[HN Gopher] Socrates' Examined Life
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Socrates' Examined Life
Author : url
Score : 47 points
Date : 2021-06-08 06:30 UTC (16 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (antigonejournal.com)
| Jun8 wrote:
| Plato's classic quote of Socrates:
|
| toutou men tou anthropou ego sophoteros eimi* kinduneuei men gar
| emon oudeteros ouden kalon kagathon eidenai, all' outos men
| oietai ti eidenai ouk eidos, ego de, osper oun ouk oida, oude
| oiomai* eoika goun toutou ge smikro tini auto touto sophoteros
| einai, oti a me oida oude oiomai eidenai.
|
| I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know
| anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something,
| although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything,
| so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I
| appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I
| do not know.
|
| I love this quote though my Ancient Greek never went as far as
| being able to parse the original. That being said, I find the
| definition game mentioned here and covered in the Dialogues
| tedious. It's like asking what "the number 2" is: One can answer
| that pointing to two apples, two car, etc. sets with two elements
| and define "two" to be the common property of all these sets.
| Cannot one proceed similar to define _courage_?
| jbandela1 wrote:
| >"What is courage?," Socrates asked Laches, who replied that if
| someone was willing to defend themselves against an enemy,
| standing in their assigned spot and not running away, they would
| be courageous (Laches 194e). An examiner would mark a red cross
| here: the man didn't reply to Socrates' question
|
| I think this emphasis on precise definitions is actually not that
| helpful.
|
| Humans don't really learn from abstract definitions so much as
| from seeing a bunch of examples of what is and what is not
| something. We ran into the same issue with ML and trying to do
| image recognition. Turned out that trying to define precisely
| what a "car" and using that to recognize a car is much less
| helpful than training with a lot of examples of what is and what
| is not a car.
|
| Although not precisely like an ML neural net, our brains are
| enough like one that that this is likely to be similar as well.
|
| I think that the guy the Socrates is examining is actually doing
| a better job of having someone learn what courage is by giving
| examples than Socrates is by trying to state a precise definition
| for it.
|
| As an aside, you see the same thing with "monads". There are a
| ton of articles trying to define a monad. However, a much better
| example is to take the student through the problem and then
| through a lot of patterns and show them the various patterns of
| monads.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Humans don't learn from abstract definitions: I agree very very
| much with that.
|
| The definition comes later. When people learn math concepts,
| the definition is in fact often of surprisingly little value.
| They need to see examples, _make_ examples, play around with
| instances and applications of the "thing", to gain intuition
| and finally come back to the definition.
|
| The abstract definition is also often (usually? always?)
| something that the person who came up with it also only came up
| with after finding the abstraction of otherwise concrete things
| they were working with.
|
| Try understanding Fourier transforms, or worse, Laplace, from
| their definition alone. Unless you have an idea of what's
| happening already, it's extremely hard. Work with the concept
| for a while, and the definition appears laughably simple!
|
| Once you did that, look up the definition of a Hilbert
| transform. What is that?! But in practice, it's just "multiply
| all complex frequencies by j" or, much more intuitively:
| "rotate all phasors by 90deg... i.e. put them on their side".
| Unlike with the previous example, you might happily work with
| this one and use it a lot, and still be mystified by its
| definition.
|
| And, yes, I only finally understood and later fully embraced
| Monads by "just using them" for a while. Now the concept is
| clear and they are everywhere. Use them even more, and you run
| into situations where Monads are not enough in practice. And
| now you've made the first step towards Arrows!
| bonoboTP wrote:
| On the other hand, I hate it when people take this mentality
| to the extreme and _withhold_ the mathematical definition and
| insist on only using examples or "simplified" definitions.
| It's similar with language learning. Sometimes I just want to
| see the grammar rule (there often is one, at least to a very
| good approximation), but the teacher has this didactic
| philosophy that I wouldn't be able to "handle the truth" or
| something. If there is an adequate definition provide it.
| It's similar with computer science papers as well. On the one
| hand, a free-text description of an algorithm or a simplified
| pseudocode is helpful to get the gist, but very often I also
| need to see the actual unambiguous code to see exactly how it
| is and to check if I understood it right because no
| description covers all the corner cases.
|
| Both are important, practical examples but also the abstract
| definition (if one exists to a good approximation).
| anyfoo wrote:
| That's also bad, yeah. We came to the abstract definition
| because it has value after all. (I think) OP and me just
| stated that it's not necessarily useful or sufficient to
| try to understand starting from the definition, but I do
| think there is still value in even just stating the
| definition already, for reference.
|
| Luckily I can't remember encountering that didactic
| approach in math or language learning, but I'm not
| surprised at all if it exists and is somewhat widespread.
| nojokes wrote:
| We can argue that ML neural net does not know what a cat is.
| jfengel wrote:
| That was kinda Socrates' schtick: demand a definition, and then
| show that it wasn't a good one. Which was true, but not really
| all that useful.
|
| The best I can say for it is that it shows the way people think
| they have definitions of things, but they don't. Push on pretty
| much any nontrivial definition and it will fail. That
| observation, at least, is kind of interesting, in that it shows
| the limits of the way we think about stuff.
