I was a very interested in philosophy in college, and if I had chosen anything other than CompSci, that probably would have become my major. I have a lot of respect for people exploring metaphysical questions. While it's easy to dismiss them as "non-practical", I can't think ill of people who try to seek underlying meaning behind the day-to-day sciences/morality/etc. and improve our understanding of truth and logic.

Those questions are really far harder than the ones I tackle day-to-day or even in my highest math/CS studies. I still feel like a wimp sometimes for not trying to attack "deeper" questions and paradoxes.

In a sense, philosophy asks questions that all the sciences, ultimately, try to get us closer to answering. I don't think there's as much glory in asking the questions, but there's still a whole lot of them to ask.

That being said, I understand your position entirely. Had I become an engineer without being introduced to philosophy first, everything there (sans the logic/fallacy discussions) would seem impractical. Now I see it as a fundamental that helped to start most of the major branches of science, and keeps growing discussion around some of the tougher problems we've yet to solve.

PS: As to the few big questions like life after death there is nothing in philosophy that let's you tackle such questions.

For an example nearer to a hacker's heart, take the "brain-in-a-vat" concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat

While science can't simulate this (well) for someone we can ask quite yet, I believe there's value in thinking about the implications of a fully simulated reality. This discussion was more or less started in the 1600's before we had any sort of technology that could remotely get us near to this. We still can't explore it yet, but it's a valid question and it's an important discussion on subjective reality.

I think it's very healthy and productive for people to ask and explore deeper questions about reality. To pretend that you can't study things without experiments is taking the scientific method. True, experimental evidence is required (in my mind and for most educated folks in our era) to confirm or disprove even the most well-founded theories. Still, there is a very abundant space of theories that are nearly impossible to prove. I feel there's value in discussing them, building conceptual models, and reasoning about them before science is ready.

PS: Think about how people talk about the landscape in a video game.

I think "brain in a vat" only makes a stronger case for mathematics. After all, in the end what else but information and it's transformation matters? Everything else can be stripped away. And stuck with pure information, I think we are talking maths.

Philosophy is bunk/useless/mumbojumbo because its obvious that <insert some random philosophical position>.

Take chapter 23 from the lecture. It is about "how to live life in the face of death" and possible ways to maximize "value". But it seems to dodge the question what is value in the face of death, which would be the only worthwhile question. Instead it dwells on ways to optimize value, which could be better done with solid economic theory (it is "how to invest actions and time to maximize results").

Why does it matter what value one's life has? The lecture doesn't seem to give an answer. Will there be a judgment in afterlife, depending on our lives value? I don't think so. I think the "value" is strictly a subjective, individual thing, and therefore Philosophy can't help much with it. Perhaps what is useful is to get a better idea of the effects of our decisions (will people be harmed by my life style, that kind of stuff). But then again it seems "hard sciences" would be much better suited to answering that question than ancient poems and philosophy.

Even if you believe in a judgment after life, I guess then you should assign a probability to the kind of god you will encounter and align your actions accordingly. I just don't see how philosophy could help.

Except if you say mathematics is a special kind of philosophy - I could accept that. So in theory there could be useful philosophy, but I have never seen it (except for maths).

Take that lecture: I actually new I could safely skip most of the chapters because they are obviously irrelevant (like the one's about "is there a soul or not"). They are just WAY too shortsighted. I bet they don't have a proper definition of what a soul would be, to begin with.

Yeah, I agree with most of your points. I feel this is a little more true of modern philosophers I read-- there is less rigor than is warranted. I don't feel it invalidates the important parts (to me), which are the questions raised by their arguments/discussion.

Why does it matter what value one's life has? The lecture doesn't seem to give an answer.

This lecture aside, (as I mentioned), I personally feel the value in philosophy is in the questions it raises and areas it explores, not specifically in any answers it provides. I also want those answers, but I don't look to philosophers to provide them. Sometimes they offer conceptual models that do help in scenarios where science isn't giving me a better one, but their "answers" are more like "suggestions" that may later give way to formal theories and empirical experiments once science catches up.

