Software Needs Philosophers (2006) | Hacker News Reader

Software Needs Philosophers (2006)

steve-yegge.blogspot.com

56 pointsluu117 comments

I am neither a software developer nor a philosopher, but I am a Computer Science researcher who spends a fair amount of time talking with colleagues in the Philosophy department.

My view is mostly the opposite of the headline -- philosophers need scientists/engineers/practitioners more than the other way around. Asking and attempting to answer big questions about the world requires, first, understanding the world. And today, understanding the world requires immense technical expertise.

One example: philosophers are quick to opine on the problem of bias in machine learning, but almost all lack even a CS 1 level understanding of answers to basic questions like "what is an algorithm?", and therefore mistake these fairly straightforward questions as somehow profound [1]. And all but a precious few philosophers [2] are frankly technically unqualified for discussions about how to actually address bias in ML.

Things only get worse when we enter questions about AI & Theory of Mind, computer ethics, etc.

[1] Of course, "what is an algorithm?" can result in conversations that lead to deep questions; my point is that there is a standard and more-or-less fit for purpose definition that's given in every CS 1 class, and understanding that definition is a prerequisite for deeper interpretations of the question. Diving off the deep end without having e.g. written and analyzed a simple sorting algorithm will always be a waste of time.

[2] Often those with either excellent training in the analytic tradition or, more commonly, some serious background in a quantitative field such as Mathematics or Physics.

Software people not philosophers promulgated the nonsense idea that "algorithms can't be biased", so I think software people need plenty of help understanding what an algorithm is, with help from philosophy and humanity. Software, being mostly based on math is a prime example of "map that is not the territory".

> Software people not philosophers promulgated the nonsense idea that "algorithms can't be biased", so I think software people need plenty of help understanding what an algorithm is, with help from philosophy and humanity.

(E: throwaway894345's comment is of much higher quality than mine.)

Very few serious software engineers -- and virtually zero computer scientists -- have ever held this opinion. It's an extreme minority view. And, I know a few philosophers who also repeat this nonsense.

Those that do hold this view IME are almost always folks who are invested in a personal politics that is congruent with dismissing concerns about bias. Without exception, IME, they're also knee-jerk antagonistic toward other ideas about bias that don't involve computers (eg they're the first ones to complain about implicit bias training). These people also tend to be the annoyingly pedantic type ("bias has a technical meaning in statistics!" sort of thing).

In other words, they're politically invested, and no amount of input from philosophers -- or technicians/scientists -- is going to change their strongly held personal politic beliefs.

Again, anyone who has spent a moment around philosophers knows that they are just humans who are not immune from the exact same problem.

> Very few serious software engineers -- and virtually zero computer scientists -- have ever held this opinion. It's an extreme minority view.

And yet here we are selling software, like facial recognition, to organizations that can ruin people and have little oversight based on how well those same algorithms are supposed to work?

> And yet here we are selling software, like facial recognition

Speak for yourself. (Also, last I checked, most CEOs, boards, and sales forces don't have technical backgrounds.)

> to organizations that can ruin people and have little oversight based on how well those same algorithms are supposed to work?

And how do you get oversight?

That's a political problem, not a philosophical problem. If you want to sway the opinions of regulators and legislators, please do not reach for the philosophy dept. Convincing regulators and legislators to do stuff is not the job of a philosopher. So what is the job of a philosopher?

This kind of brings us back to my original point from which we've now strayed. Philosophy is a field of study. The job of a philosopher is to do philosophy. In order to do that job well, philosophers require more input from technical experts than they currently receive.

This matters precisely because philosophy is important; good philosophy is the lifeblood of a healthy society, but it's increasingly difficult to do good philosophy without some scientific training.

I do not sell such software.

You blame companies, but is that to mean that engineers are supposed to turn a blind eye to ethical issues in the products their employers sell? Other engineering disciplins whole-heartedly disagree.

Regulation is besides the point. The comment I replied to said that software engineers have never held the belief that their algorithms aren't biased and I was simply pointing out that that is either false on a large scale or those engineers are complicit with the use of their software in unethical ways because of those bias issues in the software.

> but is that to mean that engineers are supposed to turn a blind eye to ethical issues in the products their employers sell?

Those engineers understand the obvious problems with facial recognition software. Everyone does.

The engineers building this software don't need philosophical training. Instead, they need a personal/professional ethics (or, in lieu of such self-regulatory instincts, government regulation). Again, neither of those presents a philosophical problem.

> Other engineering disciplins whole-heartedly disagree. Regulation is besides the point.

I disagree. Other engineers disagree precisely because they operate in highly regulated disciplines. PE codes of ethics are not (just) personal ethical commitments; rather, they are (also) backed by the force of law. BTW, lots of engineers build WMDs.

I think it's helpful to talk about "bias issues" specifically. When we talk about them in the abstract, they always seem to carry this boogeyman-ish quality, but when we talk about them as concrete instances, we can almost always (and rather easily) come up with concrete mitigations. For example, some people have rightly expressed concern about statistical models of criminality derived from law enforcement data, so we augment and weigh that data with other sources, such as victim surveys, hospital records, and so forth. Of course, that doesn't eliminate all bias (we can never completely eliminate bias) but it's a significant improvement, especially when the alternative to "using a formal statistical model" is "using law enforcement officers' personal judgment". We can also make available certain information about the training data set and the methodology to provide an audit trail. Very rarely are these ethical issues really as insurmountable as critics seem to imply when they speak about "biased algorithms" in the abstract.

We don't sell that software because it is the consensus of those qualified to judge that it's a good idea, we sell it because we live in a market economy, it is legal, and institutions want to buy it. The problem here is with the law and the institutions.

You blame companies and the market economy, but is that to mean that engineers are supposed to turn a blind eye to ethical issues in the products their employers sell? Other engineering disciplins whole-heartedly disagree.

My point is that either the statement that it's widely held that software can be biased is wrong (or more generously that the concern is not considered), or software engineers are complicit in unethical uses of their software because of known biases.

I think individual engineers absolutely have a duty to act ethically, and that that duty includes not working on unethical things. However, I don't think that stating that the behaviour is unethical and that people shouldn't do it helps solve the problem, whereas I do think that we could ban bullshit ML woo or reform our institutions so that they don't use it to spy on people

To add more context to your point, originally the "algorithms are biased" people were arguing (or strongly implying) that all algorithms were biased and that they would always be biased so we should never use them (or something to that end, anyway). I don't know that their opponents were arguing that algorithms "aren't biased" as much as for a clearer understanding of what is meant by the claim "algorithms are biased" because there's no obvious definition for "bias" that lends itself to the conclusion that algorithms will always be more bias (or "worsely biased" in case that's not the same as "more bias") than people. The latter camp specifically argued that algorithms aren't inherently biased, but rather they "inherit" any biases encoded in the training data, and thus the "algorithms are biased" group would do well to frame their concerns in terms of concerns about training data sets and focus on how we can mitigate those concerns.

Over time, as is often the case with healthy debate, the "algorithms are biased" people did start to frame their concerns this way and now we have robust and productive conversations about ethically training algorithms (instead of a strict prohibition on algorithms). This is strictly a good outcome, except that some people are misremembering the argument as one group arguing that "algorithms can't be biased" in any sense of the phrase (although I'm sure there are some fringe few people for whom that's true as well, but as you point out, that was never a prominent position) and we forget that the "algorithms are biased" people weren't always making the nuanced arguments that they've been pushed to make today.

Excellent clarification; thanks for taking the time to write this up!

Algorithms are just encodings of their methodology of their creators. Here's an algorithm to detect foreigners in my country:

Step 1: Calculate skin tone ratio of person

Step 2: If light skinned then assign person to bin "foreigner".

This will work in 99% of cases, so by one standard its a good algorithm that requires little effort to give valid results.

However, it's just encoded the bias that light skinned people can't be citizens, and thus fails for mixed children, refugees and the thousands multigenerational dependents of expats.

No one can really say computers are unbiased. They simply do what you tell them to do. In my opinion, we computer scientists and practicing engineers understand that, but the general population has the mystique that the machine is somehow more right than a person, simply because you can't see the person(s) who programmed the machine.

Very good point. And, this algorithm would totally fail in my country! As the U.S. has a wide variety of citizens of various skin tones. Which I'm very happy about : ).

