
What, exactly, do philosophers do? - diodorus
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/where-modern-philosophy-began/
======
keeler
People forget that Alan Turing's essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
was published in Mind, a major philosophy journal.

People forget that Boolean algebra comes from a work called "The Laws of
Thought," where Boole tries to describe the algebraic operations underlying
thought. If you think that isn't something "philosophers do," this is an
ancient goal stretching back to Aristotle's logic, up through Descartes, and
into figures such as Leibniz (who independently invented calculus and played
an important role in giving us the binary number system), Chomsky, and Jerry
Fodor. Philosophy is one of the disciplines in the interdisciplinary field of
Cognitive Science.

Much of the most important work on the foundations of mathematics was done by
philosophers with a mathematical bent (or mathematicians with a philosophical
bent, depending on how you want to look at it). Set theory. Incompleteness.
First-order logic was invented by Frege.

A lot of the technology we're using right now is traceable back to the work of
philosophers.

I've always found that the best way to think of philosophy is simply as
inquiry. As a line of inquiry progresses, it may bud off into a field in its
own right. Physicists today would have been called Natural Philosophers in
Newton's time. In fact, before Newton it was Descartes' physics that reigned
supreme in the academy. Some lines of inquiry might not bud off despite
significant advancements, such as logic.

Of course, I don't mean to say that philosophy and inquiry are purely
synonymous. There's something vague about what the discipline of philosophy
exactly is. But I don't think that's too terribly important. The question is
what philosophers do. Some of the stuff philosophers "do" would probably
strike some readers here as very "heads in the clouds" type stuff. But some of
the other stuff, I think HN would find interesting. Check out work by Hillary
Putnam. Or Jerry Fodor, if you're interested in "language of thought" type
stuff that bears some similarity to Boole's project in The Laws of Thought.
Chomsky recently published a newish collection of essays called What "Kind of
Creatures Are We?", which is worth a look too.

~~~
AquinasCoder
It always fascinates me that often these "heads in the clouds" type stuff has
an enormous impact on history, politics, and other disciplines while what is
supposed to be more practical often is ignored or belittled. The most
plausible reason is that we have firmer convictions in the little things
rather than the large things. This seems to reveal the contemporary, and
speaking in philosophical lingo, "modern" tendency to place epistemology as
prior to metaphysics. The exception to this thought is the field of ethics.
Logic too has been explored in depths through computer science, but this is
still -- historically speaking -- in its infancy. The difference between
formal logic and computer science is also a gap that cannot be underestimated.

~~~
keeler
Keep your audience in mind. This is Hacker News. If this were a website for
lawyers, political scientists, and historians I would have given a different
answer to the question of "What, exactly, do philosophers do?" For them, the
language of thought and issues at the foundations of mathematics qualify as
"heads in the clouds" type stuff.

I would have also given a different answer if the primary group here were,
say, physicists, astronomers, and chemists. For them, the answers I would have
given to the lawyers, political scientists, and historians would have likewise
been "heads in the clouds" type stuff.

Philosophy has unseen tendrils in almost everything. You can only get someone
to see it (or, really, care about it) when it's something they're already
interested in.

~~~
vacri
HN isn't particularly philosophy-friendly. I've talked about how philosophy
was crucial in laying down the philosophy of science and working out the
scientific method, only to be drowned in a sea of "wasn't necessary, it's
self-evident" sorts of comments.

~~~
jhanschoo
It's funny because it took philosophy centuries to see that—and even now, the
scientific method is showing limitations; its too difficult to perform in the
social sciences and the less rigorous method of extracting trends off big data
also often has great value.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
"Trends off big data" can be very useful in a machine-learning sense, if you
want to predict _very_ accurately, but you're ok with being far off when you
_do_ make a mistake. They're not very useful _at all_ for designing
interventions, which in the end is more what we care about.

------
rwnspace
Disgruntled philosophy grad: not very much, in my estimation. Most of the good
ones born in the last five decades have been swallowed by CS, at least in the
West.

