5 ms·

The Philosophy of Computer Science

205 points by agreen 9y ago

freedomben 9y ago
Gotta say, I've never ever considered "the Ontology of Programs" or "The Epistemological Status of Computer Science" before. I'm trying to keep an open mind here, but I do wonder if some academics are really stretching to justify the latest grant money.
- fabianhjr 9y ago
  > Ontology of programs The presuppositions of programs or to program Example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0602053v3.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0602053v3.pdf > The epistemological status of computer science Do Neural Nets learn or memorize? What's the difference and how do we know what Neural Nets do? Example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.05394.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.05394.pdf
  - bgibson 9y ago
    Or one of my personal favorites, the Epistemology of Computer Simulations in Science: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simulations-science/#EpiComSim https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simulations-science/#EpiC...
  - freedomben 9y ago
    Comparing and contrasting how computers think and learn compared to us certainly is an interesting idea. I tend to think of myself as epistemologically agnostic, but not for lack of trying. I haven't kept up to speed on neural net development, do there could be some fascinating insights there. Thanks for the links. I'll definitely check this out.
- archgoon 9y ago
  Are you posting your opinion for Grant money? Or are there other things that motivate people to think about things and express their opinion? There is no need to disparage people who geek out about edge cases in classification systems.
  - freedomben 9y ago
    I don't think I've disparaged anyone here. Being skeptical is one of the oldest traditions in philosophy. If one can't handle skepticism, they are in the wrong field.
    - badcede 9y ago
      Laziness is not skepticism.
zengid 9y ago
Honest question: is this useful?
- themodelplumber 9y ago
  Sure: It's designed, like any qualitative model, to yield leverage. Know the laws, understand the principles, and soon you can pull off something amazing. Maybe it guides you into a career path within the broad field of CS, or perhaps you use the principles as metaphor-templates for your personal CS education. "In what way could this Hello World program be described as a mathematical object? Is it an axiomatic theory? What is that?" etc. What I find problematic about the design here, however, is that it is overly referential at the cost of direct information transfer to the reader. Rather than communicate a logical chain of thought regarding a principle, it communicates that such-and-such a thing is thought by so-and-so to be a this-or-that. It seems to have been produced within a system that prioritizes thought-originator-referencing. Which would be fine except I'd imagine that most people who read "The Philosophy of Computer Science" probably aren't expecting what seems a lot like an extended bibliography.
  - nikki93 9y ago
    Aren’t names always referential, in the sense of refering to a meaning or in the abstract, some memory or experience, or even future experiences, that an interpreter has/is/will have? So is the issue you point out that the names are heavily loaded and proper nouns? And how is that at the cost of information transfer (one might argue it transfers more information since you are sending “heavy words” which decompress to a lot of content under a “lookup”)?
    - themodelplumber 9y ago
      > direct information transfer
      - nikki93 9y ago
        Well, all information transfer involves indirection by name, so what you’re getting at is that this lies on a spectrum where the words use are “heavy” and involve lookups where the definitions aren’t in the reader’s cache already? I’m pointing to a parallel here for similar “lookups” in the interpretation of a program by computer ... so maybe the issue is the programs analogous to the way this page is written involve like far network fetches.
neokantian 9y ago
The really interesting philosophies emerge from the trenches and the battles in the field. For example, the most surprising meta-level insights on randomness come from Nassim Taleb's decade-long experience in trading securities. What he writes, is truly striking. The article in the link, however, make no reference to such real-world starting points. It fails to emerge from the very practical. It does not gradually abstract away details in order to arrive at surprising insights at the meta-level. The verifiable path is simply gone. It is much more an example in the art of mediocre teaching. I personally think that it is a useless read.
- GuiA 9y ago
  I am completely unfamiliar with Taleb, this is a genuine question - does he have any work that is accepted as academic philosophy? Just hearing coworkers/friends/etc talk about him, I thought he just wrote books for a general audience.
  - sjg007 9y ago
    Yes. I mean wikipedia answers it for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
    - GuiA 9y ago
      That article provides little to no insight as to how his work has been incorporated within academic philosophy. It does provide a brief "Selection of papers" section, all of them in finance and statistical mechanics, so my original question remains. The answer might be “his work hasn’t really intersected with academic philosophy”, that’s fine, I’m just curious to hear about it from people who have done more than read a Wikipedia page about him.
  - ssivark 9y ago
    I don't think Taleb has engaged with academic philosophers. He prefers to portray himself as someone grounded in empiricism, and talks down "intellectual-yet-idiot" academics who lose the forest for the trees, in loving their flawed simplifications/abstractions more than the reality they are trying to model [1]. A lot of his ire is directed at economists' over-reliance on flawed mathematical assumptions (particularly relating to modeling randomness), and more broadly, academics in the less empirically grounded fields. I take his principal point to be that the modern approach to decision making under uncertainty (due to being neither theoretically nor empirically rigorous) is just a bunch of fashionable nonsense that has displaced several useful traditional/folk thumb rules which might superficially appear to conflict with the modern scientific models, but represent valuable insights won through hard experience. Most of his writing/speaking directed at a general audience is polemical, and often feels like he is ranting, so YMMV. If you're interested in getting a quick flavor of his work, try his talk at the National Science Foundation [2]. FWIW, several of Taleb's key points expound on some statements by Hume [3] and Seneca [4], so he does value certain works/ideas nominally considered philosophy. [1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577 https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e... (Taleb shares several of his articles/book-excerpts on Medium) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omsYJBMoIJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omsYJBMoIJU [3] https://philosophynow.org/issues/69/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb https://philosophynow.org/issues/69/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4MhC5tcEv0&feature=youtu.be&t=150 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4MhC5tcEv0&feature=youtu.be... PS: Having written this comment on HN makes me feel very weird, stating (my understanding of) the opinions of some particular person, but I just felt like responding to a sincere question.
dvddgld 9y ago
Props to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, it’s perhaps the best general resource on philosophy on the web
- GuiA 9y ago
  It’s a great example of what an editorialized online encyclopedia can be. Would love to learn about other such resources for other fields.
  - dvddgld 9y ago
    Me too! If anyone has any fantastic niche web encyclopaedia links, link away!
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Great article and discussion on it here for anyone trying to build something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10266103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10266103
- lainon 9y ago
  Note that there's also the "Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy" which is, such as the SEP, written by professional Philosophers. http://www.iep.utm.edu/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/
  - dvddgld 9y ago
    They definitely deserve a shout-out too, these two resources happily got me through a couple of undergrad philosophy electives!
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is definitely a step up from Wikipedia's coverage of philosophy, but it comes from a strong and pretty obvious Analytic point of view. For coverage from other points of view (which arguably give more accurate and informed accounts of non-analytic philosophy), you have to resort to classes or books.
tjgillies 9y ago
Portland State offers PhD in Philosophy of Computer Science https://www.pdx.edu/computer-science/doctor-of-philosophy-in-computer-science https://www.pdx.edu/computer-science/doctor-of-philosophy-in...
- jswrenn 9y ago
  PhD = Doctor of Philosophy This is just a normal PhD in Computer Science.