Which I think supports what you're saying; not only do algorithms have biases, but we also can't assume they are universally applicable across a domain (in this case that a single facial recognition algorithm will have the same degree of accuracy in all places across the globe).

Yep, I agree. Facial recognition is a field where you commonly see overfitting to culture where the tech package was created in.

One dead stupid example, I can think of is biometric cameras being unable to differentiate between faces accurately on the default settings. The cameras are sourced from Europe, and universally use an exposure setting that's too short to do anything more than bring out the whites of someones eyes if you have dark skin tones and are in a normally lit room. Just setting the explore to be a little longer, results in decent results for dark skin tones (and of course, worse results for light skin tones).

Consumer technologies like iPhone camera's on the other hand get it right, because they were forced to start testing on different culture groups due to bad press, but their ubiquity leads to people forgetting that every single setting in a camera can lead to better or worse outcomes, and you can't always rely on having a fast processor like an iPhone to autocorrect for you.

That's not how any real-world algorithms work (and maybe this is exactly your point); rather, provided they learned on a representative sample, they'd learn that there's a 99% chance that a given light-skinned person is a non-citizen (or more likely, that the lighter the skin, the less likely they are to be a citizen--i.e., continuous and not discrete). For a given light-skinned person, they'd return a confidence of 99% that the person in question is a non-citizen. "Bias" would be a person looking at that confidence interval and misinterpreting it as 100%.

Additionally, it's problematic because it's easily conned--for example, if it's used to determine who is eligible to vote (even if we take care not to round the confidence interval up to 100% by classifying 1% of light-skinned people as eligible and 1% of dark-skinned people as ineligible), someone could haul in a bunch of foreigners with dark skin to commit voter fraud. This also isn't "algorithmic bias", but rather foolishness in the application of the algorithm (of course, it's impossible to conceive of a legitimate purpose for an algorithm that maps statistically between skin color and citizenship).

> provided they learned on a representative sample

From this, I think you're talking about deep learning algorithms.

However, the term algorithm predates practical AI, deep learning, neural nets, etc.

I would know because I sat for an algorithms exam when the fastest consumer computers had speeds measured in single-digit MHz.

An algorithm is essentially just a series of steps that a person (or more commonly now adays, a computer) can follow along with to achieve a specific goal.

Talking about stochastic systems, back propagation, or even simple probability and confidence intervals just muddies the issue. At its core, algorithms can merely be something defined deterministically, and programmed by hand by a human being.

By the way, the system I described isn't something in actual use by machines (I hope). It's just the thought pattern of biased people in my country, a sort of mental short cut used to determine what level of service you get.

I thought we were talking about machine algorithms, but it doesn't really matter. We're talking about a simple statistical mapping between two boolean properties: skin tone and citizenship. You stipulated already that, for a given light-skinned person, the algorithm (machine or human) will return "non-citizen" with 99% confidence, and that that confidence interval is correct.

As far as I can tell, we can conclude from those facts that there is no bias (maybe I'm wrong, but I consider bias to be an errant belief); however, there are still potential issues:

* For what applications is 99% confidence acceptable? Can we do better by avoiding a statistical analysis altogether, e.g., by using citizenship records?

* Do we really believe/trust that humans are capable of 99% confidence (calling into question the fact that you established in your original post)?

* Are users of this algorithm rounding 99% up to 100%, thus disenfranchising one group 1% of the time (as opposed to distributing the error proportionately between the two groups)?

I disagree. You don't need to understand exactly how a nuclear bomb works to understand its impact.

We've let scientists/engineers/practitioners control the steering wheel for decades, and what do we have? Insidious adtech, lies spreading uncontrollably, populism at extreme highs across the world, etc. All to make more money. And you think we need more of that in this debate? We need philosophy first - not second.

> I disagree. You don't need to understand exactly how a nuclear bomb works to understand its impact.

Sure, but critique is the easy part of anything (including philosophy). You do need to understand how a nuclear bomb works in order to eg design an effective monitoring program. And not just how it works, but how it is built.

BTW, you also don't exactly need a professional philosopher to explain the dangers of a WMD or the pitfalls of facial recognition. Broad critique is the easy part. Specific critique is what leads to solutions, and specificity requires expertise.

> We've let scientists/engineers/practitioners control the steering wheel for decades

But we haven't!!!

How many POTUSes have been STEM people?

How many representatives?

How many senators?

How many governors?

How many federal judges?

How many CEOs?

Very, very precious few people who control the actual machines of power in our society have any amount of STEM training.

So, no, technologists have not been at the healm of the United States. On the contrary, non-technical people -- lawyers and business people, mostly -- have been managing a highly technical world for decades. That's why we had no economic policy to manage the impact of automation in the 1990s. It's why we still have no climate policy. And it's why we had a complete dearth of privacy regulation in the early 2000s.

Good point. And I just want to throw on to that (not saying folks are disagreeing w/this) that IMHO some amount of technical expertise is necessary but not sufficient for the kind of socially responsible decision-making we are talking about.

JFK (or whomever) didn't need to be a physicist, but he did need to understand a little physics. And math, etc.

>Sure, but critique is the easy part of anything (including philosophy). You do need to understand how a nuclear bomb works in order to eg design an effective monitoring program. And not just how it works, but how it is built.

That's just logistics - it comes after your philosophical understanding of the item. We don't have to monitor things that aren't bad. We monitor nuclear proliferation because we've already made a philosophical judgement on it. It came first.

> But we haven't!!!

The United States is an open market system. What drives most innovation is the free market, not the government. The government is almost always reactionary by nature. Software engineers have free choice to work on what they please. They choose to work for big money on insidious technology and they know it. You can't just blame someone else.

> So, no, technologists have not been at the healm of the United States. On the contrary, non-technical people -- lawyers and business people, mostly -- have been managing a highly technical world for decades. That's why we had no economic policy to manage the impact of automation in the 1990s. It's why we still have no climate policy. And it's why we had a complete dearth of privacy regulation in the early 2000s.

This logic is circular. We live in a highly technological world that can only be created by scientists/engineers, but they have no power. So how did we get to this highly technological world if they had no influence or power? Clearly they had power and clout - to suggest otherwise is just, well, wrong. No one is holding a gun to any software engineer's head in the US. None of them have to work on adtech. But they do, to make money, more than most people need. So spare me that we need more of these types of "philosophers".

We don't have climate policy because people stand to lose money, just like we have software engineers that refuse to take pay cuts to work on actual helpful technology instead of adtech.

> That's just logistics - it comes after your philosophical understanding of the item. We don't have to monitor things that aren't bad. We monitor nuclear proliferation because we've already made a philosophical judgement on it. It came first.

But professional philosophers do not all agree on the morality of developing nuclear weapons, nor do those who do agree have particularly convincing answers about how to actually denuclearize. So I'm not exactly sure how professional philosophy is supposed to solve this problem -- they don't agree, and even those that do offer no particularly useful solutions.

"Software Needs Philosophers" is NOT the same as "software engineers should abide by a strict code of ethics that aligns with my personal ethics". The latter is simply equivalent to the observation that "the world would be better if only I had perfect fiat".

Sans such fiat, you need politics. And, again, philosophers do philosophy. Not politics.

Regarding the rest of the post, the USA is run by business people and lawyers. To look at who occupies the major seats of power in government and business but then conclude otherwise requires a tremendous amount of mental gymnastics. Lots of relatively powerless people do things that are crucial to society -- factory workers, migrant farm workers, etc.

Do you really think better philosophy would prevent software engineers from working on ethically dubious projects? I seriously doubt it. I also doubt that putting technologists in charge of everyone would result in a wonderful utopia. But don't blame the state of the world on technologists when business people and lawyers are the ones setting the rules and leading the teams that play by those rules.

Anyways, this is all quite far afield from the original thesis of my top-level post, which was simply that professional philosophers need STEM professionals in order to do philosophy, perhaps more so than STEM professionals need philosophy to do good engineering/science.

Which itself is, admittedly, quite far afield from the original article :)

> this is all quite far afield from the original thesis of my top-level post,

This is accurate. I am not going to refute your points directly, I don't think they're necessarily relevant for the crux of your argument and do a fair bit of obfuscation. In your post it seems more that you are arguing against philosophy - not for "philosophers needing stem professionals."

