Why so many smart people dismiss philosophy?

>There’s no doubt that Bill Nye “the Science Guy” is extremely intelligent.
>....
>extremely intelligent
>only has B.Sc.

>pop science people
>smart

Because philosophy has been outdated and people who pride themselves in the intelligence that allowed them to succeed in technical fields despise philosophers who pride themselves for the same reason... but nothing to show for it.

Allow me to elaborate:

I study mathematics. To get where I am I have had to deeply question my own knowledge of my knowledge, but I did so with a purpose and in a concrete context.

When facing a problem in number theory you always need to know how much you know but you also need to have technical concrete knowledge that will allow you to prove an interesting proposition.

On the other hands philosophers just ask questions for the sake of asking questions. There is no purpose or context in what they do and yet they think themselves to be smart.

There are people who would not ever be able to even pass a calculus class because they are too stupid for it. But there is no one would not be able to pass a philosophy class. There is no technical knowledge needed for philosophy, you just memorize positions and arguments and then write corny essays with all the buzzwords your 'Philosophy Buzzwords 101' class taught you.

It is absolutely insane and I really hope society grows to see philosophers as the true anti intellectuals and retards they actually are.

>>There are people who would not ever be able to even pass a calculus class because they are too stupid for it. But there is no one would not be able to pass a philosophy class
That doesn't sound right

>philosophy has been outdated
>understanding has been outdated
i see... that's explain why modern science is a huge mess.

Philosophy isn't relevant anymore

In calculus you also need to be able to make arguments but if your brain is too simple to be able to do the most complex computations you will be left behind in your first test about derivatives.

For philosophy you only need to be able to write arguments, and that is why I consider it an inferior topic.

If you think that philosophy strictly equals understanding then you absolutely retarded.

I already explained how in technical fields you need to question your own understanding in the same way philosophers pretend they do. You do not have a monopoly in knowledge.

But you do have a monopoly in absolute bullshit.

>calculus
>complex computations
Oh my!

>Implying you never saw morons in your first year who could not even do implicit differentiation

I am just giving examples of how people fall short even at the most trivial topics in mathematics because you need much more than just "thinking deeply xD"

First of all, IQ is an outdated concept. Poor indicator of intelligence, worst indicator of scientific success.
I do agree with your point of view, but I don't agree with your dismissive argument about philosophy.
I think that philosophy was a great subject to study 400 years ago when science was not compartmentalized. In those days, philosophers were also physicists, mathematicians, and engineers so they had the technical knowledge to take those questions forward.
I also believe that questions about the reality are moot. As billy Nye said, question if what we feel is really real doesn't takes us anywhere. Doesn't improve scientific knowledge.

>IQ is an outdated concept
Replaced by what?

"Einstein discovered that there’s no such thing as absolute simultaneity, for example, while quantum physics shows that an object can be in two places at the same time. "
The author says that stem people don't know what they are talking about when the topic is philosophy and doesn't even take the time to fact check the simplest argument of modern physics.

>I do agree with your point of view, but I don't agree with your dismissive argument about philosophy.

Well obviously philosophy was useful back in the dark ages. Not anymore though.

The philososperg in the video was asking about philosophy TO AN ENGINEER. Engineers are people who pride themselves in how useful they are to society and how every small bit of their knowledge can be applied in the real world.

That is like asking a KKK member about how much he likes black people ffs.

Philosofags are just mad that they were outdated long ago.

In my opinion there is a fundamental flaw with philosophers when compared with STEM people:

STEM people want to be smart while philosophers want only to be seen as smart.

This is why no one who studies STEM will ever respect a philososperg. Not one bit.

Do you live in the 50's?

.
wrong password:
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su@computer$

Answer the question or fuck off

$ rm -rf ~/

"STEM people want to be smart while philosophers want only to be seen as smart."
I can tell you about my own experience, I just want to earn money and do my projects in peace.
Of course I want to be respected by my peers, but this idea of who is smarter is so petty and senseless.

