Turns out a lot of what we consider common sense today is things that were considered the cutting edge of human thought in the 1950s.
You know how its easy to figure out that just because you saw something, and are sure that what you saw makes your conclusion true, and thus is real knowledge? Well turns out nope, correlation is not causation, and the guy who explained that only managed to do so in 1950.
1950 is when we figured out that just because one thing happens right after another thing, does not guarantee that the first thing is causing the second thing. Sometimes we just get lucky.
You know the whole speech is violence and you can r*pe a woman by saying r*pe out loud? That's a misinterpretation of a paper written in 1993 that is talking about how speech itself is an action because there is an intent with which something is spoken. An argument that was once used to suggest that all porn by its very nature is the subjugation and subordination of women.
Then there is the question of moral luck, a paper by Thomas Nagel from 1979 which shows us that a big part of being a moral person is just being lucky. You never got into that accident which caused somebody to die. You never had that one bad day where that fist fight trying to defend yourself accidentally killed the person you were fighting. Philosophers previously argued that only what you cannot and can do is moral. Morality is the decisions you make, but so much of moral judgement is based on things out of your control that moral luck becomes an actual thing. That if we were to ignore moral luck, we would end up in societies that we consider undeniably immoral.
For example - letting all the weed users out of jail en masse causing an increase in other unrelated crimes.
Then there is a famous paper from I don't remember when and I don't remember by who which proves that inductive reasoning, that gut feeling works and makes perfect sense, and that someone saying they have two black balls in their drawer then pointing to a red shoe in the room to prove it makes sense, because the existence of a red shoe outside the drawer actually increases the probability of there being two black balls in the drawer even if by a minuscule amount.
Let's also not forget about the bits about how deep and complex philosophy is, and turns out it's not. That's continental philosophy, which for the majority of time has been a self masturbatory exercise where the author has been more focused on writing things that make them feel and sound smart than things that can be tested by the reader or anybody else for that matter.
Continental philosophy is the peak of conclusions a man can derive about the nature of the universe without having testable hypothesis. In my personal opinion by now it is in the same place as Alchemy as a real science.
Continental philosophy is crap. It is a bunch of guys going "what if" and "let's assume" about things then writing a whole book or five starting from there. It is an attempt at deep insight from a human perspective without the use of any measuring cowtools. It is as useful as poetry to be precise.
The last time the continental school did something useful was probably before the 1950s and its easy to tell that the continental school has reached its limits when only wannabe geniuses online would make 1 hour long videos about it, along with the fact that they are at best the backbone of real sciences, acting as the baseline which has long ago already been surpassed.
Psychoanalysis and critical theory are well and good for example, but it is real technical science and logic that builds up upon it. To find methods of proving the idea and the concepts. To take probability of events into account.
Truth is, philosophy has been failing for decades because the actual sciences made so many advances that for the philosopher to write anything useful would require them to actually be well read in advanced logic and analysis. Which is where the analytical school of philosophy was born, and over time this school has appeared to grow into something incomprehensible to the average person without a P.hd solely because the analytical philosophy school actually kept up with the sciences and the discoveries that they made.
You can also see the difference in the quality of analytical and continental philosophy in the quality of the societies that most espouse each type. The Americans are far more focused on and dedicated to analytical philosophy. They in turn have a society that continues to grow and prosper and make new discoveries, because they use logic to solve their problems and find insights into how the world works.
The European world meanwhile, has fallen far behind the Americans, because their entire philosophy and way of thinking is based off of a single individual having profound sounding insights about the world and how it functions that do not translate to actual output and solutions in the real world.
Continental philosophy is akin to the world of emotions while Analytical philosophy is akin to the world of reason, with the greatest horror of all being that the average person and the world embraces continental philosophy far more strongly than it does analytical philosophy, suggesting that people always want the r-slurred easier solutions that make them feel smart rather than the solutions that work but are beyond them. This is where the human ego clashes against human capability, and why we end up with those who revolutionize society with their discoveries becoming completely disconnected from everyday society altogether over time.
Now I wonder how analytical and continental philosophy explains the existence of the incel culture.
