It is true that a slightly higher intelligence would find some things obvious which we struggle to understand. Thus, in comparison to that higher intelligence, we are kind of dumb.

But that wasn't my question. We can compare ordinary human intelligence to whatever we want. For instance, compared to other apes we are really smart. I think we are probably smarter than our ancestors. So why pick a baseline that allows you to describe everything humans have figured out so far as obvious, and anyone who thinks otherwise as just a stupid idiot?

I don't get it, plaaynde. Stephen Hawking had to be politically correct? Is this what you're saying? I hope this is not an inconvenient question.

I'm comparing it to the baseline of what we believe we are. Take this thread. It's improbable to most people that a higher intelligence could observe the world and the vast data stream it gives us and figure out the rules we have, but without all our tools; it blows their mind and they simply don't believe it's possible.

It's to those people that I call humans "dog-stupid". Because they simply don't get how limited we are. There's a belief that what we find hard or incomprehensible, or what we need confronting empirical observations to even realize was possible, is hard or incomprehensible by its nature. I would argue that many things we put in that basket will in fact be trivially derivable to a higher intelligence.

The other people I call idiotic (because they are), are people who think that what humans currently think about a topic - as measured by published literature or academic "consensus" - has decent odds to be correct. This is a very silly belief, even though it's widespread, that fails to understand how bad humans are at measuring and judging reality, and how many biases we're subject to, from the individual to the group to the societal level. We often measure what we can see and we often see merely what lives in the narrow set of what we can create or process, out of the vast set of possibilities.

That's the point of that language. To break through the dense hubris of people like Aaron.

Personally I think humans are remarkable and our intelligence, a rare and amazing thing.

This whole thread was inspired by this post, about a computer beating Go:

Do you find this approach to work well? Do you get a lot of smart but overly complacent people to re-examine their assumptions?

My guess would be that your approach is more likely to make smart people less charitable to your views and attract acolytes who enjoy seeing their intellectual superiors insulted.

Sure, but this again makes Hawking's point. Wittgenstein was able to contribute to logic because he had an experts level understanding of the math of the day. A philosopher who understands String theory as well as Susskind or Polchinski could certainly make contributions to our understanding of space, time etc.

Fair enough....but I think this is a goal post shift. It Tractucus was a paper largely devoted to truth tables and their properties he wouldn't be considered one of the greatest philosophers of the last century.


This is largely in odds with the modern physics establishment (Post WWII American). But before that it was probably the consensus view, and not just Aristotle but even modern (of that era) philosophers.

I mostly agree with Hawking's point with regards to the traditional topics in metaphysics.

It's not a goalpost shift, you just chose a poor example.

I also don't think comparing philosophy to literature is very useful. It implies that the main goal of philosophy is an aesthetic ideal, when most philosophers for millenia have understood it to be knowledge or wisdom.

The real problem for philosophy is methodological. The only consensus way to gain knowledge about the world is the scientific method. But philosophy is understood in contrast with science. So anytime people start applying the scientific method to an area of study, they stop being philosophers and form their own scientific discipline.

This means that philosophy gets stuck with the areas of study that we haven't yet figured out how to competently use the scientific method on - questions about morality, politics, epistemology,minds, and so on. But since philosophy doesn't itself provide us with consensus ways of studying these topics, we are instead left with pre-scientific methods that only give us very provisional answers and stepwise improvements. It is also incredibly difficult to ever falsify other theories, so old philosophers like Aristotle never really go away.

Now, it is certainly worth criticizing philosophers when they act as if these old ways of studying nature are somehow superior to what scientists are doing. But it is useful to have some people tinkering on these hard problem even if they only have poor intellectual methods available to them. Anyway, philosophy is just so old, it would be a human tragedy for it to disappear.

I don't understand - physicists think that understanding Aristotle isn't helpful to understanding philosophy, history or religion? Lots of people aren't interested in learning about these subjects, to their own loss in my opinion, but if you want to understand them, learning about Aristotle is a useful shortcut.

Most philosophy is actually not false, since philosophy is really a choice of frame. It's a reflection of how minds function.

"If we frame the world this way, we get these consistent result"
"If we frame the world that way, we get those consistent results"

None of it's invalid since it's purely descriptive, and the only predictions it makes are of what you see if you view the world in that frame. It's of varying usefulness, though.

The ones that have stood the test of time are the ones that describe frames of interest and do so without too much of the baggage that modern minds tend to reject. There's not really much within philosophy except sharpening your own frame-setting and frame-shifting ability. Which is obviously profoundly important. But it can't get to the deeper places like physics can, imo. No one ever philosophized quantum mechanics, for example, before the plausible reality of it was discovered in the real world. Minds tend to not to do the work to go to weird places unless they believe those weird places might be real and hence hold reward.

