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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2386 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 4, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What was your dream job/career as a kid? Was it anything remotely realistic?

I remember I wanted to help terraform Mars at NASA because I was a massive sci-fi nerd. I even went into environmental science and wanted to go for that sort of thing, until I realized everyone in environmental science was a depressed dweeb who lied about their stats.

Anyway, now my big dream is to become a writer some day, even if not a great one.

When I was very young, an actor or journalist, and when I was a teenager, a philosopher or occasionally a psychologist (variably academic or practicing). I did want to do a degree (MA, maybe then PhD) in philosophy after my undergraduate degree before going back into finance but I had a crisis of confidence when I struggled with trying to teach myself formal logic (in all fairness, it was at least partially laziness) and so abandoned it.

I’m still not sure whether most good academic analytic philosophers are much more intelligent than me or just hide the relative banality of their ideas behind a tradition of overwrought language and an emphasis on ‘rigor’ that usually just means structuring arguments in a needlessly complex way.

Formal logic is... Boolean algebra. Most Electrical/Computer engineering students learn it in 2 weeks.

Mathematical logic is a pretty wide field of which boolean algebra is only a small part of the basics.

Yes, but a philosopher doesn’t need to know anything about model theory or large cardinals (unless they specifically specialize in the philosophy of modern mathematical logic). The only logic that most philosophers need is the very simple boolean algebra they teach you in CS 101.

And what percentage of that shows up in a philosophy course?

Not a lot (then again, it's such a huge field that only a small fraction shows up in a PhD in mathematical logic), but in all likelihood, more than just boolean algebra.

In addition to the propositional calculus (effectively a subset of boolean algebra and probably equivalent to the part you are expecting EE students to learn) I'd expect any advanced student in analytic philosophy to be familiar with the basics of first-order logic as well as modal logic (in fact most research in modal logic is done in philosophy departments because of how essential it is in quite a few areas -- c.f. Saul Kripke).

You're not missing much from philosophy imo. I did a minor (1 course away from major but I would've had to do an extra semester) and especially as I've gotten older, I'm less and less impressed with philosophy. It's great for signaling high intelligence/status and talking your way around people, but in terms of actually leading a good, satisfying life, philosophy is a remarkably poor guide.

Which is sad, because that's ostensibly the whole point of the enterprise.

because that's ostensibly the whole point of the enterprise.

Well... not really?

Philosophy started as a comprehensive rational inquiry into the nature of reality. It was math, science, and metaphysics all wrapped up into one. Knowing how to live a good life might be part of that inquiry, insofar as it's a prominent feature of our reality that we observe people making good decisions and poor decisions, and we want to know what the difference between them is - but it's only one component.

The surviving texts we have from the pre-Socratics are heavy on theoretical speculation about metaphysics, logic, and mathematics, but they contain relatively little in the way of practical life advice. When Plato considered ethical questions, it was typically done as a pretext to introduce broader theoretical issues (e.g. the moral dilemma in the Euthyphro turns into an inquiry into the metaphysical status of moral facts as such). Certainly by the time we get to Descartes, we have a model of a theoretical philosopher who focuses solely on metaphysics and epistemology and pays no attention to ethics at all. So the situation you bemoan has been commonplace for at least 400 years now.

That being said, there are philosophers who make "living life" their main focus, and you'll mainly find them in the continental tradition: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Lacan, etc.

I’m kinda there as well. As a hobby, I think it’s interesting to read and attempt to do philosophy. I also think reading, watching, and analysis of media is interesting. The academic fields are generally fart sniffing exercises producing little worth the money spent getting into it or the people who do it.

I assure you that you're more than intelligent enough to learn analytic philosophy (along with pretty much everyone else who posts here). It's not that hard, in comparison to say STEM fields.

I don't think it's fair or accurate to say that philosophers are "hiding banal ideas behind overwrought language and needlessly complex arguments". Do you have any examples in mind? Every field has jargon, it's unavoidable. Analytic philosophy jargon is in my opinion not that hard to learn; if you come across an unfamiliar word, you just look it up and then continue reading. There is an initial investment of time required on your part when you're first starting out, but it's nothing insurmountable. I think analytic philosophers generally make a pretty strong effort to make their arguments as easy to understand as possible.

Your reaction is not an uncommon one though - some people who are first getting into philosophy feel like they're being tricked in some way, that philosophers are surely just making all this stuff up, etc. But I think that's just a reaction to the ideas being strange and unfamiliar; it's not proof that philosophers are actually just writing BS.

As for whether the ideas are "banal", I suppose that's somewhat a matter of taste and perspective. You don't have to think that philosophy is interesting. But when people make claims like "tables and chairs don't exist", "there are sentences that are true and false at the same time", or "no one has ever felt pain before", I don't think those are banal claims! I think they strike at the heart of how we think about reality. You might think those claims are false, but that's different from being banal.

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