Re: [Israel.pm] Mission Statement for a New Company based on Voluntarism-taken-to-Extreme

On Thu, Apr 12, 2007, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Re: [Israel.pm] [hackers-il] Mission Statement for a New Company based on Voluntarism-taken-to-Extreme":
> By becoming a full time philosopher who does nothing in real-life but think 
> and write, I'll lose my edge. Philosophy and insights come from experience 
> and from getting your hands dirty. You need to learn in order to experiment, 
> and you need to experiment in order to teach.

It is conceivable that some "outside-world" experience can give you a
philosophical idea. For example, Richard Stallman's "free software" ideas
(and ideals) came after some real experience with a real printer. Many ideas
of Peter Singer (the philsopher I mentioned in a previous mail) probably
came from his experiences in a world eating meat and (ab)using animals.

However, once you have idea, it takes time and effort to make it into a
well-polished theory, book, or whatever. You can't do that if you don't devote
a lot of time to it. I'm not saying that you need to devote to it all your
time, or even most of your time - but if you spend 30 minutes a day "blogging",
I seriously doubt your ideas will have a strong impact on the world..
If Richard Stallman continued to work full-time on coding Emacs, he wouldn't
have had the effect he has today. Conversely, Linus who concentrated on "dirty"
code-writing hardly had any effect at all on free-software philosophy.

One problem with your "philosophy" posts (and I hope you don't take this as
an insult, I'm not trying to insult you) is that you do *not* do enough fact
checking or thinking on your theories. You raise ideas which have been
discussed by many philosophers in the past, but you never heard of them or
read their books (or books about them). You raise ideas on how to run a
country which doesn't go well with existing history as we know it. You raise
ideas on the perfect job, when your commulatative job experience is just a
few months, and you never talked to other people to hear about their job
experiences.
If you spent time on *research* - finding the facts, reading what other
philosophers said, listening to what other people think, and so on - that
will make you a better philosopher. If you can't do that because your time
is spent doing something else (be it programming or raising a kid), well,
that will never make you a better philosopher, unfortunately.

At least this is how I see it.

> While education is important, your output is what matters, not what you've 
> earned. 

This is 100% right. So if one day you'll write a brilliant philosophical
essay, I'd say, hats off for that auto-deduct renaisance-man. But until
then, I can still try to make suggestions ;-)

> I have read many of Kant's conclusions - from you or otherwise. And I can 
> prove them to be wrong based on Logic and more basic assumptions. According 
> to Neo-Tech, everything of importance can be deduced from the biological 
> nature of men and women (and possibly some other natural laws and facts) and 
> using Logic. 

So basically, your argument is that since Neo-Tech is right, Kant must be
wrong. That would be a perfect proof, if only Neo-Tech was indeed right.
But how do you know it is? And what if neither of those two positions is
wrong, and Neo-Tech is only partially right, and Kant is also partially right?
And what does it mean to be "right" anyway? Philosophy isn't an exact science
like math or physics. You don't check a philosophical idea - which is a way
to look at the world - for correctness based on experiments; Nor can you
check them using just logic - because unlike mathematics, there is no fixed
set of "philosophical axioms" that everyone agrees with.

Just a small example, is it ethical to eat animals? Some say it is (like
probably Neo-Tech, since eating meat is in our biological design), some say
it isn't (like the aforementioned Peter Singer). There isn't a "right" answer.
The only thing that matters (to philosophers) is how you explain your answer,
and the assumptions you made during this explanation (the "axioms").
You can say "yes" with a good explanation, and you can say "no" with a good
explanation...

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Thursday, Apr 12 2007, 24 Nisan 5767
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