The other point is that much of the frame-shifting that philosophy used to teach you is implicitly learned by doing something hard. If you challenge a mind often enough with hard stuff it doesn't understand, it gets better at reframing.

That might be how its understood, but if so they are simply failing at it. Any class covering the philosophy of Wittgenstein will necessarily force students to read his works. This is the polar opposite of a class in Newtonian physics, where people who teach it at Harvard likely haven't bothered reading Newton's original work. Philosophy definitely seems closer to lit crit than knowledge.

Sure, philosophy is just the useless leftovers of human thought that aren't math, science etc.

I wouldn't say it "gets stuck" with those topics. Its more that these are the only topics left where philosophers aren't ignored so philosophers seek those topics out. Kinda like how faith healers focus on things that medicine can't easily fix.

Sure. I view it the same as an ancient language that some small group of academics preserves. I have no desire to see it go away, but I also don't think its at the center of human thought.


Sorry, I thought you were saying learning about Aristotle, history philosophy and religion is useful for doing science.

Yes, indeed, the bolded was my point. The difference I identified between literature and philosophy is that literature aspires to an aesthetic ideal and philosophy aspires to an ideal of knowledge. I'm not sure if you are trying to disagree with me here or you just want to stress that you think philosophy is worthless for gaining knowledge.

Politics and morality are just the useless leftovers of human thought?

Okay.

I'm wasn't even sure what your point was. Maybe historically philosophy has aspired to be about knowledge, but now a ton of it is about reading and analyzing specific, historically important texts. Thats why I compared it to literary criticism. Maybe you agree with that.

They are fields without real experts, so people are more inclined to pay attention to philosophers.

My point was that philosophy is more like a pre-scientific attempt to learn about the world than like literary criticism. Saying that it has failed to achieve knowledge is largely accurate and a problem for philosophy in a way that it is not for literary criticism. Doing better philosophy is supposed to be about getting closer to the truth, but that isn't really the primary point of doing better literary criticism. So if you want to understand what most philosophers are trying to do, literary criticism is not a good model (I grant that much of the historical work philosophers do is literary criticism).

Sure. This is probably an improvement over people paying attention to local political and religious leaders, so there's that.

Sometimes it is not easy to make the distinction what is what. " Thus spake Zarathustra" for example, is it more philosophical or literary work? You can make a case for both sides.

There are many philosophers who are also writers and vice-versa.

More precisely, you would repeatedly assert this without supporting argumentation.

How does one break through the dense hubris of people like ToothSayer? What I'm waiting for, and have been very clear about, is an argument. You have not been able to provide one. You just make assertion after assertion after assertion. And when challenged on those assertions, you fail to respond in a meaningful manner.

If waiting for a meaningful argument is hubris, then I'll accept the criticism.

Edit: If you want to see what dense hubris actually looks like, try these:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=303
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=324

+1

Tooth's post was that long I didn't quote it

RIP religion and philosophy.

We really don't need you anymore.

Welcome behavioral sciences.

Sometimes, somehow, some people's posts are confabulated...

By the way, did you self-promote yourself to a chief-moderator? Good luck!

I again think its fine. It was written for a pro choice audience (which you seem to have missed). That caring for a child can be a burden is implicitly agreed on by all.

Doesn't seem like a grade you're qualified to give.

The thread should have been over on page 1. Our current state of the art theories are flat out underivable without input from high energy experiments. Picking the simplest theory or whatever flat out can't work because so many things about the standard model (gauge groups, number of generations, branching ratios) are not only arbitrary but completely hidden without high energy or high precision data. If we posit some super theory that can derive everything we know (but which may or may not exist) it seems just as likely it will require no observations at all. It may be impossible for OP to get this, but its already been resolved ITT.

The conflation of "burden" with "decrease in happiness" isn't obvious. And it doesn't matter that it was written to a pro-choice audience, except for the fact that his viewpoint should have been seen as more favorably (and he still got a ton of blowback from pro-life people who saw through his poor reasoning).

At the heart of it, it's an absolutely clumsy attempt to frame a belief using a utilitarian framework. I expect that there are about 2-3 fairly obvious bullets that he would be unwilling to bite if he were to follow through with his beliefs.

Maybe not. I know someone who is, but I'm not sure if he will do it.

Sorry, I don't see any of the blowback, including your arbitrary criticism any better than Dawkins. I guess I'll settle for agreement that Hawkings statement was fine and not self defeating.

Your very distinction presupposes the point I'm making. Sure, it is true that many philosophers are considered great stylists as well, and their books are read for their literary as well as philosophical worth. But it makes sense to contrast the philosophical and literary aspects of even a book like Thus Spake Zarathustra. This is because we use different criteria for evaluating each of these aspects. If we are talking about literary criticism, we would evaluate the narrative structure of the book, its relation within a tradition of apocalyptic prophecies, and so on. If you are looking at it as a philosopher, you want to evaluate the strength of the arguments put forward by the book, or how those theses can illuminate other questions we have about reality and so on.

