Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22153042

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Thanks so much to OP for linking this article.

Though, I should not be all that surprised. For my entire life in the U.S. people have pronounced my last name of "Wiese" as either "Wise" or "Why-se," both of which are totally incorrect (my family says "Weese" when anglicized). I much prefer the German pronunciation of my last name, though; too bad it's too much of a pain to explain the discrepancy between how it's spelt and what it sounds like to native English speakers. :P

I'm sure actual native German speakers could probably chime in, but I couldn't help but try to stop the spread of FUD around pronouncing poor ol' Gödel's name. :)

I took the class just last semester in Spring.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160821143752/http://nifflas.ni...

Do you happen to know of other documents in a vein similar to the LSD one you linked? Pharmacology is one of many bizarre topics I endeavor to understand in my free time (this weird thing called "programming" also happens to be one).

[1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/dta.1620

Imagine allowing a class of undergraduate students to participate in a version of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and draw their own conclusions as to potential flaws in its methodology.

Or, as a philosophy student: allow students to engage in a real life rendition of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, where a student "competes" against his or her classmates and various versions of text generation algorithms from simple Markov chain generators, to OpenAI's GPT-2 and beyond.

Furthermore, it seems strange for a professor of philosophy to so easily dismiss criticism out of hand. Of all subjects, a philosophy professor has a pedagogical imperative to entertain contradictory positions and explain why or why not one ought to follow a line of reasoning. In addition, the question about the merit of a small sample size could itself serve as a valuable aside in teaching fundamental notions in the philosophy of science.

Note: This is from the perspective of Western analytic philosophy, but the spirit of debate and discussion is no less integral to the continental tradition.

What's strange to me, is that my interpretation of the results of such an experiment wouldn't even lead to your professor's conclusion. The takeaway being the fallibility of sensory perception, where I might then prompt the class for a discussion of their intuitive refutations of empiricism before diving into the literature.

Unfortunately, being a philosophy major myself, I know all too well that a crap teacher can totally ruin a philosophy topic (let alone a topic of any subject). From my 4 years in philosophy classes of varying levels of difficulty, the common denominator between a fruitful time spent in class has been the willingness of the professor to engage with their students. Whether it's logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, &c, the principal property of a quality professor is his/her dialectical ability.

Hell, that's how philosophy & theology was taught in the first universities! The professor would profess and then the students would engage their master in the subject at hand.

I am glad to see a comment like this on HN, despite the impression that everyone here is an SV-focused tech bro. Sometimes it feels good to read about somebody's tractors whilst I gaze out at the soybean field in my backyard. :)

Think of God as an observer at the top of the Grand Canyon, looking down into the winding path of the river below. Humans are afloat on the river down in the canyon, unable to see what lies ahead. They can choose how to react to obstacles, for example, yet do no see them coming. God, however, sees our entire path on this metaphorical river laid out for us since birth; each of our individual choices are "perceived"[0] by him simultaneously.

[0]: Note, however, that many theologians would protest anthropomorphizing God in this way. Maimonides, as an example, says that we can speak of God as exhibiting mercy but not being merciful. He simply acts in a way that is analogous to human mercy.

That's a clever take. I suppose if the "original" humans came from a universe as hellish as Warhammer 40K, ours would seem like a cakewalk!

Unless of course that was your point this entire time and I just stupidly repeated it in a more garrulous manner.

Now, whether that is an argument that life at present is itself a simulation is yet to be determined. However, I'd imagine given that ungodly level of computational power we'd have the wherewithal to construct a reality for ourselves far more compelling than this one. ;)