> which was simply that professional philosophers need STEM professionals in order to do philosophy, perhaps more so than STEM professionals need philosophy to do good engineering/science.

"good" engineering/science - what is that? Define it.

I just don't buy the argument that philosophy needs stem to do its job. Not knowing how every algorithm works doesn't mean you can't discuss its impacts, effects, if it's ethical or not.

> "good" engineering/science - what is that? Define it.

You don't need to know the definition of a "good" joint to make a strong table. You just need to know how to make one.

> Not knowing how every algorithm works doesn't mean you can't discuss its impacts, effects, if it's ethical or not.

Do you work with professional philosophers regularly?

I recently had a half-hour conversation with a respected tenured philosopher who had strong opinions about ML but literally did not understand what a computer is.

He consistently confused the words "logarithm" and "algorithm".

He regularly humanized machines as if they are sentient AIs. This had practical effects; he drew all sorts of wild conclusions about how you might "fix" a "biased AI" that would be impossible to implement.

He did not understand what the word "data" means. E.g., we got into a discussion about whether a picture of a human face is "data". And not in some profound way. In the way that made it clear he doesn't understand how modern facial recognition algorithms are built/designed. In a way that was simply not a useful point for conversation.

In short, he was doing bad philosophy because he didn't have enough technical background to understand which philosophical questions were amusingly nonsensical and which were actually interesting/difficult. Or even the basic vocabulary to not sound like a fool.

We eventually had a good conversation, because he was smart and willing to learn. But without a STEM expert in the loop, his opinions were worse than useless because they implied solutions that any would elicit bemusement from anyone trying to actually implement a better system -- or even anyone trying to decide what is/isn't ethical to build!

> In your post it seems more that you are arguing against philosophy - not for "philosophers needing stem professionals.

Hm. I stated: "philosophers need scientists/engineers/practitioners more than the other way around. Asking and attempting to answer big questions about the world requires, first, understanding the world. And today, understanding the world requires immense technical expertise"

If I were "arguing against philosophy" [1], then why would I invest time in working with philosophers?! Good philosophy is needed now more than ever.

What is useless -- and not just useless, but even harmful -- is the sort of terrible philosophy that's often done by people who don't take the time to understand the thing they are opining about.

[1] "Arguing against philosophy", I think, is a bit of an oxy moron anyways. Wouldn't any argument against philosophy be a work of philosophy?

> You don't need to know the definition of a "good" joint to make a strong table. You just need to know how to make one.

That's not what I asked. Please answer the question: "good" engineering/science - what is that? Define it.

> Do you work with professional philosophers regularly? I recently had a half-hour conversation...

Do you normally make sweeping generalizations based on one man's half hour conversation with you? And yes, I do.

> If I were "arguing against philosophy" [1], then why would I invest time in working with philosophers?! Good philosophy is needed now more than ever.

And now we're full circle. You've gone so circular that you've agreed with my point - we need philosophers more than we need STEM professionals.

Perhaps what you're really trying to say, is, "we need more modern philosophers." They will come. Nothing is stopping you from becoming one - but you can't throw out the philosophy side, even if technical solutions to problems require specific expertise.

Have a great week.

That's true, I suppose, but unskilled laborers routinely achieve the level of philosophical sophistication required to make that judgment. It doesn't help your argument about the primacy of philosophy if it means the kind of "philosophy" achieved by the man in the street.

> We don't have climate policy because people stand to lose money, just like we have software engineers that refuse to take pay cuts to work on actual helpful technology instead of adtech.

That's true, but we also don't have a society that will pay more for actual helpful technology than it will for adtech. Why blame the software engineers for not making themselves martyrs? Why not blame the CEOs for not making themselves martyrs? Why not blame the people for wanting the wrong things?

I'm not sure what exclusivity has to do with primacy.

In any case that is an easy example. But what about the example of the use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima? That is much more debatable and isn't as clear cut - so we need more advanced discussions to make a better decision in that case.

> That's true, but we also don't have a society that will pay more for actual helpful technology than it will for adtech. Why blame the software engineers for not making themselves martyrs? Why not blame the CEOs for not making themselves martyrs? Why not blame the people for wanting the wrong things?

I'm not arguing that software engineers should be martyrs. I'm arguing that software engineers bear culpability as much as anyone else, and to suggest that they are more necessary than philosophy as incorrect.

You touch an important problem. We could have a discussion about the ethics - who is responsible, who is not. What do you know - philosophy.

Do you think there is room for various kinds philosophical thought within Computer Science itself? Honest question.

As an undergrad studying Comp Sci and also taking philosophy/literature classes it struck me just how rich the Computer Science metaphors are, and how much creativity seemed to go into coming up with a lot of the fundamental ideas of Computer Science.

But of course it's also possible that I was applying my own bias; I know most of the Comp Sci folks from the 50s/60s/70s were pretty heavy math folks.

But pursuing a graduate Comp Sci degree is something I've considered on and off. Alan Kay has always been especially inspiring.

TBH I've also felt like there's some unexplored areas where Computer Science and Poetics, or Literary Theory, could make a really interesting combination. Again it's a question of rich metaphors and investing meaning into use-of-language in a very comprehensive and granular way (grammar, one verb or adjective versus another, theories of narrative, etc.

> Do you think there is room for various kinds philosophical thought within Computer Science itself? Honest question.

Yes, of course!

Many areas of computer science grew out of various areas of philosophy, and that's still true.

I guess my main thesis in this thread is that, today, philosophers need STEM in order to do good philosophy more than STEM folks need philosophy to do good engineering/science. "More than" is comparative, not absolute, and of course STEM folks can benefit tremendously by interacting with philosophers (see: the first line of my top-level post).

> But pursuing a graduate Comp Sci degree is something I've considered on and off.

There are some great CS departments that interact heavily with Philosophy departments. Carnegie Mellon even has a joint PhD program: http://logic.cmu.edu/

Thank you for your response - much appreciated! And for pointing out the Carnegie Mellon program.

What is the academic job market like this days for CS Phd's, if I may ask?

This article is such a great opportunity for introspection ("what do we need in order to do better?"). It's too bad that the top comment has turned it into an opportunity for egotism ("they need us!").

This isn’t idle speculation. I’m not a software engineer anymore. Also, I publish with philosophers.

We do not need input from the typical professional philosopher to do better.

I think it's elitist to think that philosophers gave us the ability to talk about facts of practical matters.

Indeed modern technology (science+engineering) is an amalgamation of top-down ivory tower-originated ideas and bottom up common sense craftsmen folk practice and knowledge.

People knew how to build pyramids before the scientific revolution and before the academic elite people-with-wigs invented ways to deal with induction and laws of motion, falsifiability etc.

The enlightenment didn't give us facts and practical common sense. When people say spare me the philosophy, they mean they want to get down to business in a practical way, which they know is possible.

Sure, the scientific revolution had a major part of it but a lot of stuff was invented bottom up for practical reasons, as agricultural tools, construction methods, military equipment and not derived from the musings of monks and barons. Rather it was the philosophers who looked at these things and tried to put a theory behind it.

You don't think there was some amount of "Hmm. The first time we tried to build a pyramid, it failed. Perhaps we can contemplate why it failed."?

Or do you think they just kept iterating without any reflection?

I don't know the literal answer here, but I think I'd consider the reflection between iterations to probably include a degree of philosophizing, even if it was before the western formalization of the scientific method.

"Hmm, maybe we should make the bottom bigger this time."

Fair points. I think it's worth noting though that while bottom-up invention creates the horse-drawn plow, philosophy is what attempts to answer the question of its rationality, morality, etc.

I don't think the two have to be so divorced as you suggest. :-)

I think they are often divorced, as in the philosophers started out on a weird footing, a kind of twisted way of looking at things and in many cases they rediscovered principles that were already in use by common folk. For sure they also produced counterintuitive things, but in a sense the two have converged. The musings which started on what is the good life, what is moral etc lead to discussions of the inner nature of things, the heavens etc. And then I guess somewhat unexpectedly the two were sort of unified: heavens (sky stuff whose study started as a way to try and understand God and his goals with us) and mundane earthly things turned out to be governed by the same laws. The sky is not of fundamentally different nature than our everyday objects. Both consist of the same kinds of elementary particles and obey the same rules.

