I'm a tenured philosophy professor
Hi Steem folks! I'm a tenured philosophy professor, paid to research and teach philosophy. I have a very fancy academic pedigree, but I'm no star; mine is a small, non-elite university. Given the crazy academic job market especially, I consider myself very lucky to be a "professional philosopher".
I work in the so-called "analytic" tradition of philosophy, which roughly means that I tackle narrow, specific sub-questions (rather than hit the Big Questions directly), seeking literal truth (rather than metaphor) with rigorous arguments (rather than literary analogy).
I'm super-intrigued by Steem and Steemit - I've only recently heard about it, though I've been interested in cryptocurrencies since 2011. All the right incentives seem to be worked out elaborately. It's obviously the result of a lot of careful thought.
What I hope to bring to Steemit
I am still getting a feel for Steemit, but I was thinking I could help play a moderator role of sorts in the #philosophy category.
I also could play an "ask a philosopher" role if there is interest. If you have specific philosophical questions, feel free to ask them in the comments! They may spur separate posts, or maybe I'll just try to answer them here.
My specialty is somewhere in the areas of traditional epistemology, "formal" epistemology (approaching epistemology with mathematical tools), philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, and philosophy of science. I dabble in philosophy of religion and I do a fair amount of "robot ethics" as a sideline, though I don't really consider myself an ethicist. I know at least the basics of most other major philosophical debates.
It also seems like steemers have a lot of curiosity about #academia and life as an academic, so perhaps I could provide a different perspective there, too. Again feel free to ask questions in the comments!
Since you are a philosopher, and since you are open to questions, let me ask this:
What is your greatest philosophic achievement? Has your mind ever "produced" something that the world should know about, or that the world heard but has underappreciated it?
It's a difficult question obviously because most things have already been said or discovered... being a pioneer of thought is not easy. If however there is something that can be distilled by one's life wisdom and that can improve my own life, I would gladly take it under consideration...
This is a great question - and I appreciate how respectfully you asked it! (The more typical, blunt variation is "what's the point of philosophy, anyway?!") I was going to respond here, but started to think of more I wanted to say, and it's looking like it should be a post of its own. And if I start posting fairly regularly (as I'd have to say I'm feeling encouraged to do!), this is a really good one to do early on.
Assuming I do write this up, I would like to credit you for prompting it @alexgr - ideally with tangible credit in the form of some steem power or something. Is there an (official or unofficial) way to do that on Steemit? If not, then in the worst case I guess I could just transfer some percentage of any of my earnings to you. What strikes folks as fair for this kind of thing? I welcome suggestions here.
I should add that working against my Steemit productivity is my recent venture into parenthood - I have a 2-year-old and a 2-month-old, and so it's fair to say my time is not completely my own these days. On the other hand, working in favor of my Steemit productivity is that it's a very fun way to procrastinate on some tedious committee work I need to do.
If it makes a good profit (that's a big if - because articles in general can be buried - introductions are easier to spot), you can "tip" whatever you want, no problem. But since it'll be your ideas you really deserve everything... I'll profit anyway by whatever is contained in your distilled wisdom.
Ah I did not know that "intro" posts get so much more attention. Maybe I'm a budding steemit curmudgeon, but intro posts (including mine) actually seem to have less content of interest to other readers on average ...
Anyway that tempers my enthusiasm some, but as I say it's fun anyway, so I'll try to write it up - and if if if any steem comes of, it I'll pass some your way!
As you predicted, @alexgr, my post attracted a whole lot of inattention. You get 10% of my $0.00!
Even I didn't notice it. I haven't yet figured out how to get notifications out of the @nicknametags....
Very good points you wrote here as a tenured philosophy professor. I think you’ve made some truly interesting points here. Keep up the good work.
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I am very lucky as I got a chance to meet here philosophy professor, paid to research and teach philosophy. It’s great to know about your proficiency in tackling narrow, specific sub-questions seeking literal truth with rigorous arguments.
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Why is philosophy so meta? I think a lot of people would are interested in philosophy, but when you try and read the important works, you feel as though it's written in a foreign language. Allain de Botton's "Consolations of Philosophy" is a great pop-philosophy book, but how can I take the ideas further and develop my own intelligent understanding of the topic?
