
Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant - pizu
http://lesswrong.com/lw/frp/train_philosophers_with_pearl_and_kahneman_not/
======
stiff
I guess this might be stunning to some people, but even as early as before
1980 there existed people who did great science, and in some cases even great
philosophy, and, oh horror, they did not always knew the Bayes theorem,
decision theory or too much neuroaesthetics and they were not even very
rational in their private lifes. Instead, they became completely immersed in
their narrow, precisely-defined field of inquiry and had the completely
irrational drive that is neccessary to persist the years of labour it often
takes to repeatedly subject ones beliefs to the trials of experiment and
revise them times and times again. This kind of insight is not possible if you
study game theory on one day, and mathematical logic on the other, and this is
even without touching on the huge amount of often conflicting assumptions that
underly each of those distinct fields and the ignorance of which often leads
people like philosophers to nonsense conclusions.

------
1337biz
This sounds a lot like another Scientism dispute, i.e. if all questions of
human life can be empirically answered or that there are things beyond
testability.

It is an exhausting discussion, that goes way deeper than a few snaky comments
on contemporary philosophy papers. There is actually a quite good summary on
Wikipedia on the conflict: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism>

~~~
mej10
It sounds to me more like "Let's stop funding some parts of philosophy that
aren't really tied to reality, when there are real philosophical problems with
practical consequences that we need people working on".

* Edit: Made my interpretation a little less inflammatory.

~~~
unalone
The web site's not loading for me, so unfortunately I can't read the article
yet, but your summary sounds worryingly wrongminded to me.

Philosophy should not necessarily be a practical endeavor – it concerns itself
with being, life, and existence on their most abstract and difficult levels.
There is a place for functional philosophy, and plenty of places where modern
scientific discoveries can aid a line of philosophical inquiry, but suggesting
we scrap Plato and Kant for "practical" thinkers is a dangerous way of
thinking. I don't want to comment more until the article loads for me, but
there's a place for practical consequence and it's elsewhere.

~~~
jopt
Why? Is this how philosophy is or how it ought to be?

~~~
unalone
It's how philosophy _began_ and it's how philosophy is _in its purest state_ ,
which is much different from saying it's the _only_ way for philosophy to be.

Generally, I think philosophy is like mathematics in that while its purest
application is very obscure and very hard to understand without a whole lot of
effort, that pure application results in practical breaththroughs on almost
every level of "practical" research. I wish that pure philosophy was taught to
_more_ people, just as I wish that we taught kids more than the boring
"practical" math that convinces them math sucks and patterns are boring. It's
a pursuit that benefits nearly everybody who learns from it: reshapes our
mind, teaches us new ways to observe the world. And if we had scientists,
psychologists, programmers, and politicians learning philosophy, then there'd
be less pressure on the actual philosophers to start studying something
practical.

For me that's the change that should be made: not more practical philosophy,
but more philosophical practice.

~~~
edanm
So this is a great place for me to be educated: what practical applications
has philosophy yielded?

Btw, I've read your comments on this thread, and it seems like you're very
knowledgeable about the field of philosophy, but not particularly
knowledgeable about LessWrong. I'm only slightly knowledgeable about
philosophy, but I highly recommend you read more of LessWrong - it's an
amazing resource of knowledge and of philosophical discussions (albeit with a
more practical-minded bent most of the time). Lukeprog, the author of the
above post, is a very respected member of that community as far as I know, and
I honestly think you are underestimating him.

~~~
memla
To take one example, philosophers have been more than instrumental in the
development of logic, especially [informal
logic](<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_logic#History>). Don't want to
get into a discussion on whether logic is itself a branch of philosophy.

------
lutusp
> We have experimental psychology now.

Yes -- apparently a big improvement over philosophy, until you take a closer
look:

[http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/11/final-
repo...](http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/11/final-report-
stapel-affair-point.html)

A quote:

"The blame goes far beyond Diederik Stapel and the three Dutch universities
where he worked as a social psychologist. In their exhaustive final report
about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three
investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They
paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't
understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers
encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even
the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be
true."