But even today a lot of engineering, biology and medicine is extremely empirical.

I mean philosophical medicine led people to derive that we need to do bloodletting etc. While I guess less educated common village folk or indigenous jungle inhabitants had various practices that helped but they didn't know why and weren't derived from ideas like the humors and four elements.

You seem to be talking about/dismissing philosophy as though it's stuck in its very earliest days, one step away intuition.

No I'm just wondering how much philosophy has drawn from common practical low brow stuff to course-correct and grow in the right direction. What came first, empirical philosophers or the recognition that mundane experiential stuff is useful?

I'm just arguing against a sort of waterfall model of philosophers sitting on top of the totem pole and passing down to us what to do. Perhaps that's a straw man though, but some people do seem to think that before Aristotle gave us logic we couldn't follow complex arguments. Indeed, I think it's rather that they formalized already existing argument structures they observed in the agora etc. For sure the abstract tools also turned out to be useful and abstraction is how we got to the moon, not through taller ladders etc.

I think it's hard to deny there is a bitter elitist tinge to philosophers that they don't get enough credit, but it's definitely a larger topic than what fits in a comment.

What came first, empirical philosophers or the recognition that mundane experiential stuff is useful?

What came first, empirical physicists or the recognition that mundane events could be predicted and controlled in a useful way?

What came first, meteorologists or the recognition that paying heed to mundane weather patterns could be useful?

In essence, yes, you're arguing against a strawman. Every improvement is incremental. How come you're belittling Aristotle and Plato and discarding their contributions, but not similarly discarding Newton, Leibniz or Turing?

The problem with philosophy is that you can't tell the difference between an honest effort to seek the truth and a frivolous attempt to display erudition to win the debate.

Science is not perfect, but it provides evaluation mechanisms to reduce the doubt.

> The problem with philosophy is that you can't tell the difference between an honest effort to seek the truth and a frivolous attempt to display erudition to win the debate.

I'm not sure what you are including in "philosophy," but there are entire subfields dedicated to this very issue.

However, unlike the sciences, you have to work for it. Nature doesn't give you the answers.

It's an annoying game because by this tactic philosophy is always good and important and can never be useless, because when you argue that it's useless, a philosopher will say "Gotcha! Now you are doing philosophy! You just proved how important philosophy is! Thanks for your contributions to it!" But if I don't do philosophy you keep prodding me "Hey, hey, philosophy is important, do philosophy!". If I tell you to go away because I don't need it for this and this reason, then I've fallen into the trap because I'm now doing philosophy.

But I guess science-denying people argue just like I did above when they dislike the idea that science admits that it may be wrong and will update itself with new evidence. But I can see how someone with a different epistemological footing would be annoyed with this.

Something of this sort can never be "wrong", because it will just incorporate an update when it's proven wrong. But is that updated thing really the same?

It's a cheap trick to try and get around of being ever truly wrong. If you turn out to be wrong you can just say "but I knew I may be wrong and would have to update" so you weren't really wrong in the deeper sense!

Note that I adhere to this scientific ethos as well, but I can see it has a wobbly structure in this way.

>People knew how to build pyramids before the scientific revolution and before the academic elite people-with-wigs invented ways to deal with induction and laws of motion, falsifiability etc.

If you're suggesting that there was not quite a bit of science and math that went into building the egyptian pyramids, I think you're well off base.

It seems worth noting that there's still been no mention of the ethics of building the pyramids, nor the rationality of doing so, nor the implications for the future, etc.

I think that's more the point of the blog post.

Is there any consensus on ethics? What do ethical philosophers do in medical situations? Is there really some ethical training that can objectively tell them when to allow euthanasia or when to allow a certain risky intervention? (if there is we call it laws and regulations)

No, of course not. They're simply highly trusted, generally educated people, who we trust to make roughly okay judgment calls based on their instinct and life experience.

Ethics isn't a field you can study the same way as biology or anatomy. It's about compromises, staying within the broadly socially-culturally acceptible. Sure the moral intuitions of a society do evolve over time and often due to influential philosophers, but I don't think everyday ethics committees tap into anything deep.

It often comes down to an extremely uncertain medical situation where the doctor can provide no useful quantitative probabilities for outcomes and the benefits and risks are really hard to score anyway. So it all comes down to intuition and negotiation and not upsetting the public too much.

It is only since recent times that philosophy has been separated from the other arts and sciences, just as with most sciences today. Not too long ago science, theology, philosophy were often practiced alongside each other or even seen as the same thing. The pyramids were made with science for a religious (philosophical) purpose by the elite (priests, Pharaohs).

The utility of philosophy is that we create a shared lexicon and set of ideas to make sense of the world and be able to create new things in the world and communicate them to one another.

I'll give it to you with the pyramids.

As for later ages, I'm not sure about this but I assume serfs and village folks didn't really interact with monks and elites. So they kinda did their thing and built various contraptions and came up with ways to manage their crops...

But perhaps the local priest had a bridging effect?

I wonder how much the codex writing isolated high class actually openly looked at common folk practice to learn from or they were too proud for that.

I mean I can see for example that religions have lots of practical rules on agriculture or rules of animal slaughtering and so on, so you may be right that it wasn't so divided from early on.

This is one of those topics where I feel things are complicated. The relations of high and low culture and knowledge and the transmission of ideas between elite musings and common mundane practice is something that really interests me but I don't even know how to learn more about this.

> I'm not sure about this but I assume serfs and village folks didn't really interact with monks and elites.

This was actually a recurring complaint among the monks, and several groups (called "Orders") were created whose job it was to interface with the common man. A person who did so was called a "Friar."

I highly recommend the book Medieval Christianity by Kevin Madigan (Yale University Press, 2015) if you're interested in this topic.

> The utility of philosophy is that we create a shared lexicon and set of ideas to make sense of the world and be able to create new things in the world and communicate them to one another.

Honest question: What "new things" has philosophy created?

First off, I'm of the opinion that history moves forward by the actions of individuals and that technology is a main driving factor, not ideas.

That being said, people like Pythagoras, Thales, Goethe, da Vinci, and many others were simultaneously artists, scientists, as well as philosophers. I agree to a certain degree with the GP that philosophy is mostly post-rationalising of existing phenomena. It's the creation of these ideas that allow for deeper thought and exchange of these ideas. Einstein had the idea of relativity before he could prove it.

When it comes to creating 'new things', it seems an individual's curiosity and serendipity is what drives innovation. But I think one must not underestimate the role philosophy plays in this as it can give one's thought direction.

Especially social philosophers like Rousseau, Marx, and various ideologues created a lot of social power structures.

Things like separation of powers. Humanist philosophers have influenced the way we see the role of the individual vs a member of a collective and so on.

It's easy to turn a blind eye to the benefits we've gotten from philosophy, it sounds like a bunch of truisms and we think surely we would've just figured that easy stuff out ourselves without the philosophers. But suppose you were plopped down in ancient times before Aristotle invented formal logic. Would you have invented it yourself because it's so obvious and a no-brainer and you're so practical? Well, if you think so, then why did it take so long for mankind to do so? Aristotle is practically yesterday, in geological terms.

But people did lots of really smart stuff before Aristotle. Also, the Maya and Aztecs didn't have Aristotle's logic but built an empire and had calendars etc. Sure they were not as advanced at the "meeting time", but who knows where they would have arrived after a few hundred or a few thousand more years.

How much were the high brow elites piggybacking and surfing on top of discoveries and chaotic societal processes that they rather described than created themselves?

That's Aristotle all over, no originality of thought, but just riding the wave of his zeitgeist.

Were the Greeks that original in some definite way that later stuff is derivative but they aren't? Is the divergence of the vector field of knowledge positive at the Greeks? Do they pump out more than they ingested from their prior generations? Indeed a lot of the heavy lifting is done by later generations in picking out the good stuff from everything, and we know "90% of everything is crap".

Aristotle was right and influential because we the later generations pick him of all his contemporaries because we evaluate his ideas to be good. And we discard a lot of bullshit where he was wrong and made up things without any basis.

Is my analysis here original? Surely not. We all stand on the shoulders of giants etc. But the point is precisely this, that we propagate the best ideas forward, in a discourse, and this is an active process and requires our judgment. Sure this idea itself is also not my radically novel insight. But I wouldn't count on seeing absolutely novel insight in all HN comments.

