Private pilot here. No, I'm quite sure very few of you here would have made the same mistake as evidenced by the fact that literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft land successfully every day, many of them under much more adverse conditions. This is not a oh-it-could-have-happened-to-anyone kind of screwup, this is a did-this-guy-really-go-through-basic-pilot-training kind of screwup.
I’m not a manned pilot, but have my part 107 and have spent a few thousand hours flying combat flight sims - ~150kts in a cargo aircraft, four seconds from departing the runway, seems like the worst possible time to abort a touch-and-go. Then consider the numerous automated audio warnings and the copilot suggesting a go-around, and it seems pretty ridiculous to me.
Don’t get me wrong - if I had to land that plane, I’d likely have overrun the runway too. I’m not saying it’s easy, only that it appears to me that they were operating well outside the documented parameters that are the pilot’s responsibility to know.
I just looked it up, and a 767’s Vref is 122-165kts, with Vref at max weight at 144kts. They touched down at 158kts, nose down. The approach was ~35kts over speed, they were above the glide slope, and not bleeding speed fast enough to sink - so they dropped the nose.
From what I can see, they were screwed the moment they touched down - the last moment they had a reasonable opportunity to abort was when they decided to drop the nose and commit instead.
They could have “aborted” at almost any time prior to when they did. And even that may have been fine if they had stuck with it.
A decent rule of thumb in aviation (and life…) is that you’re allowed to change your mind once. Waffling kills more people than switching to a bad decision does.
I have a strong hunch there a deeper more human/emotional component involved. Like Pilot A was not in the right mental headspace. A bad breakup? Some other kind of personal loss? Or an urgency of a personal kind?
Those are a few situations when a trained individual could make a series of bad decisions. More so if they were forced into the situation (flying) despite raising objections. It has happened to other 21 Air pilots in the past - when they objected to flying but were forced, so who knows?
Absolutely does not absolve this individual of the incident. It’s a burden they’ll have to bear for the rest of their lives. But it could help explain why?
They made a series of at least ten (and that's kind of charitable) this-must-never-happen mistakes that likely rise to the level of extraordinary criminal negligence, including ignoring checklists, alarms, configuring the plane for landing in general, and basically everything related to safety.
You don't have to extend sympathy, just as you don't have to extend sympathy to drunk drivers who kill people.
I am not a pilot and I don't know anything about flying. I can go along with the idea that the pilot / crew made mistakes. So the next obvious question is how do we make sure this does not happen again?
I am not a pilot nor do I know aviation but I sincerely doubt the air traffic controller on duty has the mental capacity to babysit each and every plane that is departing and arriving second guessing each and every decision they make. I don't know if they even have access to all the data the pilots have and even if they did I don't know if they can make decisions on time. I mean the way I see it the ATC will coordinate with grounds crew to make sure a plane can land/crash land as safely as possible even if it has no engines, wheels, or even flaps. I don't know how but I know they will try their best to coordinate everyone the best they can.
I mean, complete ethical nihilism is one way to try to avoid losing this particular argument, but I don't think you'll get many people to agree with you on it.
You're being downvoted because actual qualified aviators are telling you how egregious of a mistake this looks to be, and you're quibbling with them without any professional credibility on the subject.
In any aviation incident, it’s generally a good idea to wait for the full NTSB report before drawing any firm conclusions.
That said, it is exceedingly difficult to find any explanation for what happened in this case that doesn’t boil down to incompetence or gross negligence.
There were so many opportunities to avoid this accident. The crew seemingly more or less single-handedly punched a hole straight through the entire Swiss cheese model. It’s so bad it’s hard to imagine they weren’t drunk at the controls.
This is honestly one of the few cases where it looks so blatantly and obviously negligent that I'm comfortable commenting ahead of the investigation results.
Even in a case where someone has drilled themselves into a mountainside, there's value in trying to see things like "were they distracted? Was there mechanical failure? Did they have a freak medical emergency and get incapacitated? Did unexpected weather crop up?" And in other cases, it's a "but for the grace of God go I" moment where you understand how they could have made the wrong decision in good faith. Even years out of the cockpit, I'm willing to give most aviators the benefit of the doubt, because God knows I screwed up enough in my day.
But the only thing I can think of that compares to this level of negligence was the F/A-18 pilot 20 or so years ago who lost his wings after booming his non-towered hometown airport at over 500 knots and below 500 feet with absolutely zero pre-authorization or waiver from the FAA for that kind of thing.
