> I respectfully submit that this attitude should be considered harmful, for several reasons, not the least of which is that it stifles intellectual curiosity into a subject that is still an open book
Indeed. It is quite discerning to see smart people fighting against what they believe to be anti-intellectualism with a fair share of anti-intellectualism of their own. I believe it might have more to do with a lack of exposure to varied subjects rather than a definite lack of intellectual curiosity in general however. Because many hackers are quite intellectually curious in their own domain, yet can still be susceptible to being as cynical and myopic as religious fundamentalists in other areas for some reason. The quality of thinking critically doesn't always seem to transcend domains, so I'm guessing it's a side-effect of living in a filtered environment beyond some developmental milestone of a person's curiosity. The string of comments in this other recent thread showcases this type of odd adherence to lack of understanding quite nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194276
It really is odd how when philosophy is explicitly brought up, it is generally labeled as a useless endeavor, yet in most other discussions you see philosophical questions being raised all the time with the intention of using them as 'appeals to ambiguousness', when (as you mentioned) most of these questions have already been asked and thoroughly answered by philosophers ages ago. Not that there's anything wrong in not knowing about this, but clearly there's an interest to know these types of answers that arises organically, which makes the dismissal of philosophy an ultimately misguided exercise in cognitive dissonance. Throw in all the (literally ancient) logical fallacies you see being thrown around amongst smart, well-educated people, and it just makes the whole situation even more confusing.
While I admittedly haven't read deeply enough into the psychology behind the Meyer-Briggs personality types, they do define and elaborate on types of people that could logically lead to these kinds of odd views. The easiest example is of the classic INTP vs INTJ types, both of which are strikingly similar, yet supposedly differ in one general crucial area. INTP's take all the input they can about the world and evolve their framework of understanding around it, while INTJ's supposedly form their elaborate framework of understanding first, then explore their inputs that correspond to it. I'm only somewhat partial to this explanation because I line up as a perfect INTP on all counts, but it honestly might as well be astrology at this point for all I know. Still a fun thought experiment though.
EDIT: I realize that most on HN like speaking in more concrete terms, such as about the neurological basis for the notions of 'consciousness' and all that, however abstract argumentation and analysis does have use when talking about the act of argumentation itself. So I hope those who downvoted me at least provide an explanation within that context, because I am admittedly curious about what other perspectives there are on this matter.
I really don't think this is about anti-intellectualism at all. It's about the arguments in the article being poor ones, and in many cases ones that we've seen before. Saying that an argument is sophomoric does not imply that you think the subject isn't worth thinking about.
The top comment that was disingenuously quoted as only as "Sophomoric philosophy", was actually a well thought out dissection of several of the arguments presented. The poster of this rant has been shamefully dishonest in misrepresenting the comments he quoted, cherry picking phrases from them to put them in the worst possible light.
As a side note, you might want to know that Myers-Briggs is pretty much pseudoscience. It has low retest reliability, meaning that people who take are tested more than once often show different results. In addition, the Myers-Briggs profiles are similar to astrological readings in that each of them could apply to almost anybody.
> It has low retest reliability, meaning that people who take are tested more than once often show different results.
That's good to know. I still think the term 'pseudoscience' is thrown around a bit too loosely though. There's falsifiability as a criterion for scientific theories sure, but building to a full out 'theory' requires quite a bit of maturity on the part of the 'science'. Some ideas fail at the onset like homeopathy, but others might have to be investigated more thoroughly before knowing for sure. The only thing I generally have against the 'pseudoscience' label is the effect it has on people that dissuade them from following anything approaching a certain line of reasoning sometimes. As with personality types, the Myers-Briggs framework might be bunk, but the underlying idea could be feasible, thinking of it as the emergence of certain patterns and algorithms from genetics and neurological connections; after all, we are seeing something that might end up being quite like this in the realm of IQ. But I digress.
The point is that we are approaching a future that is going to need more and more cross-disciplinary knowledge and approaches to really figure things out, and the loud belittlement and stigmatization of general approaches is a bit discerning to see around circles of intellectual people.
>It really is odd how when philosophy is explicitly brought up, it is generally labeled as a useless endeavor, yet in most other discussions you see philosophical questions being raised all the time with the intention of using them as 'appeals to ambiguousness', when (as you mentioned) most of these questions have already been asked and thoroughly answered by philosophers ages ago. Not that there's anything wrong in not knowing about this, but clearly there's an interest to know these types of answers that arises organically, which makes the dismissal of philosophy an ultimately misguided exercise in cognitive dissonance.
Do you have examples? As a scientist I'm inclined to see science as the true heir to ancient philosophy, and the part that still calls itself "philosophy" as, well, an inferior branch. When I spoke to philosophy students at university they seemed to study a really weird mix of things - about 1/3 history, 1/3 mathematical logic but covered less formally (which was intensely irritating when we shared lecturers because if there's one field where you really need to be formal it's mathematical logic), and 1/3 these very... abstract arguments that felt like they might say something interesting if any of the terms they used were defined rigorously and the arguments were written out symbolically, with small pieces of what should be science thrown in almost at random, but it was missing the desire to connect all this up and actually perform experiments to see what was right.