I do sometimes wonder to what extent Socrates'/Plato's/Aristotle's legacy benefited from Aristotle's connection to Alexander the Great. Had Alexander not been so famous, would those three have vanished into obscurity? The dual question of course is whether Alexander would've been so great without Aristotle's mentorship!

> Were the Greeks that original in some definite way that later stuff is derivative but they aren't?

I believe some folks are interested in if Indian thought and philosophy, or other Asian philosophies / schools of thought had any influence on Ancient Greek thought, as there was communication, trade, Alexander the Great conquering stuff, etc. But I believe it's an open question and probably one difficult to answer.

Schopenhaur, Nietzsche, and others, were aware of and admirers of Buddhism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Western_philosoph...

IMHO there's generally more cross-pollination, in multiple directions, than is generally realized or credited.

You're talking about whether philosophers discovered facts. Let's assume they didn't. The point of the post is that philosophers work on how to talk about facts.

> When people say spare me the philosophy, they mean they want to get down to business in a practical way, which they know is possible.

Yes. This is the problem: oftentimes, they are dismissing the second-order effects or non-practical concerns, and the idea of the post is that it takes philosophers to stand up for those other aspects of what's going on.

It's the knee-jerk dismissal (which you're engaging in, it seems like) that philosophers push back against.

I'm not sure if it takes professional philosophers though. It perhaps needs visionary, deeply reflective domain experts. You might call that philosophy and therefore the person, in part, a philosopher, but it's not in the original spirit.

But I agree we can benefit from some "philosophical products" to enhance our thinking. The common sense framework sometimes sends us into a corner and dead end from which we can only come out via philosophy.

I think it's entirely in the original spirit. Read the conclusion of the post:

> The lesson is that they are you. Whenever you hear someone ranting about something you take for granted as wonderful and praiseworthy, and you're wondering why they don't leave well enough alone so we can all get back to our incestuous cheerleading, just remember: we went from the Dark Ages to our reeeeasonably enlightened society today by questioning our most cherished beliefs.

> So keep questioning them.

The entire point is that there's nothing specially reserved to them, and that instead of dismissing philosophy, you and I and the rest of us need to engage in it, by questioning things, and looking for the second-order, and the non-obvious, and the non-practical.

This is a bit of a bait and switch or motte and bailey.

Now you're arguing that people should do philosophy.

The original argument was that we need philosophers, as in we need to take professionally trained philosophy graduates more seriously and bring them into the software industry so they can help us make better software.

The first is probably useful, everyone benefits from a broad range of knowledge and activity. Including sport, novels, humanities, philosophy, natural sciences, computer science, people management and psychology, etc. It doesn't necessarily mean we need graduates of all these fields in the software shop.

I suspect part of this push comes from a certain resentment from philosophy majors that their expertise is not valued much and they can't find jobs.

But for all but the richest places like Google, it is totally ridiculous that a software company could employ philosophers and pay their salaries for coming up with publishable articles according to the academic standards they learned at university.

Most software places are already annoyed how unpractical and far removed from the ground the CS graduates are compared to day to day practice. Them hiring philosophers is completely out of the question.

When I read philosophers takes on AI for example (eg Precht's new book), it's painful. It's as if their philosophy is still stuck at decades ago. They are asking the wrong questions, answer them clumsily, not using mathematical tools right or misunderstanding them, taking simple and well-understood things to be profound new insights and thinking that something is simple when it's actually really hard.

Philosophers (as in these actual real-life current humans) tend to invent problems for themselves completely orthogonal to what would actually be interesting and complex to investigate, probably out of fear that they are not technically adept/trained enough to engage with the details.

There's a component of tech-envy here that makes this type of discussion quite heated and tribal.

You misread Steve Yegge's post and you're accusing me of a bait and switch. Just read the post.

> as in we need to take professionally trained philosophy graduates more seriously and bring them into the software industry so they can help us make better software.

Really? Where does it say that, or anything like it? You're reacting to something you made up - not something that the post actually said.

It doesn't demand professional philosophers anywhere. It demands "great thinkers" and five of the eight people listed as examples aren't professional philosophers.

It is directed at telling the audience "you might be" a great thinker, so go to it.

This whole thread you're reacting to your imagined resentful philosophy major instead of taking the time to comprehend the post on its own terms.

Everyone thinks they can talk about and do philosophy, but if they haven't had any actual training, they're probably doing it wrong and rather tend to make anecdotal and arguments from personal preferences rather than by rigorous analysis.

Terribly true,and a great argument as to our need for philosophers in all eras. :-)

Someone well-versed in philosophy might well point out that the post you are replying to does not actually present an argument for that proposition - for example, it makes no attempt to show that this alleged widespread misunderstanding of philosophy has had measurable adverse consequences.

Can one make anything other than anecdotal arguments? If your arguments aren't based on your personal reasoning, what are they based on?

Also, I don't agree that you need to be trained philosopher to think for yourself. But why do you say so? What is it that the training provides?

Here's my take on your questions. Anecdotes [1] generally aren't the focus of academic philosophy. Modern philosophy focuses on arguments from Axiom [2] where a statement is taken to be true as a starting point for an argument. Responses to the piece of philosophy then take the form of criticism of the logic of the statements contingent on the axiom, or as arguments based on different axioms.

In other words an anecdotal argument is "I've seen and heard x, so I believe y" an axiomatic argument is "If x if true, we should believe y".

The important difference is the accessibility of each to logical analysis and discussion. Anyone can engage with an axiomatic argument by considering its premise and following statements. Anecdotal evidence relies entirely on personal experiences that another arguer may not share.

Training in academic philosophy prepares a person to engage in logically consistent criticism of existing philosophy and the production of well argued original works of academic philosophy.

You are right that you don't have to be a trained philosopher to think for yourself. In the same way that training in martial arts helps with punching, or training in coding helps you write better software, training in thinking helps you think.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdote

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

"You are right that you don't have to be a trained philosopher to think for yourself. In the same way that training in martial arts helps with punching, or training in coding helps you write better software, training in thinking helps you think."

Thank you. But are these comparable? Is thinking competitive and there's a winner? What is it to be trained to think? If that training hadn't happened, would the un-trained person not be thinking? Or, would you be thinking along a more natural way? Is it more akin to building one or other type of sandcastle, rather than to be a better fighter?

The way I view it, the only thing an individual can do is try to be the winner for themselves - they need to progress their understanding of themselves as much as possible. In nature there's no competition - there are needs that might or might not be met.

But, if you want to harness or direct individuals into a collectivised state, yes, you need to train them, and they will produce what you call 'original works of philosophy' on the basis of all the thought that has preceded them. As if 'a body of original works' is important to an individual. They may be renumerated for their trained thinking. As if renumeration is something the individual would ever want.

Let me ask you some questions to zero in on your issue here.

Is coding competitive? Is cooking? Is reading? Do you think that training does not help you become a better cook or coder or reader? Were you able to read without training? Do you think the fact that you had to be taught to read poisoned the well and you cannot trust anything you have read since?

The questions about fundamentals - cooking, reading. I would of course agree that these are useful to the individual. Now coding - again the skill is neutral. But what you code might not be. Why do you code what you code? Should you code in a bank, a facebook algorithm, etc? Are you actually undertaking your life in a positive way, or are you making gains at another's expense?

Do you think training is a neutral act? Is it possible that training can be subversive to the trainee?

Perhaps you will see my position as a political, anti-statist one. I see it as an individualistic perspective. If an individual is trained in academic philosophy, in order to provide 'production of well argued original works of academic philosophy' why is that valuable? To me, there is no value there at all. As an individual, I want to uncover the innate understanding we all already have.

Have you ever heard about people who go through half their life, having trained to be doctors, or solicitors, only to then realise that they didn't want to do that? I would say that these are the lucky ones - they have wasted only half their lives, and though they have much to undo, they at least they are honest enough to change their position and try to find something authentic and innate to them. Most people do not do that. That is the power of training and education, IMO. In it for the money, sell your granny.

In my view, this is what training at a higher level is to train people NOT to look inside themselves for answers, but to refer to an external authority. This applies to academic philosophy as much as any other area. Love of wisdom, becoming oneself, makes way for the production of 'original works of academic philosophy'. Beyond the basics, education seems to me about disempowering the individual, for the benefit of some imagined 'collective'. In fact, that collective is so individual who has their hands on the levers of governance, but let's not think too closely about that.