They are just WAY too shortsighted.

I think philosophers, as a whole, aren't short-sighted. I've always believed that the best philosophers explore different "assumption trees" in their quest for earnest questions. Certain assumptions have to be made in order to discuss much of anything at all in philosophy (e.g. we exist, etc) so some of the short-sightedness symptoms you sense might just be hidden in the assumptions of that particular discussion.

Why does it matter what value one's life has? The lecture doesn't seem to give an answer. Will there be a judgment in afterlife, depending on our lives value? I don't think so. I think the "value" is strictly a subjective, individual thing, and therefore Philosophy can't help much with it.

you're already committing yourself to a philosophical position, that "value is strictly a subjective, individual thing." But that's precisely one of the philosophical issues that's under debate! After all, how could you decide whether value is subjective or not via the scientific method? You can't. There's no value finding experiment. The only way to proceed is philosophically.

If debate is useless, why are you debating me? ;) In any event, my proposition is that the question here -- the question of values and their subjectivity -- cannot be resolved scientifically. That doesn't imply that it's pointless to discuss. Your point about god is a good one, but it's also a philosophical one.

Note: I have studied maths myself. I am no Gauss or Erdös, but I guess I have my standards for the application of logic, and most of the time, philosophers don't meet them.

Sure game theory describes a way to get what you want based on the circumstances, but do they go into what virtues are, how ethics apply, or even how life is changed by what you're doing? The ideas may not be set in stone and clear as day, but they make people think about different ideas and offer more insight based on the research that people have done than just "aha, this protein does inhibit viruses." The synthesis of ideas and cross-application nowadays is where science is at. Sure they may get there eventually using cold hard facts and logic, but every once in a while, a baseless argument ties in pretty nicely and can advance a theory more quickly just by making people think a bit harder.

If you want to read what a real scientist has to say about the value that philosophy adds to science, I suggest "Dreams of Final Theory" by Steven Weinberg, chapter 7, "Against philosophy": http://depts.washington.edu/ssnet/Weinberg_SSN_1_14.pdf

Philosophy of math generated a lot of interesting questions in the past.

see http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1518&aid=-1 for an example of this. The result seems to be an outcome of people only thinking one step ahead, and those thinking superrational (i.e. estimating how much steps ahead people will be thinking, and chosing according to that).

Philosophy (reading transcript 23 now as well) might in general be more useful to a human mind then some theoretical system on how a non-existant optimal human would behave.

Just read it. It's nice I think, especially if you've never been exposed to the ideas in there and if you are willing to seriously consider the questions raised. I'd rate it as more useful than game theory by far.

But I think the concept is extremely important when trying to understand the world around us. It makes the "people are just not rational" aspect irrelevant - evolution in the long run is rational, or rather mindlessly testing all the relevant strategies, so we still need Game Theory to figure out which strategies will be the most likely to prevail.

All seemed a bit too abstract for what we would actually encounter irl

educate yourself.

I don't understand this sentence. I guess it means "philosophy is subjective"?

If your understanding of those subjects is so great, then please elaborate.

Also, I was referring to chapter 23, which seems to be purely about economic decisions. So clearly maths and economics are much better suited for treating the issue.

What is value? How do we determine the relative values of our life decisions descriptively? How do we do so prescriptively?

My claim is not that my understanding of the subjects is great - it's that your understanding of them (from what you've said in the comments) is shallow. Subjects do not exist independent of semantics - math and economics are only "useful" if we can transform our observations into their abstractions and vice versa (1 apple and 1 apple -> 1 + 1 = 2 -> 2 apples).

Philosophy can give us tools for performing those transformations. It's very difficult to say what is of value in life (is a family of value? food? shelter? what are their relative worths?) and so is correspondingly difficult to use our abstract tools (math, economics, game theory) on the components of our observation (money, time, etc.)

