Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

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Very generic weak article, as many others have said.

I spent a lot of time studying Nietzsche in college (while getting a degree in philosophy) and it is pretty annoying how the pop culture conception of his ideas has so little to do with what he actually wrote.

I think Nietzsche would find the “entrepreneurial” rebranding of his ideas to be irritating and frankly not the audience he wanted. He was writing for a very, very specific group of people, not a mass market in any sense. He doesn’t care about you losing your job because a robot took it, he is concerned with far more consequential and foundational issues. Nietzsche himself was very critical of “merchants” and technology more broadly, so I think he would find the idea of LLMs being treated as actual conscious entities to be a hilariously stupid joke, more indicative of how society’s standards have fallen than how high AI abilities have risen.

Anyway, rather than engage in a long comment on why Nietzsche would find this article annoying – I do think there is some value to be had in using AI tools as philosophical conversations.

Personally I’ve gotten a lot of value by proposing a certain book theme or argument to ChatGPT and critiquing it, exploring other books on the topic, and so on. Previously this required someone willing to sit and debate philosophical questions with you, which isn’t everyone’s favorite activity :)

> I spent a lot of time studying Nietzsche in college (while getting a degree in philosophy) and it is pretty annoying how the pop culture conception of his ideas has so little to do with what he actually wrote.

<https://existentialcomics.com/comic/360>

But why would we care what Nietzsche would think and for whom he wrote?

That idea seems to rest on a very narrow and philosophically contested understanding of the nature of the work of an author.

Eco, to take one of the more uncontroversial figures in tradition, holds that you can understand an author better than he himself did.

Nietzsche himself also had interesting views of authorship and interpretation.

You don't need to, and certainly there is a rich history of interpreting Nietzsche in various ways to fit various philosophical programs.

But still, when the interpretation is so dumbed down and over-simplified, I think it becomes a bit insulting to the original writer. Even moreso when the interpretation quite clearly isn't familiar with the original context/meaning of the work, which is almost always the case when it comes to Nietzsche in pop culture.

The article is a prime example: the author clearly didn't read much more than the Wikipedia page. This is typical of popular writing/content (especially on YouTube) about Nietzsche.

I guess we could argue about its validity as "an interpretation of Nietzsche", but I mostly think it's just unremarkable, low effort writing. There is absolutely an article that could be written about Nietzsche's philosophy applied to the modern AI situation...but this isn't it.

That's philosophy just in general though. It's to a very large degree the study of excerpts, and commentaries excerpts, and commentaries on commentaries.

There are people with a degree in philosophy that think Plato's republic was an attempt at designing the ideal state, because they've only seen the middle of the dialogue, and were never shown the beginning and end where the republic is very explicitly introduced as a philosophical device to examine the virtue of justice in the soul.

> But why would we care what Nietzsche would think and for whom he wrote?

Because we're reading an article titled "Why Nietzsche matters in the age of artificial intelligence": the author ought then to know what he's talking about.

This is reasonably common with all pop writers about any philosopher, but it's nearly ubiquitous for Nietzsche. For a long time, I found this baffling. You can understand why someone might be confused about what Heidegger or Kant meant about something. Nietzsche writes very clearly and simply. This led me to realize that after a certain point, understanding has much less to do with cognitive capability and more to do with your emotional background and prejudices, something akin to what Nietzsche called the "intellectual conscience." I no longer actually read any article on any popular website about Nietzsche because you can be sure they don't have anything interesting to say; they don't understand the guy they're talking about.

Why put "Nietzsche" in the title of your article if you're going to do your own schtick? It's rather dishonest, IMO.

I personally disagree with a lot of Nietzsche's ideas, but if I'm ever to explain how, I would strive to present his ideas with the best interpretation of them I could muster, before disagreeing.

Philosophical figures of the past should not be used as names you throw randomly to support your positions. You have to talk about their ideas, why they believed in it and what they intended to do by sharing them.

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