There's lots I'd like to say on the topic, originating from 'psychoanalysing'
the field with a little too much vigor, supporting it with social-
structuralist bollocks, and throwing in criticisms of the academic publishing
hamster-wheel. But a simple nod is better than a rant.

Besides this, I think the main thing a philosopher 'should do' is explicitly
not just philosophy. Speaking at least two languages, being able to code, and
actively participating in empirical work and creative endeavours should be
seen as crucial to the education of a philosopher, for them to produce work of
historical merit. The first two increase the likelihood of avoiding the
Wittgensteinian errors of language and the latter two keep your brain moving
and subsuming after parsing mountains of dense text.

Of course, if you want to be a philosophical historian, or an academic who
academises in philosophy, take the well-trodden path. I think there are many
philosophers who could write like wrought iron, but whose hearts just don't
seem in it. Perhaps I'm just one of those guys who enjoyed Nietzsche a bit too
much.

Edit: I feel compelled to mention that I trust my hard knowledge of the
discipline about as far as I could throw it. It's well worth the CS-types
around here taking the time to investigate the field - I recommend Kenny's 'A
New History of Western Philosophy' if you've got time, or any old MOOC. After
all, it's probably what you'd be up to if we didn't have computers.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>Edit: I feel compelled to mention that I trust my hard knowledge of the
discipline about as far as I could throw it. It's well worth the CS-types
around here taking the time to investigate the field - I recommend Kenny's 'A
New History of Western Philosophy' if you've got time, or any old MOOC. After
all, it's probably what you'd be up to if we didn't have computers.

Are the UEdinburgh MOOCs on Coursera ok?

~~~
rwnspace
I had a look. I recognise Allan Hazlett's name, but that's as much as I can
say. Epistemology, PoM and stuff are all fairly interesting but depend a lot
on the quality of teaching, in my experience.

If you don't want to just read Kenny's ANHWP, and I were to provide a reading
list:

* Plato: Meno, Gorgias, Parmenides, Charmides, Apology. If you enjoy it, then try reading The Republic.

* Aurelius' Meditations. Democritus and Epicurus are worth reading about too, to summarise the Greeks. And Zeno's paradoxes.

* meaningness.com as an entry-point to Buddhist philosophy in general.

* Logicomix as an introduction to Russell & his project in Principia Mathematica.

* Mill's Utilitarianism, Hannah Arendt 'The Human Condition', and Henry George 'Progress & Poverty' for politics, history and economy, throw in a bit of Rawls. Schiller's 'The Robbers' is also very much worth reading.

* SEP articles for the classic writers: Augustine, Aquinas, Hume, Kant; then Kripke, Tyler Burge, and Searle present some interesting problems.

Other mentions off the top of my head: Dreyfus, Chalmers, Parfitt, Singer.

There are some great YouTube channels out there that teach to the intelligent
adult. Gregory B Sadler, Mark Thorsby, Daniel Bonevac, Carneades.org are the
ones I remember being useful. Some good series' are out there: Human, All Too
Human; Alan Watts' TV series; The Reith Lectures...

I've missed a ton, of course, this is just stuff I remember enjoying or
gaining something from. I hope this list isn't too overwhelming. I'd start
with the Greeks, then flick around some YouTube channels, then meaningness,
then off into whatever takes your fancy. I don't really fancy digging through
MOOCs so sorry I can't recommend any in particular.

My personal favourite philosophers/philosophical writers: Nietzsche,
Wittgenstein, Darwin, Hegel, Camus, CS Pierce, Feyerabend, Epicurus.

------
dvt
Always warms my heart to see philosophy on top of HN. Philosophy is _hard_ \--
much harder than one would think. And people that contribute are _incredibly_
smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison. On the other
hand, it's very political, and a lot of it is mental masturbation. Philosophy
of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field. Philosophy of Mind,
apart from a few great minds (Chalmers, Nagel) is also equivocal.

I went into undergrad with a primary focus on (meta-)logic[1] and I was taught
by some of the world's premiere logicians (David Kaplan, Sam Cumming, a few
others). But I fell in love with ethics -- a subject I'd never thought I'd
enjoy as much as I did. I loved reading Moore, Foote, Anscombe, Geach.

My best memories were attending graduate seminars -- studying the philosophy
of language and trying to figure out how logical connectives work in regular
discourse, or studying abduction and trying to stitch together Horn clauses
that seem to point to one conclusion rather than another.

Philosophers, in short, do all kinds of things: from pushing the boundaries of
exotic logics, to solving ethical problems, to systematizing natural language
or understanding the metaphysics of causality.

The article just _touches_ on all of the above (in fact, it doesn't discuss
_modern_ philosophy at all). If you're interested in philosophy, the SEP[2] is
a great resource.

[1] [https://dvt.name/logic/](https://dvt.name/logic/)

[2] [https://plato.stanford.edu/](https://plato.stanford.edu/)

