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

Hi Nadav!

Please don't take it the wrong way, but I think that following my refute of 
your claims, you have evaded them, and instead of saying that you stand 
corrected, you tried to amend them. But I'll reply to them just in case.

On Thursday 12 April 2007, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> 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.
>

Are you kidding? Linus had a huge effect. A lot of what he says has been very 
influential. He's often being quoted. He is a wonderful humourist and has 
provided a lot of balance to free software by not holding the radical 
opinions that RMS does. And he projected the project of writing the Linux 
kernel which is currently the most advanced open-source kernel and the one 
used by the most popular free software OS.

From reading Linus, I think he's both extremely intelligent and extremely 
wise. RMS, OTOH is very idealistic, very stubborn and completely unable to 
distiniguish between the two. I often found value in what RMS said, but I 
believe I usually agree with what Linus or other people like Tim O'Reilly say 
more.

> 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. 

That may be true.

> 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. 

History can often be interpreted in a misleading way. Some people claim that 
the pre-depression USA was a counter-example for why Laissez-Faire Capitalism 
does not work, but it wasn't LFC by a long shot. Some people claim that the 
situation of the Negros in the USA was improved by the regulation, but for 
all we know it could have been better without it and with a public, 
voluntary, action on part of the Black people and the people who supported 
them.

> You 
> raise ideas on the perfect job, when your commulatative job experience is
> just a few months, 

Actually my commulatative job experience is a few years.

> and you never talked to other people to hear about their 
> job experiences.

I have in fact. On IRC, on Email, in real-life, etc.

Please stop making wrong generalisations about me.

> 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.
>

I could find facts. But I believe a philosopher has an artistic licence to 
publish an essay without much fact checking. Just because he has this idea. 
As you may know, I publish a lot of mini-essays on my blogs, because I have a 
good idea, and don't want to form it into a good essay on my site (or don't 
feel its scope justifies that), and instead just publish it there for 
everybody to read.

> 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 think many of my philosophical essays are good. Most of them are not about 
philosophy proper ("What is existence?", "Is the meta-variable nature of the 
presence of multi-purpose individualism beneficial for the collective state 
of mind?"[1]) but rather about applicative philosophy.

If you're claiming I should invest more time in researching my essays, that 
may be true, and I can agree with that. However, if you're claiming I should 
get a Ph.D. in Philosophy, just to be able to call myself a philsopher - it's 
not something I can agree with.

A good engineer is any person who is competent at doing engineering work, not 
necessarily someone who has a degree in an engineering field. Similarly, a 
philosopher may not have studied philosophy in university. I believe my 
experience as a software developer, a student for Electrical Engineering in 
the Technion, a K12 student, a writer of humourous stories, bits and 
aphorisms, a writer and giver of presentations, a blogger, etc. give me 
enough credit to call myself a philosopher. And I certainly have more in my 
arsenal than most people with a B.A. in philosophy.

{{{{{{{{
[1] - Don't ask me what the latter question mean.
}}}}}}}}

>
> > 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's not what I said. You completely mis-interpreted me. What I said was 
that given several of Kant's conclusions, I could disprove them based on some 
more basic assumptions and Logic. Nothing that has to do with Neo-Tech. I 
don't know how Kant reached his conclusions, but since the conclusions are 
wrong, I can assume his reasoning was wrong too. (Or else Logic, which is the 
tool for non-contradictory identification, is useless.)

> 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? 

I have some things I disagree with the core Neo-Tech documentation, or think 
they should be corrected.  I also have many extensions or corrections to 
Neo-Tech. And I think some of the strategy that Neo-Tech took was wrong. 
However, that doesn't make me any less of a N-Ter, because in N-T people 
think for themselves, guide themselves, and philosophise for themselves.

> 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.
>

Due to the liberty of speech anyone can utter the greatest stupidity, and it 
is his right to do it. However, it is also my right to claim that he's 
speaking non-sense, or even trying to voice a bad philosophy in order to do 
harm. I believe that like Math, we can make a deduction about reality, 
humans, societies, etc.

For example, many people assume that altruism, the belief that humans must or 
should subject themselves to "higher causes" in order to live is good. 
However, then Ayn Rand asked "Why?" - give me a good reason why. And you 
cannot answer. 

JFK said <<< Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do 
for your country. >>>. There's also <<< Social good is superior to personal 
good. >>> . That was a slogan of the German Nazi party. (and no, Godwin's Law 
is not invoked here.)

Imagine what would happen if a vast majority of the people of the countries 
surrounding Germany before WWII were armed with firearms. Wouldn't history be 
completely different?

> 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...

If you tell me Peter Singer's reasoning, I may be able to detect some flaws in 
it. I can accept any philosophy as a philosophy, but I also reserve the right 
to claim it is false, invalid and illogical. Otherwise, we might as well 
agree that for each A, both A and Not-A are true, and being omni-knowing not 
say anything later on.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif-ik1l9ssToec+JF/[email protected]
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

If it's not in my E-mail it doesn't happen. And if my E-mail is saying
one thing, and everything else says something else - E-mail will conquer.
    -- An Israeli Linuxer


 
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