Philosophers are scientists, they’re just really bad scientists for the most part. This is due to the fact that they draw their power from the couple thousand years of moderately interesting mistakes that we call “the history of western philosophy”. What makes philosophers different from any other group of scientists, is simply the targets of inquiry they specialize (or try to specialize) in. The same thing that makes a biologist different from a physicist. Some philosophers have done well, but they had to invent too much of the art for themselves; not enough of their power came from the cumulative learning of their predecessors being passed verbally. Often the scriptures have done more to lead new students astray, than to lead them to victory. This sort of staggeringly slow progress, taking thousands of years, and rarely ever leading to professional consensus, can be starkly contrasted with the rapid progress of the rather young science of biology.
We are all Bayesian here, right? Let’s cut to the chase. Either philosophers will find predictive hypothesis spaces that make empirically testable predictions and manage to update their belief values for those hypotheses with Bayesian evidence, or the field of philosophy is, and always was, as doomed as the field of astrology. Some philosophers do of course do this sometimes, since some philosophers are sometimes right.
The problem philosophy faces is that it hasn’t been able to reliably teach its students how to do the bayes dance in philosophy, the way biology has been able to teach its students to do the bayes dance in biology. What i suggest that we philosophers do, is take a good long look at top notch biology (or physics, or psychology, or mathematics, or computer science, or astronomy, or geology, or economics, or any other science progressing faster than wax melts) training and philosophy training, and figure out what’s going on in the biology training community, that isn’t going on in the philosophy training community. Then we try to bridge the gap.
Philosophy is hard, but so is super symmetry, and for much the same reasons. If the bayes dance can handle the rest of science, I get the feeling it shouldn’t get stumped here. There are solvable problems of philosophy, they are just really hard, and really hard scientific problems, require really good science to get solved; not moderate science, or good enough science — really good science. It is no wonder that philosophy has steadily progressed at the pace of a snail for the last 2000 years; its students have been given Plato in the absence of Bayes.
Philosophers are scientists, they’re just really bad scientists for the most part. This is due to the fact that they draw their power from the couple thousand years of moderately interesting mistakes that we call “the history of western philosophy”. What makes philosophers different from any other group of scientists, is simply the targets of inquiry they specialize (or try to specialize) in. The same thing that makes a biologist different from a physicist. Some philosophers have done well, but they had to invent too much of the art for themselves; not enough of their power came from the cumulative learning of their predecessors being passed verbally. Often the scriptures have done more to lead new students astray, than to lead them to victory. This sort of staggeringly slow progress, taking thousands of years, and rarely ever leading to professional consensus, can be starkly contrasted with the rapid progress of the rather young science of biology.
We are all Bayesian here, right? Let’s cut to the chase. Either philosophers will find predictive hypothesis spaces that make empirically testable predictions and manage to update their belief values for those hypotheses with Bayesian evidence, or the field of philosophy is, and always was, as doomed as the field of astrology. Some philosophers do of course do this sometimes, since some philosophers are sometimes right.
The problem philosophy faces is that it hasn’t been able to reliably teach its students how to do the bayes dance in philosophy, the way biology has been able to teach its students to do the bayes dance in biology. What i suggest that we philosophers do, is take a good long look at top notch biology (or physics, or psychology, or mathematics, or computer science, or astronomy, or geology, or economics, or any other science progressing faster than wax melts) training and philosophy training, and figure out what’s going on in the biology training community, that isn’t going on in the philosophy training community. Then we try to bridge the gap.
Philosophy is hard, but so is super symmetry, and for much the same reasons. If the bayes dance can handle the rest of science, I get the feeling it shouldn’t get stumped here. There are solvable problems of philosophy, they are just really hard, and really hard scientific problems, require really good science to get solved; not moderate science, or good enough science — really good science. It is no wonder that philosophy has steadily progressed at the pace of a snail for the last 2000 years; its students have been given Plato in the absence of Bayes.