You seem to be missing a basic fact about how the world works: there are two classes of people, those who make the rules, and those who are expected to follow the rules. These classes are largely disjoint.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
There is indeed a Frank Wilhoit you're thinking of (died in 2010, active in political science and a professor at Drake University)
The Frank Wilhoit quoted in parent is just some random dude who posted a pithy comment on a blog post. so good news, you can engage with the quote without any Kissinger or CIA baggage.
It is at once obvious and hard for people to internalize that there will come a time in the future when our time will be as far in the past as ancient Rome is to us. We might not be interested in old magazines and artifacts from our grandparent's childhoods, but they will be (at least one hopes). There are so many ways that we ought to be more considerate of future generations, and this is one them. These museums are our Libraries of Alexandria.
It works as well as it ever did, i.e. in non-adversarial situations. It's not designed to be secure so it fails when people try to game it. Designing something like Page Rank that works in an adversarial environment is still an open problem.
The PageRank algo by definition is broken, because it equates popularity rather than truth or correctness.
The perfect example of why this is broken is health and medicine, for all its fails, we all know that modern medicine is based on evidence, something all other alternatives are not.
Secondly take news, the actual source the source of truth most of the time is not the first match, and could and is often surpassed by some social media commentator which is just wrong imho.
PR never worked.
Its the same as thinking the stars of music (pick any name) are the best because they are popular even if they cant play an instrument and most never write their own songs.
Correctness is impossible to evaluate without a panel of humans to define "the truth" for each topic and an advanced NLP system that compares the meaning of a page with it. Impossible in 1996, you could maybe pull this off today with LLMs but it would be super expensive and not very reliable.
This would create an intentional bias in the results. That's not something you expect from a web search, it should return the most relevant and popular links not the ones that agree with mainstream science. Wikipedia, PubMed and other databases where actual experts contribute are way better for that.
Um, no? It works in non-adversarial environments. Such environments are rare in today's world but they still exist, mainly where there isn't a profit motive. Believe it or not, there are still some people in the world who believe that there is more to life than money.
Thanks. I don't have time to watch the video, but the article still leaves me skeptical. Matching myths to past events seems to me fraught with all the same potential pitfalls as matching them to future events and thence labeling them as prophecies, especially when the event in question is as common as a volcano erupting. But I will admit it's not entirely implausible either.
I also don't have time to watch the video, but am somewhat familiar with the topic. One of the primary themes of the dreamtime stories is about the origins of various landforms: how this hill got here, how this valley got there, etc. They're often quite detailed, because explaining the unique quirks of the landscape is part of the appeal. So, not just a generic "why the valley is here" stories, but specific "why the valley has seven sharp zig-zag kinks in it" kind of stories.
There are a number of such stories which tell about landforms which have been under the ocean for 11,000 years, since the great meltwater pulses raised the ocean at the end of the ice age. Long after the stories were documented by anthropologists -- who thought it was unusual that so much mythology would be concerned with the topography of the seafloor -- sonar was invented, which confirmed that the landforms existed more or less exactly as the stories said.
So personally I think that's pretty hard proof of at least 11,000 years of accurate oral tradition.
I have no proof on hand but I have seen for instance a documentary on the French German station ARTE tv where they featured a kind of crazy dude who have gone through more or less every oral story of a tribe, the western world actually have written down.
Then he started to compare and traced bits and pieces and this is really crazy who many parallels you will find.
He then together with anthropologist estimated how old these stories might could be, based on travels and migrations like those of the caretakers...
You’re making a very glib conclusion. Please, if you have an interest, make an effort to learn more about this subject. It’s not just matching myths .. its recording a history of geologically recorded events, along song lines actually walked where those geological events occurred.
“Prophecies” is a very euro-centric way to dismiss the subject. Indeed, there is encoding for you to be discovered, which has been rigorously demonstrated.
The whole point of hacker news is to converse curiously. It's stated clearly in the guidelines. Here is a person encouraging curiosity and getting down voted.
Why is the dismissive non-curious comment not getting down voted?
Am I in denial about whether the curios community still exists here?
To recognize the topic on hand... When a native community shares an oral tradition that accurately describes something that's been under water for 12+ thousand years despite not having the technology to map the sea floor that's pretty strong evidence in the accuracy of their ability to persist accuracy through oral tradition.
