Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hubert Dreyfus

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Non-notable Berkeley professor. --Diberri | Talk 22:32, Sep 2, 2004 (UTC)

  • Delete: The article certainly does not offer notability. If people find things that he has done and add them to the article, I will be the first to change my vote, as one does not usually get a position at Berkeley without being something of a field leader. Geogre 00:33, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. He's quite notable, or perhaps notorious is the word, in the artificial intelligence community. A well-known gadfly. He wrote a paper or book, I forget which, in the sixties, entitled "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence," which absolutely infuriated AI workers. It drew parallels between the alchemists, who kept confidently predicting that they were close to finding the secrets of transmutation, and the AI workers. What infuriated them (my POV! IMAO!) is that his criticisms of the AI community for its extreme and unjustified overoptimism were right on, but his philosophical arguments as to why AI wasn't succeeding were lame handwaving. He goaded Seymour Papert into writing a satirical piece entitled "A Heuristic Heuristic-Program-Refuting Program." "Hubert Dreyfus" in quotation marks gets 6,000 Google hits. HIs book "What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason" was published by the MIT Press in 1972, according to Amazon is still in print, and has an Amazon sales rank of 123,614. You'll recall that my personal measure of book notability is that the Amazon sales rank be less than half the number of articles in Wikipedia (i.e. 160,000) so this qualifies. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 00:58, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
More. Click, click, google google... Erasmus University gave him an honorary doctorate "for his brilliant and highly influential work in the field of artificial intelligence, and for his equally outstanding contributions to the analysis and interpretation of twentieth century continental philosophy." Note that he was honored by the philosophy department, not the computer science department! The article says "In 1964 Dreyfus published Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence, a destructive criticism on the work of Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, two of the leading researchers in this field. As a contemporary Socrates, Dreyfus not only questioned the results they had so far obtained, but he also criticized their basic presupposition that intelligence consists of the manipulation of physical symbols according to formal rules, and argued that the research program was doomed to failure." [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 01:04, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
By the way, he is mentioned a couple of times in our article on Artificial Intelligence. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 01:08, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
P. S. In my undergraduate days I took a course from Marvin Minsky, and he gave me a decent grade, and out of respect for him or appreciation for the grade I am not going to do any work improving the article on Dreyfus. :-) [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 01:12, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC) Hooray, hooray! The Amazon sale rank of Minsky's Society of Mind is 31,466! Go Marvin! [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 01:15, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • His multiple publications & fellowships, as well as his reputation within the field, make him at least borderline notable. Keep.-FZ 01:05, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep, sufficiently notorious. The article as it stands is pretty much a nonarticle, though; the article doesn't make a case for his notability, but User:Dpbsmith has. Copy User:Dpbsmith's comments above to the article, then put it on the cleanup list. Wile E. Heresiarch 02:03, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
    • Good idea: Clean Up, with these comments included to guide the cleaners. Geogre 03:47, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Merge the information above into the article, or just copy the comments into its talk page and other editors will do it. One of the few problems with using VfD subpages is that copying such material into the article's talk page doesn't happen as part of the process of keeping, as it used to. Agree with Geogre, the current article does not establish the importance of the subject. I would call it a substub, a proper stub must IMO say both what the article is about and why it is of interest. Andrewa 07:32, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Vanity insanity. This is worse than when Sidney Morgenbesser was listed here and deleted. anthony (see warning) 15:21, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep for the love of god, he is one of the top philosophers of artificial intelligence, Heidegger, existentialism, and lots of other things. Heck there are two fat volumes of essays written about his work recently published by MIT Press: Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Vol. 1 and Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Vol. 2. He's what we call big bananas in the philosophical world, definitely notable enough for Wikipedia, by far. I'd write more on him and his philosophy but I'm not competent enough with it to do it myself, but maybe a friend of mine who has done work with Dreyfus can write up a few paragraphs. --Fastfission 15:29, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
    • You don't need to be that competent to add to the article: if he's that big a banana (and I don't doubt it) then he will have books, awards, honorary degrees. Listing those should be enough to get him off VfD. (no vote, by the way). DJ Clayworth 16:34, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
    • I see he's also mentioned in our article on Heidegger. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 17:59, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep and add the information mentioned above, so that there is no further doubts on his notability. Andris 15:34, Sep 3, 2004 (UTC)
  • I believe the article should be kept as the professor has been very influencial in several fields (especially that of Artificial Intelligence). He has also wrote many papers and books on the subject, which have caused significant debate into whether true strong AI is at all a possibility. Updated article on Hubert Dreyfus with additional information including the comments given here. Many regards, Jordan123 20:08, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. As a general rule, all professors at universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Berkeley and MIT are probably notable unless proven otherwise. Davodd 16:47, Sep 4, 2004 (UTC)
    • Usually, yes, but we shouldn't trust the pedigree. We need to be sure that the articles we keep (especially if no one has nominated the page to the Clean Up service) show the notability. A bare list of publications doesn't do that. As for non-notable professors, they surely do exist at even the most prestigious universities. There are people who write that first, great book and then settle down to do administrative tasks for the next 30 years. They're invaluable at the U., but they're no longer academic leaders. Geogre 19:32, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
    • ???? Davodd, are you being serious or ironic? Where does this "general rule" come from? Is it stated somewhere in Wikipedia and, if so, where? Where does this particular list of universities come from? Are you saying that Cambridge is in and Oxford is out? Are you saying Harvard is in but Yale is out? Or are Yale and Oxford considered to be examples of universities "such as" Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Berkeley and MIT? [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 00:58, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. I don't know if I agree with the "all professors at major universities are notable" criterion, but this guy is certainly notable regardless. — Gwalla | Talk 05:59, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
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