Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

I'm not sure I see the big deal. Justification is on a scale of 0 to 1, and at 1 you are onmiscient. We live in a complicated world; no one has time to be God so you just accept your 0.5 JTB and move on.

Or for the belief part, well, "it's not a lie if you believe it".

And as for the true bit, let's assume that there really is a cow, but before you can call someone over to verify your JTB, an alien abducts the cow and leaves a crop circle. Now all anyone sees is a paper-mache cow so you appear the fool but did have a true JTB - Schroedinger's JTB. Does it really matter unless you can convince others of that? On the flip side, even if the knowledge is wrong, if everyone agrees it is true, does it even matter?

JTB only exist to highlight bad assumptions, like being on the wrong side of a branch predictor. If you have a 0.9 JTB but get the right answer 0.1 times and don't update you assumptions, then you have a problem. One statue in a field? Not a big deal! *

* Unless it's a murder investigation and you're Sherlock Holmes (a truly powerful branch predictor).

> I'm not sure I see the big deal.

Tumblr is loginwalled now, so I can't find the good version of this, but I'll try and rip it:

Philosophical questions like "what is knowledge" are hard precisely because everyone has an easy and obvious explanation that is sufficient to get them trough life.

But, when forced to articulate that explanation, people often find them to be incomparable with other people's versions. Upon probing, the explanations don't hold at all. This is why some ancient Greek thought experiments can be mistaken for zen koans.

Yeah, you can get by in life without finding a rigorous answer. The vast majority of human endeavor beyond subsistence can be filed under the category "I'm not sure I see the big deal."

To say that about the question of knowledge and then vamp for 200 words is not refusing to engage. It's patching up a good-enough answer to suit a novel challenge and moving on. Which is precisely why these questions are hard, and why some people are so drawn to exploring for an answer.