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Comment by username332211 | Hacker News Reader

The reason why people can't be bothered to get formal training is that modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful.

It was a while ago, but take the infamous story of the 2006 rape case in Duke University. If you check out coverage of that case, you get the impression every member of faculty that joined in the hysteria was from some humanities department, including philosophy. And quite a few of them refused to change their mind even as the prosecuting attorney was being charged with misconduct. Compare that to Socrates' behavior during the trial of the admirals in 406 BC.

Meanwhile, whatever meager resistence was faced by that group seems to have come from economists, natural scientist or legal scholars.

I wouldn't blame people for refusing to study in a humanities department where they can't tell right from wrong.

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Modern philosophy isn't useful because some philosophy faculty at Duke were wrong about a rape case? Is that the argument being made here?

Which group of people giving modern training in philosophy should we judge the field by? If they can't use it correctly in such a basic case then who can?

Did the Duke philosophy teachers claim they were using philosophy to determine if someone was raped?

And did all the philosophers at all the other colleges convene and announce they were also using philosophy to determine if someone was raped?

> Did the Duke philosophy teachers claim they were using philosophy to determine if someone was raped?

I don't think that matters very much. If there's a strong enough correlation between being a reactive idiot and the department you're in, it makes a bad case for enrolling in that realm of study for educational motives. It's especially bad when the realm of study is directly focused on knowledge, ethics, and logic.

Note the "if" though, I haven't evaluated the parent's claims. I'm just saying it doesn't matter if they said they used philosophy. It reflects on philosophy as a study, at least the style they do there.

How much that affects other colleges is iffier, but it's not zero.

One week ago, if I asked you "how do we determine if modern philosophy is useful?"

Would you have pondered for a little while, then responded, "Find out how many philosophers commented on the Duke rape case of 2006 and what their opinions were, then we'll know."

Never in a million years. But if you said the departments were very disproportionately represented on different sides, I would think the main reasons would be either random cliques or that it shows something about critical thinking skills taught by those professors, or both, and I would be interested to hear more with the idea that I might learn something deeper than gossip.

Often, after you've figured out who's guilty, you'd need to look for more evidence until you find something that the jury can understand and the defense counsel can't easily argue against.

I've seen people make arguments against the value of modern academic philosophy based on their experience with professors or with whateversampling of writings they've come across. They usually get nowhere.

That's why I wanted to ground this discussion in a specific event.

> Which group of people giving modern training in philosophy should we judge the field by?

... all of them? Or rather, the body as a whole. Pointing at one set of faculty at one university 20 years ago and using that as the sole point to say "modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful", is just not useful.

No. The fact that they were wrong is almost irrelevant.

The faculty denounced the students without evidence, judged the case thought their emotions and their preconceived notions and refused to change their minds as new evidence emerged. Imagine having an academic discussion on a difficult ethical issue with such a teacher...

And none of that would have changed even, even if there somehow was a rape-focused conspiracy among the students of that university. (Thought the problem would have been significantly less obvious.)

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” - Anton Chigurh

> Meanwhile, whatever meager resistence was faced by that group seems to have come from economists, natural scientist or legal scholars.

> I wouldn't blame people for refusing to study in a humanities department where they can't tell right from wrong.

Man, if you have to make stuff up to try to convince people... you might not be on the right side here.

I'm not sure what you are talking about. I have to admit, I mostly wrote my comment based on my recollections and it's a case 20 years ago I barely paid attention to until after the bizzaire conclusion. But looking trough Wikipedia's articles on the case[1] it doesn't seem I'm that far from the truth.

I guess I should have limited my statement about resisting mob justice to the economists at that university as the other departments merely didn't sign on to the public letter of denunciation?

Its weird that Wikipedia doesn't give you a percentage of signatories of the letter of 88 from the philosophy department, but several of the notable signatories are philosophers.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_Duke_lacros...

Edit: Just found some articles claiming that a chemistry professor by the name of Stephen Baldwin was the first to write to the university newspaper condemning the mob.

I figure there are two sides to philosophy. There's the practical aspect of trying to figure things out, like what it matter made of - maybe it's earth, water, air, and fire as the ancient Greeks proposed? How could we tell - maybe an experiment? This stuff while philosophical leads on to knowledge a lot of the time but then it gets called science or whatever. Then there's studying what philosophers says and philosophers said about stuff which is mostly useless, like a critique of Hegel's discourse on the four elements or something.

I'm a fan of practical philosophical questions like how does quantum mechanics work or how can we improve human rights, and not into the philosophers talking about philosopers stuff.

>The reason why people can't be bothered to get formal training is that modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful.

But rationalism is?

Yeh, probably.

Imagine that you're living in a big scary world, and there's someone there telling you that being scared isn't particularly useful, that if you slow down and think about the things happening to you, most of your worries will become tractable and some will even disappear. It probably works at first. Then they sic Roko's Basilisk on you, and you're a gibbering lunatic 2 weeks later...

Hah

Nature abhors a vaccum. After the October revolution, the genuine study of humanities was extinguished in Russia and replaced with the mindless repetition of rather inane doctrines. But people with awakened and open minds would always ask questions and seek answers.

Those would, of course, be people with no formal training in history or philosophy (as the study of history where you aren't allowed to question Marxist doctrine would be self-evidently useless). Their training would be in the natural sciences or mathematics. And without knowing how to properly reason about history or philosophy, they may reach fairly kooky conclusions.

Hence why Rationalism can be though as the same class of phenomena as Fomenko's chronology (or if you want to be slightly more generous, Shafarevich's philosophical tracts).

Well, maybe. It seems at least adjacent to the stuff that's been making a lot of people rich lately.

It’s also adjacent to sociopathy, which is more likely the driving factor behind that wealth generation.

Did not know "sociopathy" is a precursor to wealth generation. I guess I'm in luck! Any day now!

I think the argument is that philosophy hasn't advanced much in the last 1000 years, but it''s still 10,000 years ahead of whatever is coming out of the rationalist camp.

Couldn't you take this same line of reasoning and apply it to the rationalist group from the article who killed a bunch of people, and conclude that you shouldn't become a rationalist because you probably kill people?

Yep. Though I'd rather generalize that to "The ethical teachings of Rationalists (Shut up and calculate!) can lead you to insane behavior."

And you wouldn't even need to know about the cult to reach that conclusion. One should be able to find crazy stuff by a cursory examination of the "Sequences" and other foundational texts. I think I once encountered something about torture and murder being morally right, if it would prevent mild inconvenience to a large enough group of people.

Philosophy is interesting in how it informs computer science and vice-versa.

Mereological nihilism and weak emergence is interesting and helps protect against many forms of kind of obsessive levels of type and functional cargo culting.

But then in some areas philosophy is woefully behind, and you have philosophers poo-pooing intuitionism when any software engineer working on sufficiently federated or real world sensor/control system borrows constructivism into their classical language to not kill people (agda is interesting of course). Intermediate logic is clearly empirically true.

It's interesting that people don't understand the non-physicality of the abstract and you have people serving the abstract instead of the abstract being used to serve people. People confusing the map for the terrain is such a deeply insidious issue.

I mean all the lightcone stuff, like, you can't predict ex ante what agents will be keystones in beneficial casual chains so its such waste of energy to spin your wheels on.

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