I'm not saying that chapter 23 is great, but I can motivate its use in -normal people's- lives. Normal people can't understand game theory, but that doesn't mean that they -should- or that they -need to- in order to survive or think about how they want to structure their lives.

My real point is just that it seems very arrogant to me to assert that some hack Yale professors ideas validate your "prejudices" re: philosophy. It's better to say honestly that you don't understand philosophy. Maybe you don't want to. That's fine. I don't care. My point is that you shouldn't rail against it if you don't understand it. No one cares about your personal preferences, so you conflate them with moral high-ground and assert them in a public sphere.

Good luck with everything :)

I am convinced that there is no possible external measurement for value, and therefore philosophy is doomed if it tries to find it. That is what annoys me about the lecture, it is pointless.

As I described elsewhere, the best we can hope for is get a better idea of the implications of our actions (the result of our life), so that we can assign our own, subjective value to them. But that is the realm of economics and mathematics. So economics would be much more worthwhile than philosophy in that context.

It's great that the guy is a professor. I am not. But there are also professors for "catholic religion" and other nonsense (I assume those people study "the will of god", studying religion as a cultural phenomenon is of course valid). There are whole conferences on "Consciousness" (which is complete nonsense in my opinion - the people going to those conferences can not even give a clear definition of what "consciousness" is supposed to be). Just because something is a subject at university doesn't imply that it makes sense.

I have a maths degree myself, and I had 35 years of a life to think about things. You can call me arrogant, but I think I am entitled to have an opinion about things even if I am not a professor. One thing I took away from studying maths is the desire to always strip away the noise and the irrelevant facts, and get to the heart of what matters. If I can "shorten away" something, it is a great relief, it makes life simpler - forever. That is the great thing about maths, it is absolute. Sorry if it irks you when I call something irrelevant, but some things are.

Edit: OK, I can't resist. You said

"Normal people can't understand game theory, but that doesn't mean that they -should- or that they -need to- in order to survive or think about how they want to structure their lives"

So you admit that philosophy is for the people who are not intelligent (or dedicated) enough to do maths or something real? That is why I say it is snake oil - it pretends to be important, when really the philosophers are only taking the easy way out, making a lot of words instead of aiming for precision.

I agree with this. However, this does not mean that we can't form systems for interpreting our our observations in terms of values or structuring our lives to create them. This might be seen as the goal of philosophy.

There's no possible external "measurement" or standard for anything, period. It's not as if we can actually -prove- math - it's just an agreement which we all come to. We don't come to it consciously; you might even say that it's in some sense the least common denominator of human computation; but "math" as an academic phenomenon is no more external than philosophy or anything else.

"the best we can hope for is get a better idea of the implications of our actions"

See, this is where I think you're wrong. Social systems have utility (buddhism, christianity) for some people because they give a method for aligning our values - they give external focus. In Japan, it's customary to say "it's cold, isn't it?" all the time in winter; this assures that a Japanese person's idea of cold is shared.

Philosophical systems are useful in large part because they enable us to communicate, and create external standards. Talking about love in the abstract is useful because it both gives me insight into my own deep feelings and into those of others. Religion is in some sense primitive philosophy.

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You seem to be missing my big point which is that the aim of philosophy is to distill our difficult-to-verbalize notions into words. You claim that we shouldn't discuss consciousness because it is not defined. But if we don't discuss anything that is not defined, how can we ever come to a definition?

If you look at the history of mathematics of physics, for instance, you'll see that people use strange and undefined terminology relatively frequently. It's hard to communicate in this forum, because I don't know your background, but formalization in mathematics didn't really take place until the end of the 19th century, early 20th century. Before that, math and philosophy were very similar.