I actually generally agree with your assessment here. Modern things that are generally labeled as 'philosophy' and only 'philosophy' are rather abstract and with very little clarity as to their usefulness. Most of the useful philosophical ideas were indeed established back before science was fully autonomous, but even as recently as the works of sir Karl Popper (1902-1994; the father of the idea that scientific theories must be 'falsifiable') have had a very noticeable influence in the sciences. What's important to note however, is that Popper's writings were much more practical and grounded down to the act and methods of science, than any of the writings of Plato ever were for example. And that's really the point I'm getting at; philosophy has shifted more from being a useful 'subject', to being a useful approach. The art of philosophical argumentation and elaboration of ideas is still very much relevant and useful as it ever was, it's just going to be finding it's niches in more and more applied areas, to the point where people will forget they're even discussing philosophy.
Any major breakthroughs in philosophy are almost certainly going to come from philosophically-minded specialists (e.g. scientists/engineers/politicians/linguists/mathematicians/etc) in the future. But just because it doesn't carry the big overarching label of "philosophy" doesn't mean that it is not. I mean, the definition of philosophy itself is so vague, that you could say that it is simply the byproduct of any exploration that uses philosophical tools (e.g. formal logic/logical fallacies), so it really doesn't go against what you're saying at all.
I agree that if all one's doing now is studying philosophy, and philosophy only, it's gonna be hard to contribute anything terribly useful to society (unless you can get a job as a historian). But the tools that philosophy gives us should never be discarded because they are ultimately the atomic building blocks that let us know whether we're on the right track or not, and thus, thinking philosophically is of critical importance. And that is where philosophy is now. It is not a field of it's own, it is scattered throughout several other fields, but the art is still very much in tact. It this bad misconception that gives philosophy these lazy/useless/idealist connotations. And that is unfortunate, because there is much people can learn from thinking philosophically, that they do not (unfortunately) seem to gain just from thinking 'scientifically'. I'm going to blame this on training/education rather than the designation of the field itself, since science should teach how to think critically, but the practice of this does not seem to extend beyond the student's specific/applied area from my experience. Philosophy helps here because the whole point of it is to train a person's entire outlook to process information critically, rather than only apply that approach to certain specific/narrow areas.
tl;dr: Philosophy is the mathematical language of reason, and good reasoning skills should be important for everybody. However, applied philosophy within specific domains (e.g. ethics/math/politics/etc) is likely to be the only way we will continue to make more philosophical advancements in the future. Arguing that we don't need philosophy anymore because now we have science, is like arguing that we don't need math anymore because now we have programming; both are important in their own specialized ways because of the approaches they allow.
Indeed. It is quite discerning to see smart people fighting against what they believe to be anti-intellectualism with a fair share of anti-intellectualism of their own. I believe it might have more to do with a lack of exposure to varied subjects rather than a definite lack of intellectual curiosity in general however. Because many hackers are quite intellectually curious in their own domain, yet can still be susceptible to being as cynical and myopic as religious fundamentalists in other areas for some reason. The quality of thinking critically doesn't always seem to transcend domains, so I'm guessing it's a side-effect of living in a filtered environment beyond some developmental milestone of a person's curiosity. The string of comments in this other recent thread showcases this type of odd adherence to lack of understanding quite nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194276
It really is odd how when philosophy is explicitly brought up, it is generally labeled as a useless endeavor, yet in most other discussions you see philosophical questions being raised all the time with the intention of using them as 'appeals to ambiguousness', when (as you mentioned) most of these questions have already been asked and thoroughly answered by philosophers ages ago. Not that there's anything wrong in not knowing about this, but clearly there's an interest to know these types of answers that arises organically, which makes the dismissal of philosophy an ultimately misguided exercise in cognitive dissonance. Throw in all the (literally ancient) logical fallacies you see being thrown around amongst smart, well-educated people, and it just makes the whole situation even more confusing.
While I admittedly haven't read deeply enough into the psychology behind the Meyer-Briggs personality types, they do define and elaborate on types of people that could logically lead to these kinds of odd views. The easiest example is of the classic INTP vs INTJ types, both of which are strikingly similar, yet supposedly differ in one general crucial area. INTP's take all the input they can about the world and evolve their framework of understanding around it, while INTJ's supposedly form their elaborate framework of understanding first, then explore their inputs that correspond to it. I'm only somewhat partial to this explanation because I line up as a perfect INTP on all counts, but it honestly might as well be astrology at this point for all I know. Still a fun thought experiment though.
EDIT: I realize that most on HN like speaking in more concrete terms, such as about the neurological basis for the notions of 'consciousness' and all that, however abstract argumentation and analysis does have use when talking about the act of argumentation itself. So I hope those who downvoted me at least provide an explanation within that context, because I am admittedly curious about what other perspectives there are on this matter.