Douchebag 2.0—an Elon Musk company

My Philosophy 101 professor basically said Kant was a dick who was wrong about everything.

Or maybe it was Hume. I always get those two mixed up.

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And also a class that takes a deep dive into the scientific method.

And wait tables and teach middle-schoolers while they’re doing it.

That should cover all the bases to create a well-rounded person.

I came out of Philosophy 101 thinking basically “ok this is mostly just a bunch of navel-gazing nonsense that ultimately doesn’t lead anywhere”.

But I still think the process of getting to that point was invaluable. It’s like the Eisenhower quote that battle plans are useless, but the act of planning is indispensable.

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Y’all wasting good tutition money when you coulda gotten the same education for a $10 copy of this book.

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Kidding. I loved school and philosophy courses.

I would live my whole life attending grad school classes if they didn’t eventually ask you to graduate or they’ll cut off funding :sob:

I started that book but didn’t finish. I think I got the gist of where it was going.

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Edit: this article is similar to the one posted earlier by @Marksman.

On several occasions over the years, Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster, according to three sources who repeatedly heard the comment. On one occasion a few years ago, Musk told employees he would trigger a “market failure” at Neuralink unless they made more progress, a comment perceived by some employees as a threat to shut down operations, according to a former staffer who heard his comment.

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maybe just mentioning Kant in passing is enough.

e.g. when teaching the hamiltonian cycles and the bridges of Konigsberg.

Which one was the apriori guy who believed in facts and evidence vs. the other the guy who believed in first principles above all?

does it matter?

kantian ethics is all about the evidence right?

I liked the apriori guy better. Unless apriori actually means first principles. Then I like the other guy better.

That’s an interesting philosophical question. There are two schools of thought abou…

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So inscrutable. Maybe Kanye is into something with the half-Chinese theory.

I guess Kant is the a priori guy, but a priori means almost the opposite of believing in facts and evidence; or slightly more precisely, a priori for Kant means we can draw theoretical conclusions about the mind, space & time, and so on through thoughts and deduction. He would not be opposed to facts or evidence per se, which I’m taking as a stand in for empiricism.

The first principles guy, maybe Spinoza, maybe Descartes?

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This reminds me a whole lot of

holmes

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Yeah I had apriori wrong. Sounds like first principles to me. What was Hume’s deal? Wasn’t he Kant’s rival?

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Heh that’s so funny because I distinctly remember having a lot of trouble with both Hume and Kant. Also we spent what seemed like half the semester on Kant.

Hume was a few generations before Kant, without googling like early 1700s for Hume, late 1700s for Kant. Hume was the last (famous) and arguably greatest modern empiricist, very popular today among many naturalism-leaning folks like Dennett. Kant credited Hume with raising strong skeptical challenges to the metaphysics of the age (the nature of cause and effect for example), but Kant attempted to address and solve most of those challenges in his system.

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All I really remember about Kant is the universalizability principle, which is a good one imo.

One of Kant’s categorical imperatives is the universalizability principle, in which one should "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law .” In lay terms, this simply means that if you do an action, then everyone else should also be able to do it.

Despite this being a clear MO, I hope SpaceX employees aren’t getting the same treatment (I expect grunts are insulated but idk). I mean some of them are literally working with potential bombs, they don’t have to imagine it.

I was thinking of Richard Feynman’s comments on the Challenger disaster. It would be interesting to have Musk give an estimate of the probability of a SpaceX rocket accident like that (maybe he has, idk). If his answer is much smaller than 1/100, he’s completely full of shit. Since management is expected to be full of it, I’d even give him a big margin and say 1/1000 is unrealistic but ok.

IT SHUDDA BEEN A SIX PARAGRAPH MEDIUM POST

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