Ultimately, I am arguing that we shouldn't infer from the lack of success of philosophy in achieving knowledge about the world to the claim that philosophers are not trying to achieve knowledge about the world. I think this is often implicit in claims that philosophy is just a form of literature, and is too simplistic a view of human attempts to gain knowledge.

Good post! From that angle I don't have any arguments here.

Given that he felt compelled enough to try to restate his original statement, I think it would be factually incorrect to say that there was no blowback is just ignoring the reality. I don't know how you can cite an article about a "twitter war" and simultaneously believe that there's not been some blowback against his statements.

Edit: Here's an article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...sophy-101.html

You can call my criticism arbitrary at this point as I've not actually laid out a fuller argument against his position. What I would do for that is to simply point out that the structure of his argument is pretty bad. I don't think I even need to go to the bullets he's biting to show the weakness of what he actually said. His moral framework:

So he establishes that his argument is based on a utilitarian persoective of "the sum of happiness [minus] suffering" and states specifically that the morality for his calculation is being taking "from the point of view of the child's own welfare."

He then goes on to make his argument:

Let's examine the actual argument here.

(1a) "You would probably be condemning yourself..." This is not actually argued from the point of view of the child's welfare. This is an argument about "suffering" from the point of view of the parent. Zero points awarded for supporting the argument.

(1b) "A lifetime of caring for an adult with the needs of a child." There are lots of reasons to reject this statement, chief among them is the utter ignorance of those with Down Syndrome. To say that this is the "probable" outcome is overstated, as there are many functioning adults with Down Syndrome who do not have "the needs of a child." In fact, statements of this type simply add to the stigma those with Down Syndrome without actually paying attention to the relevant facts. If you believe the claim that Dawkins made, I would simply suggest that you do some reading and become less ignorant. A vindictive -2 points for this comment.

(2) "The child would probably have a short life expectancy." This is a factual claim. And while it's certainly true that the life expectancy of those with Down Syndrome is shorter than average, it's probably significantly longer than what most people would guess:

http://www.nads.org/resources/facts-...down-syndrome/

http://www.medicinenet.com/down_synd...view/page4.htm

I'll openly admit that I think the numbers here might be slightly inflated (especially the first one, as it's from an advocacy group), but claiming that "short life expectancy" is actually an issue is a pretty weak argument. One point out of three.

(3) "If she did outlive you, you would have the worry of who would care for her after you are gone." Sure. This happens. But it happens to people who have physical disabilities and mental illnesses. People worry about this for perfectly able people as well. It only partially addresses things from the point of view of the child's welfare. It's framed in terms of the parent's worry, but it does involve the child's welfare, which is that presumably if the child outlived the parent then the child will receive a worse state of care than while the parent was alive. But it doesn't really say anything to indicate that this would be the case. Again, I would say it's grounded in a lot of ignorance about Down Syndrome and those who have it. The false assumption being that people with Down Syndrome have the needs of a child and lack the mental capacity for at least semi-independent living. One point out of three.

So it's basically just a terrible argument structure and arguments based on false information. His argument is pretty much an outright failure.

Edit: Ugh. After typing this all out, I see that one can argue that "in any case" is a transition to making a completely different argument than trying to argue from the point of view of the child's welfare. But if that's the case, then he's suggesting in a completely unsupported manner that Down Syndrome children live net negative lives. Again, it's a position grounded in ignorance. Much of my statements above still hold if he's just going off on a random assortment of utilitarian-ish statements and not trying to make any particular argument. And that would also basically suggest that he's not making an actual argument but is just spouting off disconnected claims, which is still another reason not to score this particular argument very highly.

Can I get a grade for this argument? I don't have a ton of respect for philosophy 201 classes, but even there this would get an F, right? Granted, your whole point is largely irrelevant. Being ignorant about Down Syndrome is completely different from poor logic. If you held yourself to half the standard that you seem to try to hold others to you would be doing alot better.

The small minority of women who elect to continue Down Syndrome pregnancies have vigorously asserted that the burden of raising a DS child has been exaggerated and that there would be fewer terminations if women were given more accurate information. However, the scientific research does not support those claims and, in fact, demonstrates the opposite.

[...]

We found that the mental health of mothers was strongly influenced by child behavior and care-giving demands. These results are similar to studies of psychological stress in caregivers of children with disability or chronic disease… [T]he average mental health score of the mothers in our study was significantly lower than the average score reported for both South Australia and Western Australia. Interestingly, the effect of care giving on maternal physical health appeared less dramatic.

http://www.skepticalob.com/2009/10/m...s-of-down.html