Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
I agree this is a problem. In retrospect, reading Yudkowsky's Sequences was far more valuable to me than reading various pre-1900 philosophers' works firsthand. https://twitter.com/PradyuPrasad/status/1757745612072894477
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bigjaymes.eth 🎩
@bigjaymes
It’s a good point, but also it can be useful to see where ideas started and how they progressed. The context is often relevant and can be eye-opening. Eg. it’s useful to understand how Newton created a model that explained/predicted a lot of things correctly, but was ultimately wrong as a description of reality.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
I agree in theory, but in practice it feels like I only got a surface level understanding of "what scientific progress feels like" out of that: "we believed naive stuff, then we observed more and thought harder, now we believe better stuff" Far more helpful was just personally living through a major ideological shift.
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Beantown 🍖🎩
@beantown
Really intruiging...Philosophical inquiries often address questions that are abstract, normative, and foundational, like the nature of knowledge, ethics, existence, reasoning. Many of these ?s remain relevant across time; insights of ancient philosophers can still provoke thought and contribute to contemporary debates.
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Beantown 🍖🎩
@beantown
Conversely, physics and biology are empirical sciences that build knowledge through observation, experimentation, and the scientific method. New discoveries and technological advancements can render older theories obsolete if they no longer accurately describe observations or predict phenomena.
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