Parent is entirely valid in encouraging curiosity in this subject to anyone who is dismissive of it.
ggp isn't being dismissive or incurious. They say they are skeptical of the reasoning used in the science.org article, but are still open to the accepting the conclusion. Does being curious mean you aren't allowed to question anything? gp is probably being downvoted for dismissing ggp's concerns with a trite "please educate yourself" and not actually referencing anything to read. Telling someone else they are wrong and to go find evidence to support your own opposing view may technically be "encouraging curiosity" but it's certainly not curious itself.
I re-read the comment you refer to as ggp and I agree with you completely. I must have gotten my wires crossed about which comment was being referred to.
TLDR: the story is about a constellation that is seven sisters, but one is hiding; and that constellation does indeed have seven stars, but one hasn't been visible for 100k years.
> The simple answer is that some storied reference events that happened that long ago.
This is another thing that you can't know.
If there is a match between an inferred geological event and a mythological event, you'd still have to ask "what is the rate of this happening by coincidence?"
Your mistake is leaning on the mythology, having, it seems, not actually listened to the songs and stories yourself, directly.
There is no coincidence - the song lines record real geological events, such as the lowering of the oceans, the formations of islands, the drying up of lakes - on an ancient timeline - all of which are verified in the geological record.
Please, do not lean so hard on the petard of treating this subject as one of methods and coincidence.
These are real cultural artifacts, which encode real events.
This is like looking at a seismograph or an electrocardiogram and concluding that it doesn’t represent anything worth knowing “because nothing is real”, “they were just dreaming because they were primitive”, or “we don’t have a <mythological and impossible device> to prove these stories”.
We do have methods of proving these stories - we can dig trenches and see the history as it was described, in the land itself.
Please, do not dismiss this on the basis of some authoritarian postulates about not having developed your own cultures time machines. Song lines literally are a verifiable time record.
I was mainly mocking the absolutistic comment above, I find it very possible that the aborigines culture remembers very old events and that there can be proof in the conventional sense for it. But it would be indirect proof.
I did research and just gave you a quote that says maybe. I have zero reason to assume your position there is definitely proof for the claim 40000 years memory to be correct.
"Do your own research for my claim" doesn't work around here.
If you weren’t so arrogant you could have gone on a journey of your own discovery. That is important on matters of great cultural significance such as this - do your own investigation and gain your own understanding, honestly - don’t just accept what you’ve been conditioned to think about it. The requirement to be honest goes both ways.
Because the original caretakers stories have been so degraded by imperialist idealogues over the centuries, the onus is on us in the modern era, to make the effort of discovery ourselves.
What you must understand, from your perspective as the ‘protector of truth in this community’, is that colonial disruption severely damaged the transmission and integrity of Aboriginal oral traditions, so modern people (scientists, researchers, and society) must actively recover and validate what remains rather than relying solely on what was passed down intact. Your desire to achieve the perception of “scientific rigor” in this discussion is manifesting the very imperialist attitude which degraded these peoples’ wonderful, amazing culture, in the first place.
So, get off your horse and learn some things. Make an effort to educate yourself and don’t just play the imperialist-knows-best card.
This should get you started at least:
Nunn, P.D. & Reid, N.J. (2016). “Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago.” Australian Geographer, 47(1), 11–47.
DOI: 10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539
Nunn, P.D. (2016). “Australian Aboriginal traditions about coastal change reconciled with postglacial sea-level history: a first synthesis.” Environment and History, 22(3), 393–420.
DOI: 10.3197/096734016X14661540219311
Related earlier/conference work includes Reid, Nunn & Sharpe (2014) on Indigenous Australian stories and sea-level change (proceedings of the Foundation for Endangered Languages conference).
“The Legend of Budj Bim - The Story: The Gunditjmara [Dreaming] narrative tells of a creator being named Budj Bim ("high head") whose teeth and blood became the molten lava and scoria flowing to the sea during a violent eruption.The Science: Radiometric dating confirms the [Budj Bim] volcano last erupted approximately 37,000 years ago, meaning the oral tradition passed down through generations via songlines matches actual geological events from the Pleistocene epoch.”
Benjamin, J. et al. (2023). “Stone artefacts on the seabed at a submerged freshwater spring confirm a drowned cultural landscape in Murujuga, Western Australia.” Quaternary Science Reviews.
Scientific American coverage (2024) of related work by Mick O’Leary and others describes elders recognising digital models of now-submerged watering holes as part of a songline known for generations, consistent with a landscape from >7,000 years ago when sea levels were much lower.
Broader context appears in papers on Murujuga/Dampier Archipelago submerged archaeology (e.g., Benjamin et al. 2020 on the first confirmed Australian underwater Indigenous sites) and predictive modelling for the Rottnest Shelf (e.g., a 2025 Journal of Maritime Archaeology paper evaluating archaeological potential, which references Noongar stories of walking to Rottnest Island.”