Who decides what is neutral? What if you are trained by masters or schools with conflicting thoughts? What if you read all sides of an argument? Is this information not valuable to the informed choices of an individual?

How can you be certain that individuals have the tools to "look inside themselves" without any training?

Also I would appreciate a deeper response to the question of reading and language. The very language(s) that you use to "try to find something authentic and innate" were not the result of an individual choice, but of training to an agreed societal standard during your youth.

Do you think that you would be better able to understand your true individual self if you had been raised without any training in a language or the other aspects of your culture?

Evidence says you would not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child#Documented_cases_o...

Once again I am getting the message that I am posting too fast. I think its when I am flagged for my 'contentious viewpoints'. Last time it was 3 hours before I could post, but I will submit this when I can. HN can be very frustrating.

Whether we agree or not, if you appreciate my taking the time to reply and provide you my thoughts, feel free to upvote me - I think a higher score may help in allowing me to respond in a more timely manner!

Back to your post.

Strangely (or perhaps not so strangely given my 'feralimal' handle) I was thinking about feral children and their inability to speak.

I think you would say they live a worse life than you. But why? How do you know? You do not.

You and I live in our classification systems - we probably share a very similar type. We were taught our classification systems at school and they are self-evident, right? Eg: "A whale is not a fish, its a mammal.", "this is a tree, not a bush", "tomatoes are a fruit", "peanuts are a legume", etc. This is an example of how we live in the ideas that we were given.

Think now about the feral child. This child will also have some sort of system to interpret the world. But its system would be very different to ours. It would have developed it on its own. The feral child wouldn't necessarily see a distinction between itself and the nature it lives in.

Now step back and apply some value to that. Which is the better way of living?

Is it better to live in your head, with layers and layers of classification systems filtering your engagement with the world? Going to work, coding, making some money to be able to pay your mortgage, and afford some takeaway?

Or is it better to feel a connection with the external reality, even if you can't talk about it?

I honestly don't know.

I can say that trying to engage more deeply with 'reality'. I suspect I am forever separate. Maybe feral children are too. But, I think innately, connecting to whatever is the source is what I yearn for. And I suspect it is the same for everyone else.

And then, my assessment is that the education we receive is about making that possibility almost impossible to even conceive of.

I just realised I didn't answer your question: "Who decides what is neutral? What if you are trained by masters or schools with conflicting thoughts? What if you read all sides of an argument? Is this information not valuable to the informed choices of an individual?"

You decide. You are free to view all information, and consider it. You can judge for yourself whether the argument you are presented with is sound or not. Whether all the assumptions are stated and whether the conclusion that follows is rational. If you don't have all the information, that is fine - you can work with your best hypothesis. I think the key thing is whether you are acting in good faith. If someone presents some information that you can't reconcile easily, that is likely an indication that you need to investigate further. You may get some data that will better inform your understanding.

> Modern philosophy focuses on arguments from Axiom where a statement is taken to be true as a starting point for an argument.

What this means is that philosophy ultimately becomes an extended argument over which propositions to take as axiomatic. One commonly-used technique in this is the thought experiment, and some well-known, much-debated examples, such as Frank Jackson's "Mary's Room", are not even anecdotal evidence.

While, I suppose, analytical philosophy could always be presented in the form an analysis of what follows from a given set of axioms, what almost invariably happens in practice is that individual philosophers act as advocates for the particular axioms that they believe actually hold.

There also seems to be a pervasive shared assumption in current analytical philosophy that analysis of the use of language can be the ultimate arbiter on questions of how the world actually is - a questionable belief that is not questioned as much as it should be, or so it seems from my very limited perspective.

>What this means is that philosophy ultimately becomes an extended argument over which propositions to take as axiomatic.

I agree. It also involves extended arguments over the statements that follow from these axioms even amongst philosophers who agree the axioms are true.

>[W]hat almost invariably happens in practice is that individual philosophers act as advocates for the particular axioms that they believe actually hold.

I agree with this as well. My main point was about the structure of the arguments. I don't think arguing from an axiom you hold to be true turns the argument anecdotal.

> It also involves extended arguments over the statements that follow from these axioms even amongst philosophers who agree the axioms are true.

It is certainly not that uncommon for people to publish claims arising from mistakes in logic, but it is rare for any dispute over them to become extended, as they can be resolved by reason. While it is possible to disagree over the meaning of words, or even of which axioms of logic to accept (such as over axiom B in modal logic), these are still issues of what to take as axiomatic.

Edit - On reflection, I can think of cases, such as Searle's non-sequitur of a response to the 'systems reply' to his 'Chinese Room' argument, that have not been promptly eliminated. In the cases I can think of, however, there are unstated assumptions being made - and any such assumption is implicitly axiomatic, as, being unstated, it could not have been derived from other axioms.

> I don't think arguing from an axiom you hold to be true turns the argument anecdotal.

Indeed - nominally, one is merely presenting a deduction of what a set of propositions imply - but no-one persues philosophy just to do that.

When reading papers, I have learned to make note of the points where the language turns to what is likely, plausible or conceivable, as this is often close to the crux of the matter. It is here that one might find what Daniel Dennett has called the Philosopher's Syndrome: "mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity."

I find it very often that these types of "numbered premises and consequences as natural language statements" analyses become "not even wrong", moot and missing the point.

The actual meat of the problem gets stashed away in what you exactly mean with your natural language sentences and "suitcase words". You may pronounce that Statement A is in contradiction to Statement B but it my be only true in some sense and the whole thing collapses because you made a hidden implicit assumption that turns out to ruin the whole nice house of cards.

Its easy to come up with those logical games, see proofs of God's existence.

If you can make those statements precise enough you get mathematics. If you cannot, you're better off doing empirical work and leaving the possibility open that you're wrong in some fundamental way. You my proclaim that either A or B is true and in 20 years it turns out that "hmm, things don't really work like that, neither A nor B is really true or it depends on how we look at it but generally this just wasn't a productive way to approach the issue in hindsight".

Its a bit like presenting a measurement result with too many decimal places, giving the impression of high precision when it's unwarranted. In the same way the principled structure of philosophical musings makes them look more definite than they actually are.

> If your arguments aren't based on your personal reasoning, what are they based on?

Absent a consensus on how to reason, one could only argue with oneself.

If disputes over matters of fact could never be resolved empirically and impersonally, there would be no science.

What is a matter of fact?

I'll save you some time, it is that we can verify personally. If I can verify it, I can say 'its true' and that 'I know it'.

But the problem is that most individuals verify very little - its beyond ridiculous how little we verify. If we see something on TV, we think we have verified it! Did we verify the film Independence Day?!

All day long, individuals will say 'I know' or 'its true'. Even though they haven't verified their assumptions, if they even know what their assumptions are. Most people's lives are based on massive, unverified assumptions. They are so big, that they cannot consider questioning them - they have to be true or they may have a mental breakdown!

Say most people 'know' that we are on a globe. How? Have they experienced the globe? How was it proven to them that this wasn't a flat plane? Do they really 'know' it, like they know the chair they are sitting on? They do not. So, when they say 'they know' what do they mean? Its a hypothesis, or a belief, or faith. They believe they know.

So, if we were honest to ourselves, and accounting for our assumptions, we should say, 'I believe' such-and-such. But we say 'I know'. What is it to do that?

If you ask me, this is a lie. We lie to ourselves and to those around us. We live in a world of lies, of false, unverified information - and yet we call it knowledge. Its actually quite amazing.

Dick got a good deal closer to the answer than you have, IMHO: “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

The thing about a position of extreme skepticism, such as you are expounding here, is that if you acted consistently with holding it, you would not have anything to say.

That's a great quote, and I've enjoyed PKD's work.

As a skeptic, I would agree that I would not claim to know so much. I have lots of hypotheses though.

And, as a skeptic, you might think that there would not be much to say... but then I find myself swimming, nay drowning, in a world of unfounded opinion and hearsay. So much baseless belief. I think I can see the contradictions and unfounded assumptions in whatever narrative is being presented. In good faith, I try to point out the errors as I see them, to the best of my ability. I think of this as a service - helping to discern belief from knowledge.