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My point is not that you are not entitled to have an opinion - I am merely encouraging you to keep an open mind about things you don't understand. Try to put yourself in the position of someone who knew little or no math, for instance. You might say things like "all those symbols don't make sense" or "it's just gibberish, it's not useful" or whatever.

I think there are a large number of problems here, really. One is that "philosophy" is hard to define. There are big branches (so-called "Western" vs. "Eastern," etc.) and smaller branches ("Analytic," "Structuralist," "Existentialist," etc.). But these are just branches of what has been traditionally referred to as philosophy. Some of these don't even really share traits (e.g. Structuralism doesn't really bear any resemblance to Analytic or Objectivist philosophies - they kind of talk in orthogonal directions).

Another problem is that you are asking for a "use" of philosophy, which is kind of missing the point. Philosophy is not an object to be used (neither is Math, in its total form, incidentally), it is more of a large structure. Philosophy as an academic institution has had profound effects in the past - it shaped the creation of the United States and the constitution, it arguably stoked the nationalist fervor of nazi germany, it affects art, literature, relationship, gender. Feminism is a philosophical institution, in large part.

My point is that as society "progresses" - as we have to deal with larger and more difficult to interpret social structures - as democracy arguably breaks down - philosophy becomes vital because it is in some sense our actual lingua franca. Philosophy -can- define the boundaries of what we can talk about. Philosophy -can- help us structure our worldviews and communicate them so that we can meaningfully cooperate.

I'm not being rigorous or anything, I'm just trying to give you a taste of how I feel/think about the subject to help you see why I find your standpoint somewhat offensive. I'm not even really trying to argue, I'm just trying to communicate -my- values/feelings/thoughts.

I also have a math degree, and I think that math is very important. Incidentally, I do NOT think that most current philosophical thought is important (I think that Foucault was important, and that he had effects, but after him I don't really know of any philosophers who I particularly "like") and I can completely understand why you think the way you do.

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As for your last point, I think you should be more careful in interpreting the statements of others. I was not saying (admitting! what harsh rhetoric) that philosophy is for those unintelligent (whatever that means) to do math. I was saying that one of the roles of philosophy is to give us a lingua franca so that we can communicate about how we structure our lives. People want to communicate, but it's hard to talk about things like love, value, etc. unless you have a structure to do it in. My claim is that philosophy (in some of its forms) achieves this task.

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As a capping point, I guess I want to say that the biggest flaw that I see in your thinking is that you essentialize "philosophy" and "math" and "economics." These things are not objects, they are sprawling and diverse academic structures whose effects are profoundly complex. To say "philosophy is snake oil" or "math is useful" is to make a major error in making objects out of things that cannot effectively be thought of as such. To say that philosophy "pretends to be important" is to draw together thousands of years of intellectual thought into one tiny heading and characterize it all (despite ignorance of most of it). For instance, why is Mahayana Buddhist Philosophy snake oil? Why is Post-Structuralist thought snake oil? What about Existentialism? What about Hegelian Metaphysics? You don't know about any of these things (most of which really do NOT "pretend to be important") but you characterize them nonetheless.

So in the end, all the rigor with which you purport to think is thrown down the tubes because you obstinately refuse to be skeptical about a vast field which you ultimately do not understand.

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EDIT:

Sorry, I know this is long, but this is something that I feel passionately about and it is very useful to write about it. I won't be terribly offended if you ignore my post.

I wanted to add something which I think you might jump on:

I am _NOT_ equating math and philosophy when I say that they are equally internal. I think that there are VAST and important differences between them. My claim is that their relative "objectivity" is not one of them.

Do you know all the axioms of ZFC? Can you justify them? Do you know category theory? Do you know multiple axiom systems? How do you justify axioms?

Most mathematicians I know (and I know a decent number) do not actually engage in foundational mathematics. In some sense they work in the "academic cloud" of math. They can't prove their ideas all the way down to ZFC. But because of the way that math as a field is structured, and because it is the abstraction of a simple concept or a small number of concepts (unit and/or set and/or "process/object" - corresponding to Peano Arithmetic, Set Theory (ZFC), and Category Theoretic bases, respectively), it is easy to work in the cloud and not run into bullshit.

