IMO, progress in philosophy leads to science. First you think and imagine (philosophy) then you try and know and have made progress (science).
From the article: Yes (with qualification) and yes. Already in Republic (Plato again!) we have an argument—a clear and compelling rational argument—that even the highest political office should be open to women. The argument? List what it takes to be a good leader of the state, then note the conditions that distinguish the sexes. There just is zero overlap between the two lists.
IMO there is not much of interest in philosophy regarding AI (except for the thinking and imagination of AI engineers). AI is still just computations as far as we know.
From the article: Almost all believe in consciousness and most don’t have a clue how to explain it, which is wisdom.
Hubert Dreyfus claimed that AI was a test of the Cartesian theory of mind.
Dreyfus was also pretty much right about everything AI related from the 1960s on. It will take nothing short of a true self-driving car to refute something he said.
The essential blocks of Dreyfus are in Martin Heidegger (which I also haven't studied in depth). Helping you obtain a partially understood, utilitarian version of my partially understood, utilitarian version of Dreyfus's partially understood, utilitarian version of Heidegger would be... enabling.
You really need to "spend time with the philosophy of other people" if you want to move ahead with the notions explored in those two links.
I have spent some time to answer my own questions. But I have neither the motivation nor the time and maybe not even the intelligence to learn and to understand the ideas most philosophers.
I'd suggest that's not a good characterisation of philosophy, because according to that characterisation, everybody is a philosopher and doing philosophy all the time.
That definition is not specific enough to do the question discussed in the article justice.
The article defends (whether successful or not I'll leave open) philosophy against the common charge of not having progressed much recently, Whitehead's famous The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato being perhaps the most popular form this criticism takes (whether that does Whitehead justice is another question I'd like to leave open here).
Here is a definition of philosophy that is much closer to the concept of philosophy the article defends: philosophy is what academics who work in philosophy departments do.
philosophy leads to science
I make a strong counterclaim: all progress in philosophy comes from progress in the hard sciences. As examples for my claim I put forward: quantum mechanics, general relativity, non-euclidean geometry, set theory and type theory as foundations of mathematics, Goede's incompleteness theorems, theory of (economic) games (leading to the first substantial progress in moral philosophy since Kant), AI/ML.
Answering what is philosphy is philosophy. And thus, IMO, I am right.
> Philosophy is what academics who work in philosophy departments do.
IMO this is too restrictive. You reduce philosophy to a job title or diploma title. I guess, many philosophers would not agree with this definition.
> I make a strong counterclaim: all progress in philosophy comes from progress in the hard sciences.
I agree that new knowledge and new abilities lead to new ideas and questions and concerns.
But philosophy is not limited to physics or chemistry; IMO the only hard sciences.
Physics and chemistry are hard sections within an open ended spectrum:
- The begin (1D view) or lower level layer (3D view) are unknown. Is string theory correct ? What are strings made of ? Is mental conscious the lower layer ? Is all a simulation ?
- The end (1D view) or upper layer (3D view) are soft science. Like biology, sociology, psychology, economics.
> IMO this is too restrictive. You reduce philosophy to a job title or diploma title. I guess, many philosophers would not agree with this definition.
I'd say that it is usually what we treat philosophy as when these discussions come up. As you said, it's probably too restrictive, and the truth is we're all philosophers to some degree, and all working off of certain philosophical underpinnings. But the article (and many philosophers) end up treating philosophy as the above poster describes ("what academics who work in philosophy departments do").
If we use a broad definition of philosophy then of course it is useful, and of course its changed over time (most would consider it progress, some wouldn't). But this doesn't seem to say anything about whether or not the small subsection of philosophers who work as academics in philosophy departments have made useful contributions recently. The fact that they struggle so much with this question suggest that they might not have.
You're being downvoted. I too voted this post of yours down, let me explain why; sheer hubris.
> Besides, humans will never die out because of lack of "resources".