>be humanitiesfag
>constantly encounter the outer fringes of maths in a hundred different branches of philosophy, from analytics to metaphysics
>be amazed by the mystical potential of maths being the language of reality itself
>be slightly in awe of STEMfags and assume they tap into this majesty through hard work, and humanitiesfags like me are missing out
>start learning maths
>it's fucking tough
>get to the point where I can just barely understand higher order university-level stuff
>eagerly start talking to esteemed, visionary, world-famous mathematicians at my university
>mfw I realize they are all complete, intuitive materialists in their outlook
>mfw they don't grasp an iota of the mystical or metaphysical aspects of higher maths
>mfw they don't even really understand what the concreteness of mathematical laws imply, and spend most of their time playing at meaningless quantitative number puzzles
>mfw even professional scientists are childlike retards who are genuinely content with puerile, reductionist accounts of the nature of reality
>mfw the vast majority of high level STEM people are ignorant of other branches of their own field, let alone other fields or disciplines altogether
>mfw the luminaries of STEM are the biggest reservoir of literally autistic toy collectors in the world
>mfw the vast majority are just average dumb normalfags aside from their single hyper-focused academic specialty
>mfw they don't read books (at all)
>mfw it is actually staggering how stupid they are in every single respect other than knowing one specific kind of maths really well
>mfw totally disillusioned
>mfw realising after all that work that maths isn't even the language of reality but a closed and self-referential puzzlebox for autistic fucking faggots

>>mfw they don't grasp an iota of the mystical or metaphysical aspects of higher maths

>mystical or metaphysical aspects of higher maths

Stopped reading right there. Back to Veeky Forums you fucking autist.

I do not know what test substituted the IQ test. It is a consensus that IQ test don't reflect the potential of a person in live.
Sure, I'm not denying that people have - what you consider intelligence- more develop than others. Nor I am denying the existence of child geniuses.
What I'm saying is that none of this means anything. Einstein was a moron when he was a kid.
Most of the current scientist today do their research because of determination and curiosity not because they are smart than anyone. You don't get accepted anywhere because of your IQ test. Even your grades won't matter when you can't work with the professors of the department and don't know how to "play" their game.
I had a college that was the "smartest" guy I ever knew. While everybody were struggling to learn something he was questioning the professor about thing we didn't even knew existed. He graduated before everyone but he was an asshole. Really annoying and was a pain in the ass to work with. I think he believe to be smart than us and even the professors. Long story short, he was passed to a permanent position at the department while a few friends and myself (who was always a C student) got at due time our professorships.

>I had a college that was the "smartest" guy I ever knew. While everybody were struggling to learn something he was questioning the professor about thing we didn't even knew existed. He graduated before everyone but he was an asshole. Really annoying and was a pain in the ass to work with. I think he believe to be smart than us and even the professors. Long story short, he was passed to a permanent position at the department while a few friends and myself (who was always a C student) got at due time our professorships.
>a few friends and myself (who was always a C student) got at due time our professorships.

Repeating things that you read somewhere else thread?

>who was always a C student
what?

if you don't indulge yourself in both, you're a brainlet, no exceptions

Fuck off, sea lion.

What am I supposed to do if this is the reality of academia?

>First of all, IQ is an outdated concept. Poor indicator of intelligence, worst indicator of scientific success.
I know Veeky Forums isn't a hivemind, but sometimes I get the feeling people in here change their opinion on this whenever it suits their need. E.g. suddenly pretending IQ is legit when you can use it to your advantage in an IQ dickwaving contest.

Similar to how people shit on biology but defend it and evolution whenever they can't resist debating creationists.

Most of the criticism of philosophy that I read has to do with philosophy not contributing to science or not making progress like science or not employing as rigorous a methodology as science. People making this kind of criticism have no idea what the purpose of philosophy is. Philosophy, in one sentence, is the attempt to solve problems that are not amenable to empirical investigation. When you can't use empirical observation to solve a problem, the only tool you have left is reason. It is because of this that philosophy progresses differently to science. Philosophy can't prove things wrong with experimentation, so it progresses by amassing new arguments and new reasons about topics.

