quus

yeah, I wish we could be more specific here. Like I appreciate the things you’re saying, and I don’t doubt the truth or sincerity of that opinion — but I feel like I’ve encountered some math PhD students who were surprisingly inflexible in the way they thought, and very parochial in their intellectual interests. I guess I just haven’t (anecdotally) found the transference of math training to other domains as much as others seem to.

Great, so what are those benefits all the way up?

You’re sort of making my point — there are people out there who think math education sets the mind free and opens the gates of higher cognition, and then others talking about hum drum stuff like tax brackets and compound interest. If the benefits really just amount to a few units of pre-algebra content, that would be disappointing.

My claim isn’t really that there’s no benefit or utility to math — that’s obviously false — but that maybe its benefits to regular people are more modest than the cheerleaders want to admit.

Math doesn’t seem to me the only source of thinking clearly, or learning how to learn, etc. And if I’m searching for an aesthetic high, there are definitely better places to look — and ones that don’t require such a long runway.

I’m actually interested in the “can benefit from” claim in this title. I don’t particularly doubt that most people could become reasonably good at math, but I wonder how much of the juice is worth the squeeze, and how juicy it is on the scale from basic arithmetic up to the point where you’re reading papers by June Huh or Terry Tao.

As anti-intellectual as it sounds, you could imagine someone asking, is it worth devoting years of your life to study this subject which becomes increasingly esoteric and not obviously of specific benefit the further you go, at least prima facie? Many people wind up advocating for mathematics via aesthetics, saying: well it’s very beautiful out there in the weeds, you just have to spend dozens of years studying to see the view. That marketing pitch has never been the most persuasive for me.

a post which will spawn many bad takes on philosophy in the comments section by tech workers who barely know the subject but believe they are experts

lol bro, I can’t imagine thinking that Wittgenstein is obfuscation. If anything that guy’s entire life was dedicated to de-obfuscation through logical analysis. Probably you don’t understand cause you casually picked up the Tractatus or Investigations without doing any background reading on what they were about

This is not accurate. Ethics is very well-studied in analytic philosophy, and discussion of Plato and Kant are central topics.

> The reason might be that philosophy is actually practically mostly irrelevant. I have not seen one undisputed statement of philosophy. And so it can neither test its statements, nor let others see their validity.

This is the core confusion I think. I find philosophy very relevant for the way I reason and solve problems and evaluate arguments, and in this sense philosophy is powerfully practical. But it’s true that for any given claim, there is always the possibility of taking the opposite position. This lack of final, case-closed consensus doesn’t mean that philosophers individually haven’t converged on true beliefs or haven’t made progress. It’s just that unlike mathematical truths, we can write out the proofs of our arguments, but there’s always someone who disagrees about one of the starting assumptions. So then civilians who haven’t heard of people like Parfit think to themselves, wow 2k years and you can’t tell me anything about ethics or logic or epistemology — it’s like bro just read the literature

sounds like you don’t know what philosophy is and why it’s dope, so rather than me try to explain in a comment on hackernews, I would say try reading Plato

I’m not sure what your professor writing some book with a vague title is meant to show. Am I supposed to google this to find the thesis?

Yes, there is a sub area called philosophy of science, and many people in that area are trained in philosophy and science. But I’m unsure why you think philosophers are supposed to be getting empirical facts about physics right ahead of the physicists. That’s not their job.

Im a grad student in philosophy, and this one unfortunately risks perpetuating the annoying myth that philosophers are somehow in competition with the natural sciences — usually believed by people who have literally never taken any courses in philosophy. Quine said that philosophical inquiry is continuous with empirical inquiry, but I think it’d be fine to say that it’s just complementary.

I did not know “strafe” which I guess a lot of guys do?

“Gauss” I just thought of the mathematician; forgot it was a science thing.

I’m not at all sure what to make of where “shemale” ranks

Maybe, but it doesn’t seem like a requirement. Like having an understanding of jazz at the level of music theory vs being a jazz musician.

They talked about this on an episode of Very Bad Wizards

Reminds me of https://telegra.ph/