Philosophy has the problem that (as I said) it is attempting to find common language for things which we do not yet have language for. This means that a lot of the meaningful computation of philosophy is pre-linguistic. This makes it difficult to interact with, externally.

One reason for this is that some philosophers (e.g. let's take the Deconstructionists) kind of live in their own world with their own specialized vocabulary. They all "understand" it, but to give a full exposition of it from basics would take forever.

Philosophy's justifications are external, but they often take place in a difficult and idiosyncratic language which is inaccessible to outsiders. This does not mean that there are not the same standards of rigor (after all, many notable past philosophers were mathematicians and one might find it very hard to believe they would drop their logical standards for mere philosophy).

This is what I don't get: wouldn't it make much more sense to study economics and complex systems to get an idea of what the outcomes of any particular choice of social structure are? It worries me that people want to build these decisions on "Ethics" (I assume you meant this special case of philosophy), because they are just a poor substitute for real understanding (morals = how to act when I don't have clue about the consequences of my actions). How can we make a philosophical decision, without having an idea of the actual, physical outcomes of our actions? Especially in the face of growing complexity, I would call for maths to the rescue, not philosophy. Economics can tell us what are the outcomes of Democracy or Communism or whatever (like in Democracy, I guess some people will be exploited, but the average is happier, or whatever). Once we know the likely outcomes, we can apply our values to them and decide which system to use. I don't see where Philosophy enters (in picking social structure, physical power decides in the end, nobody asks the philosophers anyway - better to convince the "powers" with hard facts that some particular choice is also better for them.)

"They can't prove their ideas all the way down to ZFC"

I don't think that is true in general. They build on other mathematicians proofs, which build on other proofs, which eventually go down to ZFC (or whatever foundation you choose). Of course there can be errors and holes in the chain, but ultimately, to have an unbroken chain is the goal. I am aware that the consistency of mathematics can not be proven, though - sure, the whole thing could collapse from on moment to the next. Let's hope it won't ;-)

I am not saying that there aren't any mysteries in the world...

Also sorry if I sounded aggressive at some times, I didn't mean to attack anybody personally (even the prof from the lectures seems to be a smart guy after all). I guess my anger is really just the frustration that the really important questions are left unanswered.

Ok, well, this is a fine idea in theory, but there are tons of problems:

1.) Actual social structures are way more complex than anything we could ever hope to model - ever. We can't make predictions about them - period.

2.) Even if we could, there is no means, and has never been a means, for manipulating social structures directly. The dynamics of social change are even more complex and less well understood than the structures themselves. At the very least we can classify the structures - the dynamics are a whole other world of complexity. It's not as if we, the intellectuals, are sitting on high and that everyone else listens to us and changes their behaviors accordingly.

3.) Your ideas about economics and complex systems require semantic mapping - they require that we can take a real-life situation, map it into the model, manipulate the symbols, and output a result. Unfortunately, this mapping falls OUTSIDE of the domain of the fields themselves. This is my whole point: one role of Philosophy is the creation of the mapping.

I think you are confusing my -descriptive- claims with -prescriptive- ones. I'm not telling you that ethics is -good-, I'm saying that it is the principal means by which society discusses difficult problems. Ethics, morality, religion, are all ways that society has a discussion with itself, if you want to think about it that way.

Can you give me a good, concrete, example of how you can use math to prove anything about society, without relying on assumptions about what is "good" or "right?"

A large part of what modern philosophy (post-modernism, post-structuralism) (which I am now assuming you are wholly ignorant of) talks about is the boundaries of what we can coherently talk about. A lot of it is hyper-skeptical and actually probably asserts things that you'd agree with (like that we can't claim moral absolutes, they are culturally dependent, etc.). Philosophy now serves as the kind of watchdog of language - it says what we can say and what we can't.