But evidently it is not appreciated. I am flagged, people think I am hateful (I don't believe I am). In all, people do not appreciate the genuinely skeptical position, even if they pay lip service to it. They prefer to go along to get along - to do whatever their unprincipled, lightly considered, free-style way - whatever is most expedient at the time.

PS: 'I am posting too fast' so I cannot submit this response. Its not that I don't want to continue the conversation, but HN puts a block on unpopular opinions such as mine. Skeptical voices cannot be heard! But I will try to submit this in a few hours (it was 3 yesterday), even if the conversation has moved on by then. :)

Does it amaze you that freedom of speech to have a different opinion to others, one that I think I can reason and evidence, should prove to be something that requires censure? I'm amazed. Did you think that HN was better than this? I did.

> I'll save you some time, it is that we can verify personally. If I can verify it, I can say 'its true' and that 'I know it'.

So, have you personally verified the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Is it true? Do you know it?

And, you say a matter of fact is "what we can verify personally". Is that a matter of fact? If so, how do you know that? If it's not a matter of fact, is it still true? Or is just your opinion?

I don't know the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Do you? How do you know it? If I was to sit next to you, would you be able to walk me through all the steps whereby I would be able to say that I know it too?

What does 'know' mean to you? Is it like believe, or like a hypothesis? What is the difference?

If you don't verify something for yourself, can you know it? If someone says that something is true, does that make it true, even if you haven't confirmed it for yourself? If so, who do you trust? Should you trust teachers? Do they mean well? If they mean well, is it possible that they have made a mistake and are relaying wrong information that they haven't verified for themselves? If they are relaying unverfied information as knowledge, are they liars? Are you lying if you do the same? Who has the authority on truth? Is it the schools, as funded by the government? Is it the government?

I know that is a wall of questions, but this is what I think when I hear this sort of thing. What assumptions have I made about things I think I know, where the reality is that I have beliefs of things I think I know.

PS accept my apologies if this post takes a while to appear - HN says I am posting too fast, and won't allow me to reply in my usual, more timely way. If you do want to reply to this, no problem - it just may take a while for me to respond. Cheers.

The point of my post is that your epistemology is too narrow. Trying to sell you on my epistemology was outside of my intent.

Your epistemology leads you to not "know" all of science. Even logical positivism accepted the results of repeatable experiments, and logical positivism is itself too narrow of an epistemology (which is why it was rejected in the end).

I also profoundly mistrust any philosophy that says "the only way we know is X", where that rule (about the only way we know) is not something that is knowable via X. That leaves adherents using a rule (which by their own statements they do not know is valid) to decide what they do and do not know. That's... not something I can accept. It seems self-contradictory to me.

I'm not going to wade through your wall of questions. That's a much lower level of conversation than I am willing to get bogged down in.

"The point of my post is that your epistemology is too narrow. Trying to sell you on my epistemology was outside of my intent."

Well, you either know a thing or not. Its really that simple. You know you are sitting at a table, typing, etc. I also accept the results of repeatable experiments, as long as I have verified them.

It really comes down to you. The individual. All ideas are therein. Are you prepared to kid yourself, or do you want the truth?

Often people say 'we' know to get around this. What does this usage of 'we' mean? It is trust that someone else has done the verifying, that they are trustworthy, that they are relaying the results faithfully, etc. If you are trusting though, you are not knowing.

Now, it is fine to have beliefs, and to accept other people's ideas and hypotheses. But it is another thing to say you know them to be true!

> Well, you either know a thing or not. Its really that simple. You know you are sitting at a table, typing, etc. I also accept the results of repeatable experiments, as long as I have verified them.

Marcuse and Gettier have some things to day about this (paraphrasing):

"The world is too complicated for people to verify everything themselves" -Marcuse

"Its not clear what (if anything) constitutes justified true belief" -Gettier

> I also accept the results of repeatable experiments, as long as I have verified them.

Per Quine, individual hypotheses can't be verified, only bundles of hypotheses.

I did my CS degree at a Catholic university, so I was mandated to take a couple of either religion or philosophy classes. Being atheist, I opted for philosophy, and while I certainly felt they were a waste of time way back when I was 19, but there are a few things that have really stuck with me.

I wish I remember the name that the professor used for this concept, but essentially, he argued that the same activity might be ethical or unethical depending on ease and scale. For example, I'm allowed to look at license plates in public. If I happen to see my neighbor's car (with a memorable license plate) when I'm in town, there's nothing wrong with noting that and making small talk next time I see the neighbor ("Hey, I saw you were down in town on Friday!"). If I put plate readers everywhere I can, and accumulate and sell that information, enabling wide-spread location tracking, that's arguably unethical, even though those license plates are displayed out in public. There's something that changes when certain activities become scaled up and automated.

> I wish I remember the name that the professor used for this concept, but essentially, he argued that the same activity might be ethical or unethical depending on ease and scale.

I hope you remember too, since so many drive-by internet comments reject that distinction in order to dismiss someone's valid concerns about something. It'd be a useful concept to reference in such situations.

I love this comment[1] that rants about how Steve totally doesn't understand philosophy, and then recommends a book that most philosophers consider biased/mediocre (in comparison to his other work).

[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/software-needs-philo...

Your link isn't taking me to the comment, is this the one you're referring to?

> Anonymous Anonymous said...

> I started that piece but found it intolerable to read on. I do synpathize with your general point - that philosophy is important (well that appears to be your point from the first paragraphs, but I'm sure I missed the Lisp part that is bound to follow) - but does it have to be so naive? Do you have to announce your alsmost complete ignorance of all matters philosophic with fanfares? First, philosophy, like all science, is not ethically good or bad per se. Just as there were (and still are) scientific theories justifying racism, so there have been (and still are) philosophies justifying oppression, slavery and genocide. Plato and some of his fellow philosophers were working hard to develop a philosophy that sounded good and beautiful while celebrating inequality and slavery(hint: a standard method to achieve this is to invent a heavenly realm of ideals). Similar things can be said about philosophers sympathizing with fascism, like Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger etc. And your claim that there was no philosophy between antiquity and modernity is ludicrous. Medieval occidental philosophy (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas etc.) was of course subordinate to religion and the church but it was still philosophy, whether you like it or not, and much of modern philosophy is influenced by those church men. Steve, why is it that you have to write over-over-overlong blogs about subjects you don't understand? It's not a genuine interest in philosphy, I must conclude. Mind you, philosophy isn't about screaming as loud as you can, it's about thinking - studying - a lot of studying, actually - before talking. Si Tacuisses, Philosophus Mansisses as they used to say in the old days. You SHOULD absolutely get hold of some Russell before you continue discracing yourself like this. Have a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Western_Philosophy_(...

> And please, please SHUT UP!

> 10:41 AM, APRIL 24, 2006

Yes, looks like the css ID is broken or something so it doesn't jump to that place in the page

Needs (2006)

In the decade and a half since then, have any software philosophers emerged?

Helen Nissenbaum (now at Cornell Tech) wrote a famous paper framing privacy as Contextual Integrity, which has been highly influential for researchers on computer privacy as well as public policy makers.

The Wikipedia entry on Contextual Integrity is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_Integrity

The basic idea is that rather than focusing on broad rules about privacy (like the Fair Information Practices, which underpins almost all privacy laws today), it's important to understand the norms around what is appropriate and inappropriate in specific contexts.

In my field of human-computer interaction, Paul Dourish is perhaps the best known researcher that straddles philosophy and software (though I'm sure philosophers would consider him more of a software person). He has several well-known papers, e.g. on "spaces vs places" for collaborative software (http://www.dourish.com/publications/1996/cscw96-place.pdf), on privacy as boundary negotiation, on why ethnographic research shouldn't have to discuss implications for design (http://onemvweb.com/sources/ethnography/implication_design.p...), and more.

Speaking of 2006 - what a terrible webpage. No infinite scrolling to choppily load comments as I scroll, no multi-megabyte banner full of photos, no sidebar that accompanies me through the page, occasionally playing peek-a-boo with the content. I mean, it just loads the entire post as HTML and renders it immediately. What savagery.

If we broaden software to technology, I'm pretty sure enough philosophers on the subject do exist; their just often labeled ludites.

