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Comment by n72 | Hacker News Reader

You know how, when your opinionated uncle reads a very high level description of some tech thing you know a lot about and then tells you how it will or won't work, you kind of sigh and don't even bother to try to explain just how much he doesn't know about the subject? Engineers who've taken a few philosophy undergrad courses should keep that in mind when drawing broad conclusions about philosophy. I'm not saying you shouldn't opine, but I'd suggest doing so with the appropriate amount of humility.

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I felt like the author was kind of getting at the difference between know-how and know-what, although perhaps was not aware of those terms/concepts. I would summarize her point as: you can learn the what of science and philosophy via modern books, but to learn the how of science requires practice (ideally in the lab of a Nobel prize winner), and that the point of reading old philosophy is to attempt to learn the how of those philosophers.

Whether that is actually the point of reading old philosophers, or whether that is a good way to learn the how, I do not know the answer to.

Having done a philosophy degree and been a programmer, in my opinion you're adding far too much weight to what is a very easy domain to understand. All the complicated bits became their own discipline (maths/physics/chemistry/social science/psychology).

Philosophy's not particularly complicated to someone who understands basic logic.

In some ways it's not a real subject as there's nothing to study as it's all thought experiments. There's no weird data mucking up elegant theories, or strange earth movements, or bizarre lights patterns.

These days philosophy tends to be just an argument about what a word actually means.

It's certainly nothing like a programmer dabbling in maths and claiming they've solved p v np.

> "Philosophy's not particularly complicated to someone who understands basic logic."

As with what others have said, you're completely missing the point if all you got from philosophy was logic. Logic is a prerequisite, not philosophy itself.

Philosophy is about exploring big, unanswerable questions. As soon as a field becomes objectively answerable, it splits from philosophy into a subfield usually.

My guess is that you find philosophy to be not a subject and uncomplicated because you don't care about the questions being asked by it, and parse them out, leaving you with the logical structure. If I was left with that, I would think it's a useless field too. But ignoring the interesting parts of a subject doesn't make them disappear from the field itself.

> "there's nothing to study as it's all thought experiments."

Very, very far from it. Is communism a thought experiment? Seemed pretty real to me. What about theory of law and ethics? What about politics? The most effective role of government for human happiness? Is happiness what humans need? All of these are centrally tied to philosophy, in particular ethics. It seems like your philosophy focused so much on logic that you lost most of the subject.

Where did you pick all that up from? Every replier has put lies and assumptions into my mouth, because you believe you've a "special" understanding of philosophy. You're not a special snowflake. Again, like the other repliers, you haven't even hinted what you studied, how you studied it, any qualifications, serious academic credentials. I have no idea if you're a fool who's read Sophie's World, or a Doctor in Philosophy. Then again, I doubt you're a Doctor as you've not put forward any cogent arguments. Your arguments are glorified "Oh, no it's not, 'cause I said so!".

I cared about the questions and the content. I'm past that and out the other side.

It's when you realise that despite asking all these questions and coming up with all these wonderful thought experiments that it gets you no closer at all to improving your understanding of the world, of ethics or politics or history or science, even the basics, understanding the meaning of life. All you've got are empty, hollow frameworks that you can break with simple thought experiments that make it obvious real life is far more complicated than armchair philosophy.

And worse still, the further you get along in philosophy, the more advanced work all comes down to petty arguments about the meaning of words.

I was merely using a subset of philosophy, logic, in another comment to highlight how little a module in philosophy actually teaches.

I picked it all up from college philosophy courses and practical application of philosophy (yes, it does exist, just not often taught). I plan to eventually earn a Ph.D. in philosophy and currently have enough credit to be between a major and a minor, though it isn't my major (CS). I skew towards practical philosophical subjects (social, political, contemporary ethics) for probably many of the reasons behind your frustrations, which I both understand and even share to some extent. Again, as I have said in another comment chain here, your frustrations do not make the field simple, only useless to you, which is a valid stance.

> "It's when you realise that despite asking all these questions and coming up with all these wonderful thought experiments that it gets you no closer at all to improving your understanding of the world, of ethics or politics or history or science, even the basics, understanding the meaning of life."

This has not been my experience nor would it be agreeable to many others. I think there are many people that find it useless, and many who find it useful. Just because you find it useless does not make the field generally useless to all.

You criticize my argument but fail to refute or address any of my response to the content of the field. In fact, you ignore it and keep using the assumption that philosophy is only thought experiments. When every replier has a similar opinion, you probably are better to at least examine it rather than pretending that everyone believes they have a "special" understanding of the subject. No one has pretended to have any big or even small insights on the field, or some huge understanding of even a single philosophy on its own.