------
ajb
Notably absent from this guy's syllabus is anything concerning ethics,
morality, values, or right and wrong. In all the fields he cites - even, to a
large extent, psychology - values are exogenous.

~~~
lutusp
> Notably absent from this guy's syllabus is anything concerning ethics,
> morality, values, or right and wrong.

That's because all morality is relative, one of the few things philosophy got
right. The universe is morally neutral, which means that, to the degree that
we fully grasp reality, to the same degree we discover that morality is a
human invention, malleable across time and place.

Not to discount notions of morality, only to say that nature doesn't care what
our thoughts are on the subject.

~~~
beala
> That's because all morality is relative, one of the few things philosophy
> got right.

As far as I know, there is no consensus in the philosophical community that
relativism is right. In fact, my impression is that there's a stigma against
relativism, as it's hard to come up with a satisfactory relativistic theory.
For example, if relativism is true, it might be the case that we can't judge
other societies or other times, but certainly slavery and female genital
mutilation are wrong, and objectively so. I'm also not sure what to make of
"nature not caring." Nature also doesn't "care" about math or science, because
nature isn't a thinking thing that can care.

~~~
im3w1l
>because nature isn't a thinking thing that can care.

This isn't commonly accepted even now. Many people think that good things
happen to good people because nature/god cares.

~~~
lutusp
> Many people think that good things happen to good people because nature/god
> cares.

Any realistic, objective sampling of human experience instantly falsifies this
claim. The correlation coefficient between "good" behavior and "good" outcomes
(and the reverse) is precisely zero.

To many people, the single most annoying thing about science is that it
quickly demolishes such romantic notions, using logic and objective
statistical sampling.

------
zackmorris
Philosophy and I parted ways in college when it became apparent that my own
opinion meant less than someone else's. I look at philosophy as it's taught
now like an introductory art class, where you learn how to draw lines and
circles and shade things. Once you have a certain repertoire, focussing purely
on technique becomes a waste of time, sort of the antithesis of art. Modern
philosophy is touching things up in photoshop and calling it art.

