Haha, there's no comparison. The top philosophers are smarter than our Supreme Court Justices. And those are certainly smarter than Carmack.

And I'm a huge Carmack fanboy.

Hah. I've met a philosophy majors, and most of them just seemed to want to play word games, rather than try to help build understanding or work together in a conversation towards truth.

I don't care of the smartness of any group, but I'd take the methods of rationality over whatever is taught in philosophy any day of the week. You can see sillysaurus3 trying to actually get to the bottom of your statement, and he's being a much better logician than you are.

As a biochemist I'm also allergic to the field of ethics, because it tends to be worried hand-wringing by people who have no technical understanding of the field.

I mean, for the sake of argument I'd like to entertain that hypothesis. How do you propose to prove it? Or at least show some persuasive evidence.

To define "smart", you'd have to ask a philosopher. QED.

Jokes aside, my personal opinion is that we have a lot of hubris on the average, and a lot of us probably consider ourselves smarter than we are. Or at least could do with an attitude that generates an openness to learning, which being humble does.

For this reason alone, it might be interesting to consider that there might be a smarter lot out there. And a bunch of people who are sort of smart in the same way as developers are (deductive reasoning, parsing problems very finely, etc) to boot.

Obviously I can't prove it, but we can look at a few metrics: academic performance, influential ideas, impact on society. I think Carmack would lose on all these fronts.

How have modern philosophers impacted society? (Show your work.)

It seems obvious that Carmack's ideas have been far more influential than most philosophers' ideas, but admittedly this is difficult to measure. Impact on society isn't, though.

“Every mathematician believes that he is ahead of the others. The reason none state this belief in public is because they are intelligent people.”

Gorsuch, for example, often bases his arguments and decisions[1] on the moral framework of Dworkin[1] and Singer[2], just to name two of the biggest modern moral philosophers, regularly. If you don't think that SCOTUS decisions have more and longer-lasting social impact than Doom and the Oculus Rift, then we have some foundational disagreements.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/trump-b...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Dworkin

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer

>Gorsuch, for example, often bases his arguments and decisions[1] on the moral framework of Dworkin[1] and Singer[2], just to name two of the biggest modern moral philosophers, regularly.

I don't think that changing Dworkin's or Singer's mind on an issue would proceed to strongly affect Gorsuch's views. I think he'd just find another philosopher to cite, because his ultimate views are political rather than moral.

Gorsuch always manages to contort his opinion to match up with his politics. Being highly educated is orthogonal to being a good person.