~~~
nomel
> And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software
> engineers, by comparison

Comparing a software engineer to someone contributing to the advancement of an
entire field is not really a fair comparison. This is like comparing someone
who has a job in "compliance and ethics" to someone making advancement in
quantum computing.

~~~
dvt
I'm comparing people of equal experience in either field. A philosophy
undergraduate is, in my experience, much more intelligent than their
engineering counterpart. This probably has to do with the fact that in
philosophy, writing clear arguments is of primary import.

Whereas in engineering, most examinations are problem sets -- where the worst
that can happen is a clever gotcha' (see whiteboard interviews).

~~~
sillysaurus3
Your argument is that the top philosophers are smarter than Carmack. That
seems suspect.

~~~
dvt
Haha, there's no comparison. The top philosophers are smarter than our Supreme
Court Justices. And those are _certainly_ smarter than Carmack.

And I'm a huge Carmack fanboy.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I mean, for the sake of argument I'd like to entertain that hypothesis. How do
you propose to prove it? Or at least show some persuasive evidence.

~~~
fnordsensei
To define "smart", you'd have to ask a philosopher. QED.

Jokes aside, my personal opinion is that we have a lot of hubris on the
average, and a lot of us probably consider ourselves smarter than we are. Or
at least could do with an attitude that generates an openness to learning,
which being humble does.

For this reason alone, it might be interesting to consider that there might be
a smarter lot out there. And a bunch of people who are sort of smart in the
same way as developers are (deductive reasoning, parsing problems very finely,
etc) to boot.

------
tw1010
Philosophy is not like software engineering. There's a lot more reading that
needs to be done before you can make a contribution. A lot of it progresses by
just reading the works of the established masters, getting ideas, and
publishing your thoughts about what they had to say. You don't start from
scratch. You build on what is already there. Addition by addition the field
progresses and removes bad ideas or clarifies good ideas and long-term that
mountain of work has gotten us from plato to the rich field it is today.

~~~
pishpash
What is the state of the art in today's philosophy? What's the latest truly
novel idea?

~~~
mcguire
That is, I think, the wrong question. Or rather, the wrong approach to
take.[1]

Philosophy is not _that kind_ of human endeavor. There is no "state of the
art"; instead, Plato is as state-of-the-art as he ever was[2][3] and every
publishing philosopher has novel ideas (or at least hopes they do, although
they might also like to learn that some ancient sage has expressed support for
their notions).

My personal way of viewing philosophy is as a conversation. A philosopher
starts by finding other statements that they like or don't like. Then, they
add their own thoughts, modifying previous ideas or attacking or supporting
them, all with the best arguments they can muster. From all this, you, as an
innocent bystander, can pick out the threads that best let you sleep well at
night.

[1] And if I've ever written a more philosophical paragraph, I don't know what
it is. I wish to submit it to the Faculty of the College of Liberal Arts,
blah, blah, blah.