We are in grave danger of dying out; because of lack resources and because of our mind-boggling stupidity, sheer arrogance and our inability to deal with our tribal instincts.
You might (or not) have noticed that humans don't exist outside of the ecological system that our plant harbors. We're part of this ecological network, we're fully, totally, no-exceptions dependent on it. Techno-utopian dreams (nightmares, more like it) of being independent of the 'natural' world are not going to save mankind; we're part of 'nature', we exist within nature, there's no existence for humans outside nature. We need an ecosystem that provides us with calories and oxygen. The only ecosystem in existence that is capable of providing that is the very ecosystem we're working tirelessly to dismantle and destroy. So yes; we might die out because of lack of resources. We very probably will. Maybe
There's only so much damage that an ecosystem can take. And there are tons of signs that signal that our earthly ecosystem is reaching it's breaking point;
- we've lost about a third of the arable land in the last forty years.
- we've lost about 30% of bio diversity in the last twenty years.
- we've lost almost 75% of insect biomass in the last thirty years.
The loss of insects is especially alarming; insects play a major role in all food webs on earth. The disappearance of 75% of insects (biomass, not species) has a catastrophic impact of everything further up the food chain. Yes, including humans.
We're currently working non-stop to destroy our ecosystem's capacity to carry animals in the upper food chain. Guess who's on top of that food chain. Yes, us humans.
Don't kid yourself; we're currently rushing full-speed ahead towards a full-scale ecosystem collapse. And don't fool yourself on our ability to create and maintain a man-made closed ecosystem as a replacement; we're not able to do that and we probably won't for many, many, many decades to come.
The only ecosystem we have to save our collective asses is the one we're currently punishing every day with our overproduction, overconsumption, with our fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides and waste.
It's so past high times that we - humans, as a collective - have a hard talk how much longer we want to exist as a 'civilized' species, with global trade, no struggle for survival, boundless capitalism.
Because if we keep going, we've got a dozen or so decades left. It's back to hunter gathering for the rest of mankind's existence after that.
If we leave enough prey species alive, that is. Otherwise that will be the end of mankind's short stint.
Again: I welcome a reduction of farm animals by 50% or 75%.
> because of lack resources
What resources of and on Earth are scarce in your opinion ?
Depending on skills and technology, they are not scarce for a world population of 10 billion humans or they are scarce with a world population of 1 human.
> and because of our mind-boggling stupidity, sheer arrogance and our inability to deal with our tribal instincts.
Yes, most societies worldwide are very insane. Obvious proofs: Wars and military and poverty in 2018. All elected and re-elected US presidents being evil mass murdering war criminals.
IMO, humanity is not so insane that humanity will die out. If people became vegan and current morality and practices and technology improved we could live in a biological paradise even with 10 billion people.
Improvements like cooperation instead of competition, waste treatment, recycling, no fossil fuel, no insane individual commuting every day because of flexibility, no insane transport of products, less waste of time and energy for needless production,...
I live in Belgium.
Do Belgians need butter from Ireland ? No.
Do Belgians need milk products transported around Europe ? No.
I studied agriculture at university so I know a little more than the average arrogant angry downvoter.
And I am in favor of transhumanism (e.g. machine body parts) in case somebody might read my previous comment in the future.
The problem is not of a technical nature, but of a political/social one.
> Depending on skills and technology, they are not scarce for a world population of 10 billion humans or they are scarce with a world population of 1 human.
This is very true. If organized properly we could very easily feed the 7.7 billion people that live on earth today. We could easily feed the 11 billion people that are expected to exist in about 50 years or so on earth. I do not doubt that the technological hurdles are gigantic, but the could be overcome.
Alas, I don't see that happening. Not because of the technological difficulty, but because of human stupidity or shortsightedness, our tribal instincts and the tendency towards reckless acquisition of resources that allowed our ancestors to become the dominant species on this planet in the first place.