This is one of those moments when you sigh and don't bother. If you've done an undergrad in philosophy and still don't think there are parts which aren't very sophisticated and difficult, we'll... Sigh.

This is one of those moments when you wonder why someone bothered to reply without mentioning a single one of these "sophisticated and difficult" parts of philosophy that we could then happily explain in simple terms. You only had to mention a single name or sub-discipline.

For example one of my modules was philosophy of mathematics. It was sophisticated and difficult, but not complicated or meaningful.

It was just a fairly pointless thought experiment. The actual important bits are just called "mathematics".

It's like today's social science. It's an extension of moral and political philosophy. But moral and political philosophy are fairly pointless and get bogged down by fairly meaningless arguments about the meaning of "self" or "altruism", while social science attempts to make people's lives better.

You know, I studied 3 separate modules on formal logic. I did 36 hours worth of lectures, wrote various essays and read multiple expensive philosophy text books.

I learnt more about logic from a single 1 hour high school electronics lesson than I ever did from all that.

pg has a good essay about why he doesn't particularly rate philosophy: http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

"You know, I studied 3 separate modules on formal logic.... I learnt more about logic from a single 1 hour high school electronics lesson than I ever did from all that."

Can you say more about that? I can't make any sense of it. In a 1 hour electronics lesson, you'ld presumably cover the gates, i.e., propositional calculus. In a first logic module, you'ld learn that and another, richer, form of logic, the predicate calculus. You'ld also learn about the proof procedures for both, which ought to lead on to learning the (to my mind, interesting and important) fact that there's a mechanical procedure that's guaranteed to prove or disprove any argument in propositional calculus, but there's no such procedure for predicate calculus. Later logic courses would probably include some formal semantics, so you'ld learn about the (again, to my mind significant) distinction between what makes something true, and how we prove that something is true. Did you learn all these things in your one hour high school electronics lesson? Or are they somehow not "meaningful" or "complicated"?

"It's like today's social science. It's an extension of moral and political philosophy. But moral and political philosophy are fairly pointless and get bogged down by fairly meaningless arguments about the meaning of "self" or "altruism", while social science attempts to make people's lives better."

That's not an error in the subject, that's an error in how the field is being practiced. There is also plenty of social and political philosophy that had nothing to do with what you said bogs it down. Writing off an entire field for a few bad pieces would be like saying program design is useless because look at how many people use bad design.

Additionally, a field's effect on people's lives doesn't have anything to do with its level of complication, which was your original claim.

I see no evidence for the idea that any philosophy is simple in any way.

The idea that you are trying to flaunt your credentials downthread but really fail to address any points relating to most of what philosophy studies and the questions it asks (ones I am sure you don't have the answer to, which would seem odd for someone who finds the subject to be uncomplicated.) is why many commentators don't think you understand what philosophy about, myself included. You're taking an incredibly objective approach with a subject that isn't. If you're looking to say that philosophy does little to nothing for society, there's an argument to be had there and valid arguments on both sides. I think a decent number of philosophers would even agree. That still doesn't make the subject uncomplicated. Your original posts seem incredibly ignorant of the subject you studied.

Did you have any exposure to the Continental tradition or did you entirely study analytic philosophy? I can't square what you're saying, with someone who has studied and at least partly understood the work of people like Nietzsche or Heidegger.

Pick one:

1. There's something you missed along the way and thus you fail to appreciate the complexity of the issues.

2. You're considerably more intelligent than the hundreds of thousands of very intelligent people who struggle with the issues.

Even my math books admit that math is less subtle than human interaction. A single mathematician can nail down a truth for all eternity, but that'll never be the case for ethics.

> Philosophy's not particularly complicated to someone who understands basic logic.

Yes, of course — modus ponens has a lot to say about how we should live.

More like modus pwnens.

>Having done a philosophy degree and been a programmer, in my opinion you're adding far too much weight to what is a very easy domain to understand. All the complicated bits became their own discipline (maths/physics/chemistry/social science/psychology).

That's the kind of thing somebody who doesn't understand philosophy would say.

The "complicated bits" (physical philosophy) were never much of what's important about philosophy in the first place.

OK, so there's me + pg saying it's not complicated. We've said why, and have a background, experience and relevant degrees.

And there's you and N72, who haven't said why, can't put forward a single argument to support yourselves or even what backgrounds in philosophy you have.

And you accuse me of not "understanding". Pathetic. It's the precise antithesis of the very discipline you allude to support.

It's about time. I'm not willing to put in the time to attempt to enlighten some guy on the internet who's claims imply that he considers himself considerably more intelligent than the great thinkers of history who have struggled with issues in philosophy.

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