I'm a STEMfag and I am always astounded by the amount of hubris shown by many of my peers. I love science as much as anyone but I am willing to accept that a large number of philosophical assumptions have to be made before you can start any scientific endeavour.

The example Bill Nye the developmentally disabled guy gives is that philosophy questions the nature of reality so undermines science. He fails to recognise that even if reality is an illusion, there is still value in studying it.

empiricism is philosophy

>rogresses by amassing new arguments and new reasons about topics.
Give some examples that happened in the last 20 years

Feyerabend is love, Feyerabend is life.

brainlet confirmed

Benatar, David (2006). Better Never to Have Been. Oxford University Press, USA.

>brainlet confirmed cause I don't follow the literature progress in a field unrelated to my interests

I'm not gonna read a whole book, what's the progress?

David Chalmers is a philosopher I like who has done a lot of work on consciousness. Here's a link to his papers:

consc.net/papers.html

Can you summarise some of the advancements that he pushed?

Sam Harris solved philosophy.

Add Feynman to the right side of that pic if you don't want to make it too obvious that you are cherrypicking.

>I'm not gonna read A WHOLE BOOK
brainlet confirmed 2.0

are you asking me whether an arguement has been advanced or not in the last 20 years?
brainlet confirmed 2.1

kek

The progress is in the form of new ideas and perspectives and conceptual tools. Each individual has to make up their own mind concerning philosophical topics because without observation nothing can be proven wrong. But the more perspectives we have at our disposal the better we'll be able to make up our own minds.

Feynman didn't dismiss philosophy, though.

youtube.com/watch?v=X8aWBcPVPMo
There also his "philosophy of science is as useful to as scientist as ornithology is to birds" quote, him calling philosophy "baloney" etc.
And to quote Feyerabend:
>The withdrawal of philosophy into a "professional" shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth – and this is the fault of the very same idea of professionalism which you are now defending

But to be fair, maybe he was more dismissive towards professional philosophers than philosophy itself.

He developed and explicitly stated the "hard problem" of consciousness. He makes a distinction between the "easy" problems, like explaining how the brain can produce certain behaviors, and the hard problem of explaining how physical stuff can give rise to first person experience.

Science cannot answer moral questions.

I have literally NEVER ONCE EVER referenced A SINGLE THING in philosophy EVER in undergrad, grad, or post grad.

It is totally and completely irrelevant to everything in the academic world outside of itself. "New ideas and perspectives and conceptual tools" means exactly jack fucking shit if nobody in the whole world outside of your field ever uses them.

Morality is a human made up concept. Ask a crocodile tearing up an innocent zebra about what right and wrong means.

Philosophy is the exploration of the most fundamental questions. It is the most meta discipline. A physicist asks what we know about the universe, and a philosopher asks what knowledge even is. A mathematician asks what is true of numbers and other mathematical objects, while a philosopher asks what mathematical objects are and what is their relationship to physical reality.

You mean the same way that an electrician doesn't reference scientific papers after fitting light fixtures?

>Ask a crocodile tearing up an innocent zebra about what right and wrong means.

I'm not a fucking animal which lives purely on instincts.

Veeky Forums is not the right place to ask this question, just like it is not the best idea ask a physicist or engineer or anyone without formal studies in philosophy about it.

I'll give my opinion as a guy who majored in both philosophy and mathematics, but now studies cognitive neuroscience. I think I'm familiar enough with both sides.

1. Philosophy is in the very same position that has always been. Pushing questions in order to show the premises implicit in different disciplines, and I think, often showing successfully that the reasons given are not enough to hold certain viewpoint - ethical, political, or even scientific or logical. It is to expect an experts will not be happy when a philosopher push questions to him which he is unable to answer about the grounds of his discipline. This has been going on since ancient greek, just remember Socrates death and the very close death of Aristotle due to similar reasons. Across history we will find many examples of the same behaviour towards philosophy, so there is new about recent criticism about it - in more than 2000 years of criticism against philosophy is hard to heard anything new. It's also unlikely it will stop, unless philosophy stop asking question, in such case, philosophy will be dead.

