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A comment on Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department?. Parent comment

Re:Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department? by humanrebar on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @10:41AM (#16274668)
> ...it teaches us to be as rigorous as possible when reasoning in natural language.

A philosopher should explain to all the natural-language-as-code people why their endeavor is much, much harder than they think it is. If a philosopher isn't available, a lawyer would probably be qualified as well.

Point being, I feel like I'm getting some of those benefits just writing code and talking about it on a regular basis.

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Re:Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department? by meri_dian on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @10:45AM (#16274708)
It sounds to me like you're philosophizing about code then, which is a fine thing to philosophize about.

We use natural language to express abstractions formed over a very complex world, so it's guaranteed that when talking we'll be imprecise in some way, but the goal is to try to reduce this imprecision.

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Re:Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department? by tommorris on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @01:42PM (#16276321)
> If a philosopher isn't available, a lawyer would probably be qualified as well.

The lawyers are busy explaining to the "smart contracts" people that trying to translate contract law into code is going to produce a whole lot more comedy than it is practical value.

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