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).

edit: Then there's the whole "what is a cow" thing. Like if you you stuffed a cow carcass with a robot and no one could tell the difference, would that still be a cow? Or what if you came across a horrifying cow-horse hybrid, what would you call that? Or if the cow in question had a unique mutation possessed by no other cow - does it still fit the cow archetype? For example, what if the cow couldn't produce milk? Or was created in lab? Which features are required to inherit cow-ness? This is an ambiguity covered by language, too. For example, "cow" is a pejorative not necessarily referring to a bovine animal.

edit: And also the whole "is knowledge finite or infinite?". Is there ever a point at which we can explain everything, science ends and we can rest on our laurels? What then? Will we spend our time explaining hypotheticals that don't exist? Pure theoretical math? Or can that end too?

A robot in a cow carcass is not a cow, it's a "robot in a cow carcass". Someone might believe it's a cow because they lack crucial information but that's on them, doesn't change the fact.

A cow-horse hybris is not a cow, it's a cow-horse hybrid.

A cow with a genetic mutation is a cow with a genetic mutation.

A cow created in a lab, perhaps even grown 100% by artificial means in-vitro is of course still a cow since it has the genetic makeup of a cow.

The word cow is the word cow, its meaning can differ based on context.

Things like this is why philosophers enjoy zero respect from me and why I'm an advocate for abolishing philosophy as a subject of study and also as a profession. Anyone can sit around thinking about things all day. If you spend money on studying it at a university you're getting scammed.

Also knowledge is finite based purely on the assumption that the universe is finite. An observer outside the universe would be able to see all information in the universe and they would conclude; you can't pack infinite amounts of knowledge into a finite volume.

I have this pet theory that Philosophy is kind of the Alternative Medicine of intellectual pursuits. In the same way that Alternative Medicine is doomed to consist of stuff that doesn't work (because anything proven to work becomes "Medicine"), Philosophy is made entirely of ideas that can't be validated through observation (because then they'd be Science), and also can't be rigorously formalized (because then they'd be Math).

So for any given claim in Philosophy, if you could find a way to either (a) compare it to the world or (b) state it in unambiguous symbolic terms, then we'd stop calling it Philosophy. As a result it seems like the discipline is doomed to consist of unresolvable debates where none of the participants even define their terms quite the same way.

Crazy idea, or no?