2. Philosophy has changed like most humanities and sciences. I don't think I would be extremely wrong if I say that philosophy has become a collection meta-theories about different disciplines. Is it needed? Maybe not. But it is hard to dismiss it with the raise of an eyebrow since, again, this is how philosophy has always been treated, and when looking back at history it has proved to be not useless. Even for scientific progress, if you wish, philosophical inquiries the precisely close to scientific ones have pushed new scientific concepts. Michael Friedman, has shown some interesting aspects of that in Kant and The Exact Sciences, and in Kant Construction of Nature (for example, Kant's answer to the Newton-Leibniz about space)

Or simply you're talking with different people.

As a guy who studies philosophy now and is studying science for fun in my spare time I have to disagree.

Whilst the majority of philosophy students are actual idiots, incapable of arguing without committing fallacious arguments, there are some of us who are not. The most famous philosophers, the ones considered the best or smartest, often had interests in and studied other fields.

Philosophy utilises logic and reason in an open discourse in an effort to find truth and ideas about the universe. Whilst unlike maths or physics it will not produce any equations or evidence of the objective universe, philosophy primarily focuses on the questions that concern morality and humanity.

Any claim that a subject has importance also requires a subjective reason. Maths or physics is no more important than philosophy. Nothing objectively matters, since reason as we know it is a consequence of how we see the world.

The claim that anyone can pass a philosophy exam is also wrong. It requires an extensive knowledge of the field and ideas. Any argument that is not concrete will be ripped to shreds by all those around you. Philosophy relies on logic and reason.

That all being said, I fucking hate most people on my course since they know little about philosophy and far less about most other subjects. They are mostly all communists, Marxists, or socialists.

Cars are a made up human concept. Ask a zebra running what the difference between a Chevy and a Ford is.

TIL electricians are academics.

Ever notice how every academic field overlaps and shares information EXCEPT for philosophy?

For example: Biophysics, Biochemistry, Chemical Physics, Chemical Engineering, Engineering Physics?

How come there isn't Philosophical Engineering? Why can't I get a degree in Philosophysics?

Because Philosophy has NOTHING of use to say in any of the real scientific fields.

>philosophy and science are rivals
>one can replace the other
>mfw

Yes you are. "Morality" is just what we evolved to think because cooperation is beneficial, and those groups of humans that couldn't cooperate were out competed. There's no deeper meaning than that.

>electricians are academics

9/10 people who aren't sparky shocks spaz monkeys disagree.

I think that philosophy can have a positive effect on the progress of scientific disciplines, at least hypothetically. Take quantum mechanics for example. The philosophical interpretation of the mathematics of quantum mechanics to produce a "quantum worldview" might make the quantum world more intuitive and hence aid in further discoveries and insights.

Philosophy, at least as it relates to science, is about understanding our understanding. And for the most part this is not immediately beneficial to scientific progress. If you're not interested in having a meta-awareness of our understanding of scientific disciplines then there's nothing I can say to make you interested.

>All human behaviours work in the best interests of their continued survival.

Not a biologist, are you?

Electricians are tradesmen you dope. If you can't even understand the basic difference between a tradesman and an academic, please self ban yourself from this forum.

Literal autism.

>The philosophical interpretation of the mathematics of quantum mechanics to produce a "quantum worldview" might make the quantum world more intuitive and hence aid in further discoveries and insights.
> might make the quantum world more intuitive and hence aid in further discoveries and insights.
> might make the quantum world more intuitive
>might make
>might
>might

So after all this time and progress that physicists have made studying quantum mechanics, philosophers are STILL sitting here with their thumbs up their asses saying they "might" make a contribution in the future????????

Yes I'm sure playing video games is about evolution.

TIL you have to be a biologist to understand something so incredibly simple. You think there's a metaphysical "morality" that exists outside the physical world?

Philosophy is like an axiom. Without it you wouldn't be able to prove theorems, i.e. do science, but the most interesting insights come from the theorems.

How?

