Hacker News Reader

I generally agree that HN is too ready to jump in with Engineer's Disease, but:

> I mean nevermind that adorno is socially validated - ie his peers, those that are actually qualified to assess the value of his work, respect him and his arguments right?

These days I think we have realised that that counts a mild negative - there are plenty of closed-set groups of people who agree with each other while looking completely incomprehensible to outsiders. Especially in the political arena.

> machine learning

This is a particularly good example because it's so upsetting to any kind of formalist, not just philosophers but the earlier ontology-wielding formal-reasoning AI developers and even those with a statistical training. Machine learning is very short on theoretical soundness. But it works. You throw images at it and it tells you how many of them contain cats or lamp-posts or whatever, and it agrees with a human often enough, despite the fact that neither human nor machine has really grasped "cat-ness".

The line of convincing needs to run the other way. It is no longer enough to market knowledge of Adorno as entrance to a social clique. You need an argument for "what can we do with Adorno that we could not do without Adorno?"

> You need an argument for "what can we do with Adorno that we could not do without Adorno?"

This is an interesting idea. It reduces all human knowledge to things that help you achieve some goal, knowledge is something you 'do things' with.

It's a really common position. It's how schools teach. It's how we define 'hard' knowledge as opposed to soft, wishy-washy stuff. It also is really convenient if you need a culture of employees - they don't need to think why they do things, or what they should do. The boss tells them, and the market tells the boss.

So that's how you end up with the kind of headless monster capitalism that's cooking the world in CO2. Nobody's trained to think about the whys and whats. They can only think about the hows, and sometimes, problems simply aren't purely technical in nature.

PS: that was a bit of a tangent, but I think philosophy isn't probably the best place to look for goal-oriented rationality.

A problem with that metaphor is that a machine learning paper refers to an objective reality. If a philosopher came along and said 'I'm not sure how this methodology works, but it is clearly optimized for the wrong metrics as evidenced by your sales since you implemented it', the data scientist should know to listen to the philosopher no matter how he came to that conclusion.

The equivalent in philosophy is, unfortunately, very different for someone deeply engaged with philosophy and an educated layperson. To a layperson, the measure of philosophy is something like the moral and mental well-being of the philosopher. That is why the laity cares and most would say should care about philosophy. Unfortunately, this is not the metric used by professional philosophers. Social validation may be a more rigorous heuristic than moral well-being, but that does not make it more relevant to what makes philosophy itself relevant.

It seems likely to me that the reason laypeople so consistently criticize more educated philosophers is that philosophy optimized for social validation is not optimized for moral well-being. That is an alarm bell that should matter to the intelligent philosopher, much as a 'but sales are down' warning should matter to the intelligent data scientist.

You could apply this criteria to mathematicians or historians, and it would be just as unfair. Philosophy isn’t religion. How one should live is just one of many areas a philosopher might be interested in. Are we to judge the work of artists or writers by their well-being?

But that's a circular argument. What makes his peers qualified? What is the root of qualification in a field where the foundational axioms are ultimately subjective and there is no reliable source of objective truth? Or to put it another way, what makes this branch of philosophy any more respectable than astrology?

>What is the root of qualification in a field where the foundational axioms are ultimately subjective and there is no reliable source of objective truth

without going into post-modernity and socially constructed truths i'll simply ask you: are you an academic researcher in stem? what are the objective metrics for stem? beyond anything else it's citation count.

There you go again, dodging the question.

i'm not dodging any question; i'm trying to explain to you that there is absolutely no such thing as "objective truth" anywhere outside of formal mathematics. so the humanities are absolutely no different from 99% of academia.

I could claim that "repeatable experiment" comes pretty close to "objective truth" for at least physics and chemistry.

I strongly support studying humanities, especially as a way to learn how to think clearly and communicate effectively. Unfortunately much of what passes for "humanities" is simply empty sophistry. Dig below the surface and there's nothing there. Yet everyone is afraid to say that "the emperor wears no clothes" for fear of being labeled unsophisticated by a gang of pseudo-intellectuals.

I know bullshit when I see it.

To invoke the notion of "objective truth" as a grounding requires that one has already accepted several "foundational axioms [that] are ultimately subjective".

We in software are lucky, representing what Hannah Arendt calls "homo faber", those who work with their hands and use instrumental reasoning to create use-objects. Of course object-ivity is our concern. But using such standards to critique and create philosophy ends up favoring what one might call "propaganda."

here here. i'm not as read up on arendt as i should be but that's a perfect refutation of the kind of ideas i see espoused on hn every day. the problem is that getting people to buy into this very insightful critique of formalism.

Since you are responding to my comment: I like and believe it or not, recreationally read continental philosophy: this is a book "review" for the rerelease of the book "the authoritarian personality" -which is a work of sociology and a fraud. You have to read the article carefully to realize this.

I disagree that nepotism is a reason to take a thinker seriously, but that's not relevant towards this article touting Adorno's fraud of a book. It's also a tremendously hostile book. As Lasch put it, the substance of the book, bad stats and all, is that he thinks the culture he lived in is sick and needs therapy. There's a more parsimonious explanation.

I’ll admit it, I couldn’t understand any of the Adorno I read in school, except for the part where he hated jazz, so I wrote him off. On the whole I haven’t found much useful in the Frankfurt school, especially compared to what your average anthropologist is up to.

I'd recommend One-Dimensional Man by Marcuse. You're not going to extract anything too wild out of it, but the picture he paints of 50's American consumerism is worth it.

Sexual Taboos and the Law Today is a good intro but you need to know Freud well. The problem is very few know Freud and Marx.

I’m sure famous homeopaths are also revered by their peers. But this doesn’t make them any less wrong.

your arrogance is showing: hundreds (thousands?) of tenured professors engaging in sincere discourse and investigation are not at all the same thing as homeopaths - to wit homeopaths don't publish treatises on authoritarianism.

>to wit homeopaths don't publish treatises on authoritarianism.

If they did, it would probably be as fraudulent, moronic and evil as Adorno's was.