineering if you think problem sets make up most of it.

A [someone who studied the same like I did] is, in my experience, much more intelligent than their [majority of this forum] counterpart.

As someone already stated here, modern philosophy more or less is nothing but a dick measuring contest.

QED

A few bits that may be of interest: there's intelligence (as measured by IQ, [pre-1996] SAT) and there's insight.

I doubt we have the data to compare philosophers as opposed to programmers in terms of intelligence (and this is an empirical question), but consider Alan Turing: a highly competent early programmer (he was known to be an expert debugger as well) and (almost incidentally) hugely impactful in philosophy of mind as well.

On the other hand, in terms of impact, insight can be just as valuable as intelligence. Bryan Magee once asked Bertrand Russell about who he considered to be most intelligent person he's met: Russell's answer wasn't Einstein, but rather Maynard Keynes; Einstein's contribution came from his insight (incidentally one inspired by his reading of Kant and Schopenhauer) rather than from intelligence alone. This point (on insight vs. intelligence or "percepts" vs. "concepts") is one that Schopenhauer also harps to a great deal (in between his vituperation of Hegel, of course.)

This implies that if it is indeed true that philosophy has much greater impact on the world than programming, it doesn't necessarily imply anything about intelligence of philosophers relative to that of programmers. Indeed, it's quite possibly that some of most influential programmers (in terms of influence on the wider world) aren't always the smartest (consider startup founders, especially for startups solving social/economic/business as opposed to purely technical problems -- not always great programmers -- and their subsequent software specialist hires.)

Orthogonally, sometimes the influence of a programmer can be behind the scenes. Take epistemology for example: if you asked someone how they know something, it's quite possible that their answer might mention Google in some way or another (possibly fallaciously, of course) -- yet few think of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Craig Silverstein, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Jeff Dean in the same vein as Plato (with his Meno and Theaetetus) when discussing "why is that we say we know know X."

As for Carmack, consider how much virtual reality (and here I am not just thinking Oculus, but even more so the 3D labyrinths of the original ID Software Games) might end up influencing metaphysics in the long run.

If you think of argumentation as the primary form of intelligence, then of course philosophers, who are trained to argumentate to the highest standards, are smartest. If you think that intelligence ought to somehow affect or encompass the world outside arguments, then plainly the natural sciences and engineering are smartest -- that's what their discipline does.

If you think intelligence ought to convince people of things, then obviously rhetoricians are smartest.

And so on and so on. sniff

"Philosophers, in short, do all kinds of things: from pushing the boundaries of exotic logics, to solving ethical problems, to systematizing natural language or understanding the metaphysics of causality."

I think you're mostly talking about analytic philosophy.[1] That's dominant in English-speaking countries, and in the process of dominating most everywhere else. But Continental philosophy[2] also exists, and has pretty different concerns and methodologies.

I encourage everyone to check out both.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy

That said, there's a big argument to be made that the distinction between analytic and continental is false, useless and on a shaky foundation of approximations even with massive overlap.

Who usually makes those arguments, analytic philosophers or continental?

> Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field.

Not sure what you are talking about. Godel and Turing demonstrating the limits of some systems are actually giving philosophy of science results. I don't see any bogus in their work.

>Godel and Turing demonstrating the limits of some systems are actually giving philosophy of science results.

The Halting Problem doesn't really touch on phil-of-sci concerns, which are chiefly about how to do empirical reasoning correctly. You don't need to deductively solve deductively unsolvable problems to do empirical prediction and control correctly.

Also consider Karl Popper's contributions towards the importance of falsifiability.

I think you probably had some good points to make about philosophy, but you killed it by turning it into a dick measuring contest.

It seems like half his point was that modern philosophy more or less is nothing but a dick measuring contest.

> Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field.

Could you please elaborate on this?

I'm being kind of harsh, so let me restate: my experience with Philosophy of Science has been very sub-par. I took a class on the Philosophy of Time and a lot of it dealt with relativity. Now, I don't think you need to understand Einstein to understand the gist of relativity, but if you're studying it for 10-weeks in a formal environment then, yeah, you probably need to have a grasp not only on Minkowski spaces, but on the metric tensor as well -- and the accompanying math. These topics were merely brushed over (with the kind of brevity you would see in a Netflix documentary) and it left a bad taste in my mouth. At the graduate level, a few (Philosophy of Science) grad students didn't have a grasp on Bayesian inference -- but were attempting to use it in their arguments freely.

Maybe I'm being unfair, but I just think science should be left to the scientists.

I do think you are being harsh here, or at least too particular to your own experience. My experience differs.

As a practicing scientist who also did a thesis on the concept of Causality, with projects on Time, I did in fact have to interact with and learn significant physics to make a dent in my projects. My professors were themselves extraordinarily capable with respect to (at least theoretical) science. My graduate-level philosophy of science classes were significantly harder than my theoretical physics classes, in some regards. The insight with respect to what is 'experimentable', and to be able to trace logical consequences of scientific assumptions through to experimental effects, and then to challenge those most basic of scientific assumptions by designing and using an experiment made powerful by its relation to an underlying philosophically-derived framework was extraordinarily empowering. And that's on the philosophy side.