Note: there is much, much more for you to discover - I’m only relaying the experience for which I have great affinity, having grown up visiting Rottnest Island myself, many times.
Stop being a dickhead about it, and go on the journey, mate.
"If you weren’t so arrogant you could have gone on a journey of your own discovery."
Thanks, but I did travel the world (and libaries) quite a bit and also was in the outback at places where few other souls go.
Still, I do see a difference with having a sound hypothesis - and having solid proof.
And I do not see actual researchers making claims as you do. They present their theory and data.
Arrogance is rather associated with being very sure of oneself without having the data to back it up.
I too have been all over the outback, and I find your skepticism unwarranted. If you’d had any time with the culture, you’d understand how important it is for us to value their stories, rather than push imperialism at them.
That you are unsatisfied is of no relevance to the fact that the studies are solid. The evidence is in the stories and the geological record. I hope there is much, much more research done on this subject in the near future, for some to criticize and others to truly value an incredibly important culture, on the brink of extinction, precisely because of the types of Euro-centric, imperialist views you proffer being applied to their existence.
Dude, all I am saying is that I have not read any claims by any researchers that there is absolute proof of any sort.
You have such a claim, then just show it.
And imperialism has nothing to do with whether the oral history of the aborigines goes back 40 000 or 10 000 or just 1000 years. British imperialism succeded, because they had superior weapons.
There is also a legend of incestuous royals connected to the Boyne valley tombs in Ireland, written down in the 12th century. DNA examination of a person buried in the tombs found that his parents were indeed very closely related. This suggests almost 5000 years of oral tradition, even surviving a fairly big cultural replacement event.
If that can happen, it's not so surprising a story can last 20-30000 years either - especially not if there's not much else making a similar impression to tell stories about.
Indeed, there are scientific studies which correlate specific tales to geologic events which occurred in the tens of thousands of years ago - there are multiple studies now.
The one I know of by way of personal experience (heard the songs, been there many times) is the tale of the creation of Wadjemup (Rottnest Island) ...
I don’t have references handy at the moment - I leave it up to you as an exercise to go on a course of interesting discovery - because there are some very fascinating papers for you to read, if you maintain the interest in the subject. The treatise on the potential crypto mechanisms (kinship system in a multi-lingual environment) is extremely fascinating, if I get a chance to find the references in a few days or so I’ll try to follow up … but anyway, do go do your own search, it is worth the journey.
The Supreme Court has a long history of ignoring both the letter and the spirit of the law for the sake of politics and practical expediency. I can legally buy an AK-47 but not a Patriot missile despite the fact that the second amendment makes no distinction between different kinds of armaments. Allowing Patriots to be banned but not AK-47s is a distinction that the Court invented out of whole cloth. Likewise the weakening of the fourth amendment at the border is an exception that the Court invented out of whole cloth. Both of these exceptions were invented for defensible reasons. I don't want people to be able to buy Patriot missiles or nuclear bombs (or AK-47s). But that doesn't change the fact that there is a line that was invented by the Court out of whole cloth.
The problem is that the Constitution is broken, and has been since it was drafted. The right to bear arms probably should be conditioned on something more clear than the necessity of a well regulated militia (whatever the hell that means) to the security of a free state. The requirements for warrants probably ought to be weakened somewhat at border crossings. But the plain text of the Constitution does not allow this. The plain text contains no exceptions, and does not empower Congress to make exceptions. But changing the Constitution is hard, so rather than go through this slow, arduous process, everyone just punts the problem to the Court and says, "You deal with it." And so they do. The Court just does end-runs around the Constitution for defensible and practical reasons. But this doesn't change the fact that it is doing end-runs around the Constitution.
To make a 22 nF capacitor using a pair of copper pours separated by a 1.6 mm thick old school two-layer PCB, we would need something like 10 square feet! It would have to be an electronics art project, intended to be displayed on a gallery wall. :)
That goes down to something like 90 square inches if the separation is a 0.1mm thick layer of a thin four-layer PCB: still an impractically huge area.
Capacitors achieve their density in a small package by two tricks: extremely tiny dielectric gaps, and convoluted surface areas.
For instance, electrolytic caps achieve a big surface area due to using rough, anodized aluminum (or tantalum) for the anode (mnemonic: anodized aluminum -> anode). Then every ridge and crevice in that anode is available for capacitance due to using an electrolytic gel for the cathode. The roughness of the anode and the gel optimize for high surface area. Then the thinness of the oxide layer optimizes for a small gap size, also favoring high capacitance.
