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Comment by siglesias | Hacker News Reader

Re: philosophy, I think understanding the difference between representing the world in language and representing it in logic is critically important to programmers. It has implications for natural language processing as well as artificial intelligence. I personally recommend to anyone endeavoring to understand Wittgenstein's transition from Tractatus Logico Philosophicus to Philosophical Investigations. In fact, Google used the family resemblance concept from PI to inform its search algorithm early on to attribute diffent meanings to the same search term.

What you take away is a very precise way to pose questions that make sense and to avoid questions that don't make sense.

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I disagree with pg about the use of philosophy. If nothing else, Plato should disabuse anyone of the notion that what's obvious to them isn't really that solid. Aristotle at least demonstrates your point about just how hard it is to think systematically about this stuff.

The humility gained from those encounters would do a great deal to open people's minds that "there's more on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy". Maybe people would less adamant, and pay more attention to why they hold their opinions. If everyone did that, we'd have far more productive discussions.

I agree. Philosophy is great for exposing how uncertain we are about things we believe we know for sure. He are some simple games that help demonstrate this:

http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/

(I designed a nested version of the Tractatus if you're interested: http://tractatuslogico-philosophicus.com/)

I spotted two mistakes:

it says somewhere "thought it need not be red"; should be "though".

Proposition 4.022 should be called 4.002, according to my edition and another edition on the web I checked.

Perhaps the Gutenberg edition you used is not as properly proofread as one would hope.

Mentioning the source on the site is probably a good idea, for those not inclined to open up the source and hunt for it.

I completely agree. I would also recommend reading books and watching films about philosophers, novels and plays written by philosophers that is intended to be read as a narrative , and especially conversations with philosophers. You get a feel about how they came about their conclusions - what I am interested in is how a certain idea was arrived at, and philosophy can really give you some great analytical tools.

Can you give any further reading/info on family resemblance as used by Google?

I don't have the specific page citation but I read it in Levy's In the Plex.

You can see that Kindle users have highlighted the passage here: https://kindle.amazon.com/work/in-the-plex-ebook/B003QJNVO4/...

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