I'd also argue that the framework instilled by my philosophy of science education has made my work as a scientist significantly more generalizable, and thus more influential to my fields.

Fair enough, my experience was very wishy-washy and hand-wavy. Maybe I just got unlucky. Philosophy of Science isn't UCLA's strength, after all.

I hope one day I'll get a chance one day to take a class on Philosophy of Science I'll enjoy.

Though I don't know much about philosophy of science, I'm studying for a doctoral degree in philosophy and study foundations of math and related topics in philosophy of mathematics and logic (i.e., an allied subfield of philosophy). There are a couple of things to say about your experience with philosophy of physics. I.e., that philosophy of physics is not sufficiently well-informed by the details of the physics it is supposed to be about.

There are definitely philosophers, both in philosophy of physics and in philosophy of mathematics, who are far better thought of as just studying philosophy simpliciter. These philosophers tend to use relatively trivial examples from science and mathematics in a pretty flat-footed way in order to make philosophical arguments. For example, arguing in favor of Platonism on the basis of purported facts about mathematical objects rarely takes into account mathematical reasoning beyond what is accessible to an average 7 year old.

But there are also many philosophers who study the exact sciences (i.e., math and physics) that actually take the details extremely seriously. Take a look at graduates and faculty at the Pitt HPS department or the UC Irvine's LPS department (for just two examples). There are quite a few people who even get doctoral degrees in both philosophy and physics. And, at my not-at-all-HPS (but technical-leaning) department, one of my colleagues who is just finishing with philosophy already has a doctoral degree in math.

Now, obviously just bc one has a doctoral degree in the exact sciences does not thereby make them cautious in assessing what philosophical content there is to be found in studying the exact sciences. The point is just that there are plenty of philosophers who, in contrast with the experience you had (at UCLA?) in philosophy of physics, know the details well enough to have contributed original research in the exact sciences.

Two very legit philosophers of physics to check out are David Malament and Howard Stein.

I am not as awed by philosophers as you are, but I think this is rather unfair on philosophy by extrapolating from a bad example, that isn't even what is generally meant by the philosophy of science. From your description, your example looks like a group of philosophers (or at least philosophically-minded people) trying to take on a scientific topic without first learning the science (of course, some physicists have been accused of doing the same with regard to philosophy.)

Henri Bergson, who had put a lifetime's study into a philosophical rumination on time, vigorously rejected special relativity, to the point that it is said that Einstein's Nobel award citation did not mention special relativity on account of Bergson's criticism. Nevertheless, Einstein was in no doubt about what was his most important work, and gave an acceptance speech that was all about relativity.

If Bergson had been more aware of what had been going in in physics, over the previous two decades, to come to terms with the (meta?)physical implications of Maxwell's equations, he might not have been blindsided by special relativity.

As the above is rather critical of Bergson, I will end by noting that near the end of his life, he stood up to the Vichy regime's persecution of Jews, even though he was not Jewish himself and could have remained aloof.

The central question in philosophy of science is a meta-scientific question, as would be expected, and it's the Demarcation Problem. You know this, but I'm restating it for observers: What is the difference between science and pseudoscience, and how can it be realized as a repeatable procedure?

Science should be left to scientists, but the interpretation of science is still an individual responsibility.

I do like the joke that career philosophers know no maths aside from arithmetic and about half of Bayes' Theorem.

So you are OK with the works of Karl Popper? Because as an outside observer, that's what I consider the phenotype of the philosophy of science.

Yeah, Popper is obviously a genius. I know he's regarded as a philosopher of science, but I think that's a bit of a misnomer. I think he's probably somewhere between logic and metaphysics. Carnap, too, is also more of a logician. But, alas, they're both labeled philosophers of science.

Hmm, I think you are mistaken here. Popper was as much a philosopher of science as anyone. Here's the intro to his Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper):

He is generally regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers of science.[11][12][13] Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favour of empirical falsification: A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments.

> Maybe I'm being unfair, but I just think science should be left to the scientists.

There is a world of difference between science and philosophy of science. Karl Popper wasn't a scientist but that doesn't mean he can't inquire about the philosophy of science. Philosophers in "philosophy of science" aren't doing any science. You do realize that don't you?

In your top-level comment, you crow about how smart philosophers are and now you are just deriding philosophers as incapable of understanding science and basic mathematics?

"Always warms my heart to see philosophy on top of HN. Philosophy is hard -- much harder than one would think. And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison."

> And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison.

As someone who studied both computer science and philosophy ( CS and Philosophy degrees ), no.

> Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field.

What?

> Philosophy of Mind, apart from a few great minds (Chalmers, Nagel) is also equivocal.

What?

