I think there must be more pillars than that. Biology and chemistry while related to physics are distinct (in the same way physics is not maths). More broadly, humanities and the arts are still valid areas of knowledge. Hacker news has a bias towards your three pillars, but I think it is important to acknowledge that human knowledge does go beyond CS, maths and physics.

I disagree re: biology and chemistry. Certainly they are epistemically useful simplifications of the other pillars, but they are not foundational or fundamental.

Physics is not math because it's an empirical rather than a priori exploration. We are trying to reproduce the function governing natural laws, where in mathematics we are exploring the properties of functions. Computer science in turn is concerned with the construction of mathematical structures via algorithms, and so physics will be one such construction.

I think trying to place humanities and the arts under "knowledge" is a category error. These fields don't produce knowledge as its commonly understood, as a corpus of mind-independent facts and their relationships. Certainly facts appear in these fields, such as historical facts and authorship, but I don't think building a corpus of facts is not the main purpose.

> simplifications of the other pillars

This fallacy is called "reductionism."

It's not universally accepted that it is fallacy. And for whatever it misses, reductionism is a hell of a tool that has been incredibly useful in understanding the world.

Of course, so are chemistry and biology, so blithely dismissed in the parent comment.

> Of course, so are chemistry and biology, so blithely dismissed in the parent comment.

I didn't dismiss them at all, I explicitly said they are epistemically useful, but that doesn't entail we should accept them into our core ontology.

It's a philosophy not a fallacy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/

Wrong. Philosophy and Mathematics are the real pillars of knowledge. Everything else can be derived from this including physics.

Philosophy doesn't really produce knowledge, it explores and frames questions. When we accept that the questions define a coherent domain of discourse, we create a field of study that does produce knowledge. This is how natural philosophy became science, and if ethics ever gets to this point, we'll get a moral science which will produce moral knowledge. Ethics doesn't currently produce moral knowledge.

would you care to elaborate?

And that's the problem with living in a philistinic society. When people think the sciences are the only noteworthy achievements of human intellect.