I wish that philosophy was more about existentialism. Exploring what all of
this really means and how it fits into your life. I've already diminished my
argument by focussing on one narrow segment of philosophy. Then again, if
philosophy is so fragile that any talk of improving it is met with hostility,
maybe it's not all it's cracked up to be. And "modern" sciences like
mathematics and probability don't have much to do with philosophy in my book.

~~~
cthaley
Yes, this is quite an interesting feature of philosophy, and I would say, an
interesting feature of the world: that some opinions are more valuable than
others.

Nietzsche's argument against the existence of God has become a common argument
against any and all truth. Zarathustra tells his disciples: "If there were
gods, how could I stand not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods."

Therefore do not study philosophy.

------
unalone
The argument is absurd. Claiming that universities are "poisoning minds" by
teaching Aristotle and Descartes _in 101 Intro to Philosophy courses_ is just
silly. Those same universities teach modern philosophy courses that deal with
the intersection of science and philosophy – judging by my one or two
philosophy friends, philosophers are much more interested in the practical
discoveries of psychology, math, and science than practitioners in those
fields are interested in the most challenging branches of philosophy, which is
a damn shame.

The reason Aristotle and Descartes are taught, the reason the roots of
philosophical study are so important, is that philosophy at its highest is the
process of _directing inquiry at that which is not yet examined_. Plato's
_Laws_ and Aristotle's _Poetics_ mark some of the earliest attempts made by
man to reason about the world simply through observation and lengthy
reasoning. Descartes' work is even more breathtaking, in a sense, in that
Descartes took the process of philosophers before him and developed a
formalized explanation of how that process worked, then insisted that we could
not fully understand the universe unless we applied this process to slowly
revealing it. It was the birth of modern science, and it followed a profound
philosophical insight.

Philosophy is a conversation that goes back thousands of years. Modern
philosophy is so fascinating that of course there's a temptation to skip right
to it – in my personal studies, I bounce back and forth between contemporary
writers and writers from other centuries and millennia, letting the former
refine my understanding of the latter and the latter provide context for the
former. But the process of philosophy's development is important to teach, not
to mention a somewhat exhilarating story when told properly.

Those contemporary articles the author scorns are proof that you can take two
or three sentences from anything and make it sound much worse than it is. Yes,
some of those subjects have been debated for years and years – that's a
feature, not a bug. Philosophy's purpose is to search not for an answer to the
surface questions (and when you're doing it right, _everything_ becomes a
surface question) but to dive deeper into questions of what lies beneath those
questions, what assumptions we make when we use certain words or claim certain
beliefs. We'll stop asking those questions when culture shifts enough that
those questions cease making sense to ask – and if they do, it will be in
large part because philosophy has helped reveal some unseen truths that led to
a reorientation of society.

Look, Hacker News loves this stuff because people here are largely surface-
oriented people. We love practical results, we love making things that
directly affect a population's lives. LessWrong is best known for its
connection to Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bright guy who's interested in putting an
end to forms of death. This article's written by somebody who works for a
Singularity institution. Those are what a lot of us think of when we think of
philosophy – attempting to answer questions as old as mankind by devising a
technical "solution" to them. Like plugging leaks and whatnot.

You have to understand that this isn't philosophy's sole purpose – in fact,
this is a shallower purpose than philosophy's real one, which is to constantly
search for deeper underlying truth. Philosophers should be aware of scientific
developments, especially psychological ones, but only inasmuch as those
developments completely invalidate a part of their studies, which isn't
frequent. Philosophers aren't writing for the everyman; they're writing to
continue a certain lofty ivory-tower discussion that slowly trickles down,
through conceptual artists and writers and thinkers, to more practical-minded
makers, down slowly towards people with more "mass-market" appeal, until what
started as a very high-minded concept has shifted our way of thinking
entirely.

Now, is that the _only_ place philosophers should exist? No! The more
philosophers, the more philosophy-oriented practitioners in whatever field,
the better. But the solution is not for philosophy to become more scientific,
it's for _science_ to turn more _philosophical_. Insist that scientists and
programmers and psychologists study philosophy. Teach philosophy to business
majors. Remind students that inquiry lies at the heart of all understanding,
all breakthroughs, and that therefore it's useful for nearly anything you'll
undertake in your life. But don't critique philosophy for its approach. That
sort of pure inquiry is still necessary, it's more difficult than ever – the
geniuses of the 20th century are far more frustrating than the geniuses of
ancient Greece and Europe – and it's under attack from many fronts, ranging
from the blatantly anti-intellectual to the more subtly-so like this one.

The architect Christopher Alexander, who I greatly admire and whose work
combines philosophical inquiry with practical reasoning with a fantastic
mathematical rigor, makes the argument that what we typically think of as
"practical" will never be enough to fully understand the nature of how the
universe is organized. We can figure it out part by tiny part, but that's
insufficient for thought or practice on any significant scale. He's a critic
of our reliance on physics and constructing physical scientific models, not
because they aren't the most cutting-edge way we know to study the universe –
they are! no question about it! – but because they have their blind spots,
just as every practice of inquiry throughout history has had its blind spots.
For him, there is a practical intersection between math and philosophy,
science and spirituality, that could be said to favor each side in a different
way. But to emphasize one over any other simply because we value its "results"
more would be just as disastrous as to favor the other instead. Each type of
study is good at a very particular thing, and we should let it be good at that
thing without insisting that it bow its head to the demands of the others.

The result of his thinking, incidentally, is that he comes out criticizing
modern philosophy as well, but for much sounder and more incisive reasons than
lukeprog does in this article.

~~~
dean
While I agree that philosophy has the ability to ask good questions,
unfortunately it does not seem to be able to answer those questions in any
meaningful way. Science also has the ability to ask good questions, but it
knows how to answer them in a meaningful way (at least good science does). By
meaningful, I mean provably true. Philosophy is very happy to take untested
opinion as true. Which is provably dangerous.