[2] I'm sure I'll be vigorously attacked by analytic philosophers at this
point. There are very much schools who would like philosophy to be more akin
to the sciences or (even better) mathematics (but without all the icky
evidence and formal proofs and such). But then, the only particular sympathy
I've had for analytic philosophy I've recently discovered due to an interest
in Daoist philosophy.

[3] Except for Epicurus. He seems to have won on some topics---his physics; if
you're a materialist, you're Epicurean even if you don't already know it---and
everything else seems to have been misplaced. Which is the interesting part,
dang it.

~~~
azeirah
Isn't it so that whenever something within philosophy becomes state of the
art, it stops being philosophy?

~~~
mcguire
As far as I know, the only way a question stops being philosophy is by someone
thinking up a way to definitively answer it.

------
room271
There are a few different areas of philosophy and it's useful to separate them
out:

1) Logic (this is useful and also can be called maths) 2) Political Philosophy
/ Political Theory (crosses over with politics/history, again useful) 3)
Ethics (useful and important but not necessarily worth academic study) 4)
History of Philosophy (this is really the history of thought and useful and
interesting. A lot of philosophy is really this) but unfortunately it blurs
into attempting new thought 5) epistemology (useless, science is the better
path)

Source: I studied philosophy.

It's important to remember that early philosophers tended to also be
mathematicians and scientists.

------
nathan_long
Last time I checked into philosophy, we couldn't prove that philosophers
exist, so I'm going to call this question premature.

------
Koshkin
It looks like philosophy is several different things: an "umbrella" term for
any subject that is still in a "pre-science" state and has not matured enough
to acquire a name of its own; a part of the name that stuck for purely
historical reasons, as in "philosophy of mathematics"; a collection of
miscellaneous (named) subjects, some of which are "science", while others are
not (yet); a world-view (including cases when it is driven by a political
agenda).

------
siculars
Warn of the ever present existential threat, smoke, drink and seduce
undergrads.

;)

~~~
koolba
That doesn't sound any different than me studying CS.

------
westoncb
One often overlooked aspect of philosophy which HNers would appreciate, I
think, is: with varying degrees of upfrontness about it, the aims of
philosophers are not solely to deliver truth in the sense which non-
philosophers understand it. (This is not in reference to academic scandal,
btw.)

When philosophers make this departure from pursuing the usual notion of truth,
the motivation derives from an understanding that the adoption of one
philosophical idea versus another can have profound impacts on people's lives
(just consider how certain religious ideas can make people behave for
instance)—so it's often partly about figuring out a set of ideas which would
be most beneficial if adopted.

The Pragmatists for instance were quite explicit about this (see William
James' redefinition of 'truth' in Pragmatism for example)—and maybe others
have been too, but I think the more common thing is to not be up front about
it at all (which makes a certain amount of sense since that could impact the
effect of their project to begin with).

I haven't seen the details myself, but a philosophy professor friend pointed
out to me that even Plato was pretty blatantly doing this.

------
DanielBMarkham
Programming is applied philosophy. That is, through inquiry we explore a
previously unknown field (to us) and reduce common concerns to a formally-
testable set of axioms (our tests) When programmers walk into a new field, it
might as well be magic and noise -- things happen for reasons we can't
understand and conversations occur in which we don't understand the context.
When we leave a field, at least for the part we've coded, we're able to
describe both the "fuzziness" of the area and the parts that work in a more
predictable format. We turn mystery into science.

Looking at it this way, and as a layperson outsider, modern philosophy went
off-the-rails sometime after formal logic theory. We've forgotten the skill
and benefits of general inquiry and instead tried to formalize philosophy
itself as if it were already a science. (or as if there were some underlying
science waiting for us to discover it)

------
todd8
Consider these numbers from the College Board (SAT/GRE folks) [1]:

Total of Reading, Math, Writing scores on SAT by college plans:

1488 -- Visual & Performing Arts

1476 -- Psychology

1587 -- Philosophy & Religious Studies

1606 -- Computer & Information Science and Support Services

1612 -- Engineering

1685 -- Physical Sciences

1714 -- Mathematical Sciences

As anyone that has been around a US university lately knows, non-native
English speakers are overrepresented in CS departments and consequently, this
bring down the verbal and hence overall SAT scores for CS a bit. Furthermore,
that's a pretty big category for CS that includes some of the far less
theoretical areas.

I've noticed, more than once, that Philosophy majors feel that they are
somehow in a rarified domain where the things they do are far beyond the
understanding of the rest of us. A bit like my father, a doctorate in
Theology, that was worried that if I went to MIT I would end up being a super
TV repairman.

Academic papers and books in Philosophy are at times obtuse, but really no
more difficult than reading a paper on, say, orogeny, out of my field, so slow
going, but not impossible (it's the study of how geologic processes form
mountains). Can Philosophy majors say the same thing about my books on Ring
theory, Measure theory, Category Theory, Stats, Machine learning,
Computability, Compilers, or Operating Systems?

I've tried to understand general relativity (to no avail) and my struggles
with quantum theory have given me a great respect for Physics majors--they
deserve their place at the top of the academic IQ ladder, but Philosophy
majors should perhaps take a peek at what some of the rest of us work on.

[1] [https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/total-
group-2016.pdf](https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/total-group-2016.pdf)

------
dispo001
The term has been repurposed into philo-historianism. IOW A modern philosopher
is someone who studies real philosophers. Look how the field is void of any
original idea and at its endless citation of dead people.

Far to much value is attributed to "what they said" rather than the mind set
that made them say it.

This could happen to any field and to some benevolent and productive extend it
does. We normally put the word history or historian behind or in front of it
like computer science history, art history, the history of foobar.

I have to ask: how does one write the "hello world" of philosophy? And please
don't cite me a manual.