(For instance, the statement "God Exists" is not wrong, it's incoherent. Have you ever thought about it that way? What's god? What does it mean for an undefined entity to "exist?" Does dflskajfk exist? More precisely, it's incoherent in the context of assertions of objective truth. It's NOT incoherent in the context of religious discourse, in which it's taken to be a transcendental truth (axiom). Only by engaging our structural ideas about society can we think about why people "believe in god" and realize that "believing in god" is not a metaphysical but rather a cultural condition)

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"Economics can tell us what are the outcomes of Democracy or Communism or whatever"

No it cannot. This statement is absurd unless you make tons of assumptions.

"like in Democracy, I guess some people will be exploited, but the average is happier, or whatever"

Lots of "whatever"'s here. You really aren't making a good case for "economics." Do you even know economics? Have you taken any graduate courses in it?

"Once we know the likely outcomes, we can apply our values to them and decide which system to use."

Which values do we use?

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""They can't prove their ideas all the way down to ZFC"

I don't think that is true in general."

Do you actually know?

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Look, I don't mean to be mean, but it really doesn't seem like you're interested in Truth per se. You're interested in truth in terms of how you see the world. I guess that's fine (and necessary). I understand what you're saying. I guess problems start to arise when you try to understand what I'm saying (and fail). If you don't want to understand what I'm saying, that's OK too.

You have to understand that from my perspective, your belief in "math" and "economics" and your constant appeals to them as "things" and "bringers of truth and wisdom" seems borderline religious. You might be able to say the same thing about me re: philosophy, but I keep claiming that "Philosophy is not a thing" (and neither is Math or Economics, incidentally), so that wouldn't make sense.

Consider for a moment what it would be like to believe in god. I'm sure you've had arguments about god with Christians/believers. I'm sure they've been frustrating. There's always a sense that you "just can't get through." Consider that perhaps I feel the same way with respect to you. Consider the possibility that you are stuck in the same sort of mind-dungeon that religious people are stuck in. The only tools you have to interpret your world are the tools are you arguing for. You interpret other tool sets in terms of your set of tools. It's like trying to convert someone who uses C++ to use Lisp (have you ever tried?). They say "why should I use that? It's the same! They're both Turing Complete!"

I do not believe that any argument can be non-ad-hominem. We are both people, arguing.

The truth is complex and neither you nor I understand it. The deepest claim I'm trying to make is that I think we should be humble and err on the side of assuming that we don't understand things (until we are absolutely certain that we do). This is what I originally took offense to in your original post - your claim that your "prejudice had been validated." It hadn't been. I don't understand why you are more comfortable saying Philosophy (which you don't understand) is useless and meaningless instead of just saying "I don't understand Philosophy." It's OK to not understand things. (again, I'm not even saying that I "understand" any of these things, but then again I still haven't claimed to)

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages." - Adam Smith

In other words, I expect the baker to not poison the bread he sells me not because it would be immoral to poison the bread, but because it would have bad consequences for him. That is why I think economics trumps ethics. Ethics are really just rules for "stupid" agents who don't understand why the rules make sense or what implications they have. Take the rule to not eat pig's meat - it made sense in the hot desert back in the day, when pigs were competing for the scarce food with humans and were transmitting their diseases. Probably some smart people figured that out and made up the rule (and were in the position to enforce it), that now billions of people are senselessly stuck with.

I think a society based on selfishness would be much superior to a society based on morals. With morals, there will always people who don't comply and mess everything up, who feel unsatisfied and create revolutions and upheavals. In a selfish society, things should be clear. For example, I don't think we should help the poor because we are morally obliged to do so. We should help them because otherwise they will end up lingering on our doorstep and trying to rob us (or also simply because it is a kind of insurance system, in case we become poor ourselves). In our current system, there is constant bickering about giving away too much money for social causes. In a selfish view, there would be no discussion - there would be a desired outcome (no robberies and beggars) and a means to achieve it. The only discussion left would be the best way to achieve the outcome (welfare systems? death penalty for throwing chewing gum on the floor? legalized abortions?...), and how much investment it would be worth to the individual. But those would not be philosophical discussions, they would be technical discussions.

