Daily Nous

> Yes I would, if it seemed to me that an awful lot of people who had studied carpentry were mediocre carpenters, while many who hadn't studied carpentry were excellent carpenters. I would start to question the usefulness of carpentry study.

Well that's not really the point, is it? The point is that on average the person who studied carpentry is better than someone who hadn't studied it at all.

> I don't think we should accept that the study of philosophy improves critical thinking just because that is "one of the aims" of philosophy as a discipline. (One of the aims of homeopathic medicine is to cure disease, after all.) I certainly accept that you'd have a very hard time going through a philosophy program without ever thinking critically, but I'd say the same thing about a student in a comparative literature program.

That's actually rather insulting, you do realise that don't you? It's insulting in three different ways going by the way you've worded it. First, you've compared philosophy to something that is widely regarded as a pseudoscience (which is ironic considering that philosophy is that _very_ discipline that attempts to rigorously demarcate science from pseudoscience[0]). Second, this isn't something I'm making up–this is _central_ to what philosophy is methodologically about and has been since its inception. Third, It's more than likely you'd _fail_ a philosophy program if you didn't demonstrate critical thinking skills by the end of it. I've tutored philosophy…

It's said that GPT-3 shows rudimentary hints of "general intelligence"-like behaviors, it can really "solve" (not just memorizing answers) many puzzles without fine-tuning it by domain-specific training data, although the performance is limited without doing it.

David Chalmers [0] wrote,

> When I was a graduate student in Douglas Hofstadter’s AI lab, we used letterstring analogy puzzles (if abc goes to abd, what does iijjkk go to?) as a testbed for intelligence. My fellow student Melanie Mitchell devised a program, Copycat, that was quite good at solving these puzzles. Copycat took years to write. Now Mitchell has tested GPT-3 on the same puzzles, and has found that it does a reasonable job on them (e.g. giving the answer iijjll). It is not perfect by any means and not as good as Copycat, but its results are still remarkable in a program with no fine-tuning for this domain.

> What fascinates me about GPT-3 is that it suggests a potential mindless path to artificial general intelligence (or AGI). GPT-3’s training is mindless. It is just analyzing statistics of language. But to do this really well, some capacities of general intelligence are needed, and GPT-3 develops glimmers of them.

[0] https://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3

Good article. The point about contemporary philosophers not having grand theories is something that comes up frequently in philosophy spaces (i.e., /r/academicphilosophy or https://dailynous.com).

The problem is that the academic system is really not designed to select such individuals, instead optimizing for specialized publications, pedigree, etc. The average philosopher has zero incentive for constructing grand theories and indeed is typically ridiculed for even attempting to do so.

And so instead the best "public intellectuals" the world of philosophy can offer are either obsessively focused on particular issues rather than the field as a whole, (e.g., Peter Singer) or are entirely philosophically-uneducated charlatans who want to sell books and make money, not discover truth (e.g. Sam Harris, talking heads on Twitter, Substack, etc.) that unfortunately get an audience. The closest we get are probably Charles Taylor (big scope, but unfortunately too verbose and abstruse) or Zizek (too niche and far into his own entertainment career.)

I'm not sure what the solution is, but it probably involves a brilliant (and credentialed) philosopher that is also savvy with YouTube and willing to disregard the academic philosophy social milieu.

Philosophy is about asking questions, which eventually lead to separate disciplines, once frameworks for answering those questions have been created. Many discrete departments at a modern university have their roots in philosophy.

I'm not arguing with your initial point, articles like this and the subsequent claims about science and philosophy are usually wrong. But I realise, from the responses to you claim that a lot of people are quite ignorant about philosophy and its history in science.

There is a great quote in a Daily Nous article, about this: "many new disciplines have sprung forth from philosophy over the years: physics, psychology, logic, linguistics, economics, and so on. In each case, these fields have sprung forth as tools have been developed to address questions more precisely and more decisively. The key thesis is that when we develop methods for conclusively answering philosophical questions, those methods come to constitute a new field and the questions are no longer deemed philosophical."

[0] http://dailynous.com/2017/08/23/intellectual-achievement-creating-questions/

Or, perhaps, the reason for the decline of history is because it is written by the "winners", and has, for the most part, failed to shed outdated, colonial modes of thought. History is progressing very fast, exponentially faster than it ever has. Do the old, tenured professors of today have what it takes to see this progress and give up their outdated modes of thinking?

The fact that philosophy is not seeing a similar decline (http://dailynous.com/2018/11/30/sharp-decline-philosophy-majors-hit-bottom-guest-post-eric-schwitzgebel/) should be reason enough to believe that people today, even less privileged ones, desire to know who and where they are. Not that philosophy is unaffected by outdated modes of thought - but its raison d'etre is to lay bare those modes, which allow students to engage with the modes themselves, rather than the misguided content (bad history) generated by misguided modes.

I think the true importance of GPT-3 is its general learning ability across multiple domains. David Chalmers wrote about this recently:

> More remarkably, GPT-3 is showing hints of general intelligence. Previous AI systems have performed well in specialized domains such as game-playing, but cross-domain general intelligence has seemed far off. GPT-3 shows impressive abilities across many domains. It can learn to perform tasks on the fly from a few examples, when nothing was explicitly programmed in. It can play chess and Go, albeit not especially well. Significantly, it can write its own computer programs given a few informal instructions. It can even design machine learning models. Thankfully they are not as powerful as GPT-3 itself (the singularity is not here yet).

source: http://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/#chalmers