I get the sense from reading your post that you think of Philosophers as
Philospher-Kings, who sit at the top of humanity and think about important
things and their ideas eventually trickle down to the Plebeians at the bottom.
And once everyone agrees with the Philosophers, there will no longer be a need
for Philosophy. Give me Science any day.

~~~
unalone
I think that kings ought to be philosophers, metaphorically speaking: I trust
politicians who prove they have at least some understanding of philosophical
inquiry much more than I trust the ones who are skeptical. But philosophers
themselves shouldn't be kings: hell, how would you pick the one to rule over
the rest of them? The best philosophers are frequently the most controversial:
the controversy surrounds them because of how challenging and provocative
their thoughts are.

Here's the thing with "provably true" that I find worrisome: the process of
proving something as rigorously as scientific research demands it is so slow,
so painstaking, that if we relied entirely on science to inform our knowledge,
we'd lose out on literal millennia of human experience. Now, there are some
things for which scientific rigor is _absolutely necessary_ : don't get me
wrong, I think science is one of the best things ever. But it's not enough.
It's a tool in an arsenal which employs many different techniques to get at
knowledge, and as far as techniques go, it's a highly specialized one.

Philosophy is a much, much broader technique; in fact, it specializes in
finding ways to look at even broader questions in exquisite detail. That makes
it a very impractical tool if you're trying to, say, build a space ship. But
it makes it a far more useful tool if you're trying to understand things as
complex and abstract and subtle as, say, questions of how we acquire
knowledge, or what it means to think. "Meaning" is something which science
deals with very practically, and as a result its meaning will usually go only
as deep as is needed to achieve a practical result. Once science begins
worrying about satisfying deeper curiosities, well, it's no longer practical
and your argument is moot.

You think philosophy is provably dangerous. Well, I think that science left
unchecked is dangerous as well – it's such a powerful method of inquiry that
it can convince you it's the only sort of inquiry that has any meaning
whatsoever, which is a seductive promise (it's so simple! it could explain
_everything_!) but not a true one. There have been certain controversies
involving very bright scientific minds saying some very stupid things, and
then attempting to "prove" that there's a scientific justification for what
they're saying. It's especially frustrating because these scientific thinkers,
who are so humble and questioning when examining the universe from their lens,
are incapable of the same humility when offered any other perspective on their
thoughts – even well-reasoned and meaningful ones.

But I wouldn't argue that because of this, we ought to cut funding to science,
or insist that science change its techniques. No: science should do what it's
good at, period. But so should philosophy. And so should mathematics, or
theology, or history, or whichever other method of inquiry might yield useful
and important breakthroughs. The dangerous part of science is its claim that
it ought to dominate other fields of study, which practically speaking I find
no different from the claim made by fundamentalist Christians that their
religion should dominate all fields of study. There's a similar belief that
their worldview is _so_ right, _so_ all-pervasive, that no other argument
could possibly suffice to dethrone it.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
_"Here's the thing with "provably true" that I find worrisome: the process of
proving something as rigorously as scientific research demands it is so slow,
so painstaking, that if we relied entirely on science to inform our knowledge,
we'd lose out on literal millennia of human experience."_

 _"Philosophy is a much, much broader technique; in fact, it specializes in
finding ways to look at even broader questions in exquisite detail. That makes
it a very impractical tool if you're trying to, say, build a space ship. But
it makes it a far more useful tool if you're trying to understand things as
complex and abstract and subtle as, say, questions of how we acquire
knowledge, or what it means to think."_

To be blunt: you need to read Pearl (and Kahneman), because it is clear you
are not familiar with the ideas you are arguing against.

------
sharkbot
I see a lot of criticism that lukeprog is "shallow" or "surface-oriented" on
the topic of philosophy. While I don't believe he has formal training, the guy
had a long-running blog and podcast covering a number of philosophical topics,
including interviews with professional philosophers:
<http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=1911>

I think lukeprog has done much to provide himself with an unbiased
philosophical education.

------
ElCongelador
So the author argues for some kind of long in the tooth peculiar positivism?
Had he studied just some 20th century philosophy and its problems (from
positivism to analytic philosophy to post-analytic), he wouldn't make such
tiresome arguments.

~~~
KarmaKaiser
The thing I find odd is that I've followed Luke for some years and he's
remarkably well read on these topics and assuredly know of the complications
with this stance. I find his Scientific Narrative argument (Science has solved
other problems, why should X be the last to fall?) problematic but he seems to
lean heavily on it.

