
Why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy? - fnordsensei
http://qz.com/627989/why-are-so-many-smart-people-such-idiots-about-philosophy/
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CM30
Dunning-Kruger effect to some degree. A lot of people well versed in at least
one field tend to end up thinking they're also well versed in everything else
as well, so you get a fair few scientists who think they also know everything
about the humanities and social sciences. Or people well renowned in one field
of science thinking they know a ton about a completely unrelated one (see,
many 'Intelligent Design' advocates).

There's also a certain amount of disdain towards it from scientists who seem
to think philosophy has been replaced by science in general. Which is perhaps
true in some things, but not so much in a lot of others.

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charonn0
I read the article, but I still don't know why Bill Nye is supposed to be
wrong, or how philosophy is not "asking pointlessly 'deep' questions, plucking
an answer out of thin air".

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ktRolster
Philosophy is why we have democracy today with checks and balances....over
millennia people discussed and argued about the best kinds of governments to
have, how to find good leaders, and how to avoid problems.

That's just one example out of many.

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charonn0
Philosophy provides no basis for objectively deciding what is the best system
of government or who would make the best leaders. If it did then why are there
competing systems that are at least as effective at governing a population,
even if not as popular with the population?

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ktRolster
There's no objective definition of 'best'

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mannykannot
Perhaps philosophy's problem here are that it doesn't present its case very
well, and this article provides us with an example of that. Instead of
explaining the relevance of philosophy, it picks apart Bill Nye's poor
arguments. You don't have to be a philosopher to see that the existence of
poor arguments against philosophy does not, in itself, establish the relevance
of current academic philosophy.

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mbrodersen
Smart people make dumb decisions all the time. They are just better at
convincing themselves/others that their (wrong) decisions are right. So why
should philosophy be different? All people (independently of intelligence)
make decisions using their values/emotions first. And then defend those
decisions (more or less well) using their intelligences.

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tetraverse
There's been centuries of philosophizing and what's that contributed to
humanity - nothing. Science has provided clean water and protection against
most pathogens. I'm with the science guy anyday.

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routerl
> There's been centuries of philosophizing and what's that contributed to
> humanity

Socrates and Plato introduced the idea that morality isn't just about doing
what your society expects of you.

Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and others developed the notion that governments ought
to be accountable to their citizens.

Frege and Russell formalized logic (as mathematicians) and argued that its
structures were not merely syntactic constructs (contrary to Boole) but
somehow reflected the nature of reality and/or rational thought (a strictly
philosophical discussion).

Popper conclusively killed the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific
reasoning and replaced it with falsifiability, the now dominant foundation of
all scientific endeavour.

Newton was a philosopher whose philosophising caused physics to became its own
discipline. Similar trajectories apply to psychology, linguistics, and
sociology, just over the past ~200 years.

Einstein credited his ruminations on Kant's metaphysics with giving him the
conceptual insights to develop general relativity [1].

Historically, once a philosophical line of enquiry becomes sufficiently
developed, we just stop calling it philosophy and give it a new name. This
tends to happen once the methodological and conceptual questions are more or
less settled, so that empiricism can finally be brought to bear on these
problems.[2]

> I'm with the science guy anyday.

It's absurd to think of science and philosophy as mutually exclusive or
somehow opposed to each other. Modern scientists are doing philosophy any time
they do anything other than gather or analyse data. Field foundational and
methodological questions are, by and large, precisely the kinds of questions
philosophy has addressed for centuries.

[1] [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-
philscience/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/)

[2] Here's a computational neuroscientist going into more detail about that:
[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-
scien...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-science-and-
philosophy)

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peterashford
It's funny how Scientists like to quote Popper but rail against their idea of
what "Philosophy" is, never quite putting 2 and 2 together and realising that
Popper was a Philosopher.

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stray
Do you mean why are so many smart people uninterested in what you find
interesting?

Maybe it has something to do with being called idiots for not knowing all the
nuances of a field that can't even define itself.

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burfog
Everybody already knows everything worth knowing about philosophy. This
includes people who know nothing about it. :-)

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drdeca
Do you mean that what is worth knowing about it is relative to the person
knowing, or that there is nothing worth knowing about it?

Is knowing that people study it "knowing something about it"? Because, I find
that knowing that people study it helps me understand the actions of others.