You see, the problem is not our abilities to change the environment. The problem is our inability to change ourselves.
/If/ we all went vegan, /if/ we stopped needles, wasteful wars, /if/ we stopped consuming more than we need, /if/ ...
... then we could make it. But we don't change our behavior. We are still greedy little apes that are driven to resource acquisition to improve our social status in order to have higher reproductive success. We are reproduction machines, nothing that is changed by a few decades of wealth in some parts on earth.
It is this inability to overcome our biological imperatives that will doom us, because they prevent us from recognizing the foreigner as our sibling. And so we compete for resources, even though we've already so many resources that we die from over saturation.
So, unless all the peoples around the world start working together very soon to combat climate change, mitigate species and biomass loss, reduce the consumption of resources to a degree our planet can actually provide, I don't see how the human species will be able to survive.
It's not that we couldn't do it. It's that we're not willing to pay the cost in the /now/ to be able to survive in the /future/.
First: I had missed the part of your previous reply where you wrote that you too had downvoted my comment because of "my hubris". Unfortunately I read and replied too quickly because I had to leave. Now it is too late to correct my reply.
Second: Fortunately only few people need to introduce or enforce change to make big changes for all. Modern societies would have never happened if change was not imposed by a few on all.
Unfortunately climate change is a bad problem because it is also a political problem because appropriate technology might not be available and imposed soon enough. Politics are determined by the stupid ignorant democratic majority. Even in dictatorships like China because a dictatorship must be tolerated by the democratic majority.
Fortunately, the stupid ignorant democratic majority could die and leave the surviving elite (not a money based elite of billionaires) with a better society. Natural evolution.
IMO, relatively few humans will die because of climate change but many more other species will die out.
> "Either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior — less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity — or we need an exponential improvement in technology."
> "If you look at current geopolitics, I don't think we're going to be getting an exponential improvement in human behavior any time soon."
> "That's why we need a quantum leap in technology like AI."
I switched from Fedora 28 to Ubuntu because I could not make my IDE (IntelliJ, Netbeans, maybe Eclipse too) recognize the installed Fedora JDK (no valid JDK found). It seems that this has been a common problem for years.
It is a problem if the default JDK is useless and the solution requires research on the internet. I had even enough patience to search for more than 15 minutes AFAIR.
I have been using Windows and other Linux distributions including Arch Linux for years and never had problems with the JDK.
You didn't install a JDK, though. You installed a JRE. (Ubuntu does this too, BTW - openjdk-N-jre versus openjdk-N-jdk.) If you Google "fedora jdk install" I get this page:
Which says pretty clearly: "The java-1.8.0-openjdk package contains just the Java Runtime Environment. If you want to develop Java programs then install the java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel package."
The standard package is to run software, not to compile software. Because most people who manage systems--hi--want to know what can be built on a system (and, more importantly, what can't be). You might not like that, and that's totally fine, but it's consistent and in my experience distros that have trouble with that (CentOS never, Ubuntu rarely, Arch rather often) quickly become ones I don't consider reliable.
I think the issue here is the stupid name "OpenJDK" - everyone who has anything to do with Java development understands JDK to mean "Java Development Kit", and here those sneaky bastards give you a package named "jdk" but containing jre.
Would it hurt them to name the project "OpenJVM" instead?
When I wrote that post I was thinking exactly that.
Honestly, were I running Debian/Ubuntu I probably would have at least called it `openjdk-N` and `openjdk-N-dev`, to match the other `-dev` packages, but...yeah. In this way I think CentOS/Fedora are a little more straightforward.
In Ubuntu it is called openjdk-11-jre and openjdk-11-jdk.
With headless variants.
I am no system admin and the -dev or -devel convention suits the Unix and C world but maybe not the JVM or .net or nodejs worlds with their own standards and package managers.
