I have an undergrad in Philosophy. Our required math classes were formal logic, which we shared with the comp sci. majors. Those classes basically taught me how to program.
I am now a senior engineer at a F500 and I just have a BA in Phil.
It is a highly underrated degree, and going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject for 4-8 years for a PHD dissertation, it will probably end up being one of the only remaining degrees left.
Academia may be going back to its roots; Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject. Once capital accumulation through job training stops being the focus of academics, it can go back to being what it once was. University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge.
Philosophy of science went hard and was hands down the most valuable course in my education. It's very strange that they don't force everyone to take at least some philosophy in university. Can you imagine living in a world where the average person not only thought about what they believed, but were also equipped to ask themselves hard questions about the nature of belief itself?
I had an Ethics professor in uni who would ask his intro classes to raise their hands if they thought they were a morally upright person. On average, much fewer philosophy majors would raise their hands, and they would continue to decrease throughout their studies.
Of course, the thought process of "I'm trying my best, but sometimes failing", could push someone in both directions of the answer, but striving to be better only works when honestly acknowledging failures. In my experience, the majority of people tend to construct their moral views conveniently along the lines of their preferred actions, but principles built on convenience usually don't hold up to scrutiny.
Marxist-Leninist Philosophy was a required course for all undergrads in my time studying in USSR. Strangely enough, the professors made it into an overview course on history of philosophy, which was quite enjoyable, with just some mention of Marxism-Leninism in the last lecture.
What in some countries is grad studies, is in other places undergrad, and in a personal high point, high school extension studies. In contemporary rich country education systems, it’s not just grade inflation, it’s very low expectations of the student population’s capabilities, in my opinion.
I'm from such a country and this tracks. I often look to individuals of the past with the same academic credentials as me and it seems they are much better read & educated. And when I was in school, it often felt like my education was diluted to cater to the LCD.
I've worked with some professional coders who were philosophy majors - there's some overlap between formal computer science and philosophy for sure. I was sort of surprised when one guy started talking about using diagonalization to prove Godels theorem of incompleteness - I thought, "ok, I guess they do teach y'all a thing or two".
On the whole, though, it's _way_ easier to bluff your way through a philosophy degree than a CS degree.
I have a PhD in mathematics and have worked in tech for more than 30 years as a programmer. I went to a Renaissance era university in Scotland which is required by law to require of me a broad education rather than something very specialised. Because I entered the science faculty, as an undergraduate, I had to balance that with something from the humanities and I chose Philosophy, naïvely thinking that it would be easy. Philosophy is in no sense of the word "easy" and not something you can "bluff your way through". In fact, it is more difficult than mathematics and more difficult and arduous than computer science.
I also teach at a university level and would advise young people reading this to pursue, these days, a philosophy education (or a mathematics education) over a software engineering/computer science education.
I was born a philosopher, people were telling me to study philosophy when I was in high school. But instead my formal education choices took a more circuitous route that included the fine arts, physics, electrical engineering, computer engineering, and eventually theoretical computer science.
However even I can see that philosophy as a field is flawed and generic advice to tell students to go philosophy is incredibly problematic. As someone with philosophical tendencies this is incredibly obvious to me but and I must suggest that those who keep endorsing philosophy as a professional discipline for "success reasons" are putting forth a deeply prejudiced argument due to certain blinders.
For example as soon as you claimed "philosophy is harder than math", then I cannot take this line of argument seriously. The entire statement is a bad and unphilosophical statement. Anyone with an intuition for good philosophy, who is well read and has the wisdom of life experience, who is scientifically literate, should have known that before saying it. It actually offends me. It is intellectually insulting.
So you've never actually studied philosophy or mathematics formally, yet you can succinctly claim that philosophy is easier than math? FWIW, I hold math and CS degrees, and fulfilled as many of my humanities requirements with philosophy classes as I could (although I didn't take anything beyond a 300 level course, and grad level is where both math and philosophy explode in difficulty).
For me at least, I found CS the easiest, followed by math, with philosophy the most difficult and challenging. With philosophy, you need to be as rigorous as when writing a mathematical paper, but at least with math there is a highly structured and rigid format. I can easily see why mathematics, for a very long time, was considered a subfield of philosophy.
Personally though, I'd challenge framing entire disciplines as easier or harder than each other, I think that's an individualized thing. Some people could easily find philosophy much easier than a computer science course. For me, I'd really struggle and probably couldn't complete a fine arts degree. I've just never been able to draw or paint, it's just a skill I've tried but failed to be able to develop. So in general understanding an art degree is the easy degree to BS your way through, but I'd find a fine art bachelor's degree harder to complete than a math PhD. At least unless it was a degree that didn't require any studio classes, so maybe art history?
1. I never claimed philosophy was easier. The previous commenter blankly claimed the opposite on the basis that they are a teacher. I am making a simple meta-observation that if they get to do that, then I get to claim I was literally born with philosophical tendencies in that such an ad hominem is entirely transparent except to the teacher. This argument itself is an example of rigorous, critical argumentation. If they get to use an ad hominem, then they break the rules of good faith argumentation, hence the whole illustrative point about people having philosophical personality traits.
2. The fact that you completely failed to read this exchange context carefully, such casual prejudice toward the argument from authority ("I am a teacher, take it from me, philosophy > math blah blah blah"), also raises doubt in the quality of actually existing philosophy education. It is a lot more like court philosopher behavior than any regard for close reading and actual research-level rigor.
3a. There's an objective, rational argument as to why philosophy is "hard" (emphasis on the quotes). A lot of it has to do with the fact that it is about speculatively complex questions. See for example Noam Chomsky's elaboration on this, he generally philosophy as a field as having deflationary characteristic in relation to scientific progress.
3b. What this also means is that "hardness" is not a good measure at all of a human discipline being actually a good discipline--astrology can also be very "hard", so can Derrida, etc. Simply writing a good piece of fiction is also cognitively hard. But where is this nuance, I ask you, in the OP comments? I do not see it. Where is the impact of philosophy, then?
All of these ought to part and parcel of students who actually learned philosophy well. The fact that multiple top comments do not evince this level of learning, at least on a tech social media forum, says a lot and it should trouble you.
(Having written all this, I think there is a further elaboration on 3a that makes the question/issue much more interesting, but it does not excuse the attitude of philosophy-chauvinism which is well known as thing in academia, analogous to how math/physics has their share of hardness chauvinists over other disciplines, ad infinitum.)
Your comment is clever but plainly unkind. If you truly care about philosophy you would say something more constructive. It is in no comparison to my explicit criticisms, whatever you may disagree with about them.
My general opinion is the same: saying "philosophy > math", and variations thereof, is generally an uneducated, absurd, stupid, unwise comment. I won't mince words with that. Nor am I being paid to write a proper article as to why such a view is deeply misled. It's an online forum.
I'm struggling to find a counter argument in your response. You say it is a deeply prejudiced argument? Why? You say blinders? What are those?
What is a philosophical statement?
One tendency I've noticed is that people well versed in philosophy can communicate well. Just anecdotally. Not something I am seeing here in this response.
Why is refusal to carefully and patiently explain the wrongness of prestige theater, "physics envy"-type conversations an example of not being well-versed in philosophy?
I'm not going to waste my brain cells trying to prove a negative that my comment doesn't have fallacies, but I will say that I meant every word of what I wrote while on my phone commenting casually in an online forum, not for a research paper and perhaps what is more likely is that you don't realize that commonsense context and/or have not fathomed / fill-in-the-blanks as to actual valid reasons as to why I said those things that to you seem to be fallacies.
For example if you knew about STEM-elitism, it is not many mental steps to "philosophy-elitism" of the sort of sentiment "Philosophy >_hard Math". Why exactly does omitting this explication make my opinion a fallacy? It doesn't. It's an online forum with people handwaving their opinions, just as the people above me were already doing.
The objections that one treatise makes to another will typically be of type violation, category mistake, nonsense - which is typical of compilers. I don't need to tell you which discipline invented the ideas of type and type error and was even largely organized around them in early and mid- 20th c, even across wildly different theoretical views.
I'm not sure I agree with this. A senior academic is usually very familiar with the canon. You don't think you will be vaporised if there is no underlying logic and saliency to the arguments in the work you present?
Yes precisely. In my eyes the lack of objective answers in much of philosophy makes it an easy target for humans getting lost in their own "rationality". People vastly overestimate their ability to reason and draw conclusions about abstract concepts that really lack strong definitions.
Some philosophy study is very good for raising the questions one should always ponder in life, but building a career on philosophy very easily leads you astray.
I have studied philosophy, literature and physics. In literature you know everything is made up, that is the point of literature, creating art, but in philosophy many people make up things and then pretend they are real. Objective ethics? Postulating the nature of reality? Please.
idk I have a BA Phil and have been a professional programmer for over a decade now. If you don't know how to search stackoverflow I'd agree. But I had to go to University to learn all the ins and outs of philosophy. Much easier to find the answers online for programming. Searching for "how to live a good life"? Many charlatans on this topic out there. As the academy gets hollowed out in favour of Profit, increasingly those charlatans have STEM degrees.
