Comment by trominos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trominos | Hacker News Reader

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1) I think you've confused logic with an experimental science.

2) I am having serious trouble figuring out how this dismisses PG's essay.

3) So this is the only item in your list that actually addresses Graham's central point at all. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say but I think you're circling around this idea: "Sure, pre-20th century philosophy got a lot wrong, but it was that wrongness that allowed certain modern philosophers to get stuff right. PG thinks he could've gotten through the wrongness quickly, but I think he's wrong about that."

Well, okay... but let me give some evidence against that: I independently came to the conclusion that most philosophy is bullshit before I encountered Paul Graham. I think I'm smart, but I'm also pretty sure that there have been a bunch of people in history who are just as smart as I am, and so I'm led to the conclusion that there have been people in history who realized that philosophy as it was being practiced was bullshit. Which implies that, yes, all those pre-modern philosophers were wasting their time, because we didn't need their "false starts" to get to the root of the wrongness with philosophy.

4) I admit that I don't know enough about the origins of various disciplines to talk about any of the things you brought up, but, to me, the fact that philosophy helped nurture "useful" disciplines and ideas doesn't automatically imply that philosophy itself is valid or useful. Every kind of thinking, even pretty dumb kinds, produces more thinking. And after more than two thousand years, it's statistically likely that some of a discipline's intellectual offspring will have merit, even if the discipline itself doesn't.

Also: "Anybody who's a little bit careful can find these examples easily. Graham, however, failed. What does this tell us about his essay?"

First: this is really incredibly obnoxious. Second: why do you think that attacking the construction or presentation of PG's argument is the same as dismissing the argument itself?

Thanks for your critical thoughts. That's holds for you as well as gambling8nt, straiberman and kragen.

I'll try to answer some of your objections.

(1) You're right that "sample of 1" is an expression found in experimental science. But how do we know that a small sample is no sufficient reason to accept a hypothese if not by using logic?

Also: Read PG's essay once more and tell me: What reasons did he present to support his hypotheses, other than merely: "I didn't understand philosophy, therefore all current philosophy is useless"? He's basically making an appeal to authority, namely his own authority. Hardly a good reason.

2) PG asserts that early philosophy was inspired by maths. But was it, really? How does PG know? In fact, both fields probably inspired each other. This is one of the examples that makes some philosophy useful -- examples that PG simply ignored.

3) Just because you agree with PG (or had a similar experience) doesn't make any of you right. However, I agree that philosophy has had a quality problem every now and then. But that doesn't render all philosophy (or its method) useless.

Also: I'm wasn't trying to say: "I think he's wrong". I say: "Where are his arguments to believe his assertions that he can find a quick way?" Even the more practical sciences have had some really strange ideas when looking at them in hindsight. If usefulness is such a good guide, why did they run into these errors?

4) Indeed, all kind of thinking produces more thinking. Homo sapiens is about 40.000 years old. Then, what did they do the first 37.000 years if mere thinking is sufficient to find the meaningful and true statements?

Finally, attacking the presentation is often the same thing as dismissing the argument. For what are his arguments? PG can point to some bad philosophy, granted. Everybody can do this for all kind of fields. I can point at some really bad software. Is therefore all software engineering useless?

PG wants us to believe his assertions that the philosophical method is inherently flawed. But he presents no arguments other than his own experience, some selected examples and that's about it.

If you want to know what's useful about philosophy, look no further than Socrates: His way to ask people critical questions about the meaning of words, the reasons why they do have the believes they have, and his way to find the differences between good and bad reasons (namely by debate) still is what philosophy is all about. We need the bad thinking to find out why it's bad. Philosophy proceeds by discussing and recording these issues.

You might call it as well critical thinking.

Our small discussion here hopefully shows why this is useful. Trying to dismiss arguments makes you a better thinker.

1) A "small" sample is often sufficient reason to accept a statement. If I tell you that there exists a Turing machine that can solve SAT in polynomial time, all I have to do to prove it is supply one (incidentally, if you have one lying around, let me know :P ). If I tell you that ALL of something is bad, then I have an uphill battle. But if I tell you SOME of something is bad, I only have to provide a single example to be right.

Also, you may want to read PG's essay on essays (www.paulgraham.com/essay.html); his goal in writing an essay isn't to explicate every detail of a subject, it's to work through a subject to understand it--it is only tangentially that any other audience is involved. That I am convinced of the rough truth of his arguments is not solely based on what he has written, and he does not have to personally supply me with every bit of evidence to be right (although doing so would certainly make it easier for the reader).

2) I would not question the fact that Greek philosophers influenced the development of mathematics, and I expect PG would not do so, either (particularly since the Greek philosophers were typically also mathematicians, but even without that, it would seem an impossible claim to the contrary). A claim I have made, however, is that the things that the Greek philosophers wrote that could not now be seen as important in some other field currently extant, or in cognitive science--which ought to be thought of as its own field (although in many places it isn't yet)--were not themselves important to the development of mathematics or any other field. These aspects of their writing, when studied, critiqued, and emulated in modern times, are the only topic of concern to PG in his essay, or myself in this particular discussion.

3) This is a fundamental problem. Just because we disagree certainly does not make one of us right, and the only reason that at least one of us is guaranteed to be wrong about something here is because I just asserted that we disagree. An equally fundamental problem is your assumption that either PG or myself is talking about all of philosophy.

With regard to "strange" ideas, every field has had strange ideas when looking in hindsight. The fields for which those ideas are still in contention for validity are the ones with the greatest problem of lack of substance, in proportion with how many such ideas there are, and how "strange" they are (where by strange I do not mean counterintuitive, but rather running against other existing evidence).