Certainly not at these frequencies and corresponding high capacitance values; getting 22nF out of a PCB even with ECM would require quite a large surface area and at 220GHz you can't have that since your wavelength is so short; you'd just be making a giant resonator instead.
Length of this capacitor is close to half-wavelength of 220 GHz (in vacuum).
Using siblings of this broadband capacitor (40 GHz, same package) in some designs. In assembly, those require decent process control. This 0201M package is closer to 01005 passives in pad size. Typically no solder paste is used, just flux. Solder mask alignment has to be very tight (thin web used as a dam only).
Cost per cap is reasonable where it is actually needed, other parts of the system are often orders of magnitude more expensive at those frequencies where performance matters. Where it gets the very high performance, is pillars/channels etched into silicon quite similar to how DRAM capacitors are made, just a “little bit bigger”. This allows for very low inductance and thus very high resonant frequency.
The (more common) package has very precise solder bumps. You can have a special order for one with ENIG finish as well, but this only makes sense if you have a really good use case (using Pb solder, wirebonding directly). Not sure what method is used to deposit this solder. Probably just stencil on wafer before slicing.
No, not if you want 22 nF. That's a pretty substantial capacitance. It would need to be quite big on a PCB. That would mean significant inductance, and thus, bad performance at high frequencies.
mind defending that? I suspect that opinion would only come from one who took philosophy 101 and stopped there. If all you took was philosophy 101, this sounds a lot more reasonable and runs right into the point made by the pos you just responded to
How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion. I could give you a long list of things in philosophy that I consider BS, but what good would that do? Do you really doubt that I could provide such a list? The most likely outcome of that exercise would be for you to invoke the no-true-scotsman fallacy and say, "Oh, of course those things are bullshit, but that's not real philosophy." And the fact that I can make that prediction with confidence is my defense.
If you really want my list, since this is HN, I'll start with Ayn Rand and the Austrian school. You can read this if you like:
I think it's ironically telling about your opinion on philosophy that your argument is illogical and boils down to:
1. people who aren't philosophers said some bullshit
2. don't you dare point out people who don't do philosophy shouldn't have their ramblings labeled philosophy
Ayn Rand, a 20th century writer without a university education; Paul Graham, a computer scientist; and the Austrian School, an economics movement, are categorically not entities that have produced or ever will produce philosophy.
That's no a No True Scotsman fallacy. It is a strict application of the definition of philosophy, a deep analysis of certain specific topics. Neither Rand nor Graham is educationally equipped to plumb that depth. And, again, the other name you dropped is not even a philosophical school.
> Neither Rand nor Graham is educationally equipped to plumb that depth
In his defence, Graham does hold a BA (Philosophy) from Cornell University in 1986.
Is your distaste here due to BA degrees rather than PhDs, a dislike of Cornell, or that Graham didn't chase academic philosophy and join a philosophy department?
> people who aren't philosophers said some bullshit
Wow, I didn't expect to be vindicated quite so definitively when I predicted: "The most likely outcome of that exercise would be for you to invoke the no-true-scotsman fallacy."
> That's no a No True Scotsman fallacy.
It absolutely is:
> the definition of philosophy, a deep analysis of certain specific topics.
I see nothing in that definition about writing in a particular time period or having a university degree, which are the two features you cited that allegedly disqualify Ayn Rand. I also see an awful lot of wiggle-room in the "specific topics" and how one measures whether one's analysis is sufficiently "deep". You exclude economics and computer science from your list of "certain topics" but you don't say what topics are allowed or on what basis this assessment of admissibility is to be made. Your argument is a paragon of muddled thinking, and does more to support my position than refute it.
> You exclude economics and computer science from your list of "certain topics" but you don't say what topics are allowed or on what basis this assessment of admissibility is to be made
Oh, so you're not at all engaging in good faith. Thanks for wasting my time. It breaks credulity when you try to argue that economics is a field of philosophy in some attempt to demonstrate I'm engaging in a NTS fallacy.
> How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion
One of the first useful things that philosophy teaches you is how to construct a well-rounded argument in support of any position. Following up "philosophy is useless" with "I don't know how to argue my own opinion" demonstrates quite a lack of awareness.
Apparently they don't teach you about straw-man arguments. I didn't say philosophy was useless, I said a lot of philosophy is bullshit. That is not the same thing. A lot of physics nowadays is bullshit (like string theory) but that is not to say that physics is useless.