There might be a deeper meaning if there is something in the universe that is intrinsically valuable. Ethics is the study of what constitutes the right ways to act and why. If there is something that is valuable, the right way to act is whatever way increases what is valuable.

There is a difference between the scientific explanation of how we developed altruism and social rules on one hand, and what may be objectively true about ethical action on the other.

(comment too long, cont'd)

3. Progress in philosophy. This question has been often dismissed by philosophers just like a scientists would do if someone ask him about the progress of science.
I think Pigliucci, who has done work both in biology and philosophy wrote an excellent series of entries in his blog, that I'd rather leave there instead of leaving my much worse opinion on the matter.

platofootnote.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/progress-in-philosophy-i/
platofootnote.wordpress.com/2016/05/17/progress-in-philosophy-ii/
platofootnote.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/progress-in-philosophy-iii/
platofootnote.wordpress.com/2016/05/19/progress-in-philosophy-iv/
platofootnote.wordpress.com/2016/05/20/progress-in-philosophy-v/

5. In the end, it doesn't really matter, because there isn't a serious discussion going on. Science vs Philosophy ramblings are leaded by the very same people who spend their time debating creationists. It appeals to the laymen, but the arguments are straightforward and nothing that has not been said before.
Bill Nye & friends are people, and they are entitled to have and give any opinion they are asked to give. We have often see physicists talking about politics on tv, and the show considerable ignorance on the topics. Their opinions are not to be taken seriously when they talk about something they clearly know nothing.
Nobody in the academia take those people too seriously, often, not even in their own disciplines, let alone others they do not know.

>IQ is an outdated concept. Poor indicator of intelligence, worst indicator of scientific success.
is this even true? any books disputing IQ that i should read?

>The example Bill Nye the developmentally disabled guy

This made me laugh really hard at work and everyone is staring

the fuck is TIL

>browsing Veeky Forums at work

reddit meme

science and philosophy are irreversibly intertwined, they build on each other, to discredit the respective other would indicate a very poor comprehension

Again, the purpose of philosophy is not to make scientific progress. Philosophy answers questions not open to empirical observation, science answers problems that are open to empirical observation. Your argument reduces to "philosophy isn't science, therefore philosophy is bad".

The thing that is "valuable" is called persistence. Organisms that assign value to having their genes persist in the universe are naturally more likely to be found simply because they try to propagate their genes. Populations which behave in a way more likely to increase the propagation of their genes (cooperation) are still more likely to persist.

"Morality" comes from cooperation. There is no "intrinsic right or wrong" in the universe.

How old are you? It's ok if you don't want to answer, but it's not a troll question. Nice detailed post by the way, it's not often that we come across those here on sci.

Oh no, not your home directory!
Not the user you're replying to, but I interpreted him saying "smart" more as "having useful knowledge" i.e. STEM people want to have knowledge while philosophers only want to be considered to have knowledge.

I still disagree with this idea though. I think that both genuinely desire to have knowledge, however philosophers pursue that goal entirely wrong.

>Poor indicator of intelligence, worst indicator of scientific success.
IQ is nowadays considered the most accurate measure of intelligence.
Success is a completely different matter, and bears no relation with has has been said at
For the record, philosophers who specialize in logic, philosophy of logic/mathematics or philosophy of science, need to take courses in those areas and study them thoroughly. No need to say that it's a different matter if someone specialize in ethics or a different branch...

Explain how science is built by philosophy.

24.

TIL autists cannot grasp irony, at all.

So you believe that morality is a subjective phenomenon that needs to be discussed. If only there was a field that tackled that.

>Philosophy answers questions not open to empirical observation

>Religion answers questions not open to empirical observation

ftfy

How come so young and you've studied all of those things?

You haven't read any of the philosophy on this topic.

>So you believe that morality is a subjective phenomenon that needs to be discussed.

I actually said the exact opposite of that. Apparently they don't teach you how to read in philosophy course work.

Religion relies on the noting of faith and revelation, philosophy uses reason.

...

>that needs to be discussed.
>user called it "incredibly simple"

...