How so? `java` is the JRE. `javac` is the JDK. `mono` (I forget the .NET Core executable name) is the runtime, `mcs` is the development tool. Node or Ruby or Python all have similar splits, too. Yes, they're interpreters, but you generally need the `-dev`/`-devel` package to compile things against your runtime there, too. Their package managers are orthogonal to this (but a failed Ruby build, as an example, will often tell you you need development packages for a library).
It's not about being a system administrator, it's about understanding what the things you're installing actually do. You need development packages to develop against, rather than consume, a package. I don't understand the criticism you're making here.
But as a Java developer I know and I care about the terms JRE and JDK that are used officially and on Windows and many Linux systems and MacOS. I was not aware of the Fedora package conventions.
And as I already wrote, I had most likely installed jdk-devel because, I guess, it is listed in yum and DNF-dragora. Maybe it was a bug in some Fedora related package tool. DNF-dragora had double entries for Java. Unfortunately I do not remember anymore the details.
Someone replied this to me:
"This is a fairly trivial problem to work around, although maybe this should be one of those "sane default" kind of things. Set the environment variable JAVA_HOME=/etc/alternatives/jre or point it at the specific OpenJDK version you want. That's what /etc/alternatives is for."
I guess that is way I tried "alternatives --config java" at the time.
I might be wrong but my mind associates -dev and -devel packages with something that is provided for developers of the package itself, e.g., kernel-devel allows you to compile the kernel. I'm not going to contribute to OpenJDK project so why would I need openjdk-devel package?
Good point, java-devel sounds like C++ headers and libraries and not like Java.
I do not contribute to the OpenJDK project or to the JVM either.
There are standard packages in the Java world: JRE (users) and JDK (java programmers).
The JDK is a standard set of tools and libraries related to using Java as program language. It is not a Linux distro or JDK distro specific set of libraries.
Thanks. AFAIR I installed everything related to Java; maybe I made a mistake somewhere. I also tried to fix the problem with "alternatives --config java".
This is a fairly trivial problem to work around, although maybe this should be one of those "sane default" kind of things. Set the environment variable JAVA_HOME=/etc/alternatives/jre or point it at the specific OpenJDK version you want. That's what /etc/alternatives is for.
This might be useful for interventions by medical experts. Like narcotics are useful for surgical interventions or antibiotics are useful against bacteria infections.
I would agree that you probably don't want to do psychedelics when severely depressed. But they can be quite helpful if you feel you're in a "rut" that you feel like you can't get out of.
I am no friend of drugs in general and psychedelics in particular.
It might work to get out of a rut but, IMO, the risks (what dosage?) are not worth it. Certainly not without professional assistance (not a shaman). The new rut might be much worse than the old rut.
Yes, there is evidence that psychedelics can be useful. I agree that they can be useful to give a different perspective to quit a rut, as you wrote.
Still, according to experts and many anecdotes on reddit, psychedelics are very risky (unwanted bad effects) and not safe drugs and not miracle drugs.
The risk of bad short term and long term effects depends highly on the dosage and the personal mindset and the current environment. Nobody knows in advance how your brain will react.
Yes, but genius should be not synonym with exceptionally talented. Although anything useful including natural perseverance or optimism and motivation should be called a talent.
An idea can be called genius. Often it requires knowledge and experience and coincidence for a genius idea (innovative idea, wise idea, disruptive idea).
Often it requires many years of efforts to create or to discover something new or great or genius.
A genius is a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability, creative productivity, universality in genres or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of new advances in a domain of knowledge. Despite the presence of scholars in many subjects throughout history, many geniuses have shown high achievements in only a single kind of activity.[1]
Whether it was poorly drafted legislation remains to be seen. The "unintended consequences" people are talking about here are minor, what matters are the intended consequences such as the augmented rights europeans have over their data, their privacy, etc. I personally don't give a shit about the annoying cookie popups, I'm just glad I can finally delete my account and email address from various websites when I want them gone.
