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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.

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.

>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.

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. :-)

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.

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?

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."