|
| But we do think about stuff, and both bio and silicon neural
| nets do a pretty good, messy job of it. If Socrates had pushed
| harder on that, he might have gotten some real work done about
| the nature of thought. Instead, he always just struck me as
| being kind of a jerk, rather than contributing anything.
| Cybotron5000 wrote:
| The oracle at Delphi would beg to differ! ;) I take your
| point though, sort of... It's maybe worth pointing out that
| we only know about Socrates from secondary sources:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing
| You could maybe think of him as playing devil's advocate, or
| employing 'reductio ad absurdum' methods (even moving towards
| a precursor to some sort of scientific method perhaps?) ...or
| maybe as employing sometimes useful methods of liberating
| people from irrational superstitions/unexamined beliefs,
| which eventually helped in some way to lead us to more modern
| ways of thinking? Have a read of this if you fancy, see what
| you think: https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/On
| line/texts...
| smogcutter wrote:
| Off topic, but the specific content of Laches' reply is
| interesting of itself for how much it says about Greek culture
| and war making.
|
| It's a very different reply than you might expect to get from,
| say, a Sioux warrior, or a European knight, or a samurai, etc.
| Or from the Greeks themselves, outside of this fairly narrow
| band of history!
| xamuel wrote:
| The reader presumably already knows what courage is, and does
| not need to be taught that. Rather, Socrates/Plato probably
| intended to guide us toward the eternal Form of courage.
| Laches' approach would indeed be better for teaching a neural
| net, but neural nets are not Socrates'/Plato's intended
| audience.
| pjfin123 wrote:
| If you're interested in classical philosophy this YouTube channel
| (Daniel Bonevac) has high quality recorded philosophy lectures:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkHDwe_kfS8
| imbnwa wrote:
| I feel like Arisotle already responded to all of this over 2000
| years ago. Ethical questions are strictly contextual, there's no
| overriding definition of Good to apply, what Aristotle calls the
| Golden Measure isn't an objective mark on a ruler, its the
| ability to discern what is right in given situations with their
| particular variables. An archetypal notion of Good that
| transcends specific situations is a notion of Good that solves no
| situation at all. Ethics is inherently contingent and Aristole's
| Nichomachean Ethics is basically a parenting guide on how to
| raise someone who is capable of this ethical praxis. There's also
| no easy settlement between practical self-interest or
| gratification and ethics either, if you're pursuing the one, you
| can't be pursuing the other since that would pre-suppose what the
| Good is.
|
| Its interesting to note that Aristotle was considered _the_
| practico-scientific thinker of antiquity into the middle ages in
| both the Christian and Muslim worlds (he is referred to as The
| Master, and The Philosopher endlessly), with Plato only making a
| comeback near the end of the renaissance IIRC and his import
| prior largely being in theology (again, in both the Judaeo-
| Christian and Muslim worlds).
| kashyapc wrote:
| _> Walking through my school library many years ago, I walked
| past a copy of Plato's Republic, walked back, picked it up, and
| started reading._
|
| If you've never read Plato before, I'd suggest _not_ to start
| with the _Republic_ -- it is diving into the deep end of Plato. I
| 'm saying this as someone who has recently completed _Republic_
| [1], and thoroughly enjoyed it (and fumed at it in some places).
|
| Instead, get familiar with some of the _earlier_ , and famous,
| Socratic dialogues: _Euthyphro_ , _Apology_ (this is referring to
| a "formal defense", i.e. _apologia_ ; not regret), _Crito_ , et
| al -- they're shorter, give you a great flavour of Socrates, and
| will prepare you for the _Republic_. An excellent English
| translation here is the _Five Dialogues_ [2], a fine selection by
| Hackett Publishing. I'm happy that I started with this.
|
| [1] There are many English translations; I'll strongly recommend
| the "Reeve Edition". This translation recasts the entire dialogue
| as direct speech, this makes it easy to keep track of the
| speakers. Ensure it is this Reeve-only edition (because Reeve
| also revised an earlier translation by Grube):
| https://www.hackettpublishing.com/republic
|
| [2] https://www.hackettpublishing.com/five-dialogues
| cafard wrote:
| Haven't seen the Reeve edition, but yes, the _Republic_ is
| diving into the deep end.
| kashyapc wrote:
| Reeve is a long-time Plato scholar; do check out his edition.
|
| I also consulted in parallel the Allan Bloom translation[1],
| which is more literal and aimed at the "serious student", as
| he puts it. It also comes with a long (and controversial?)
| interpretative essay.
|
| [1] https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/allan-bloom/the-
| republic-o...
| [deleted]
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I found the Republic pretty accessible without much background
| in Plato. I had some exposure in philosophy and had read the
| Apologia, but otherwise had no Ancient Greek exposure.
|
| This absolutely could be a function of the translation I read
| though (I read Desmond Lee's)
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Non-native here, pardon me, did the rules change about
| possesives? It used to be "Socrates's life" as well as "Jones's
| life", but this article uses "Socrates' life" so consistently
| that I'm starting to doubt my rusty memory.
| randallsquared wrote:
| Depends on your style guide; it's contested, and has been for a
| long time.
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