Incidentally, it is one of the achievements of economics to show that selfishness can benefit everyone. There was actually an artificial life researcher who committed suicide when he learned of that, because he wanted to believe in true altruism. Such a shame.

Nonsense. Of course we can not make exact predictions (like the real thing), but we can get a pretty good idea of some things. We have good idea why capitalism works better than communism, for example. Honestly, I think you are just nitpicking. Of course we can not predict everything, but we can get estimate of SOME things, which is better than nothing, and certainly more useful than philosophy.

Even ethics are eventually just subject to Evolution - evolution decides on the ethics that prevail, not philosophers.

" It's not as if we, the intellectuals, are sitting on high and that everyone else listens to us and changes their behaviors accordingly."

That's why philosophy is useless and economics is not. If economics can show that some path of action is beneficial, people might well listen. Or at the very least, they might listen if you exploit that path yourself and get rich by it. Economics is not just a theoretical things, it is happening all around us.

"Can you give me a good, concrete, example of how you can use math to prove anything about society, without relying on assumptions about what is "good" or "right?"

I can recommend the book "Priniciples of Economics" by Gregory Mankiw, it is full of examples. I don't see why you would need assumptions about "good" or "right" at all? Also, check out many of the economics submissions on HN, there were some good ones. One interesting experiment was the one about freeloaders, and groups in which people could spend "money" to punish the freeloaders, vs groups in which they couldn't - one could eliminate the freeloaders problem, the other couldn't. That seems a very useful result, for example.

I am more an artificial life guy, one example that amused me was a simulation of agents eating a "sugar mountain", and a comparison of the "society" with and without tax (showing that agents ended up better off on average with taxes - the tax was evenly distributed among all agents). But that is a long way from practical application (I tried to find it, but Google let me down - it was from an artificial life professor in Amsterdam). Another thing is catastrophe simulation, where mass events are being simulated to discover dangerous areas during panic outbreaks for example in football stadions or pilgrimages to mekka. But these are just very specific examples - honestly, most economics textbooks are full of answers to the question you are asking.

"Do you even know economics? Have you taken any graduate courses in it?"

Uh - do you know economics? Sorry, but I think this is getting silly. You seem to put exaggerated emphasis on academic titles - I really thought people on HN were beyond that. To answer your question: no, I have not taken such courses, I have only read some books and articles. I don't claim to be an economist, either, but I think I have a sufficient idea of what it is all about. My own definition might deviate from the public opinion, for example I think evolution theory is also relevant for economics - and some parts of biology could as well be called economics.

""They can't prove their ideas all the way down to ZFC"

I don't think that is true in general."

Do you actually know?"

Have I personally verified every mathematical proof that has ever been published? No, as it is impossible and would not be very useful. Another silly question, I am sorry. I think you are just nitpicking. Of course mathematicians sometimes work with unproven concepts, but the concept of a proof is fairly established I should think. If a mathematician publishes something conceptual, they won't call it a proof (or at least it won't be accepted as such as long as the community has not verified it). Actually "proof theory" and "logic" was also my main subject in my maths degree - so at the very least, I am sure some mathematicians have a very precise idea of what a proof is, namely the ones doing "proof theory".

"For instance, the statement "God Exists" is not wrong, it's incoherent. Have you ever thought about it that way? What's god? What does it mean for an undefined entity to "exist?""

Now it is getting interesting, the failure to address such questions is exactly what disappoints me about philosophy. If you are saying post-modern philosophers are doing a better job with it, point me to a worthwhile book.