Conclusion:
Continental philosophy is people pretending to be smart. Analytical philosophy is people actually proving what they say. The human species is on average genuinely r-slurred and you can tell by the fact that even truths were being written down and becoming famous like some great and amazing profound truths in the 1950s and the average person still hasn't caught up to them so far.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
This is a big one. While I greatly enjoy modal logic, one of the issues I have is that it deals with possibility and necessity in very absolute uses that don't hold up too well now. But that becomes a problem when you have things that are "more possible" or "less possible", or that the world is defeasible by nature which isn't accounted for as it's built in. Abductive reasoning methods and Fuzzy Logic kind of touch on that, and I just read a compelling paper on a Ceteris Paribus based system of logic that could address modality like that, but that's a big issue because it's not accounted for as part of an overarching branch and accepting anything novel is like walking through a minefield.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Explain?
Basically what you are saying is that the field of logic is so stagnant that some unemployed r-slur in a third world country could come up with strategies to revolutionize the system.
It's been a real surprise that the species and even the mid to higher end academia hasn't yet embraced probability properly in their ideas and experiments.
It's like you need 2-3 P.hD's before your brain acclimates to the idea of," okay, this experiment proves this, the other one proves the opposite, so obviously there are differently probabilities of an event occurring at play", even though we proved with the development of the field of quantum mechanics and mathematics that even baseline reality is more likely running on probability than on binary functions of yes and no or on and off.
Fun fact: In theory there is like a one in an absurdly high number chance of your brain actually springing up at random in the void and imagining the entire universe and reality as it exists right now. The experiment is called the Boltzmann brain.
There is a 1 in 5.2 to the power 61 chance that if you were to slap a table, your hand would slip through the table.
The universe is probability. Reality is probability. All creation and engineering is the act of making desirable events more probable by putting together the right chain of actions to get the desired result. We have been lucky so far that even going as deeply into applied physics as we have that we haven't had to seriously deal with low probability events to make our products function.
Probability alteration would unironically be the greatest power in the universe. Luck is just probability working in a man's favor.
I like to believe that biology would actually allow for a probability gene which increases luck and that some people actually do have this gene.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Oh no. I agree with that, at least up until the last handful of paragraphs more or less. It was more a critique that First Order Logic/Modal Logic/Propositional do not have good ways to account for defeasibility. Defeasibility meaning things like "it is true that if this then this, [most of the time]", but then there being things like "defeater" rules: "the exception to this rule is X", rebuttals: "the exception does not hold if x", static rules "if/then conditional, and that's final." So as a classic example, you take "if x is a bird, then x can fly" is generally true. But if you say "x is a penguin, and x cannot fly," then that becomes troublesome because the logical extension is that a penguin is not a bird. So that's non-monotonic reasoning, which isn't really decided well on. There are alternatives to doing it in standard systems, like compunction, but it doesn't encompass the whole of it, and there's a lot of approaches to non-monotonic reasoning but there isn't an agreed upon standard (dydadic approaches, Ceteris Paribus approaches, standard defeasible reasoning if you even want to call it that). This becomes problematic though when considering that formal logic isn't just how we approach deductive reasoning in large part, but also that it's supposed to be reflective of how deductive reasoning is employed on an interdisciplinary matter. Of which if you look at fields that are heavy on deductive logic, such as Law, you will see a lot of defeasibility.
Not quite. Logic is high end, and it requires being able to think with novelty while also being able to think rationally. This is how axioms are brought about. So It does require a degree of pedigree. I think it's more that we have a wealth of literature out there, but there isn't a huge push in that community for consortium or standardization. The way it's structured isn't just one set of rules that continually compounds, it's a whole bundle of microcosms that account for a variety of niche situations without interplay. It's why when talking about logic the terms "modal logic", "Fuzzy Logic", or "Intuitionistic Logic" is used rather than terms like Modality, Fuzziness, or an Intuitionistic exception. To a degree I understand it, but to another degree it seems odd.
As an analogy (though not the best one), you wouldn't call geometry "geometric math system" or statistics "statistical mathematics system" and say they're separate with a lack of an attempt to marry them and having completely different rules of operations for equations, when considering that its all under the branch of mathematics. Despite one involving the study of shapes and another studying probabilities and distributions, there are situations where both of those branches are implicated. Practically maybe that's urban planning, within the domain of Mathematics then maybe that's statistical analysis through a Digraph, a Vornoi diagram, or looking at cosine similarity in a vector space to look for shit. Explicit hybrid approaches or instances where the principles separately are required for understanding aren't just clearly evident, but it would be odd to say that mathematics fundamentally applies differently in statistics and geometry to where they warrant different systematic approaches.
