21 Comments
Apr 4, 2023Liked by Joseph Bronski

I wonder how much of this is high midwit hubris? I have about 125-130 IQ based on WAIS and ASVAB and I could maybe, with a lot of effort and headache and Khan academy teach myself to understand what all your mathematical equations mean but i understand you are smarter than me so I just skip all that and go to the verbal explanation at the end. I think these philosophers and NRX people just think because they are gifted kid learned how to read first smartest kid in elementary school smart they can understand all of reality all the time.

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Mar 25, 2023Liked by Joseph Bronski

Heidegger bit made me actually laugh out loud. What the hell does this shit even mean lmao.

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Most High-IQ societies at the top-end do have philosophers, but they are also mathematically inclined. They do in fact think in an abstract algebraic way when verbalizing their thoughts. Most papers are written by 110-135 IQ individuals (dependent on the original population) which is not sufficient enough to access powerful mathematical tools that would best encapsulate the precision of their thoughts (IQ 145+). Furthermore, academia is mostly about pushing papers, getting grants, getting political power nowadays -- it's just the nature of any institution that is human-made.

My counterargument would be modelling complex mathematical processes inside one's head is only one formulation of thought. The application of the operative-logical structure, its broader implications and effects is also necessitated. Having high working memory and high processing speed without abstraction capabilities is just as bad as a supercomputing human that is brute-forcing a problem without proper executive control over assigning where those resources are best utilized.

As Von Neumann has once said :

A facility with the symbolic manipulation of linear operators;

An intuitive feeling for the logical structure of any new mathematical theory;

An intuitive feeling for the combinatorial superstructure of new theories.

Most likely philosophers have (c) but whether they have (a) or (b) is not a given.

Dimensional reduction and abstraction is necessary (synthetic) but so is computational analysis (multi-variate analysis) (analytic). Without either, one can't perform integrative forms of thought.

Physicists are likely good with both, otherwise you just end up with equations but not knowing what they mean, or how they relate to the phenomenological space of reality.

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Imagine calling all philosophers and their thoughts "invalid". Ancient greek philosophers postulated the existence of the atom before modernity, and some argue even that of quantum uncertainty. Yeah, just through philosophy and words... Imagine that...

Schopenhauer is a heavy hitter (disliked by modern academic philosophers) who influenced many scientists and physicists (also other philosophers)... What type of influence? You have to read him yourself to understand it.

You seem to lack basic knowledge, about what modern physics says about reality. Most o the latest physics interpretations and explanations of the nature of reality default on metaphysics and philosophy.

Doubt you are a very deep thinker.

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Why're you using quantitative test scores as a measure for articulating or understanding truths, when the measure for that should obviously be g/IQ in general? That is like controlling for political ideology to measure political ideology and so on. In the GRE test (correlated with g like SAT) from which you took the scores above the philosopher majors aced the whole cohort and outdid both Math and Psyhics majors. https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/11/28/converting-the-new-gre-to-iq/

Furthermore, you use some bullshit/bad philosophy to somehow prove philosophy as invalid when in any given medium whatever is expressed ought to be measured for its consistency, and say that as math is more consistent, it is more "valid." Math as a language of expression was designed to be consistent, whereas linguistic expression which we use for daily interactions developed organically, leading to ambiguities. One can express in math observational truths localised for specific data more consistently, hence eliminating bad woke bullshit that can slip through the cracks but this means nothing for its ability to hold everything in one coherent idea/narrative/meta-structure, for which you'd need math and language together.

And again, the issue comes back to your inability to understand what philosophy is or how to distinguish good philosophy from the bad ones, which I may attribute to your -assumed- low verbal intellect etc. But it does not change that philosophy as a major -even after all this woke bs- is still very heavily g-loaded and continues to score close to math and psyhics.

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This is magnificent. Well done. Poor old Heidegger - perhaps he meant ‘pissed on’ when he wrote ‘pieced on’.

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My spellchecker offers delouse for Deleuze

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Factually based and that's say that someone who doesn't use neither is good at equations, I need to learn some maths beyond division and multiplication

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I disagree with the social power thing, it's probably utterly garbage. The Generalizability Crisis (Yarkoni) pretty much has shredded most of these behavior/sociological/psych papers. But the rest of this essay is gold.

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It'd be interesting to see you review Morris Kline's book Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty

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Rousseau (strong on biology) and Hobbes (strong on economics) at least make for good philosophers.

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Philosophy is poetry

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