I had a mandatory philosophy course as part of high-school, and as lucky to pick a practical-yet-philosophical degree. You can easily pick up other skills, but it’s lovely to learn philosophy early on.
I spent my 20s trying to become a Stoic and/or finding ways to practice a secular form o Taoism.
>University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge.
Depends. US had the land grant system going back to the end of the civil war. It was very much oriented towards practical and marketable skills such as agriculture and engineering that were deemed to be in short supply. Still is in these land grant (now also sea grant and space grant) schools. Engineering departments will be massive with a huge campus footprint of a half dozen or more buildings. Liberal arts departments, not so much, relegated to the most ancient of buildings oftentimes.
To your point on being able to argue transferable skills, I think you got in at a great time. It is very difficult to do this now that there are a plethora of actual domain trained candidates for just about any role, far in excess of hiring needs. They can be choosy and wait for the perfect engineer trained in the stack in question. They don't have to settle for someone who took a unit of formal logic anymore.
> going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject
Did your philospophy degree not teach you to think "what could go wrong?".
> with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject for 4-8 years
Do you have any particular reason to believe that this is a likely outcome, other than assuming that you can tell the difference between an exponential curve and a logistical one before the inflection point? I've heard a lot of people make predictions like yours over the past year or so but I've yet to hear any basis for it that doesn't end up being essentially just a hunch that there can't possibly be any diminishing returns before then.
There is substance in philosophy, don't get me wrong, but just not that much of it, theres only a handful of real theorems with proofs (like the deduction theorem etc., which is basically some syntactic sugar correctness proof, if I may put it barbarically).
A physicist will have studied atomic and molecular physics courses, and some intro to chemistry course, and there will be some overlap with thermodynamics. But no physicist pretends to grasp chemistry like chemists do, even though chemistry is technically a branch of physics.
Technically mathematics is a branch of philosophy, but the sheer diversity of statements in mathematics, the nearly endless constellations of symmetries and structures described in mathematics make the few "deep insights" from philosophy pale in comparison.
It's great that the important sliver of your philosophy courseware (the formal logic part) essentially taught you programming, but that is you pivoting to computer science and enjoying success, its not really the non-formal-logic parts of philosophy that propelled you forward.
Relying on ML/AI to solve your problems, and effectively advocating to stop understanding or stop thinking is advice that will not age well. Meritocratically what is supposed to set a "philosopher" ahead of their peers?
Picture a philosopher managing a cloud of AI agents, trying to break RSA-grade products, without the philosopher understanding the intermediate insights.
Contrast with what some human individuals can achieve without AI, they will break it long before the philosopher with AI will!
"Theres only a handful of real theorems with proofs"
Philosophy is not mathematics. Philosophy asks you the question of what is a theorem in the context of philosophical thought, why should the fractal of reality be reduced to a reductionist theorem in the first place, and what consists as sufficient proof for said theorems.
You establish, that it is virtuous to not fall for the hybris that claiming knowledge beyond the scope of your domain is. (i.e. the virtuous physisit who does not mistake his encounter with some institutional courses in chemistry for a foundation to transgress against "the chemist" by pretending to grasp chemistry like the latter does)
Now what is it exactly that you want to put forward regarding the faculty of philosophically trained cognition again?
One of the best programmers I have ever met/worked with had a degree in philosophy, having started in the computer industry before there was widespread adoption of it as a formal subject --- he is one of only two people I've ever met outside of TeX User's Group Conferences who had read TAoCP (and kept a well-thumbed set of the first 3 volumes on a shelf at his desk).
Really miss working with him, but he has since moved on to better things in his choice of locale.
Hypothetically if universities were a place for knowledge and truth instead of vocational training then would it really matter what my major was?
Why would Philosophy still be a better major than say, English or Physics? In that world, you should still pursue whatever interests you most because critical thinking is fostered regardless of major.
> University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge.
Universities were historically finishing schools for the sons of rich families at one time. There was never some era where it was some bastion of truth and knowledge.
I am deeply passionate about the value of a college education and how beneficial an educated population is for basically every conceivable metric, but let’s not get too rose tinted about what universities were. The truth is important here!
That's a very harsh take. Most of us would not be alive by the end of the century to personally witness or attend the 1000 years of the University of Bologna, but that goes enough to say how ancient these institutions are: meaning their role obviously changed over time.
Historically, universities BECAME bastions of truth and knowledge, particularly with the introduction of Alexander von Humboldt's ideas for research. And that was already happening by the mid-end of the 19th century. You can not seek seriously truth and knowledge before the establishment of serious metrics and research methodology.
> I have an undergrad in Philosophy ... It is a highly underrated degree
I agree with that. A philosophy major is the ultimate interdisciplinary major because it is essentially the theory of knowledge. That said, I wish universities mandated humanities and social science majors dual major with a STEM field and vice versa.
Interdisciplinary knowledge is critical now that fields are starting to merge and overlap heavily.
As a counterargument, it is a bad degree if philosophy led you to jump a foregone conclusion that "AI will surely render knowledge specialization by humans useless".
It is literally very badly taught if four years of such an undergrad degree program creates such students with lack of technical background to evaluate AI. It is like vibe coding except the soft sciences departments were already doing it all along. And I suspect it is part of the way philosophy as a program has to work, it is essentially pre-scientific so students that specialize in philosophy, of either the analytic or continental kind, don't actually do enough scientific research and/or some kind of real-world moral and social testing to balance that out. In that sense philosophy as an institution is medieval and for society to go back to that way due to AI would be an intellectual regression.
Basically the mistake here was to conflate the purpose of the university with philosophy, they are very different things. A philosocratic university would be incredibly problematic for humanity. Truth and knowledge in isolation, under a philosophical quarantine, was precisely one of things that thinkers of the scientific revolution like Noam Chomsky warned against.
"Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject."
Hard no. Theology was first, and will forever be.
Where was Plato's Akademia? In a chapel of Athena, goddess of wisdom. In Aristotle you'll often find that philosophy is actually a method of theology, it's a way to figure out the divine, and what is most or least divine.
I mean, theology and philosophy could be argued endlessly to be interchangeable, go ask Wittgenstein. He just argues that things that are 'truly argued' with language are philosophy, while things that are bullshit is more or less theology.
I usually stick to the analytical stuff, the continental stuff was pretty traumatizing honestly, reading through Being-and-Time in a couple days on Adderall fried some brain cells and my perception of reality permanently.
Infamously analytical philosophy quickly turned out to be a dead end and led them to metaphysics to try and salvage their community.
Being and Time has a lot of interesting material but it is ill advised to approach it without having spent quite some time studying the philosophical tradition from Plato up until Heidegger himself, including Nietzsche. The old nazi presupposes a firm grasp of this history of ideas and makes an attempt at a 'reboot', which unsurprisingly turns out rather inscrutable without this background.
As for traumatising, in my experience Heidegger just lays down some groundwork for Derrida and Baudrillard. They're seriously efficient at questioning the foundations of language, thinking and society. Though I'd sooner recommend Merleu-Ponty, whose phenomenological achievements are more accessible and more easily applied in everyday life.
One could make the claim that some knowledge and experience does not fit into language and writing, the primary vehicles of philosophy. Here theology is a long tradition of approaches to such knowing and experience, which tends to be more foundational than the problem domains of philosophy.
I like the notion that religions prescribe a philosophy of life. That’s really all they are, with 1+ deities to justify the basis for it. Or, you know, you pick a philosophy that makes sense without the fear of god(s).
Religious traditions tend to hold that certain claims or parts of their canon are infallible, whereas academic philosophy is more welcoming of the critical and argumentative process.
I would think they're on opposite ends: philosophy teaches you autonomous experiential thinking, religion asks you to follow some third party authority.
this is a modernist misconception. ancient religions are philosophical frameworks and the texts are internally coherent arguments for those frameworks. They are just expressed in language that modern audiences without formal training don't understand.
> While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”
But wait, there's this:
> Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.
The implicit assumption is that these AI-company jobs were recently created and indicate the start of a trend.
Chalmers is stating that there's more demand for philosophers with the right sort of training to work at AI companies (whatever that is) than there are philosophers with that training. (I don't really believe this, but that's what he says.)
He's making this claim for two reasons: (1) to respond to the argument (not directly stated in the article, but quite commonly understood to be sound in the profession field) that it's unwise to get a PhD in philosophy because there are not enough jobs and (2) to suggest that if you do want to get a PhD in philosophy and use it professionally, you'd be wise to study with Chalmers at NYU in order to get placed into these tech-industry jobs.
That reminds me of a survey that found that in the entire field of Social Psychology, there was something like eight people that indicated they would vote for Romney over Obama.
Romney was even pretty centrist, to the point that Obamacare was based on Romney's plan. A similar analogy would be if only a half dozen employees in some field were willing to vote for Fetterman.
At this point I wouldn't consider Romney "rightwing", more of a centrist by current standards. Heck, the president probably thinks Romney is a socialist.
Bit of a tangent, but it's fun to think about how much it takes to become a -er, -ian or -ist in a given field. Philosophy is probably one of the hardest, you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats. In history or physics you probably need to be faculty, in economics you need to have a PhD, in engineering you don't even need a degree but you need to be practicing,...