Expected it to be more like the aim of this book, cowritten by a computer scientist and a philosopher:

https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Context-Philosophy-Practice...

There was a golden age of philosophy 2500 years ago (during a period in which there were very few massacres or genocides). Then there was a long "dark age" in which there were no philosophers and lots of massacres, genocides, and general ignorance. Then philosophy had a resurgence and gave birth to the notion of "facts."

It's hard to imagine how this absurd fantasy vision of western history can lead to insight about anything.

> gave birth to the notion of "facts."

Somewhat ironically, around the same time (+/- 40 yrs) that it gave birth to the notion there is no ultimate truth.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World (1928)

Somewhat ironically, this article contains several examples of the same sort of rhetoric, anecdote and tendentious argumentation as the author is protesting.

I just want to point out a few question-able statements about history made in the article:

> Does it ever strike you as just a teeny bit odd that after a brief period where philosophy flourished, from maybe 400 B.C.E. to ~100 C.E., we went through a follow-on period of well over one thousand five hundred years during which the Roman Catholic Church enslaved everyone's minds and killed anyone who dared think differently?

First, let's not forget that it was the Athenians (the Greeks) who put Socrates to death! So it's not like Ancient Greece was all about this philosophy stuff and we can just go blame the Christians ...

I don't know why we saw an 'end' to the golden age of ancient Greek philosophy. BUT .... the Greeks were conquered by the Romans. Christianity developed in the Holy Land and spread through Rome. Early Christianity was highly influenced by Platonism (Plato). So in some ways Christianity is an outgrowth of Greek Philosophy. Or at least not orthogonal to it. And if anything, maybe blame the Romans for the end of Greek philosophy? Though the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_philosophy#Helle...

> It was philosophers that got us out of that Dark Ages mess, and no small number of them lost their lives in doing so.

The Dark Ages weren't really "dark"

"As the accomplishments of the era came to be better understood in the 19th and 20th centuries, scholars began restricting the "Dark Ages" appellation to the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th century),[3][7][8] and now scholars also reject its usage in this period.[9] The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether due to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate.[10][11][12] Petrarch's pejorative meaning remains in use,[1][2][13] typically in popular culture which often mischaracterises the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

Since Steve's article uses this history as an analogy for the state of Computer Science / Programming, and then draws on it as an argument for why we need "philosophers" (IMHO philosophers of computer science might well do something completely unexpected and not what is suggested here), I think it's important to address the historical inaccuracies.

If anything I think more Science & Technology Studies folks / Philosophy of Computer Science, or anthropology folks studying the culture and implicit biases of computer scientists and software engineers would be useful & kinda awesome.

I agree that technology requires philosophy.

But 'the world' requires philosophy - technology is just an extension of the world. Discomfitingly, 'the world' or 'society' is really just an idea in an individual's mind - these are just ideas that don't exist independently of individuals. What is really required is for individual's to consider their positions, and to extend whatever they reason into action in the real world.

The unfortunate reality is that 99% of people do not consider their positions at all, they simply accept what they are taught as true. However, whether they have considered their worldview deeply or not, they do have one. The default one is what was embedded in their education. Unfortunately again, the nature of education is to make one think in a communitarian way - ie to think 'we', 'society', 'the world', etc. Education does not care for the individual - its aim is to produce individuals that are malleable to the needs of 'society'. So communitarian (not individualistic) thinking is the order of the day.

So, sadly, most people, don't really think at all, they are just running their 'educational programming'. Those who are most educated are often the most inactive thinkers. Their position is that they 'believe they know' without having verified anything personally.

Nevertheless, everyone has strongly felt opinions, such that they are able to say: 'we need to do such-and-such a worthy cause'. Well, who is 'we'? Why is 'such-and-such' a worthy cause? Do we really need to do it? Do I have the right to force another to do anything? The means to analyse these quite simple questions are beyond the means of most.

Anyway, for my sins, I do try to provide my philosophical perspective on things around here. I'm skeptical (most would say ultra-skeptical) and given my understanding of the world, I'm not convinced that technology is helping us. This is not a popular opinion around here! But I will persevere.

Why are people flagging this? Genuinely curious. I don't agree with every point but I think it's a valid comment.

I would like to hear too. But I think I know.

Most people when they hear an opinion that they dislike (possibly because its challenging or worse, true) would rather that opinion disappeared. I think I am downvoted and flagged because I am prepared to voice my personal opinion that has a basis that I am prepared to defend. I am even prepared to change my opinion if I'm corrected! (Shock horror!!)

Most people do not want to engage with that - they would rather say that I am undertaking hate speech. So they would actually rather take a minor act of hate against me (even though I have not taken an act against them) - to quash or silence my opinion - than consider an alternative. Consensus is everything, even in a discussion about philosophy! Its sad, but it does tell you much about the world we live in. That people are highly educated to think according to what their authorities tell them - they do not/cannot discern things for themselves.

It used to be a popular thing to say 'I don't agree with you, but I will fight for your right to say what you like'. Those days are long gone. Now, its I don't like what you're saying, you're challenging me and as that causes me psychological harm you are inflict hate speech on me. And that I feel threatened, rightly or not, means I am empowered to try to hurt they person I perceive to be threatening me..

Worst to me, is that HN facilitates teeny, tiny acts of violence against me. I can only post a reply once every hour or so at the moment because of downvotes and being flagged. Perhaps that surprises you? Sure, youtube, hn, facebook, etc are private platforms and they can do what they like, but where exactly is the free speech? The effect of the measures these platforms take, is that some thoughts are not allowed - to most, I am committing thoughtcrime and deserve to not have a voice. Its amazing.

TLDR - people are a bunch of babies and can't co-exist with opinions that differ to their own. They feel threatened because their worldview is a stack of cards - a small gust or comment could bring it all crashing down.

PS - this is a great video from Larken Rose that touches on some of the points I raised, from a different angle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoPRLeXEzE0

To make the same points but get less of a harsh response, maybe try improving your comments by talking in the third person. In short, don't take things personally.

Why? I am a person, and I am making my personal observations.

I am happy to hear other perspectives, wisdom, understanding.

I'm not that interested in people not engaging with the ideas presented, as the form is difficult.

This is sort of my point - that individuals shouldn't write themselves out of the picture.

I agree in principle. Unfortunately, the audience's brain does not work with logic, it works with emotion.

Yes. Everyone is so used to being manipulated, and, it seems, without the ability to work things personally, according to their principles. (Do people even know what principles are? Is it whatever is expedient or are there lines that cannot be crossed?)

They actually prefer sugar-coated bullshit to honest responses. They do not use logic, it is all emotional responding. Their ears or eyes cannot take honesty, and they actually feel psychologically assaulted by honestly stated propositions.

For myself, I intentionally don't play that game. I don't seek to manipulate or sell ideas to others. I want people to engage with the ideas or not. And I'm fine either way. But I get slammed in this thread and others, not because I may be wrong (and I may be) but just because they don't like the simple, unadorned, probably true, message.

If this is where we are at on hackernews, in a thread about philosophy, it speaks volumes about how much trouble we are in as a group, and how we will not be getting out of it anytime soon. The only solution they see is to close down voices like mine.

Amen brother. Try voicing a balanced perspective on China some time...

Cheers. I'd be interested to hear what experiences you have had. Feel free to point me to a thread, or conversation...

Have you met my friend Eliza?

I think I know, too, and I differ from you.

I think the post people are asking about got downvoted because you are saying thinks like "Discomfitingly, 'the world' or 'society' is really just an idea in an individual's mind - these are just ideas that don't exist independently of individuals." And you're just stating it like it's true, with no justification.

More, you're saying "Discomfitingly", like this "truth" is obviously true but we don't want to hear it because we don't like it. If nothing else, that violates the site guideline of the principle of charity. But I think it's deeper than that. I suspect that you maybe actually think that - that you're actually, obviously right, and anyone who disagrees with you is deliberately blind. That kind of attitude draws downvotes any time it escapes into your words.

In particular, the parent post to this one. I'm surprised that it isn't downvoted. In fact, I did downvote it, purely for the "you're a bunch of whining crybabies with your heads in the sand because you downvoted me" that runs all through it.

And:

> Worst to me, is that HN facilitates teeny, tiny acts of violence against me.

If you think downvotes (or being rate limited) are violence, you need to separate your identity from your words.

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