In a similar sense, the same should apply to logical deductive reasoning. They all essentially invoke propositional and predicate logic, it's just that propositional and predicate logic don't account for everything in the same way that, say, basic algebra doesn't account for everything. Yet really it doesn't once even when you get into other territories that seem well established. But there is enough content out there to where I believe that there could be a push for consortium of one system that covers the whole of the scope of deductive logic.
The problem with that is that a) it's not glamorous, it's just logic, and b) if you read academic papers that reference other works by logicians it's all very petty. Very little is constructive or trying to check for errors and providing a solution, it's more invalidating and then saying "well here is my unique approach." So what that entails is there's not as much attention being focused on it as one might think, as compared to the sciences or mathematics. Imagine if you have a central project on GitHub that a bunch of people want to contribute to, and someone noticed an error the main project doesn't account for, and instead of revising that issue or having that issue fixed on the main project a separate fork is made to accommodate for that very niche error that does its own thing, but then there's five other forks that do more or less the same. The material that's even remotely well-accepted, it seems, is whatever gets onto the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or in a textbook. Which is fine to a certain extent, but otherwise there are very real considerations which are just the Wild West for how it's solved. Probability studies, in large part, being of that stuff that needs to get incorporated or considered beyond just Fuzzy Logic, Modal Logic and its variants, what have you.
To make a long story short: it's troublesome, there's not a standard academic way for accounting for all the niche aspects in a way that compounds, and the community is kind of weird.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
That just sounds like the field hasn't matured yet. There are multiple incomplete alternate theories to solve the same thing with problems of their own to each one, and the criticisms haven't caught up to the point of creating a, for lack of a better term, additional layer of logic which surpasses the limits of the previous generation of logical systems. By the sounds of it, the field should be where you want it to be in another 30 years or so.
I enjoyed your reply.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Thank you! It's fun to talk about this with people who are interested. Logic is fascinating as a field of study when you get past how people use it as a cudgel of superiority (see:so called rationalists) and as a way to understand how reality functions or how to make sound arguments, so I'm always up for discussing it.
To get to your comment, I think that's kind of one of the issues. Logical reasoning isn't really a new field that needs to mature. It's been around for millennia, starting with Aristotle and the Greeks developing syllogisms, and continuing through Catholic theologians and Enlightenment thinkers. Even the way we construct mathematical proofs and legal arguments traces back to principles of deductive reasoning.
Now admittedly the 20th century did see a boom in logic, largely driven by the development of computers. This led to things like Higher Order Logic and Modal Logic as people tried to figure out how to make computers work. We can't understate the importance of that period. But it left a lot of room to be desired that the successor generation of academics have to work out. In that sense it's still "new".
My issue is with how contemporary academics approach the field. It feels like there's this hyper-competitive atmosphere where researchers are more focused on poking holes in each other's work than actually building on it. Instead of taking a peer's idea and improving it, or incorporating multiple perspectives to solve problems, everyone's trying to come up with something totally original if not altogether discredit opposing ideas. It's building extremely wide but not necessarily tall in a way that matters. It reminds me of how there are countless Protestant denominations because of minor disagreements, rather than working through differences constructively.
So I think we might see a major breakthrough in our lifetime with the mess that's sort of left over, especially with AI being the new driving force behind logical reasoning research. So there will be money and demand for professionals who specialize in that beyond just software developers. But right now, the lack of a central hub or major thinker to rally around means the field has felt like the Wild West for roughly a few decades at minimum. It's frustrating because these are issues that seem like common sense on the surface, but the approach to solving them is scattered and inefficient.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
You are actually fun to listen to.
Could be an issue of too many cooks and too high a point of entry to making advances? Such that the only thing 90% of those in the field are actually capable of doing is criticizing? because that's easier?
also I think pragmatism is the best philosophy to live life by. what do you think about that?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Disclaimer:
For your first issue, I think the high point of entry is a part of it. I'm unsure about the too many cooks aspect for reasons I'll get to below. But I think you hit the nail on the head.
The main thing is while it's interdisciplinary, you don't think of Logic as being something that can really be found standalone. Which, to a degree, makes sense. I can rattle off a ton of professions and majors where Logic is invaluable: computer science, the law both as an attorney and legal scholar, philosophy, writing, mathematics, theology. It sets the foundation for higher thinking at large. But if you look at universities where there is a dedicated major to it? In the US, I'm turning up very few results. In Europe you'll tend to find more, as well as some places in Asia (I've seen an odd distribution of papers come from people based out of Hong Kong, for instance). Which makes sense for an institution. You're not just teaching, you're selling, and Logic as its own discipline doesn't sell well on its face. I would disagree with that lack of value, because I think even as a minor it provides unquestionable benefit. As another thing, Logic used to be required curriculum in the 20th century, at least in America, but then was removed because of a perceived lack of social value.