> you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats
when in school i hung out with a lot of architecture students. They were all told and taught that they will be the next Frank Lloyd Wright or a failure. Then they graduate and end up getting a job drawing construction documents for Taco Bell. Heh they're a pretty jaded bunch.
There was another article on this recently[1], if I didn't know better I would suspect this narrative is being pushed by some PR firm. Maybe it's coming from AI companies trying to imply their models are so advanced that they need philosophers to determine if they're conscious or something?
I studied analytic philosophy, which is basically an education in how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments. IMO there is no better preparation for any sort of writing-and-thinking job than studying analytic philosophy, although of course I am biased.
Not sure I’d recommend doing only a philosophy degree, but I highly recommend pairing it with something else more employable. CS and Philosophy seems like the best pairing for the direction tech is going.
I have one area of my education that I highly value but its very hard to explain without people importing a lot of assumptions.
I like to call it critical listening but also its textual evaluation.
In addition to some didactic instruction my Father gave me a short book on the principles of hermeneutics around 13. We went to different churches over the years growing up but I would bring my bible, take notes, and on the drive home from service he would ask me if anything unsubstantiated by the text was snuck in, anything against the text, etc.
In the hundreds of sermons I took notes on over the years there were only 3 without obvious butchering of the text, statements directly contradicting the very text being examined, nightmarish hermenutical implications, outright fabrications, etc.
The shear volume of evaluation I did against a static text was interesting.
It helped me understand how to parse language, how to do evaluation, just a lot of stuff in a way that was more dynamic than something like debate club.
It also helped me understand how self servingly imprecise people can be and the ways in which deceptive and misleading language is used.
I like the _idea_ of reading continental philosophy, and then I opened up Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Here is a random sentence from a random page verbatim:
"Spirit contains this actuality here because the extremes whose unity it is just as immediately each have the determination to be for itself its own actuality. Their unity is subverted into aloof aspects, each of which is for the other an actual object excluded from it. The unity thus emerges as a mediating middle which is excluded and distinguished from the departed actuality of the two aspects; thus it itself has an actual objectivity differentiated from its aspects, and it is for them, i.e., it is existent. The spiritual substance enters into existence, first while it has gained for its aspects the sort of self-consciousness which knows this pure self to be an actuality which is immediately in force, and therein it just as immediately knows that it is this actuality only through the alienating mediation. Through the former, the moments are refined into the self-knowing category and thereby are refined right up to the point that they are moments of spirit. Through the latter, spirit comes into existence as spirituality."
Yeah I've mostly come around to the idea that Hegel is a Bad Influence and German philosophy should have just stopped at Kant :-)
If I recall "Spirit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and makes it sound more mystical than it probably is.
And Hegel was obsessed with trying to find out how apparent contradictions really... weren't?
So Gemini actually did a great "translation" of this paragraph into something people on this forum could understand:
"If it helps to view it as a distributed architecture problem, Hegel is basically describing how autonomous nodes (individuals) form a network (Spirit).
Because the individual nodes don't trust each other and act strictly in their own self-interest, they can't simply mesh. Instead, their "unity" emerges as a shared, externalized protocol or state machine (the mediating middle). The network actually "comes into existence" when the nodes are fully initialized and aware of their local state, but simultaneously realize they can only achieve anything by serializing their data and passing it through this massive, alienating central protocol."
TLDR: society is made up of individuals, but every single individual thinks they are the main character. We all view ourselves as independent and self-sufficient. And because we all act like we are the centre of the universe, we don't naturally form a harmonious blob. We look at other people and see them as external objects -- NPCs who are separate from us. To interact, we have to invent a third party that sits between us—money, laws, government, social norms. ("The unity thus emerges as a mediating middle which is excluded and distinguished from the departed actuality of the two aspects; thus it itself has an actual objectivity...")
IMHO it's actually really just bog standard liberalism / social contract stuff masquerading behind obscurantist German / high-philosophical language. Though it's probably more mmeant to be more about knowledge and experience and human spirit than boring market relationships etc.
No, Hegel was attempting to figure out the problematic of the gap between universal knowledge (of specific categories) and individual substance (of particular things) by recasting the resolution of this problematic in social development, that the way in which Science resolved the “truth” of our own understanding of the gap between our individual experience and our place in the world (most basically, perhaps, between our beliefs and so-called “objective reality”), was a historical process that could be observed in both the development of the Idea and its concretization in society, and this process is called “Spirit.” That the resolution of this problem would lead to absolute knowledge, because the individual would then be identified with the universal, means that social development is dependent on the assumption of such knowledge, but one which is always missing something extra or excessive to it, some exception to the universal which also expands and deepens it. Hegel claims that this has always been happening, but what is unique about our era is that we are actually consciously aware of this process—-but he was the first person to demonstrate it explicitly, whereas, for him, it was only implicit before in thinker such as Kant.
Much of the apparent obscurantism in continental philosophy is a product frankly of bad translations.
That and much of it was meant to be read somewhat poetically not prescriptively.
I am also not convinced that today's distracted and scattered brains are even capable of reading and digesting something like Kant or Hegel fully. I have a hard time slowing down and thinking at the slow but detailed pace the text requires. I used to read this stuff on the bus or plane before smart phones and even then it was hard to focus deeply enough.
It is only within the horizon of a presumed transparency - already inscribed by the metaphysics of immediacy - that the demand for “clarity” emerges as an unquestioned norm. Thus the Continental philosopher, precisely insofar as they decline this foreclosure of meaning, demonstrates beyond ambiguity that they are entirely capable of writing clearly, choosing instead, with impeccable lucidity, not to.
I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics.
>how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments
This is a little generous. Analytic philosophy often comes across as people using heinous amounts of ink to argue whether a hot dog is technically a taco all while pretending that only a fool would even consider what it tastes like.
> I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics.
I don't think this is true at all. To start with, there's roughly 2000 years between the earliest known philosophers and the analytic-continental split. Plenty of philosophy majors can and do get really into the ancients or medieval philosophers or whatever and complete their degrees without doing much more than a cursory read of the major thinkers post-Kant. And anecdotally, my own undergraduate degree was in philosophy, from one of the more prestigious schools in Anglo-Canada, and we had plenty of opportunities to dive into the continental stuff.
Once you get to the graduate level and academia folks focused on Derrida or whatever are going to gravitate towards the universities that prioritize the schools of thought they're interested in, and those have always been on the continent for the continentals naturally. But for run-of-the-mill philosophy majors in the Anglosphere, IMO you should just assume they have a reasonably broad and just-deep-enough knowledge of the entire history of philosophy and make no particular assumptions about their interests.
I have to disagree here. The split is not incidental, and studying medieval/ancient philosophy naturally means that you are going to concern yourself with Ontology, which is expressely ignored by the “analytic” tradition. If you come to ancient philosophy through your typical post-quinian formal reasoning education, you are going to view such ontology with the weight of thousands of years of translation which you will not realize contains its own tradition and its own truth. You will be stuck in a very narrow, and, frankly, uncritical interpretation. It was Hegel’s fundamental insight (into Kant) that any epistemology fundamentally requires the enclosure of the problem of ontology; that, on account of the schema, the entire Critique of Pure Reason is such an enclosure—-but we cannot genuinely go beyond such an enclosure if we view everything from within it, ie “analytically.”
The average American philosophy undergrad gets very little of any philosopher pre-Russell other than a very skewed review of Aristotle. I have no idea about Canada, and there are some exceptions in the US, but average philosophy undergrad will get a very cursory skimming of pre-analytic thought, with basically none I've ever met having read Kant's first Critique, much less Hegel or any 20th century continental philosopher. Instead they are mostly moved into the only things analytics care about: logic and ethics. The former because they are always temporarily embarrassed mathematicians and the latter because teaching students the sophistry needed to morally justify building bombs for Raytheon that kill thousands of poor people is the bread and butter that keeps American philosophy departments funded. About metaphysics, ontology, etc., they care not at all. Those fields tend to try their best at ambitious answers to unanswerable questions whereas the analytics strive for unusable answers to banal questions.
td;dr: I think you give Anglo philosophy students FAR too much credit. In my experience they aren't well read at all and their departments are staffed by professors who aren't well read.
I've spent a surprising amount of time reading philosophy of language, and it's probably done more for my AI prompting than most of the "prompt engineering" articles I've read.
Speech Act Theory, Austin's How to Do Things with Words, and Searle's work changed how I think about prompts. Instead of asking, "What words should I use?", I ask, "What action am I trying to perform?" Is this a request? A commitment? A declaration? An instruction? It turns out LLMs respond differently when you think in terms of acts instead of sentences. With AI able to hallucinate context, facts, intent, and answers, keeping AI on track is much like herding cats.
I've been borrowing those ideas for prompts, reusable skills, and even governance. The side effect of making me look smarter than I really am.
I even ended up writing an article about baseball umpires through the lens of Speech Act Theory: https://pitcherlist.com/umpires-dont-make-calls-they-make-hi.... Baseball, as usual, turns out to be an excellent way to explain philosophy. Or philosophy is an excellent way to explain baseball. I'm currently working on a update, since the ABS challenge system helps improve my position.