GDPR has given me a ton of rights over my data that I should have, and everybody should have. It has given me access to my own data. It has given me the power to delete it. This shit is important, and now it's law. That there's cookie popups because the companies in question suck? I don't care. If it makes you close the page, that's a positive side effect IMO. This shit must be bad for conversion in order for businesses to start getting a clue. It's a version of the "tax on privacy" that a lot of people on HN like talking about.
Regarding #2, I dispute that for the same reasons. GDPR is achieving its goals of securing user data in europe. Companies are scared straight into following it so far.
There are issues with it (especially a lack of compliance material). None of them point to "the authors had no idea what they were doing".
In other words, no, GP isn't "right" just because you have to click off some annoying popups. That's not the only thing GDPR does.
Edit: Lacking replies, I'm going to assume those downvoting this comment are the usual no-privacy-apologists who are annoyed they now have to put legalese in front of users and don't ask themselves why they have to.
I agree with you that an important and useful part of the GDPR is deletion of your data. Good examples: No advertising and spam. Prevention of later hacking and theft of your data like e.g. credit card numbers or private messages. You have revealed your true identity on social media and want to remove your posts.
But maybe GDPR gives a false sense of safety and security and control:
- What is technically possible ? When I cite you, must my posts be deleted as well ?
- Who controls what companies do outside of the EU or even within the EU ?
- National police and secret services in the USA and EU might be more interested in the data than some US company. They have no moral problem with installing spyware on your computer.
- Banks and maybe even insurance companies have already the right to know much about you.
IANAL so I can't address most of your questions, but
> When I cite you, must my posts be deleted as well ?
You mean for comments and such? What I write on a site's comment section falls under copyright law, with the usual attribution reservations etc. So no.
> Banks and maybe even insurance companies have already the right to know much about you.
I shouldn't have used the word "privacy" in my comment. I think calling GDPR a privacy law is a shortcut a lot of people take (myself included), but it really is a data protection law. (It's even in the name!)
GDPR doesn't talk about privacy very much. In fact, I just searched the full english text of the law: There isn't a single instance of the word "privacy".
In other words, it doesn't so much say who can and cannot store and analyze your data. Instead, it lays out your responsibilities if you are storing/analyzing personal data, and your (consumer) rights as someone whose data is stored/analyzed somewhere.
> we're not making progress anywhere near fast enough in any of these areas.
Unfortunately it is true and I fully agree with this judgement.
We have already so much technology and yet there is still much poverty and misery in every country and NO (elected) government respects even the human rights.
Well, we could go on and both claim our statements are true. OR you just follow the link of my initial post and read a book that simply states facts published by the UN, and you would see for yourself that the rates of poverty, child mortality and mass inequality have become much better in the course of the last 30-50 years.
The only reason why both of our statements are true is because "fast enough" or "not fast enough" is a personal opinion.
I believe in the benefits of technology.
The reason for current misery is not only lack of knowledge (scientific) and technology (e.g. in psychology and psychiatry) but also lack of knowledge (economic) and bad morality as proven by the kind of societies and elected governments in 2018.
The lack of morality to vote for decent politicians. Why do US citizens claim to want medicare for all but vote for Democrats or Republicans who do not want medicare for all ?
The lack of morality that private property should be spent to help other persons in need.
The lack of morality that allows an insane military budget and immoral lies and crimes and murder in other countries by political and military and economic warfare.
From the article: Yes (with qualification) and yes. Already in Republic (Plato again!) we have an argument—a clear and compelling rational argument—that even the highest political office should be open to women. The argument? List what it takes to be a good leader of the state, then note the conditions that distinguish the sexes. There just is zero overlap between the two lists.
IMO there is not much of interest in philosophy regarding AI (except for the thinking and imagination of AI engineers). AI is still just computations as far as we know.
From the article: Almost all believe in consciousness and most don’t have a clue how to explain it, which is wisdom.