~~~
rwnspace
>I have to ask: how does one write the "hello world" of philosophy? And please
don't cite me a manual.

Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum. I'm sure you could write that out in a faintly
amusing way using 'import' or something.

Your second sentence is right a lot of the time, but certainly not always.
It's just that certain, foundation-shaking ideas are treated exceptionally and
independently, or as not relevant to the very practice of thinking. As if the
contents of the mind and the stomach (etc) vary independently.

------
essive
Philosophy Degrees: Reid Hoffman - LinkedIn, Stewart Butterfield - Flickr,
Peter Thiel - PayPal, Patrick Byrne - Overstock, Carly Fiorina - you all know
her, Carl Icahn - Icahn Enterprises, Sheila Bair - FDIC, George Soros - Soros
Funds, Herbert Allison Jr. - Fannie Mae, Gerald Levin - Time Warner, Ethan
Cohen - you all know him, Rupert Murdoch, Rashida Jones, Philip Glass, etc...
...of course - just statistical - there's always some list for other degrees
too....

------
mcguire
Construct elaborate logical edifices on their previously existing, unreasoned
prejudices?

(At the risk of having them take away my Junior Philosophers' Secret Decoder
Ring.)

------
TheLilHipster
Philosophy is just so inaccessible to most people and is unrelatable to the
layman.

The most valuable philosophers of today IMO, are those that stay on the rails
of pragmatism for the everyday struggles of the average citizen.

Stefan Molyneux on youtube is a good example.

He gets off the rails a little bit, but his core ideals of ethics and moral
virtue is something I value quite highly in my everyday life.

------
gerbilly
I would say philosophy is a non experimental form of psychology.

Spend five minutes of introspection to see how your mind appears to work, then
build huge tottering edifices of analytical thought on those narrow
observations.

Profit?

------
excalibur
> What, exactly, do philosophers do?

They keep it hot.
[https://media.giphy.com/media/ytZHCP0IPPogE/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/ytZHCP0IPPogE/giphy.gif)

------
yarrel
1\. Spend an awful lot of time chasing tenure.

2\. Spend an awful lot of time trolling each other on Facebook.

3\. Occasionally rehash old ideas.

4\. Even more occasionally come up with breathtaking insights into the nature
of reality and what it means to be human.

