Yeah, it sucks that you can’t do good philosophy without knowing a ton of other stuff, but that’s life. We don’t listen to electrical engineers when they complain about needing to know nitty-gritty calculus, and that’s a year of study for someone with an IQ over 150. Sometimes fields have prerequisites.
You could do good programming without knowing too much physics. You could probably do good physics without knowing too much machine learning, assuming you have someone in your department who does know machine learning. You could do good biology with chemistry alone, though that requires minimal physics, as well.
But lukeprog’s curriculum / reading list suggests that you can’t do good philosophy without knowing math, machine learning, physics, psychology, and a bunch of other subjects. If that is true, then virtually no one can do good philosophy at all, because absorbing all the prerequisites will take a large portion of most people’s lifetimes.
What seems needed is a groups of creative 150IQ people willing to take the MegaCourse and create good philosophy as fast as possible, so we can use it for whatever purposes. Probably that group should, like the best intellectual groups examineds by Domenico de Masi in his “Creativity and Creative Groups”, get a place to be togheter, and work earnestly and honestly.
Finally, they must be sharp in avoiding biases, useless discussions, and counterfactual intuitions.
If that is true, then virtually no one can do good philosophy at all, because absorbing all the prerequisites will take a large portion of most people’s lifetimes.
It doesn’t really take that long to learn things. But good philosophy already looks like this—my favorite political philosophy professor threw out references to computing, physics, history, etc. assuming students would get the references or look them up. Much like pride is the crown of the virtues, philosophy should be the crown of the sciences.
Yes, some subjects are just hard. But there are limits to this. How much one needs is a function of how much one wants to focus on a particular subject. So for example most physicists probably need three semesters of calc, linear algebra, and stats, at minimum. But only some of the physicists will need group theory, while others will need additional stats, and others will need differential geometry. But almost no physicist will need all of these things. Similarly, some degree of specialization may make sense if one wants to do philosophy.
That’s in fact already the case: the moral philosopher has a read a lot more about the history of moral philosophy, and same for the person studying epistemology, or other basic aspects of things. So to some extent the issue isn’t the amount of learning that is required, but a disagreement with what is required, and how cross-disciplinary it should be.
Sure, but the curriculum doesn’t actually change in response to engineering students complaining about the difficulty of their calculus classes. That’s because the stuff in those classes actually applies, in easy-to-see ways. There’s almost a 1:1 match between the sylllabi of engineering math classes and the math that engineering classes end up needing. (This is not a coincidence.)
Yeah, it sucks that you can’t do good philosophy without knowing a ton of other stuff, but that’s life.
Agreed!
We don’t listen to electrical engineers when they complain about needing to know nitty-gritty calculus, and that’s a year of study for someone with an IQ over 150.
What? Surely lots of electrical engineers have IQ less than 150 (the average being approximately 126 ETA: actually that’s the average for EE PhD student, but still). How did they pass their calculus courses?
What? Surely lots of electrical engineers have IQ less than 150 (the average being approximately 126). How did they pass their calculus courses?
I assume they meant that an EE with IQ > 150 would require a year; many places distribute their calculus courses over two years, and some students require longer.
Yeah, it sucks that you can’t do good philosophy without knowing a ton of other stuff, but that’s life. We don’t listen to electrical engineers when they complain about needing to know nitty-gritty calculus, and that’s a year of study for someone with an IQ over 150. Sometimes fields have prerequisites.
You could do good programming without knowing too much physics. You could probably do good physics without knowing too much machine learning, assuming you have someone in your department who does know machine learning. You could do good biology with chemistry alone, though that requires minimal physics, as well.
But lukeprog’s curriculum / reading list suggests that you can’t do good philosophy without knowing math, machine learning, physics, psychology, and a bunch of other subjects. If that is true, then virtually no one can do good philosophy at all, because absorbing all the prerequisites will take a large portion of most people’s lifetimes.
And we independently observe that almost no one can do good philosophy at all, so the theory checks out.
Nothing better than a hypothesis that makes correct empirical predictions!
Besides the sciences that Luke Mentioned, don’t forget people also need to learn the subsets of philosophy which actually are consistent and compatible with science. In the case of philosophy of mind, I began a list here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/58d/how_not_to_be_a_na%C3%AFve_computationalist/
What seems needed is a groups of creative 150IQ people willing to take the MegaCourse and create good philosophy as fast as possible, so we can use it for whatever purposes. Probably that group should, like the best intellectual groups examineds by Domenico de Masi in his “Creativity and Creative Groups”, get a place to be togheter, and work earnestly and honestly.
Finally, they must be sharp in avoiding biases, useless discussions, and counterfactual intuitions.
This gets more likely every minute.…
It doesn’t really take that long to learn things. But good philosophy already looks like this—my favorite political philosophy professor threw out references to computing, physics, history, etc. assuming students would get the references or look them up. Much like pride is the crown of the virtues, philosophy should be the crown of the sciences.
Yes, some subjects are just hard. But there are limits to this. How much one needs is a function of how much one wants to focus on a particular subject. So for example most physicists probably need three semesters of calc, linear algebra, and stats, at minimum. But only some of the physicists will need group theory, while others will need additional stats, and others will need differential geometry. But almost no physicist will need all of these things. Similarly, some degree of specialization may make sense if one wants to do philosophy.
That’s in fact already the case: the moral philosopher has a read a lot more about the history of moral philosophy, and same for the person studying epistemology, or other basic aspects of things. So to some extent the issue isn’t the amount of learning that is required, but a disagreement with what is required, and how cross-disciplinary it should be.
Correction: you don’t. Those of us who teach EEs (really, any class of engineers), do.
Sure, but the curriculum doesn’t actually change in response to engineering students complaining about the difficulty of their calculus classes. That’s because the stuff in those classes actually applies, in easy-to-see ways. There’s almost a 1:1 match between the sylllabi of engineering math classes and the math that engineering classes end up needing. (This is not a coincidence.)
This is not correct. Compare a vector calculus book from fifty years ago with the relevant sections of Stewart.
Agreed!
What? Surely lots of electrical engineers have IQ less than 150 (the average being approximately 126 ETA: actually that’s the average for EE PhD student, but still). How did they pass their calculus courses?
I assume they meant that an EE with IQ > 150 would require a year; many places distribute their calculus courses over two years, and some students require longer.