Not sure how to respond to your comment since you are all over the place. But there are plenty of smart minds in software engineering/computer science and plenty of dumb minds in philosophy.

Not sure where you get the idea that philosophers are smarter than "software engineers" and what metric you are using to determine it. But if you have a metric, I'd love for you to lay it out.

>And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison.

How can you possibly think this subjective, anecdotal statement is going to land well?

When I went to college I took Computer Science as my major and Philosophy as a minor. Beyond the first year, the first day of every class was the same. Everyone introduced themselves and when I said I was a CS major everyone looked at me and wondered if I was in the right room... I love philosophy! For a CS person it is extremely relatable.

Philosophy is easy. It takes a different skill set and is a more developed field, however their is nothing that verifies mistakes so you can succeeded without being absolutely correct.

The problem is when you confuse what you need to do to succeed with the search for truth.

If your claim is that your philosophical position can not be verified, then sure, nothing verifies it. Typically, however, philosophers actually claim their ideas are in tight correlation with reality. That offers plenty of opportunities for verification.

Such as...

> there is nothing that verifies mistakes so you can succeeded without being absolutely correct

Yes there is. The primary method of argument is proof.

At a practical level acceptance in The Philosophical Review arguably the top Journal does not require some sort of mechanical formal verification.

The barriers to entry are no less difficult from it's absence, but the barriers to accuracy are defiantly lower.

Does any journal exist which includes mechanical formal verification as part of its acceptance process? Not even mathematical journals do this. Hell, mathematicians would probably lose their minds if such a thing was suggested. Just look at the crisis the Four Color Theorem proof caused when it came out.

> Yes there is. The primary method of argument is proof.

Only in logic, I think. Is there proof in ethics? (which is not to say that I think it is an invalid field of discourse.) One can demand internal consistency in a philosophical argument, but not necessarily proof.

In the interminable squabbles over consciousness and the mind, the physicalists and the dualists each seem to think they have ruled out their opponents' position, but they can't both be right.

And yet, proof in this domain isn't precise the way a mathematical proof is precise.

Of course it's precise (in fact, it's isomorphic to a mathematical proof).

If you read universally accepted classical philosophers most of their work are not precise at all, yet they are widely recognized.

Actually, a lot of philosophy is "arguable". I don't think you can argue a lot with a mathematical proof.

And I'm sorry, but when Lacan compare the penis to square root of -1, it's hard to come back to scientists and sell the rigor of philosophy. Same when philosophers use and abuse Gödel's incompleteness theorems or the quantum observer effect to justify ludicrous claims.

> Same when philosophers use and abuse Gödel's incompleteness theorems...

Except the most popular abuser of Gödel's conclusions by far is a physicist and mathematician.

Nobody said scientists couldn't be wrong. I'm just against the idea that philosophy is as rigorous as maths in most of the forms it has taken until today.

I suppose it depends on how narrowly you are defining philosophy. But the fact is that we can write computer programs to verify many more kinds of mathematical proofs than we can philosophical "proofs".

Even mathematical proof is a relatively low standard in practice.

Just look at all the retracted papers that have been published. Erratum are surprisingly widespread for such a formal system.

Making a mistake has nothing to do with using an accurate system. You can have the most precise ruler in the world and yet use it incorrectly.

My point is that perfection is not required. So, calling something a proof does not mean it must be accurate.

Of course it is. When you see a mistake in a reasoning, it's not called a proof anymore. It's kinda the definition.

The problem is it was called a proof beforehand.

So, their is cases of demonstrated lag between publishing and problems showing up. Therefore in the strictest possible terms, every published result is in some way suspects as they simply have yet to be disproved.

I am in no way suggesting this is some kind of reasonable standard. Just that math is slightly more subjective than often portrayed.

PS: This line of reasoning was simply in response to the suggesting that proof somehow inherently implied accuracy.

Fair enough :)

Philosophy is hard -- much harder than one would think. And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison. On the other hand, it's very political

The part which is political is very relevant.

You might not like this one's politics, but his analysis of the politics of the Weimar Republic is cogent and very relevant to today's American and European politics. (It also applies to the Postmodernist Left.)

http://a.co/fP0iFwZ

Disparaging (all!) Software Engineers on HN? I'm surprised this comment has not been downvoted into oblivion.

>Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field.

A coherent philosophy of science is required for science to be based on valid premises. I don't know what you mean by this, unless you're referring to something recent which I don't know about. The past philosophy of science has been extremely instrumental to creating the scientific method; Karl Popper is science household name.

>On the other hand, it's very political, and a lot of it is mental masturbation.

There's nothing wrong with political philosophy, and arguably political philosophy is some of the most important from certain perspectives (pragmatism?). There's also nothing wrong with mental masturbation; by the same measure art, abstract mathematics, theoretical computer science, theoretical physics, poetry and a vast array of human literature is also mental masturbation, yet few would deny its value.

I have a hard time dismissing Hegel and Marx because their work involved political philosophy.