205 points by agreen 9y ago

Gotta say, I've never ever considered "the Ontology of Programs" or "The Epistemological Status of Computer Science" before. I'm trying to keep an open mind here, but I do wonder if some academics are really stretching to justify the latest grant money.

fabianhjr 9y ago
> Ontology of programs The presuppositions of programs or to program Example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0602053v3.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0602053v3.pdf > The epistemological status of computer science Do Neural Nets learn or memorize? What's the difference and how do we know what Neural Nets do? Example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.05394.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.05394.pdf
- bgibson 9y ago
  Or one of my personal favorites, the Epistemology of Computer Simulations in Science: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simulations-science/#EpiComSim https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simulations-science/#EpiC...
- freedomben 9y ago
  Comparing and contrasting how computers think and learn compared to us certainly is an interesting idea. I tend to think of myself as epistemologically agnostic, but not for lack of trying. I haven't kept up to speed on neural net development, do there could be some fascinating insights there. Thanks for the links. I'll definitely check this out.
archgoon 9y ago
Are you posting your opinion for Grant money? Or are there other things that motivate people to think about things and express their opinion? There is no need to disparage people who geek out about edge cases in classification systems.
- freedomben 9y ago
  I don't think I've disparaged anyone here. Being skeptical is one of the oldest traditions in philosophy. If one can't handle skepticism, they are in the wrong field.
  - badcede 9y ago
    Laziness is not skepticism.

zengid 9y ago

Honest question: is this useful?

themodelplumber 9y ago
Sure: It's designed, like any qualitative model, to yield leverage. Know the laws, understand the principles, and soon you can pull off something amazing. Maybe it guides you into a career path within the broad field of CS, or perhaps you use the principles as metaphor-templates for your personal CS education. "In what way could this Hello World program be described as a mathematical object? Is it an axiomatic theory? What is that?" etc. What I find problematic about the design here, however, is that it is overly referential at the cost of direct information transfer to the reader. Rather than communicate a logical chain of thought regarding a principle, it communicates that such-and-such a thing is thought by so-and-so to be a this-or-that. It seems to have been produced within a system that prioritizes thought-originator-referencing. Which would be fine except I'd imagine that most people who read "The Philosophy of Computer Science" probably aren't expecting what seems a lot like an extended bibliography.
- nikki93 9y ago
  Aren’t names always referential, in the sense of refering to a meaning or in the abstract, some memory or experience, or even future experiences, that an interpreter has/is/will have? So is the issue you point out that the names are heavily loaded and proper nouns? And how is that at the cost of information transfer (one might argue it transfers more information since you are sending “heavy words” which decompress to a lot of content under a “lookup”)?
  - themodelplumber 9y ago
    > direct information transfer
    - nikki93 9y ago
      Well, all information transfer involves indirection by name, so what you’re getting at is that this lies on a spectrum where the words use are “heavy” and involve lookups where the definitions aren’t in the reader’s cache already? I’m pointing to a parallel here for similar “lookups” in the interpretation of a program by computer ... so maybe the issue is the programs analogous to the way this page is written involve like far network fetches.