My suspicion is philosophy has a lot more to offer AI than ethics alone. Philosophy of language seems like an obvious fit, but epistemology ("what does it mean to know?") and philosophy of mind also seem increasingly practical once you're building systems instead of just chatting with them.
Maybe the shortage isn't philosophy majors. Maybe it's people who can translate philosophy into engineering without making everyone read Kant first.
Even before LLMs I used to joke with my traditional SE coworkers that "philosophy is very practical." On nearly every project we'd have to talk to stakeholders and ask questions like, "But when you say X, what do you mean?" Establishing definitions, relationships between concepts, etc etc turns out to be really important when you're encoding ideas into a block of silicon. (Yes I know other fields do versions of the same thing too.)
In summary, AI has tricked a bunch of philosophy majors into not only thinking it's more than linear algebra but changing their entire life trajectories because of their confusion. AI seems to be a very alluring tar pit for the non-technical. The sad part is how this negative externality of AI is being actively encouraged for political ends.
I think the main problem is whether intelligence is a computable function (or at least approximable by ones, like AIXI is), and then whether it's of the form that NNs implement (linear algebras plus sigmoids and all that jazz).
The reality is it would be a very small % of philosophy majors or the philosophically interested who would be able to shape their approach or personal opinions to match what the AI labs are looking for anyways.
Only particular schools / kinds of philosophy need apply.
I'm a (dropout) philosophy major, but for 30 years (last month!) have been doing SWE instead. The tar pit of being able to use my brain to make money instead of navigating politics inside academia... happened for most of us a long time before AI.
>> The tar pit of being able to use my brain to make money instead of navigating politics inside academia... happened for most of us a long time before AI.
Anecdotal evidence to support your point.
Have a degree in Anthropology. Took copious amounts of philosophy classes as part of my major. Took some CS classes just to stay on top of the stuff happening in tech.
I wasn't able do what I wanted in Anthropology, so I took the same route and ended up in SWE. To a degree, I have monetized my degree because everything I learned while obtaining my degree I use almost every day in SWE. I was jaded by the toxic politics of academia and it finally pushed me out as well.
Good news, you can become jaded by the toxic politics of corporate software development now, too!
When I worked at Google it was the thing that drove me nuts the most. It was very much a "publish or perish" kind of environment with performance and evaluation structures very obviously inspired by academia. (And just like academia, there was sometimes a culture of stealing other people's projects to get credit, with credit and kudos more important than any kind of monetary success since the company was run by an absolute firehose of revenue anyways... )
I am not trolling or anything, just have genuine question.
What is the expected deliverable of philosophy degree and of its holders in 21st century? What do they produce. I can understand stem - the ones who have it presumably can do math, engineering, construction, even pure math I can to some extent understand. I can understand, to some extent, even memetic English language, women studies, dance etc.
But what is philosophy degree? I don’t think that it’s just history of philosophy.
Like when I was in college I read history of western philosophy. And for majority of philosophers there the thought was that yes, maybe at a time it was reasonable opinion, but looking back from 21st century it was often pretentious nonsense. So what are modern philosophers doing, especially run of the mill philosophy majors? Again, I’m not trying to be rude or anything, I just don’t even know how to formulate that question :)
I think this line of thinking is a bit dangerous. It reminds me when I used to teach in a Civil Engineering department and the other faculty members focused exclusively on how well our coursework prepared our students to become civil engineers. Of course, very few of our students actually did become civil engineers and those that did both required years of additional training and often didn't last long in the profession before transitioning to something else. I used to teach maths and decision making. Had numerous students thank me later on for teaching some of the only material they actually used in their (non-civil-engineering) careers. No one knows what students will do post graduation. One of the best things we can do is to give them tools that are broadly useful.
"the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into"...
There's about 20 philosophers employed by AI labs worldwide, vs 1000s of software engineers, product managers, designers, etc. There's probably more economists working in these labs than philosophers...
I would have thought so too, a priori, but at this point three former colleagues are working for Anthropic; the most extraordinary case, one of the brainiest people I have known, was announced this week.
If service to others and to society mean anything to you, working in Starbucks or any fast food job will teach you more about humanity and human society than most college grads learn from a humanities degree.
It’s difficult to articulate the tedium and monotony of a Starbucks gig. There’s so little intellectual stimulation available in that setting. If you managed to learn more from your fast food than your humanities degree, then I think that’s on you for not paying attention at college (perhaps because you were exhausted from your job?).
> If you managed to learn more from your fast food than your humanities degree...
It's not about learning "more". It's that earning a degree is an academic undertaking whereas working at a coffee shop is "real life".
There is no need to treat one as more or less valuable/useful than the other. They're just different kinds of human experiences. Learning is possible from both.
If you find that sort of work, tedious and monotonous, then I think that says more about you than the job. I’ve been a janitor, a barista and a software developer, and they all are fascinating and fulfilling in different ways. Of course if purely measuring on status, comfort and financial renumeration software dev currently beats them all handily, but to imagine there is nothing you could learn, nothing interesting, nothing fulfilling in other types of work is pretty arrogant. The lefties might even call it privileged.
The mega corp is making 3.98% profit. Sure you could focus all your time at Starbucks on that 3.98%, but most of us would focus on the other 96% which is helping customers.
That is not what AI is. AI is a powerful tool, a semiautonomous set of wood working tools that still need a master craftsperson to use. You need the tool+genius to drive it. Everyone wants to shoot down AI but they think AI will do everything. Being proud of a creation where someone did style transfer between spongebob and Rembrandt and they think they made art. About as responsible for actual art as just downloading images from google.
I'm not seeing any evidence of this. Precision tools raise the ceiling. AI mostly just raises the floor. Ease of use is a focus point for all AI labs and it's what they're constantly trying to improve. Yes, an expert can juice these models for all they've got, but an average Joe today is probably getting better results than the best power users had a year ago. Extrapolate this a bit and ask yourself if businesses will ever want to pay your geniuses and craftspeople a professional's wage if they could get 'good enough' results from any desperate minimum wage worker, or even by doing the work themselves.
It’s actually pretty bad at it. I think there just isn’t enough literature to get a good effect from the LLM approach. Good luck with verifiable rewards when the target discourse is effectively pure self-criticism. Maybe ‘disputable rewards’ …
I have found that with proper framing I can get good help from Claude and ChatGPT on questions of translation of haute German philosophy and, to my amazement, Ancient Greek. An immediate ‘translate this passage’ request is a cataclysmic disaster. The nexus of sentences differs from other forms of discourse.
Philosophy is a living process of integrating ideas. Classical materials are the whetstone upon which the mind is sharpened. Unlike history, where literal established accounts are ideal, in philosophy one is expected to view today (or the future) through the lens of contextual discourse.
While there is “no right answer” understanding what the issues are and how the discussion plays out is relevant.
Hilarious that the article is framed as a humanities vs sciences thing even though the caliber of philosophers who can get these jobs at labs are the top 0.1% in their field, and wouldn't have trouble finding a job elsewhere, whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile.
> …‘‘computer science’’ is not a science and…its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology – the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view
-- SICP
I studied both in undergrad. They're more similar than different.
David Chalmers has been doing this for a long time. The fun thing about successful philosophers is it is a very small club and given their nature a lot of them have kind of humorous beef with each other. To make a name for yourself you often have to find a credible target whose intelligence you can insult. This sort of philosophical rivalry is a common historical occurrence as well, and common to the nature of philosophy itself. As such, it feels wrong to mention Chalmers without mentioning some of his famous detractors.
Everyone is debating the merits of philosophy and education without stating the elephant in the room: these AI companies hired these philosophy majors to launder their reputation and obfuscate the horrible anti-social products they are making.
I would much rather hear that they were hiring theoretical logicians than philosophers.We could use more people exploring the limits of prepositional and propositional logic and set theory than we need philosophy. AI is never going to become conscious, at least not the kind we have right now.
You do realize that propositional logic, set theory, and mapping the limits of formal systems are philosophy, right? You're literally describing mathematical logic and philosophy of language.
When I was a young man I took three philosophy courses from a very old man who, when he was a young man, was the dissertation director of Alan Turing. The latter, by the way, was an habitué of the seminar of Wittgenstein.
I studied it getting my CS degree - you can literally write mathematical formulas using symbols and you can perform operations in logic. Very different from a philosophy class - excuse me if you were already aware.
Both professions require writing detailed, overly specific, reasonably watertight arguments that will be read by only a handful of people, so that tracks
Arguments so watertight that none of them ever agree with each other and have argued for thousands of years without a resolution to even the most basic of questions.
Connections are far more important IMO. The opinion itself is there for the plebs so they don't revolt when the high-IQ trickery flagrantly mismatches the plain language of the constitution. The courts are really the main thing nowadays that can provide legitimacy to the acts of the state since it doesn't follow the people or the documents authorizing it.
But a law degree is probably even better. I know what you mean though, consulting companies also hire the (top 1-3%) philosophy majors and math/physics majors for the same reason. Good thought processes.
Philosophy, and more specifically, epistemology is one of the most important disciplines in the world and it would do a lot to help our societal discourse if people studied it from an early age. Most people never ask the questions of what knowledge actually is and what constitutes knowing something vs assuming something vs motivated reasoning, bias, etc.