"Alice O'Connor (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum;[c] February 2 [O.S. January 20], 1905 – March 6, 1982), better known by her pen name Ayn Rand (/aɪn/ ⓘ), was a Russian and American writer and philosopher.[3] She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system which she named Objectivism."
Well, yeah, obviously. I didn't say that all philosophy is BS, only that a lot of it is, including a lot of what is included in SEP. But as a source for making the field accessible, SEP is excellent.
Why do you think I needed to? The phrase "a lot" has an established meaning in the English language.
> or mention which topics in philosophy you think are legitimate
That's true. I was writing an HN comment, not a review paper for submission to a peer-review journal. But it doesn't take a lot of imagination to notice that my comment was made in the context of a discussion of an article entitled "Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy" and to infer from that I was referring to philosophical topics popular among silicon valley tech bros. The specific topics I had in mind are mainly political and economic theories, which not everyone considers philosophy. But I'll point as an undeniable example the work of Curtis Yarvin a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug who, rather incredibly, attracts a huge audience by advocating for the divine right of kings, among other absurdities.
When I read "a lot of philosophy is bullshit" without qualification I read it as an anti-intellectual statement either dismissing academic philosophy as a discipline, or confusing philosophy for self-help/mysticism.
In some sense, I guess Curtis Yarvin could be considered (very bad) political philosophy, but he's so far removed from serious philosophy that he wouldn't have crossed my mind.
Curtis Yarvin honestly wouldn't have crossed my mind as a philosopher. I think of him as a political pundit. If I were thinking of right-wing philosophers, I would think of Burke, Hayek, Nozick, etc. I might disagree with some of their ideas, but I wouldn't call them "bad philosophy".
Now that you've pointed the Yarvin thing out to me, it makes sense and I think I have a better idea of what you were trying to say.
Oh, the irony. If you look at the rest of the comments in this thread you will find people insisting that the Austrian School is economics, not philosophy.
And this is exactly the problem. Philosophy is whatever other self-styled philosophers say it is, and that authority ultimately can be traced back to the people writing the checks. Yarvin is able to do what he does in no small measure because he has (or at least had) Peter Thiel as a patron. In 50-100 years, if the Republicans win the next election, Yarvin will be taught alongside Trump and Vance as being among the brilliant thinkers who threw off the yoke of woke and ushered in the new era of enlightenment.
It's ultimately all about money and power, not truth.
I'm not sure if providing a counterargument to a point not being made is a good way to argue against a field that trains people to notice when you do that.
There's a lot of BS in most fields. The problem with philosophy is that it has no criterion for separating the wheat from the chaff. All other fields have some kind of external forcing function. In science, its experimental data. In the arts, it's the ability to produce novelty or exhibit skill or attract an audience. In philosophy there is no external forcing function. The only thing that makes a great philosopher is other philosophers saying they are great philosophers.
There are definitely some non-BS philosophers, like Dan Dennett and Tim Maudlin. But really they are more like scientists than philosophers. In Maudlin's case, he's really a physicist, he just happens to work in a philosophy department.
The problem is that you're citing people known for their popularisation, not academic work. None of that is subject to the kind of critique that happens between academics.
Yeah, well, the topic at hand is how Silicon Valley tech bros abuse philosophy. The philosophy they abuse includes a lot of non-academic stuff.
I can cite a lot of bullshit in academic philosophy, but so what? There's a lot of bullshit in academia in general. There is bullshit in physics (string theory). There is bullshit in chemistry (James Tour). There is bullshit in botany (John Sanford). There is bullshit everywhere. If you really want an example from academic philosophy, I'll give you John Searle and the Chinese Room.
> You're basically pointing at RFK Jr's speeches and saying, "See? Biology is bullshit."
That's actually not a bad analogy, except for the tacit implication that RFK is a crackpot and not worthy of serious consideration. I, of course, agree with that. However, the sad fact of the matter is that RFK is the United States Secretary of Health and Human Servivces. He was appointed to that position by a democratically elected President and confirmed by a democratically elected Senate (or at least as close to democratically elected as it gets in the USA). So dismissing RFK as a crackpot is a no-true-scotsman fallacy. Like it or not, RFK is part of the biology establishment. In fact, he is one of the principal leaders of the biological establishment. The only difference between RFK and philosophers is that RFK is a recent and, hopefully, temporary aberration, whereas philosophy is shot through-and-through with RFKs and has been for thousands of years.
reply