So as a result, you aren't sparking young minds to really be interested in it, and you're not laying a bedrock for the average citizen to be a more potent thinker. Which means that, like you noted, there's little wiggle room unless you're doing it as your PhD, because why weigh the opinion of someone who got it as their undergrad degree and not their doctorate in something like this, and there's not a lot of people doing that. So the perceived lack of practical value, despite what I would argue as a heck of a lot of evidence to the contrary and the insular culture, means that we've got a field that's kind of eating itself alive.
Now, about the "too many cooks" bit, I'm not sure if that's the case. It's more like we've got a kitchen with a handful of master chefs and a bunch of people who've only ever eaten at restaurants, if that makes sense. The real issue is that we don't have enough people who are truly engaged in advancing the field. This is where your point about criticism comes in. You're absolutely right that criticism is easier. It's way easier to poke holes in someone else's argument than to construct a watertight one yourself. And in a field like Logic, where precision and rigorous thinking are paramount, on top of academia's subculture where your reputation is the most important thing to safeguard, that criticism can be pretty brutal.
So what we end up with is a situation where you've got a small group of highly specialized experts making advancements, and a larger group of people on the periphery who can understand enough to criticize but not enough to make substantial contributions themselves. It's not that 90% of people in the field are incapable of doing anything but criticizing. The bar for making meaningful advances is so high that many don't even try. This creates a sort of feedback loop. The field becomes more insular, the advances become more specialized and harder for outsiders to understand, and the cycle continues. It's not that there are too many cooks in the kitchen. It's just that we've made the kitchen so intimidating that most people don't even try to cook.
So long as it doesn't impinge on innovation or novelty, it's one of the best approaches. Philosophy and Political Thought are great as things to talk over at cocktail hour or as establishing baselines for implementing policy and such, but sometimes it can get into the weeds and miss the important things that hit close to the human experience. Life is messy, people are tricky for a million different reasons, and sometimes if you spend your whole life looking at things under a metaphorical microscope in metaphorical lab conditions then you can forget to look up from your work, see the the world for what it is, and remember why you were analyzing something in the first place. Because if you can't put something into practice, or intend to, and it won't provide an insight that can be used down the line, then what's the point? Ideas and ideologies are a tool, and a tool that doesn't have a good use is a pretty shitty tool.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I agree fully with your last statement. I think a high quality pragmatist would automatically account for innovation and novelty as well as being part of a pragmatic lifestyle. What I like about pragmatism is that once we are all pragmatist the best pragmatists would obviously come out on top and it makes sense for them to come out on top, because they are the best at making useful decisions taking into account how the world is.
Reading the first half of your post I feel like I accidentally came to the right conclusion. I wasn't thinking about the logic not being valued as a major aspect at all.
Honestly, I know I wasn't born during those times, but I still kind of feel like I missed out on the time of television where it was used as an educational resource to explain how things work.
One of the tragedies of humanity as a species is that we prefer being entertained over being educated. The surprising part is that the entertained group never seems to die out either.
Also I want to celebrate a little win with ya, I managed to study today without having an anxiety attack. I don't know when I started having a negative experience trying to study but I am finally passing it by and I am glad that I am.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I hope you had chatgpt pen that one fam
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Heck yeah, always good to hear. Keep your chin up, keep hacking at it, admit when you're wrong so you can figure out how to be right, seek help when you need it, and you'll do just fine.
Regarding the entertainment/education part, I think it's all a state of mind. If you find something that really interests you, and you even just dabble in it as a craft or as a study to dabble in as a part time thing, then I think that's how you get around that. We have YouTube for a reason, and watching videos or lectures is incredibly beneficial. Quite frankly you could get the equivalent of a bachelor's degree by self motivated study and working through problems with how much information is online right now. We live in a time where the library of Alexandria is alive and well, and all you need to do is just have that desire to learn something. I've been getting into the swing of reading and listening anything I come across, and it doesn't just make me smarter but it also makes me feel more well-rounded and a want to learn more as opposed to learn about a certain thing.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
no way
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Now I know you're trollin',
This is what people who talk about superpredictors and prediction markets really believe, though.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
How am I trolling. It's called a sperg out. Very rational. Very cool.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context