I know that many people don't care about Knowledge™ and are more motivated by winning but perhaps it would be easier to counter these people if the language of knowledge was more broadly spoken, understood, and internalized.
I wanted to major in Philosophy but was worried I wouldn’t make enough money to support the lifestyle I wanted so majored in Computer Science instead. What irony.
Someday I hope to go back to school to get a PhD in philosophy with a focus on logic. :)
I got a degree in philosophy. Couldn't be less interested in this kind of job. I hate philosophy now
One of my biggest regrets is not getting into this stuff when I was in school.
Didn't know about tech at all when I was going, just picked whatever was easy to major in and somewhat bearable. Had zero interest in school until later adulthood
No doubt there's great programmers with philosophy backgrounds, just like I've worked with many from chemistry, physics and music. The conversation here though, is a bunch of pompous arguing over minutiae and correctness, trying to win using the densest phrasing and allusion to deep knowledge of esoteric readings and history, i.e. much like my one university philosophy class. Meanwhile people from all backgrounds are busy getting shit done and actually winning.
I've noticed that many famous billionaires want to be viewed as philosophers: Thiel obviously, Musk arguably.
For this they do need ideological coherency and the ability to order their arguments logically, ideally as part of a larger program. Since it is such a popular destination late in life, you'd think it would be a good choice for a major too.
I don't think it does explain anything. I've seen no evidence that Thiel takes any particular inspiration from Plato. Rather, Thiel seems to be much more focused on Christianity and libertarianism, and those would be the sources of Thiel's anti-democratic predilections, not Plato's Republic. I think philosopher-king is more of a label that other people are trying to pin on Thiel. The Republic actually said that the philosopher-kings should have no private property, and children should be raised by the community.
Moreover, I've seen no evidence whatsoever that Elon Musk is looking to be considered a philosopher. He writes short meme tweets, not treatises.
I think you're reading my comment too literally. The concept of philosopher-king has moved beyond literal reading of Plato and into the broader concept of epistocracy.
> I think you're reading my comment too literally.
Well, I agree that the concept of philosopher-king is applied by people nonliterally to Thiel, though mainly because those people are ignorant of Plato. But if we interpret your comment nonliterally and remove the "from Plato" part, I still don't see how the nonliteral concept helps to explain anything. Unless we're supposed to interpret "It explains a hell of a lot" nonliterally too?
As I see it, calling Thiel a philosopher-king wannabe is nothing more than a hand-wavy insult. He's a politically powerful billionaire, he has an undergraduate philosophy degree, and he likes to spout about politics and apparently the Antichrist. That's really all there is to it. The use of the term philosopher-king has no intellectual value in this context.
In the gentlest way possible you are responding to "he thinks he's Napolean" with minutia about troop movements in Austerlitz. But you do you lapcat, you do you.
No, I was reponding to "It explains a hell of a lot."
You would have had the same problem if you had said, "Look up Napolean. It explains a lot." The problem is that it explains nothing. Neither Plato nor Napolean helps to explain Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk for that matter. "Philosopher-king wannabe" or "Napolean wannabe" is nothing but an insult wrapped in an historical reference, with no intellectual or explanatory value, and no specific connection to Thiel.
"Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers."
I would hardly call that the revenge of the philosophy majors.
I find it so exhausting how the analytic and classical traditions are the de-facto face of philosophy in the US. The Continental tradition has a _ton_ to say on the topic of AI, and is likely where you'll find the answer to your questions about why the vibes feel so bad in the post AI world.
Philosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates!
It's great preparation for law school, as a commenter has already pointed out, since skill in one game carries over to the other. The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious, and I think one can reasonably argue that philosophical training does more harm than good by inculcating bizarre/narrow/counterproductive intellectual habits/commitments/bugaboos. But philosophers have tricked themselves into places where they really have no business being, like hospital ethics panels. Cool for these guys though, it seems harmless.
> The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious
I wouldnt go that far. I think your clutching at straws a little bit. Its a real stretch from philosohers are insecure to they are useless. This is the sort of thing confident ignorance gets you, when you dont know how philophy impacts mpdern life so you assume it doesnt because you think you know everything
The experts on hospital ethics panels are trained internally by medical schools, which are like little universities inside universities. There has not been philosophical access for about thirty years.
You have a great build up for an argument but why this conclusion?
At some point who should be doing ethics? Lawyers? Computer scientists? (I'm not asking ironically, who really is well placed to make population level and extremely though questions like balancing the protection of the few against a global important health interest/gain?)
Presumably, a reasonably repræsentative cross section of society. So my cop out answer is "all of them, plus the stay at home mother, the farmer, and the lumberjack"
>“We can do neuroscience on A.I. systems in a way that we kind of can’t with humans,” Mr. Long said, in that they “don’t have skulls.” The three jobs Eleos was hiring for would all be machine-learning research scientists who could design and perform experiments.
This is pretty interesting! I wouldn't know how easy such "surgery" on LLMs would be to do, if if they do have "knowledge" or "consciousness" as their proponents claim, there could be some profound outcomes from this.
I find it a bit strange to assume you can only understand these topics with a philosophy degree. My CS degree had a good chunk of philosophy baked in (philosophy of science) and parts of it strongly encouraged you to dive into philosophy. AI 101 introduced me to Gödel for example and logic in general.
From the article it seems like they mostly do "is AI conscious" and ethics work. Call me a skeptic (no pun intended) but it looks like "hiring some philosophers to confirm the things we want to keep saying for the sweet AGI-race-$$$ to flow". Kind of like these tobacco studies way back when.
When I was young, they said this about Mathematics degrees. "You can do anything with Mathematics degrees." and so on and so forth. But no one ever said that about CS/EE degrees then. Those ones needed no justification or anything. And that seems to be the general case in the world. People will tell you "actually, X is amazing" because there's some countercultural need for us to say "it's not the thing everyone thinks that is right; it's this other thing" but then you check and it turns out the normie thing is correct.
Any time there's an implied Malcolm-Gladwelliness to something, I stop and think to myself, and when I scratch the surface I find that the normie take is true. It's Betteridge's Corollary, if you will.
In the distant future, our cybernetic descendants will say:
“He thinks, therefore he isn’t”
Because it will have been so obsoleted as the medium of experience that those who think with depth and solve problems logically will seem like a primitive species.
Most of the intentionality and experience will happen at a spatial and relational level - unlike language and math.
High level abstraction and novelty.
More like design, intuition, and intention - fleeting and never lingering, searching, never defining.
> “Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year.
According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.
It is my understanding that early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus was mostly critical of logical positivism as opposed to philosophy as a whole, and that late Wittgenstein of the Investigations embraced philosophical inquiry, only abandoning the idea of language as a precise tool (and in fact embracing it).
I have heard that Kierkegaard was one of his favorite philosophers, which challenges the idea that people seem to have of Wittgenstein as a precise purely logical thinker who disdained ambiguity.
The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.
A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”.
The problems, are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.—Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off.—Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.
> "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
I'm not sure why you're quoting the quote that I just quoted. I was hoping for an analysis.
> If you view the story of Wittgenstein and Rorty as primarily one of leaving academia, I believe you are telling on yourself.
I said that they left academic philosophy. Rorty didn't leave academia entirely. But yes, I left academic philosophy too, so in a sense I am telling on myself, though I don't accept the negative connotation.
I think the quote doesn't say what you think it says. Wittgenstein loved philosophy, and it's frustrating when people cherry pick his work to try and dunk on the entire field.
And if you accept that you are telling on yourself, then don't you think it's awfully convenient that your perspective on philosophy as a discipline is a little skewed by personal hangups?
> I think the quote doesn't say what you think it says.
You still haven't said what you think it means!
> Wittgenstein loved philosophy
I think the phrase "loved philosophy" is way too vague to be informative.
> when people cherry pick his work
I picked some quotes for a Hacker News comment, necessarily brief. I also provided a link to the entire Philosophical Investigations, which I've course I've read more than once.
> dunk on the entire field.
The field of academic philosophy has a tendency to dunk on Wittgenstein. His previously biggest personal booster Bertrand Russell certainly did: "I have not found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations anything that seemed to me interesting and I do not understand why a whole school finds important wisdom in its pages." Many analytic philosophers feel the same way, ironically finding the Tractatus, which Wittgenstein repudiated, more to their liking.
They're probably correct to feel threatened. My own view, as I've stated, is that Wittgenstein's later work is a broad-based critique of philosophy, not aimed only at logical positivism, for example.
> skewed by personal hangups
What personal hangups do you mean?
I said that I left academic philosophy. After many years. I didn't say why. Do you think Wittgenstein and Rorty left academic philosophy due to personal hangups?
> But Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”
Could it be? Did all that concern and daydreaming regarding how to safely wish for something from a malicious Jinn (and other such thought experiments) have a use?
It seems everything has a use if you wait long enough. Number theory also seemed famously unapplyable until modern digital cryptography came along, and same with non-Euclidean geometry before general relativity.
