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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"Of course events in the world follow a directional sequence. Drop an egg on the floor and it breaks. You don’t see eggs assembling themselves."

The operative phrase here being "you don't see". Of course, seeing is a matter of perception and perspective. It could very well be that time is flowing "backwards" and eggs are in fact reassembling themselves, but we are just perceiving time in reverse.

You know, when I hear physicists try to tackle philosophical problems, it's usually kind of embarrassing. These guys are rarely trained in philosophy and are out of their depth.

As Feinman famously said to his own students, "Shut up and calculate."

I wish more physicists would follow his advice, and leave philosophy to philosophers.

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Well, Frank Wilczek said something like "Philosophy is too important to be left to the philosophers." [0] The unspoken assumption is that those silly philosophers are off writing a priori worthless post-Marxist historiographic treatises and other humanities BS, so the real men (physicists) are going to have to storm in guns a blazin' and sort things out.

Being neither a philosopher nor physicist by training, I'm probably unqualified to arbitrate that debate. But it is worth noting that when qualitative approaches meet quantitative approaches, the quant guys seem to pretty persistently come out on top (e.g. Google with programmatic advertising vs. the good old boys selling ads by taking the client out to a steakhouse. Which model overwhelmed the other in mere months?)

[0] http://frankwilczek.com/unification.html

"it is worth noting that when qualitative approaches meet quantitative approaches, the quant guys seem to pretty persistently come out on top"

One could certainly make the argument that the practice of science and the creation of technology "gets results" (though there are counter-arguments having to do with human agency or free will, with causality, and with our perception of the world and whether what we perceive is real and whether what looks like obvious cause and effect is actually what's going on here).

But whether something "gets results" may have little bearing on whether it is true or an adequate explanation of the world.

They don't need to ignore philosophy entirely, they just need to recognise that it's a different subject, and that studying physics is not sufficient to understand it, nor is it necessarily going to give them any unique insight.

The point is that we don't see eggs break at some times and reassemble themselves at others. Whether time is flowing "forwards" or "backwards" is just a label - if you decided to start calling "tomorrow" "yesterday", it wouldn't change anything except what you say.

However, if you could break an egg and then unbreak it, that would be remarkable (and observable), whether you did it tomorrow or yesterday.

Shame on you. Nobody should be discouraged from trying to dabble in things that aren't their field.

Having the background of being extremely well-trained in one field gives a different perspective than the typical "echo-chamber" of the elite in any specialty.

If you know something they don't, why not try to start a dialog instead of criticizing and dismissing?

I second that. Paul Graham wrote about this in "How to do philosophy".

http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

That was a great reading, thanks.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but I only criticize because they're often given a soapbox (such as in this article) due to the perception that they are specially endowed with the power of "explaining how the world is" to us mere mortals.

Well, that wouldn't be so bad if they stuck to explaining the results of their experiments, but when they stray from that on to philosophical subjects, they're really no more suited to talking about that than any other non-philosophically trained layman.

It might help if they toned down the rhetoric a bit and make it clear that they're speaking about something that they have no training in.

On the other hand, I suppose I should be grateful that they're exposing the general public to ideas they might not have otherwise thought about, even if they do so clumsily and their conclusions are highly suspect.

I would contend that having a high degree of education in anything develops certain thinking abilities that are widely transferable. At some point, they transform from being a "layman" into being an "amateur philosopher" simply by virtue of these transferable thinking skills.

Of course being an amateur doesn't lend a high degree of credibility, but certainly more than the average Joe.

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