4) Relatively little thinking. We got a lot better at it when we didn't have to spend most of our time hunting and gathering. The course of human history has been the process of freeing up more time to spend thinking; at this point, we've freed up so much that we tend to use most of it in ways we typically later label as non-productive.

You say you can do this for all fields. Can you point to some bad math for me? That you would have much greater difficulty doing this than PG or I would have for finding bad philosophy is precisely PG's point.

Is there some other form of argument that could possibly exist to support his claim other than personal experience and selected examples? I'm not sure what kind of evidence you would like to see in PG's essay, but feel it lacks. The subject matter does not lend itself to effective experimental testing, and the claim is not mathematical in nature.

PG's, and my, problem, is that modern philosophers still rarely identify the fact that the bad thinking is bad. Understanding the utility of (and the utility of understanding) effective but civil critical debate remains unquestioned. The subject matter of these debates is what is under fire here, precisely because it is typically pervaded by faulty reasoning. Even if you want to use previous bad reasoning to learn why some reasoning is bad, this doesn't mean you need to continually create more examples of bad reasoning; surely those that already exist suffice.

Well, we seem to agree on some issues: Not all philosophy is bad or useless. Some might be. So, let's say "Some philosophy is useless." PG presents a few quotes and we may conclude, he proved his point.

But did he present any useless philosophy or just badly written philosophy? Or does it just appear to be useless because we don't immediately understand it?

The latter case basically boilds down to an argument from ignorance: "We don't understand some philosophers, therefore they must be useless (or bad or false)." Many people don't understand much of contemporary maths either, but that's hardly a good reason to call it useless (or bad or false). In contrast to maths, though, many people assume to be able to understand it.

The former case is also hardly a good reason to call something useless. Kant, for instance, is bloody complicated to read (at least, for me, and I'm German). However, his arguments still make sense -- one just needs to read the literature that explains Kant's ethics and meta-physics in a more accessible manner. They were also quite useful for other philosophers.

You say you can find bad philosophy more easily than I can find bad maths. Maybe, but since this is basically an empirical question, our small sample won't be sufficient to prove anything. On a side note: It's easy to find useless maths -- in the sense of published proofs that turned out to be wrong. Since they didn't prove anything, why have they been published, at all? For examples, look at the history to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. Quite a lot of them failed or were simply wrong. What a waste of time.

However, your test to find useless philosophy also suffers from the lack of a proper definition of "useless" and "useful". Just because you can't think of any use, doens't mean you're right -- this is just another argument from ignorance.

Let's consider ethics, for instance: It is basically useless concerning empiricial results. However, it's still useful in many contemporary discussions; for instance, animal's rights, abortion, women rights, death penalty, justice, atheism, and many other issues.

Concerning your question whether some other form of argument could possibly exist to support PG's claim? Sure, from an empirical point of view: A proper definition of "useless" and a proper random sample concerning philosophical works. This would at least support the conclusion that, say, 35% of philosophy turned out to be useless.

But PG made two additional arguments:

(1) Any resulting number of useless philosophy is due to the current philosophical method that is motivated by studying the most abstract problems.

(2) A different method that starts from studying practical problems and builds up to abstract problems will result in a smaller number of useless philosophy.

To support (2), an argument from analogy would help: Study a model of the proposed method (thankfully provided by science) and establish the empirical fact that is produced a smaller percentage of useless results.

Of course, this can easily be refuted by attacking the analogy. The methods of empricial science simply doesn't translate well to issues philosophers care about; such as ethics.

To support (1), one would need to start from the premise of the current method and deduce that it will lead to a certain number of useless philosophy and that there is no other possible explanantion. I doubt that it can be done, but I may be wrong.

Just to present a counter-example: to establish the habit of presenting arguments in a more formal way could help to distiguish good and bad philosophy much easier.

However, the point is that PG -- although his intention is apperently to "work through a subject to understand it" -- fails badly. He hardly worked though and he probably still doesn't understand it. Maybe, if he would have studied philosophy more carefully he could have made better arguments for his case.

Which shows how careful one should be about certain words: From a philosophical point of view, namely, PG's work was useless, indeed.

PG presented a definition of useless that set the bar too high; I (in another comment) presented a more reasonable definition of useless which accurately applies to most of philosophy--something is useful insofar as it answers questions asked by other fields (want empirical evidence of this? consider the number of references to philosophical papers on papers from other fields, excepting those related to cognitive science, which will, I believe, probably be the last field to split off of philosophy). There, thus, is no question of whether or not I understand a philosophical work; it's utility is measured by reference of other fields, regardless of my personal attitude upon reading the work. This definition accurately fits what is typically meant by the term useful, and meaningfully explains why, for example, an incomplete proof, or a result a given person doesn't understand might be useful.

That empiricism doesn't apply well to ethics is part of PG's point; he does not believe that the philosophy of ethics is useful. From my definition, I would say that the philosophy of ethics can conceivably be useful, but rarely is in practice.

In vague support of argument one, you might try turning your other argument on its head. Philosophy and science (and, before science, engineering and early health care) developed in parallel over the course of human history; one of them primarily studied abstract problems and tried to make them more useful, one of them studied uses, and worked toward abstraction. Until the 19th century, it appears that abstract study was better for developing new fields, and concrete study was better for development of technology. After the mid-19th century, philosophy lost its firm grip on most forms of abstract study, and became (for the most part) the field that it is today; now other fields tend to be the starting point for the spawning of new fields, and tend to be better for the development of technology.

With regard to your counter-example, I will continue to present my counter-counter-example: mathematics.

Your final sentence is nicely ironic. If, as you've said earlier, you need bad philosophy in order to determine what the good philosophy is, yet PG's work is useless, then PG's work must not be bad philosophy.

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