It does have a use but not in the colloquial sense, history is plastered with bad winners yielding to their predatory instincts and a malicious Jinn is one of infinite ways you can visualize something that pulls/pushes into the abyss for a competitive comparative sense of superiority. Understanding it doesn't make it happen less because the phenomena exhibits in circles that mock thought itself. But taking it into consideration in thought does tend to improve the outcome of novelty the same way an engineer looks as Murphy's Law as a warning not to seek positive thoughts for the sake of it but look at failure modes because they're central to good design
It was really just the luck of the draw for me ending up in the undergrad program that I did, but every day I am grateful to have spent both my degrees and a decade mostly just teaching Kant or Descartes and reading Derrida, Marx, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Deleuze, etc. Meaningful, sometimes beautiful, thought which maybe never made me feel "smarter" than other people, but undeniably taught me how to live and navigate the world.
That is, instead of the Analytic hokum these nerds are selling to literal billionaires! Can you imagine the meetings these guys are having?
I have an undergrad in Philosophy. Our required math classes were formal logic, which we shared with the comp sci. majors. Those classes basically taught me how to program.
I am now a senior engineer at a F500 and I just have a BA in Phil.
It is a highly underrated degree, and going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject for 4-8 years for a PHD dissertation, it will probably end up being one of the only remaining degrees left.
Academia may be going back to its roots; Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject. Once capital accumulation through job training stops being the focus of academics, it can go back to being what it once was. University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge.
Philosophy of science went hard and was hands down the most valuable course in my education. It's very strange that they don't force everyone to take at least some philosophy in university. Can you imagine living in a world where the average person not only thought about what they believed, but were also equipped to ask themselves hard questions about the nature of belief itself?
I had an Ethics professor in uni who would ask his intro classes to raise their hands if they thought they were a morally upright person. On average, much fewer philosophy majors would raise their hands, and they would continue to decrease throughout their studies.
Of course, the thought process of "I'm trying my best, but sometimes failing", could push someone in both directions of the answer, but striving to be better only works when honestly acknowledging failures. In my experience, the majority of people tend to construct their moral views conveniently along the lines of their preferred actions, but principles built on convenience usually don't hold up to scrutiny.
Marxist-Leninist Philosophy was a required course for all undergrads in my time studying in USSR. Strangely enough, the professors made it into an overview course on history of philosophy, which was quite enjoyable, with just some mention of Marxism-Leninism in the last lecture.
That's very sad. There is much to learn on the subject.
no its not and the great example is the Sowjetunion.
Without getting into a big fight, Marxist-Leninist Philosophy is not, like, general philosophy in the conceptual sense.
The idea that you need to be familiar with Hegel as a prerequisite means you’re looking at graduate level classes if we’re taking it seriously.
Just to add to your “no big fight” observation:
What in some countries is grad studies, is in other places undergrad, and in a personal high point, high school extension studies. In contemporary rich country education systems, it’s not just grade inflation, it’s very low expectations of the student population’s capabilities, in my opinion.
>contemporary rich country education systems
I'm from such a country and this tracks. I often look to individuals of the past with the same academic credentials as me and it seems they are much better read & educated. And when I was in school, it often felt like my education was diluted to cater to the LCD.
I've worked with some professional coders who were philosophy majors - there's some overlap between formal computer science and philosophy for sure. I was sort of surprised when one guy started talking about using diagonalization to prove Godels theorem of incompleteness - I thought, "ok, I guess they do teach y'all a thing or two".
On the whole, though, it's _way_ easier to bluff your way through a philosophy degree than a CS degree.
Something to ponder...
I have a PhD in mathematics and have worked in tech for more than 30 years as a programmer. I went to a Renaissance era university in Scotland which is required by law to require of me a broad education rather than something very specialised. Because I entered the science faculty, as an undergraduate, I had to balance that with something from the humanities and I chose Philosophy, naïvely thinking that it would be easy. Philosophy is in no sense of the word "easy" and not something you can "bluff your way through". In fact, it is more difficult than mathematics and more difficult and arduous than computer science.
I also teach at a university level and would advise young people reading this to pursue, these days, a philosophy education (or a mathematics education) over a software engineering/computer science education.
I was born a philosopher, people were telling me to study philosophy when I was in high school. But instead my formal education choices took a more circuitous route that included the fine arts, physics, electrical engineering, computer engineering, and eventually theoretical computer science.
However even I can see that philosophy as a field is flawed and generic advice to tell students to go philosophy is incredibly problematic. As someone with philosophical tendencies this is incredibly obvious to me but and I must suggest that those who keep endorsing philosophy as a professional discipline for "success reasons" are putting forth a deeply prejudiced argument due to certain blinders.
For example as soon as you claimed "philosophy is harder than math", then I cannot take this line of argument seriously. The entire statement is a bad and unphilosophical statement. Anyone with an intuition for good philosophy, who is well read and has the wisdom of life experience, who is scientifically literate, should have known that before saying it. It actually offends me. It is intellectually insulting.
So you've never actually studied philosophy or mathematics formally, yet you can succinctly claim that philosophy is easier than math? FWIW, I hold math and CS degrees, and fulfilled as many of my humanities requirements with philosophy classes as I could (although I didn't take anything beyond a 300 level course, and grad level is where both math and philosophy explode in difficulty).
For me at least, I found CS the easiest, followed by math, with philosophy the most difficult and challenging. With philosophy, you need to be as rigorous as when writing a mathematical paper, but at least with math there is a highly structured and rigid format. I can easily see why mathematics, for a very long time, was considered a subfield of philosophy.
Personally though, I'd challenge framing entire disciplines as easier or harder than each other, I think that's an individualized thing. Some people could easily find philosophy much easier than a computer science course. For me, I'd really struggle and probably couldn't complete a fine arts degree. I've just never been able to draw or paint, it's just a skill I've tried but failed to be able to develop. So in general understanding an art degree is the easy degree to BS your way through, but I'd find a fine art bachelor's degree harder to complete than a math PhD. At least unless it was a degree that didn't require any studio classes, so maybe art history?
1. I never claimed philosophy was easier. The previous commenter blankly claimed the opposite on the basis that they are a teacher. I am making a simple meta-observation that if they get to do that, then I get to claim I was literally born with philosophical tendencies in that such an ad hominem is entirely transparent except to the teacher. This argument itself is an example of rigorous, critical argumentation. If they get to use an ad hominem, then they break the rules of good faith argumentation, hence the whole illustrative point about people having philosophical personality traits.
2. The fact that you completely failed to read this exchange context carefully, such casual prejudice toward the argument from authority ("I am a teacher, take it from me, philosophy > math blah blah blah"), also raises doubt in the quality of actually existing philosophy education. It is a lot more like court philosopher behavior than any regard for close reading and actual research-level rigor.
3a. There's an objective, rational argument as to why philosophy is "hard" (emphasis on the quotes). A lot of it has to do with the fact that it is about speculatively complex questions. See for example Noam Chomsky's elaboration on this, he generally philosophy as a field as having deflationary characteristic in relation to scientific progress.
3b. What this also means is that "hardness" is not a good measure at all of a human discipline being actually a good discipline--astrology can also be very "hard", so can Derrida, etc. Simply writing a good piece of fiction is also cognitively hard. But where is this nuance, I ask you, in the OP comments? I do not see it. Where is the impact of philosophy, then?
All of these ought to part and parcel of students who actually learned philosophy well. The fact that multiple top comments do not evince this level of learning, at least on a tech social media forum, says a lot and it should trouble you.
(Having written all this, I think there is a further elaboration on 3a that makes the question/issue much more interesting, but it does not excuse the attitude of philosophy-chauvinism which is well known as thing in academia, analogous to how math/physics has their share of hardness chauvinists over other disciplines, ad infinitum.)
Man I love this brand of unintentional comedy
Your comment is clever but plainly unkind. If you truly care about philosophy you would say something more constructive. It is in no comparison to my explicit criticisms, whatever you may disagree with about them.
My general opinion is the same: saying "philosophy > math", and variations thereof, is generally an uneducated, absurd, stupid, unwise comment. I won't mince words with that. Nor am I being paid to write a proper article as to why such a view is deeply misled. It's an online forum.
Wow dude, you seem like a tool.
I'm struggling to find a counter argument in your response. You say it is a deeply prejudiced argument? Why? You say blinders? What are those?
What is a philosophical statement?
One tendency I've noticed is that people well versed in philosophy can communicate well. Just anecdotally. Not something I am seeing here in this response.
Why is refusal to carefully and patiently explain the wrongness of prestige theater, "physics envy"-type conversations an example of not being well-versed in philosophy?
If you actually studied philosophy you would realize that your comment is riddled with fallacies.
I'm not going to waste my brain cells trying to prove a negative that my comment doesn't have fallacies, but I will say that I meant every word of what I wrote while on my phone commenting casually in an online forum, not for a research paper and perhaps what is more likely is that you don't realize that commonsense context and/or have not fathomed / fill-in-the-blanks as to actual valid reasons as to why I said those things that to you seem to be fallacies.
For example if you knew about STEM-elitism, it is not many mental steps to "philosophy-elitism" of the sort of sentiment "Philosophy >_hard Math". Why exactly does omitting this explication make my opinion a fallacy? It doesn't. It's an online forum with people handwaving their opinions, just as the people above me were already doing.
