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Comment by eddd | Hacker News Reader

Philosophy today is one of the most undervalued discipline. It doesn't yield any return on investment immediately and is mostly confusing at the beginning, so people don't tend to have interest in it.

I think we have some sort global identity crisis because of that. Religions are not sufficient enough and science doesn't even try to answer the question of "why?" but rather "how?". In result of that, we ended up with no ideology and no tools to build one for ourselves.

This is laughably ironic, because we really want some change in the way we live and think and yet, we don't turn back and evaluate what people came out with in the history.

edit: if you want to start with it: http://philosophizethis.org/category/episode/

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Philosophy gets a bad rep for the same reason psychology and sociology and applied macroeconomics do: because there is no way to clearly distinguish right ideas from wrong ones, so the field is flooded with junk.

Not sure I would lump economics and psychology in there. Economics tries to explain some observable phenomenon which arises from human behavior which we don't fully understand. Psychology again, tries to understand human behavior. In theory, if we measured the correct things and the measurements were accurate, we'd be able to make accurate predictions based on those measurements in both fields. The problem is that we aren't able to do that currently.

Philosophy is asking way more subjective questions, like "what should we do, and why?". The answer will always vary by context and individual and there will never be a "right" answer.

Ok, I will say something. Economics had a problem in that it is partially descriptive, as you say, but it is also partially normative: it wants to say how things should be. Then it gets the two parts confused a lot, leading to homo economicus stuff.

Behavioral economics is more relevant to both the fields you describe.

Do you mind giving an example?

In Misbehaving, Richard Thaler describes a meeting of psychologists where he describes the best current thinking of economists as to what a "rational" person would do if the government were to give a payment to all citizens as an economic stimulus. I don't remember the details, but it involves the recognition that a citizen would have to pay the money back (as taxes) at some point, and that the citizen would have descendants in perpetuity---as a result, the economic stimulus would fail because the citizen would lock the payment into a 0-risk savings account. He had to have another economist at the meeting reassure everyone that that was indeed the current best economic thinking in order to stop them from laughing at him.

He recalls telling the story to Some Fameous Economist and being told that (a) yes, that was the most rational thing to do in that situation, and (b) that it was indeed what everyone would do.

Philosophy, for the most part, isn't flooded with junk. (I'll refrain from comments about the rest.) In fact, I'm not sure what philosophical junk would be.

There may be schools of thought based on assumptions that are fundamentally alien to you, but making sense of them is the fun of philosophy.

If at the end of the day, you've got a world to live in with problems to solve, it does not suffice to say "oh, gee... there are lots of interesting ways to look at the world." You have to do something more than just catalogue esoteric thought. And there's a lot of junk philosophy that poses questions and says "this is interesting", even if, for all practical purposes, it is definitely not interesting. (Like P-Zombies, the Ship of Theseus, free will, etc. It's all junk philosophy.)

P-zombies are a bit overblown in my opinion, too, but that arises from the AI question: what is the moral, ethical, and ultimately legal status of a general AI? Does an entity that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a person have any rights a real person is bound to respect?

Likewise, the question of free will has some downstream legal consequences. A pure practical, utilitarian answer might just be unpalatable.

In the end different philosophical systems have different behavioral results-a strong believer in divinely received morality will certainly come to different conclusions from an existential absurdist. Support charities? A Nietzschian might not thank you for that. A Randian might just think you a fool. There's probably a difference between Buddhist philosophy and that of Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann, but for the life of me, I can't see what it is.

>Does an entity that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a person have any rights a real person is bound to respect?

Any entity that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a person is a person. That's what "is" means. Scientists figured this out. Programmers figured this out. Mathematicians figured this out. Philosophers? They don't want to figure things out. They want to drop names.

In the end, these are mostly solved problems, and if it weren't for people continuing to worship their own ignorance -- sorry -- "the mystery", then we'd be able to move past these and find some useful philosophy to talk about, rather than spinning up 1300 year old problems again and again.

> Religions are not sufficient enough...

I don't really draw such a strong distinction between religion and philosophy. I consider theology to be a school of philosophy that deals with certain metaphysical axioms and their implications.

If investment in philosophy helps people understand how most controversy is downstream from assumptions they don't know they're making, they might be able to de-escalate from thier religious fervor (a popular "religion" these days is an unhealthy political divisiveness), I welcome that investment.

Religion is a oversimplification of philosophy doctrines. Imagine Moses trying to communicate with regular folk his views on the world in a way that Socrates did. It was much more efficient to translate it to a set of stories that impose specific behavior.

The closest religion to philosophy (I can think of) is Buddhism, it is basically a guide to learn about self and the world.

I don't agree, maybe you have have a oversimplified view of religion, do you believe religion only consists of regular folks? Where would you put St. Thomas and his Summa Theologica

Religion, like schools of philosophy, grow overtime as more theologians add to the thought.

Here is a theologian's thought on modern secularism, it is essentially a philosophical essay: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/02/the-metaphysics-...

> Religion is a oversimplification of philosophy doctrines.

No, it's not, though what most people are exposed to is, just as what most people exposed to philosophy by other means get is oversimplified. If you go beyond the surface, theology is no less deep than other philosophy.

Russel:

Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should contend— belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy

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