neokantian 9y ago

The really interesting philosophies emerge from the trenches and the battles in the field. For example, the most surprising meta-level insights on randomness come from Nassim Taleb's decade-long experience in trading securities. What he writes, is truly striking. The article in the link, however, make no reference to such real-world starting points. It fails to emerge from the very practical. It does not gradually abstract away details in order to arrive at surprising insights at the meta-level. The verifiable path is simply gone. It is much more an example in the art of mediocre teaching. I personally think that it is a useless read.

GuiA 9y ago
I am completely unfamiliar with Taleb, this is a genuine question - does he have any work that is accepted as academic philosophy? Just hearing coworkers/friends/etc talk about him, I thought he just wrote books for a general audience.
- sjg007 9y ago
  Yes. I mean wikipedia answers it for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
  - GuiA 9y ago
    That article provides little to no insight as to how his work has been incorporated within academic philosophy. It does provide a brief "Selection of papers" section, all of them in finance and statistical mechanics, so my original question remains. The answer might be “his work hasn’t really intersected with academic philosophy”, that’s fine, I’m just curious to hear about it from people who have done more than read a Wikipedia page about him.
- ssivark 9y ago
  I don't think Taleb has engaged with academic philosophers. He prefers to portray himself as someone grounded in empiricism, and talks down "intellectual-yet-idiot" academics who lose the forest for the trees, in loving their flawed simplifications/abstractions more than the reality they are trying to model [1]. A lot of his ire is directed at economists' over-reliance on flawed mathematical assumptions (particularly relating to modeling randomness), and more broadly, academics in the less empirically grounded fields. I take his principal point to be that the modern approach to decision making under uncertainty (due to being neither theoretically nor empirically rigorous) is just a bunch of fashionable nonsense that has displaced several useful traditional/folk thumb rules which might superficially appear to conflict with the modern scientific models, but represent valuable insights won through hard experience. Most of his writing/speaking directed at a general audience is polemical, and often feels like he is ranting, so YMMV. If you're interested in getting a quick flavor of his work, try his talk at the National Science Foundation [2]. FWIW, several of Taleb's key points expound on some statements by Hume [3] and Seneca [4], so he does value certain works/ideas nominally considered philosophy. [1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577 https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e... (Taleb shares several of his articles/book-excerpts on Medium) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omsYJBMoIJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omsYJBMoIJU [3] https://philosophynow.org/issues/69/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb https://philosophynow.org/issues/69/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4MhC5tcEv0&feature=youtu.be&t=150 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4MhC5tcEv0&feature=youtu.be... PS: Having written this comment on HN makes me feel very weird, stating (my understanding of) the opinions of some particular person, but I just felt like responding to a sincere question.

dvddgld 9y ago

Props to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, it’s perhaps the best general resource on philosophy on the web

GuiA 9y ago
It’s a great example of what an editorialized online encyclopedia can be. Would love to learn about other such resources for other fields.
- dvddgld 9y ago
  Me too! If anyone has any fantastic niche web encyclopaedia links, link away!
nickpsecurity 9y ago
Great article and discussion on it here for anyone trying to build something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10266103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10266103
lainon 9y ago
Note that there's also the "Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy" which is, such as the SEP, written by professional Philosophers. http://www.iep.utm.edu/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/
- dvddgld 9y ago
  They definitely deserve a shout-out too, these two resources happily got me through a couple of undergrad philosophy electives!
pmoriarty 9y ago
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is definitely a step up from Wikipedia's coverage of philosophy, but it comes from a strong and pretty obvious Analytic point of view. For coverage from other points of view (which arguably give more accurate and informed accounts of non-analytic philosophy), you have to resort to classes or books.

tjgillies 9y ago

Portland State offers PhD in Philosophy of Computer Science https://www.pdx.edu/computer-science/doctor-of-philosophy-in-computer-science https://www.pdx.edu/computer-science/doctor-of-philosophy-in...

jswrenn 9y ago
PhD = Doctor of Philosophy This is just a normal PhD in Computer Science.