Interested to hear how you think one "bluffs" their way through a philosophy degree. Could you sketch that out?
Philosophy treatises don’t trigger compiler errors.
More seriously, the main issue with most philosophical investigations is a question of grounding.
When you start stacking abstract concepts on top of each other, things can get dicey very quickly. Moreso if you are smart.
The objections that one treatise makes to another will typically be of type violation, category mistake, nonsense - which is typical of compilers. I don't need to tell you which discipline invented the ideas of type and type error and was even largely organized around them in early and mid- 20th c, even across wildly different theoretical views.
Warning: Irony :)
Category error: Theory of compiler != compiler
Mathematics.
I'm not sure I agree with this. A senior academic is usually very familiar with the canon. You don't think you will be vaporised if there is no underlying logic and saliency to the arguments in the work you present?
If the only checks you have are literally someone thinking very hard, then... well... it's just extremely difficult.
Few things are as difficult to check as a philosophical argument.
Yes precisely. In my eyes the lack of objective answers in much of philosophy makes it an easy target for humans getting lost in their own "rationality". People vastly overestimate their ability to reason and draw conclusions about abstract concepts that really lack strong definitions.
Some philosophy study is very good for raising the questions one should always ponder in life, but building a career on philosophy very easily leads you astray.
I have studied philosophy, literature and physics. In literature you know everything is made up, that is the point of literature, creating art, but in philosophy many people make up things and then pretend they are real. Objective ethics? Postulating the nature of reality? Please.
> Philosophy treatises don’t trigger compiler errors
Compiler errors make programming easier, not harder. They are firm, clear rules about how something needs to be in order to work
Philosophy has no such constraints or automated checks, it's harder
We are in agreement!
The difficulty scale starts with o chem and then goes through all of the arts before it hits another STEM discipline.
Sorry, please elaborate.
It was easier, I imagine. Now you can vibe code your way out, no?
>"It was easier, I imagine. Now you can vibe code your way out, no?"
Coding was always the easy part of a CS major. Claude won't help you on a proctored Differential Equations exam.
I hear from my son that, yes.
idk I have a BA Phil and have been a professional programmer for over a decade now. If you don't know how to search stackoverflow I'd agree. But I had to go to University to learn all the ins and outs of philosophy. Much easier to find the answers online for programming. Searching for "how to live a good life"? Many charlatans on this topic out there. As the academy gets hollowed out in favour of Profit, increasingly those charlatans have STEM degrees.
I had a mandatory philosophy course as part of high-school, and as lucky to pick a practical-yet-philosophical degree. You can easily pick up other skills, but it’s lovely to learn philosophy early on.
I spent my 20s trying to become a Stoic and/or finding ways to practice a secular form o Taoism.
I’m very, very grateful for these pursuits.
>University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge.
Depends. US had the land grant system going back to the end of the civil war. It was very much oriented towards practical and marketable skills such as agriculture and engineering that were deemed to be in short supply. Still is in these land grant (now also sea grant and space grant) schools. Engineering departments will be massive with a huge campus footprint of a half dozen or more buildings. Liberal arts departments, not so much, relegated to the most ancient of buildings oftentimes.
To your point on being able to argue transferable skills, I think you got in at a great time. It is very difficult to do this now that there are a plethora of actual domain trained candidates for just about any role, far in excess of hiring needs. They can be choosy and wait for the perfect engineer trained in the stack in question. They don't have to settle for someone who took a unit of formal logic anymore.
Land grant system actually started during the civil war.
> going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject
Did your philospophy degree not teach you to think "what could go wrong?".
> with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject for 4-8 years
Do you have any particular reason to believe that this is a likely outcome, other than assuming that you can tell the difference between an exponential curve and a logistical one before the inflection point? I've heard a lot of people make predictions like yours over the past year or so but I've yet to hear any basis for it that doesn't end up being essentially just a hunch that there can't possibly be any diminishing returns before then.
There is substance in philosophy, don't get me wrong, but just not that much of it, theres only a handful of real theorems with proofs (like the deduction theorem etc., which is basically some syntactic sugar correctness proof, if I may put it barbarically).
A physicist will have studied atomic and molecular physics courses, and some intro to chemistry course, and there will be some overlap with thermodynamics. But no physicist pretends to grasp chemistry like chemists do, even though chemistry is technically a branch of physics.
Technically mathematics is a branch of philosophy, but the sheer diversity of statements in mathematics, the nearly endless constellations of symmetries and structures described in mathematics make the few "deep insights" from philosophy pale in comparison.
It's great that the important sliver of your philosophy courseware (the formal logic part) essentially taught you programming, but that is you pivoting to computer science and enjoying success, its not really the non-formal-logic parts of philosophy that propelled you forward.
Relying on ML/AI to solve your problems, and effectively advocating to stop understanding or stop thinking is advice that will not age well. Meritocratically what is supposed to set a "philosopher" ahead of their peers?
Picture a philosopher managing a cloud of AI agents, trying to break RSA-grade products, without the philosopher understanding the intermediate insights.
Contrast with what some human individuals can achieve without AI, they will break it long before the philosopher with AI will!
"Theres only a handful of real theorems with proofs"
Philosophy is not mathematics. Philosophy asks you the question of what is a theorem in the context of philosophical thought, why should the fractal of reality be reduced to a reductionist theorem in the first place, and what consists as sufficient proof for said theorems.
What is your argument exactly?
You establish, that it is virtuous to not fall for the hybris that claiming knowledge beyond the scope of your domain is. (i.e. the virtuous physisit who does not mistake his encounter with some institutional courses in chemistry for a foundation to transgress against "the chemist" by pretending to grasp chemistry like the latter does)
Now what is it exactly that you want to put forward regarding the faculty of philosophically trained cognition again?
"There is substance in philosophy, don't get me wrong, but just not that much of it"
One of the best programmers I have ever met/worked with had a degree in philosophy, having started in the computer industry before there was widespread adoption of it as a formal subject --- he is one of only two people I've ever met outside of TeX User's Group Conferences who had read TAoCP (and kept a well-thumbed set of the first 3 volumes on a shelf at his desk).
Really miss working with him, but he has since moved on to better things in his choice of locale.
Hypothetically if universities were a place for knowledge and truth instead of vocational training then would it really matter what my major was?
Why would Philosophy still be a better major than say, English or Physics? In that world, you should still pursue whatever interests you most because critical thinking is fostered regardless of major.
> University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge.
Universities were historically finishing schools for the sons of rich families at one time. There was never some era where it was some bastion of truth and knowledge.
I am deeply passionate about the value of a college education and how beneficial an educated population is for basically every conceivable metric, but let’s not get too rose tinted about what universities were. The truth is important here!
That's a very harsh take. Most of us would not be alive by the end of the century to personally witness or attend the 1000 years of the University of Bologna, but that goes enough to say how ancient these institutions are: meaning their role obviously changed over time.
Historically, universities BECAME bastions of truth and knowledge, particularly with the introduction of Alexander von Humboldt's ideas for research. And that was already happening by the mid-end of the 19th century. You can not seek seriously truth and knowledge before the establishment of serious metrics and research methodology.
Not saying that’s all they were. I’m just saying they’ve been many things throughout history.
> with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary,
I will take the other end of this bet
> I have an undergrad in Philosophy ... It is a highly underrated degree
I agree with that. A philosophy major is the ultimate interdisciplinary major because it is essentially the theory of knowledge. That said, I wish universities mandated humanities and social science majors dual major with a STEM field and vice versa.
Interdisciplinary knowledge is critical now that fields are starting to merge and overlap heavily.
As a counterargument, it is a bad degree if philosophy led you to jump a foregone conclusion that "AI will surely render knowledge specialization by humans useless".
It is literally very badly taught if four years of such an undergrad degree program creates such students with lack of technical background to evaluate AI. It is like vibe coding except the soft sciences departments were already doing it all along. And I suspect it is part of the way philosophy as a program has to work, it is essentially pre-scientific so students that specialize in philosophy, of either the analytic or continental kind, don't actually do enough scientific research and/or some kind of real-world moral and social testing to balance that out. In that sense philosophy as an institution is medieval and for society to go back to that way due to AI would be an intellectual regression.
Basically the mistake here was to conflate the purpose of the university with philosophy, they are very different things. A philosocratic university would be incredibly problematic for humanity. Truth and knowledge in isolation, under a philosophical quarantine, was precisely one of things that thinkers of the scientific revolution like Noam Chomsky warned against.
"Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject."
Hard no. Theology was first, and will forever be.
Where was Plato's Akademia? In a chapel of Athena, goddess of wisdom. In Aristotle you'll often find that philosophy is actually a method of theology, it's a way to figure out the divine, and what is most or least divine.
I mean, theology and philosophy could be argued endlessly to be interchangeable, go ask Wittgenstein. He just argues that things that are 'truly argued' with language are philosophy, while things that are bullshit is more or less theology.
I usually stick to the analytical stuff, the continental stuff was pretty traumatizing honestly, reading through Being-and-Time in a couple days on Adderall fried some brain cells and my perception of reality permanently.
