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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

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

>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.

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.

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.

>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

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