Although if you quote something like "like that we can't claim moral absolutes, they are culturally dependent, etc." I say why bother at all? Why not just do our economics calculations, ie "moral rule #1 would make one billion people unhappy and save one million lives, moral rule #2 would make 500 million people unhappy and save 500000 people's lives" and let society decide (I made it up, but for example moral rules about smoking could well have such statistics). Of course there is still an issue with physics, we don't know what it means that something exists, but why bother with metaphysics if "normal" physics already provides all the answers?

Edit: found the tax link: http://www.cs.vu.nl/%7Egusz/papers/Tax-and-evolution.ps

Dying is not easy to understand.

I notice a lot of commentary on lecture 23. Skip that. Read 16 onward. The meat of this whole thing is his really long treatment of the questions of why we fear death, what it is we fear, what about death is so bad, and what that suggests about how we should LIVE.

These are not new concepts, but it is easy to try to ignore them.

http://catalogs.rutgers.edu/generated/nb-ug_current/pg20657....

If there's no afterlife, death is to be hated intensely, but not feared at all, because no unpleasant experience will come from death itself, though the prelude may be terrible. In fact, the great casualty of materialism is not death but aging. Death becomes neutral, while aging becomes terrible, pointless, and ultimately disgusting. The fact that we're aging from the first moment of life makes materialism especially horrifying. No offense to the atheist materialists here, but I'd become severely depressed if I thought materialism were the case, because the omnipresence and inevitability of eventual bodily failure are rarely far from my mind.

If there is an afterlife, death is not to be hated, and possibly to be loved, but it is to be feared, because it marks a transition into a sort of existence we know nothing about. Many atheists who have near-death experiences describe an initial, liminal point of awareness, surprise, and fear. They anticipated eternal sleep in death, and yet experience a moment of awareness while being "dead", and this is shocking to them.

So it seems like exactly one of these two attitudes-- hatred, fear-- is appropriate for death. It seems like very few people can sustain the sort of metaphysical confidence that would prevent them from having one of these two attitudes; I think it's psychologically difficult to keep perfect faith. Death could be hated and feared by a person who anticipated a negative afterlife, but few people anticipate such a fate for themselves, and indeed this scenario seems far more unlikely than any of the alternatives (namely, a positive afterlife such as heaven, a neutral-positive one such as rebirth, or the dismal but ultimately neutral scenario of annihilation).

See the fruits of it in that page. Modern biology tells us the soul doesn't survive death any more than 'treeness' survives the fireplace. I suppose it's easier to read Plato than to study evolutionary psychology or game theory.

Uh, no.

Plato wasn't writing a textbook. You're not supposed to read it and accept it and be done. You're supposed to fight back with Socrates on every page, and this is the mental training that is supposed to make you able to be your own Socrates. As such, Plato seems really boring to most modern people who read it, since they're reading it wrong. "Why would Socrates say that? That's clearly wrong. Oh well, I guess he was dumb."

> Modern biology tells us the soul doesn't survive death any more than 'treeness' survives the fireplace.

I would be very interested in hearing any evidence that you could give to support these two assertions. In particular, I'm curious as to why you think the concept of a tree can be destroyed by destroying an individual tree. That seems like spooky action at a distance to me...

If you intend to teach critical thinking, I can think of 10 subjects off the top of my head that don't involve bronze-age concepts.

re: soul

I think you missed my meaning. I meant all thinking is a physical process that ends at death, same as the individual tree's cells stop working when you burn them. I dislike discussing it; this is so blindingly obvious (today) that it makes more sense to look at why they've made no progress in 2000 years.

So the bit about "treeness" was just rhetoric and not meant to do more than suggest an analogy.

It seems to me that when discussing Plato it doesn't make sense to gratuitously trash an idea related to Platonic thought if you have no intention of backing up that attack.

More importantly, in your case, those who think the classics are a waste of time are cretins.