5\. Get annoyed if you point out any flaws in those insights.

6\. Publish more than they used to.

~~~
Diederich
> 2\. Spend an awful lot of time trolling each other on Facebook.

I think I would very much enjoy seeing some citations of this. (:

~~~
spiffyman
I'm friends with several philosophers since I took it fairly seriously in
undergrad and befriended several grad students. From my perspective, the
"trolling" is generally just pointing out interesting entailments of another
philosopher's arguments. For example, in a recent thread philosopher X
outlined philosopher Y's argument just to point out that he hopes it shows the
"weird consequences" of the basis of Y's argument. Y showed up to point out
that X had missed a key wrinkle. A bunch of others showed up to wrangle about
the meaning of certain words.

... So basically the same thing philosophers do in their papers, just with
fewer citations.

(That's not me throwing shade -- just pointing out how the field seems to
work. I loved and still love philosophy.)

------
ue_
The article starts with a question which asks about the present very clearly,
but then answers a different question of what philosophers _did_ (i.e the
past) without any reference to modern philosophers.

Modern philosophers analyse older philosophical work and reply to
contemporaries; for example there is an ongoing debate about the difference
between "letting die" and "killing", and if it is an ethical difference then
what significance it holds. Other philosophy seeks to blend together with
sociology and psychology to analyse our current life (for example, the work of
Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School), for example to ask what is capitalism and
to what extent it is desirable. Some other philosophy works with economics to
examine classical and modern ideas of the value of commodoties and its
ontology. Some philosophers concern themselves with the ethics of killing and
eating animals and by extension humans. Other philosophy works through
linguistics to formulate theories of what we mean when we speak and the limits
of language to describe reality. And other philosophy involves itself with
natural science to formulate theories of causation and being. Yet other
philosophy does other things.

It's a broad field, and with advances in all related fields it's become a lot
broader than it was since the enlightenment, even considering how natural
science is no longer considered a philosophy.

~~~
euyyn
I see the importance of exploring those questions, for they pertain to current
movements and political issues, like veganism or euthanasia.

So (from my position of now knowing the work of any modern philosopher) have
such philosophical explorations, in the past decades or century, produced
answers? In the sense that, have they made a change in the way these important
issues developed? What are the biggest ways they have affected other fields?

~~~
ue_
I wouldn't say that modern philosophers, or even old philosophers, have had
much of an effect on current legislative decisions concerning things like
euthanasia. As to what extent they have influenced real communities I also
don't know about veganism (aside from perhaps Pinker, though again I don't
know of his influence) but modern philosophy (since 1950s or so) has been "all
the rage" within left-wing communities, most visibly the work of Slavoj Zizek
who is seen as a "superstar Marxist philosopher".

I'm under the impression that philosophical investigation has been largely
ignored in science, though I don't have enough information to give a
definitive answer.

Principles in law seem to me to be unclear and not guided along any particular
philosophy, despite in the UK at least PPE (politics, philosophy, economics)
being a common choice of university degree for politicians. I have seen
utterly terrible and fallacious and evidence-lacking arguments used to create
hideous laws, as the arguments are public record in England and Wales.

I'd say that philosophy doesn't have nearly as much impact as it should do,
and anyone who disagrees with this should recognise that the ability to think
critically is taught in any and all philosophy.

~~~
ue_
Why the downvotes for my comment? And why is _this_ comment downvoted? If you
don't think my comment above was substantive or helpful, please tell me so
that I can improve the quality of my posts.