------
nachteilig
Tying philosophy to usefulness in STEM disciplines is a terrible idea.

Reading Kant doesn't "too much respect for failed philosophical methods"--if
you read him properly it helps teach solid thinking that might even lead you
to reject some of what he says.

------
br1anberg
this is worse than that ayn rand post a while back

~~~
dbaupp
In what way? (Genuine question.)

------
gadders
The modern mis-use of the term philosopher is annoying.

A philosopher isn't a philosophy professor. A philosopher is someone who lives
by and espouses there own belief system.

------
cthaley
Poor Plato, it seems the only sin of which he is accused, and for which he is
pilloried, is that of having lived a long time ago. But for all of the
comments, I can find no arguments against any thesis in Plato. And this is
noteworthy. Not just because it indicates that Plato is here just a straw man
and that few (if any) of his assailants here have read him, and so of course,
have no grounds to criticize. But more importantly, because, Plato does not
have some set of theses which even could be toppled or made irrelevant. Plato
does not work like that. Philosophy does not (usually) work like that. Plato
does not promulgate, he investigates. He is still taught not so much because
his answers are still relevant, but because his questions are. The original
article implicitly acknowledges this point when the author guesses that
philosophers trained in "modern" disciplines might "get farther" than Plato on
the big questions—to which one might reply: and how shall they know the big
questions?

Someone here pointed out that this wholesale dismissal of philosophy is a
category mistake (a welcome reference to Aristotle), and I agree. If you will
forgive my speaking too broadly, the difficulty many non-philosophers seem to
have with philosophy is simply that they do not know what it is—and more
importantly, that they have never done it. I do not fault them for this (and
I'll readily admit that our academies are very much at fault here, as the
professionalization of philosophy has done no favors for philosophers or non-
philosophers) but one ought to have, if not enough humility, at least enough
love for truth to motivate silence, study, or wonder in the face of the
unknown—not slander.

Philosophy (and especially Plato's philosophy) is not the sort of thing for
which one uses a textbook. If you recall the Phaedrus (and if you don't recall
the Phaedrus, you probably should not be commenting on philosophy) you'll
remember that Plato has an argument against books. He worries that books will
codify doxa in such a way as to stifle inquiry—a worry that was clearly
warranted, as evidenced by this thread. Thus he preferred dialogues to
dissertations, and precisely because the individual appropriation of
knowledge, and the harmonizing of the person with reality, is what really
counts—not knowing (or believing) a bunch of stuff. It is important to
remember that Plato, even when making myths, is imminently and always
practical.

Those who advocate that contemporary science is better equipped than
philosophy to answer the big questions, because science "examines reality,
etc." fail to recognize that "reality" itself is big question. In my own
experience, I have often found it amusing how quickly some "scientists"
dismiss philosophy, while I've met very few philosophers who would do the same
for science. It is fine if one wants to ignore philosophy, but it is hubris to
dismiss it simply because it does not do what one wants it to do.

------
guard-of-terra
Why "train" philosophers?

When I imagine a "trained philosopher" I see a person who uses a lot of smart-
sounding quotes but cannot choose between the right saying and the wrong
saying. It's all the same to him, a material that he absorbed and now outputs.

Challenge philosophers. Confront them. Let them take on each other.

~~~
jacques_chester
So, you _imagine_ what a philosopher does, and then tell this imaginary
philosopher what to do?

Doesn't that strike you as awful presumptuous?

~~~
EliRivers
Well, we have to imagine philosopher; the philosopher Form can only be known
to us through our experiences with "philosophers" we encounter, from which we
can build an idea of the true Form philosopher :p

~~~
jacques_chester
Except this fellow hasn't even left the cave, he's yelling at the shadow of a
shadow of a philosopher.

------
marcuskaz
it's spelled "perl"

~~~
elehack
Umm, no, it isn't. He's talking about Judea Pearl, the developer of Bayesian
networks: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judea_Pearl>

~~~
marcuskaz
it was a joke. why so serious?