Hey @bitcalm, good question. Yeah a lot of philosophy - even historically - is written for other philosophers, where it's assumed that they know the relevant background. This makes sense from a certain perspective; compare academic work in other fields. If a chemist had to start a paper by explaining every concept in the background, it would be page 1,000 before she got to start explaining her own result.
But of course this does not make it easy for someone who wants to start learning more introductory stuff. The trick (as in chemistry and other fields, and even on Steemit!) is to start with the right readings and teachers. I might recommend Bertrand Russell's famous The Problems of Philosophy, which is an intro book that recently came into public domain! I have other ideas & resources if you can give me a more specific idea of your interests.
Thanks, I'll take a look at that book.
As for my specific interests? That's a good question. As a person I have a strong belief in fairness, equality, and justice. I also think topics like "what do you need to be happy?", "what defines success?" also interesting. So I suppose those are good places to start.
For "fairness, equality, and justice", you can't go wrong with John Rawls' seminal Theory of Justice (which is not public domain, though Rawls probably would have made it so if he reasonably could have in his day). This book incidentally provides a powerful counterpoint to libertarianism, if you happen to lean in that direction.
There's also this free online course at Harvard. I haven't seen it myself, but I hear it's very good, and the teacher is a big name among us philosophers.
I just realized I never answered your question about philosophy on "what do you need to be happy?"! This understandably may be of higher priority for you. I'm sadly not an expert here, but I would say on this question the classic (and free!) place to start is Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
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Since reading:
https://steemit.com/anarchism/@ai-guy/3gjiju-killer-robots-artificial-intelligence-and-human-extinction
a couple days ago, I've been revisiting my thoughts on 'benefiting from AI without getting destroyed by it." With that said I am an optimist and believe in the goodness of most individuals, but the I hold hold as much ethical esteem for the financial gatekeepers to these types of projects. I don't have answers for this yet (outside ability of embedding abstract feeling/emotion into AI.)
I'd love to hear a question/problem/issue you're currently working on or have found interest or counter intuitive. Seems like it would give a great springboard to further discussion.
Welcome to Steemit @spetey!
Ha thanks for the kind welcome!
As you might have seen in the comments on that thread you linked to, I just wrote a paper on superintelligence and AI extinction, to be published soon in an anthology called Robot Ethics 2.0. My thesis was roughly that any AI with "complex" goals will have to learn those goals, and learning goals is tantamount to reasoning about goals - enough to make room for ethical reasoning even in an AI with quite different values, such as one designed to maximize paperclips. There are a lot more moving parts to the argument (sadly), but that's the gist of it. This is some reason to be optimistic, I think, but I have to say Bostrom's arguments worry me.
Perhaps my most "counterintuitive" and still accessible argument is also in robot ethics - in the first Robot Ethics anthology, I argued that it would actually be okay to make intelligent, ethically valuable robots who want to be our servants. (Of course I'm giving away my identity here, but it was hardly a secret for anyone who wanted to check anyway.)
What I think of as my main work these days is in a formal model of Ockham's razor based on algorithmic complexity. A related project, it turns out, is in an issue philosophers call the special composition question - when do a bunch of things get together in the right way to make ("compose") a new thing? The standard answers to that problem are totally counterintuitive - basically the standard answers are
a) always - there are tables, and cats, and table-cats
b) never - there are no tables or cats, just fermions and bosons (or strings or whatever's at the bottom)
c) when the things together make up something living - there are cats but no tables
Here I actually try to defend a much more intuitive answer against these standard responses. According to my theory, there are cats and tables but no table-cats. The question may sound totally crazy and obscure, but it's the kind of question you're driven to when you start with "real world" questions - such as whether and when abortion is ethical - and try to answer them as rigorously as possible.
More of a response than you wanted maybe, but thanks for your interest!
good post!
Hi, Thank you fro bringing new content and growth oportunities for everyone not only in what steem is concerned
Upvoted
Hi Prof, next research for you...getting your next post to include images. I use steemimg.com to host my pics and link them in my post. Check my post:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@ace108/how-to-include-image-in-your-post-reference-to-using-steeming-com-in-include-pictures-your-post
If you are actually making money from this platform, this article might be of use to you.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@leprechaun/a-visa-debit-card-without-a-bank-account
Nice post, thanks for sharing your feelings