~~~
grzm
Likely your second comment was downvoted because it's specifically against the
guidelines:

> _Please don 't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good,
> and it makes boring reading._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
ue_
I don't think it does make boring reading at all. In fact, it makes very
important reading - the strange drive-by downvoting culture on HN deserves to
be called out. And as I have noted elsewhere, those are merely guidelines; if
they are to be rules then they ought to be called as such.

~~~
grzm
I understand where you're coming from and sympathize with any effort to make
HN a better place. I don't think you're necessarily going about it in a way
that will accomplish that, or have taken to heart that there are some aspects
of HN that are the way they are because that's how the mods want it to be
after considered experience, thought, and reflection. I hesitated writing this
response because it's not clear to me that it will have much of an effect: you
seem intent on making HN the place you want, all the while ignoring the
guidlines explicitly spelled out because you don't think they apply to you.

Yes, they're guidelines. Communities often have norms that aren't written down
in laws, and people that behave outside of those norms end up feeling some
friction. You can argue about whether or not that's fair, but that's part of
human psychology. Another aspect of human psychology one needs to take into
account is figuring out what is effective in creating the change you want.
That's key to me wondering whether this comment is worth writing, because I
don't think it's the best way to convince you that you may be making things
harder for yourself than you could otherwise. Unfortunately I can't think of a
better way to do so right now. (Indeed, having followed your comments
yesterday in another thread, I hesitated to even make my initial comment.)

I think that's likely what drives some of the drive-by downvoting culture, as
you put it. I remember a comment (likely by 'dang, but I can't find it at the
moment) along the lines of how much effort it takes to respond well to
comments like the last two you posted in this subthread. You asked why you you
were downvoted (against the guidelines, and then again violated the guidelines
with your edit), and when that was pointed out, stated that the guidlines are
just that, so you shouldn't have been down voted. I'm really not sure how to
answer you honestly in a way that you would accept, and take it upon yourself
to accept some responsibity for the consequences of your comments, regardless
of whether you personally agree with them. Communication involves every
participant. I can affect my comments and responses, crafting them the best I
can for productive conversation. I can't control how they'll be taken, but
given what I understand of those I'm in discussion with, I can (and should)
take that knowledge into account when I'm writing. To do otherwise just makes
me ineffective and frustrated, and to do so repeatedly makes me appear a fool
to those observing me, and they'll be even less likely to respond to me
charitably.

Here's a comment by 'dang on the topic of downvoting:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440694](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440694)

Also, if you search the archives, there's plenty of discussion on this,
including people voicing exactly your concerns. While I sympathize with a "we
shall overcome" attitude (I harbor some of that myself), expecting this to
change just by continuing to call it out will likely work against you.
Personally, I think encouraging better behavior while abiding by the
guidelines is likely to make HN a better place. Finding the balance between
encouraging good behavior and calling out bad is admittedly difficult.

As a concrete example, here's a suggestion for rewriting one of your comments:

You wrote:

> _Why the downvotes for my comment? And why is this comment downvoted? If you
> don 't think my comment above was substantive or helpful, please tell me so
> that I can improve the quality of my posts._

An alternative would be to just eliminate those first two sentences:

> _If you don 't think my comment was substantive or helpful, please tell me
> so I can improve the quality of my posts._

If within the editing time, you can append that to your post rather than
starting a new comment. Try to frame it as best you can to not sound
defensive.

I do wish you the best and hope that you can read this in the spirit in which
its intended. I want everyone (including you and me) to have a positive,
constructive experience on HN, and that's why I've taken the time to write
this lengthy comment.

~~~
ue_
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

------
OneTimePoster
Philosophy discovers unknown relationships.

Math categorizes relationships.

Science tests relationships.

Engineering exploits relationships.

Remove any one of these and the whole damned process stops.

------
kutkloon7
It is very characteristic for philosophy to have a very clearly defined
question, and a very long and pompous essay which does not provide an answer
at first sight.

------
vander_elst
I know I going to get downvoted but:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgoB2JMEowc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgoB2JMEowc)

~~~
anigbrowl
Not by me - I read a lot of philosophy, and bullshit arguments are a problem.
Not unlike programming, sometimes people get lost in trying to perfect their
chosen framework or language without regard to its utility. Think of
Brainfuck, which is technically very interesting because of its extreme
simplicity while still being Turing-complete, but which would be a terrible
choice for most practical problems.

Having said that...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8)

