

The Unexpected Uselessness of Philosophy, The Unexpected Usefulness of Mathematics - phony_identity
http://www.isteve.com/Philosophy.htm

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kcl
Article title makes it looks promising but actual content fails to deliver.

Better to read 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural
Sciences': <http://euler.slu.edu/~srivastava/wigner.pdf>

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pg
Thanks very much for that reference. That is a very interesting paper and I
didn't know about it before.

Here's an html version:
<http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html>

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eru
The article stems from 1960. Compare this citation with the causes of the
Chernobyl disaster:

"The probabilistic nature of the "laws of nature" manifests itself in the case
of machines also, and can be verified, at least in the case of nuclear
reactors, if one runs them at very low power."

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rkts
Awesome. A lot of people revile Steve Sailer, but I think he's one of the best
essayists writing today.

This quote in particular elegantly sums up the history of philosophy:

"To this day, most philosophers suffer from Plato's disease: the assumption
that reality fundamentally consists of abstract essences best described by
words or geometry. (In truth, reality is largely a probabilistic affair best
described by statistics.)"

It's not so much the world that's probabilistic, though, as the human mind and
the thoughts and abstractions we impose on the world. Hume was the first
philosopher to explicitly argue that the mind works this way, and modern
research has supported him.

I think that, as Sailer briefly suggests, there is value in studying the works
of skeptical philosophers like Hume: it gives you the tools to see through the
kind of bullshit that philosophy is full of. Because you don't just see it in
philosophy. It's there whenever people argue about politics or religion, and
whenever a dreamy computer scientist rambles about "objects" and "types" and
whatnot. It's useful to able to refute these arguments by recognizing their
meaninglessness.

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zach
I only revile Steve Sailer because of his self-marketing campaign of leaving
many tiresome comments on the Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell blogs, taking
the authors to task at length over various issues. I was unaware he was well-
known from anywhere else. His essays may be splendid but he behaves like a
kook.

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yters
Before Plato and Heraclitus, Greeks thought reality was essentially chaotic
and impossible to understand. You can see this in their creation myths.
Heraclitus originated the idea of the Logos, a pattern underlying everything,
and Plato built on this.

Articles like Steve's happen when people don't know their history of
philosophy or science.

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mynameishere
Well, the useful parts of philosophy tend to drop off and become other
fields...and so what's left becomes "useless" by default.

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yters
The thing about philosophy is that it ultimately questions everything and is
the gateway to every new realm of knowledge. Useless philosophy is just
stagnant thinking that has given up on truth.

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jraines
This news.yc meme sucks.

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phony_identity
Which meme?

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menloparkbum
the iSteve spam meme.

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phony_identity
A meme of two posts?

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jraines
the meme of trashing anything that's not a hard science