If you're referring to the finale in the Tractatus, then I'd recommend you spend some time with the late Wittgenstein, like On Certainty or perhaps some of his letters to Drury, e.g. https://externalword.blog/2013/10/19/ludwig-wittgenstein-let... .
Infamously analytical philosophy quickly turned out to be a dead end and led them to metaphysics to try and salvage their community.
Being and Time has a lot of interesting material but it is ill advised to approach it without having spent quite some time studying the philosophical tradition from Plato up until Heidegger himself, including Nietzsche. The old nazi presupposes a firm grasp of this history of ideas and makes an attempt at a 'reboot', which unsurprisingly turns out rather inscrutable without this background.
As for traumatising, in my experience Heidegger just lays down some groundwork for Derrida and Baudrillard. They're seriously efficient at questioning the foundations of language, thinking and society. Though I'd sooner recommend Merleu-Ponty, whose phenomenological achievements are more accessible and more easily applied in everyday life.
One could make the claim that some knowledge and experience does not fit into language and writing, the primary vehicles of philosophy. Here theology is a long tradition of approaches to such knowing and experience, which tends to be more foundational than the problem domains of philosophy.
I like the notion that religions prescribe a philosophy of life. That’s really all they are, with 1+ deities to justify the basis for it. Or, you know, you pick a philosophy that makes sense without the fear of god(s).
Religious traditions tend to hold that certain claims or parts of their canon are infallible, whereas academic philosophy is more welcoming of the critical and argumentative process.
I would think they're on opposite ends: philosophy teaches you autonomous experiential thinking, religion asks you to follow some third party authority.
this is a modernist misconception. ancient religions are philosophical frameworks and the texts are internally coherent arguments for those frameworks. They are just expressed in language that modern audiences without formal training don't understand.
Which texts are internally coherent? The religion I grew up with certainly wasn't.
A PhD is a doctor of philosophy. Science is a natural philosophy.
Philosophy is a broad, vague category.
Brave statements only boys
This article seems high on vibes, low on metrics.
> While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”
But wait, there's this:
> Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.
So, between 6 and 12 each?
What you're missing is that this is approximately at least a half-dozen more jobs than open tenure-track positions at research universities.
Wouldn't the correct comparison would be filled positions tenure and tenure-track positions?
The implicit assumption is that these AI-company jobs were recently created and indicate the start of a trend.
Chalmers is stating that there's more demand for philosophers with the right sort of training to work at AI companies (whatever that is) than there are philosophers with that training. (I don't really believe this, but that's what he says.)
He's making this claim for two reasons: (1) to respond to the argument (not directly stated in the article, but quite commonly understood to be sound in the profession field) that it's unwise to get a PhD in philosophy because there are not enough jobs and (2) to suggest that if you do want to get a PhD in philosophy and use it professionally, you'd be wise to study with Chalmers at NYU in order to get placed into these tech-industry jobs.
Wow, it is hard not to immediately think of that meme. There are indeed dozens of them!
Half-dozens of them, apparently.
more than half a dozen, probably, so safe to say there could be as much as ten.
Can earth's population fill that demand?
> each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.
Imagine knowing that you're hired to launder regulatory capture for a trillion dollar corporation lol
Imagine explaining Nietzsche's relationship with his sister to an AI. :/
That reminds me of a survey that found that in the entire field of Social Psychology, there was something like eight people that indicated they would vote for Romney over Obama.
Well yeah rightwing people are not the kind of people to take up psychology. I also don’t think you will find many Marxists in corporate law .
Romney was even pretty centrist, to the point that Obamacare was based on Romney's plan. A similar analogy would be if only a half dozen employees in some field were willing to vote for Fetterman.
I suppose that makes sense if you assume that people who aren't right wing must be Marxist.
I'm neither and am labelled left wing because I think everyone deserves some basic level of life and dignity.
At this point I wouldn't consider Romney "rightwing", more of a centrist by current standards. Heck, the president probably thinks Romney is a socialist.
> I also don’t think you will find many Marxists in corporate law .
I imagine you'd find more than average, actually. You have a front-row seat to how the sausage is made.
The revenge of the _nearly a dozen_ philosophers.
Hey now, that might be infinite% growth compared to just a couple of years ago!
Those are dining philosophers!
Philosophy majors. That piece of paper does not make you a philosopher.
Bit of a tangent, but it's fun to think about how much it takes to become a -er, -ian or -ist in a given field. Philosophy is probably one of the hardest, you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats. In history or physics you probably need to be faculty, in economics you need to have a PhD, in engineering you don't even need a degree but you need to be practicing,...
> you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats
when in school i hung out with a lot of architecture students. They were all told and taught that they will be the next Frank Lloyd Wright or a failure. Then they graduate and end up getting a job drawing construction documents for Taco Bell. Heh they're a pretty jaded bunch.
Still an “architect” though.
Reminds me of section 211 in Beyond Good and Evil (and all of part 6, for that matter)
Someone did quote me on bash.org once as having said: Wanting a man who doesn't smell is like wanting a woman who doesn't talk.
The title of the article is misleading -- they're pretty clearly talking about philosophy PhDs here.
By my personal standards for the term, the majority of philosophers don't have PhDs and the vast majority of philosophy PhDs are not philosophers.
There was another article on this recently[1], if I didn't know better I would suspect this narrative is being pushed by some PR firm. Maybe it's coming from AI companies trying to imply their models are so advanced that they need philosophers to determine if they're conscious or something?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48662452
> a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes…
The irony
> This article seems high on vibes, low on metrics.
That's the in-house style for the WSJ
Not sure if it changed but this is written by NYTimes.
FWIW I think the WSJ is the best news source available and does not match this description.
Agree 100%
I studied analytic philosophy, which is basically an education in how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments. IMO there is no better preparation for any sort of writing-and-thinking job than studying analytic philosophy, although of course I am biased.
Not sure I’d recommend doing only a philosophy degree, but I highly recommend pairing it with something else more employable. CS and Philosophy seems like the best pairing for the direction tech is going.
I graduated a long time ago with a degrees in CS and philosophy.
I've never understand the hate for philosophy; I think more about my philosophy classes now than my CS classes.
I did Philosophy and Physics - each of which I have fond memories of.
I have one area of my education that I highly value but its very hard to explain without people importing a lot of assumptions.
I like to call it critical listening but also its textual evaluation.
In addition to some didactic instruction my Father gave me a short book on the principles of hermeneutics around 13. We went to different churches over the years growing up but I would bring my bible, take notes, and on the drive home from service he would ask me if anything unsubstantiated by the text was snuck in, anything against the text, etc.
In the hundreds of sermons I took notes on over the years there were only 3 without obvious butchering of the text, statements directly contradicting the very text being examined, nightmarish hermenutical implications, outright fabrications, etc.
The shear volume of evaluation I did against a static text was interesting.
It helped me understand how to parse language, how to do evaluation, just a lot of stuff in a way that was more dynamic than something like debate club.
It also helped me understand how self servingly imprecise people can be and the ways in which deceptive and misleading language is used.
Do you remember the title of the book on principles of hermeneutics?
To my ear, that sounds very much like the GRE Verbal.
I think that's a generally fair statement. I understand its historically pretty common to see a theology to law pipeline.
And I studied continental philosophy! Which is the opposite!
Now I program to be less stochastic
:)
(Dropped out in my 3rd year to join the .com boom)
Aha, continental philosophy is definitely worth learning as well. I don’t share the disdain many analytic people have for continentals.
However I don’t think it’ll make you better at writing clearly, unfortunately…
I like the _idea_ of reading continental philosophy, and then I opened up Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Here is a random sentence from a random page verbatim:
"Spirit contains this actuality here because the extremes whose unity it is just as immediately each have the determination to be for itself its own actuality. Their unity is subverted into aloof aspects, each of which is for the other an actual object excluded from it. The unity thus emerges as a mediating middle which is excluded and distinguished from the departed actuality of the two aspects; thus it itself has an actual objectivity differentiated from its aspects, and it is for them, i.e., it is existent. The spiritual substance enters into existence, first while it has gained for its aspects the sort of self-consciousness which knows this pure self to be an actuality which is immediately in force, and therein it just as immediately knows that it is this actuality only through the alienating mediation. Through the former, the moments are refined into the self-knowing category and thereby are refined right up to the point that they are moments of spirit. Through the latter, spirit comes into existence as spirituality."
wtf is Hegel saying?
If you open a random page of most scientific journals in a field you're not familiar with, you probably wouldn't understand anything either.
Yeah I've mostly come around to the idea that Hegel is a Bad Influence and German philosophy should have just stopped at Kant :-)
If I recall "Spirit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and makes it sound more mystical than it probably is.
And Hegel was obsessed with trying to find out how apparent contradictions really... weren't?
So Gemini actually did a great "translation" of this paragraph into something people on this forum could understand:
"If it helps to view it as a distributed architecture problem, Hegel is basically describing how autonomous nodes (individuals) form a network (Spirit).
Because the individual nodes don't trust each other and act strictly in their own self-interest, they can't simply mesh. Instead, their "unity" emerges as a shared, externalized protocol or state machine (the mediating middle). The network actually "comes into existence" when the nodes are fully initialized and aware of their local state, but simultaneously realize they can only achieve anything by serializing their data and passing it through this massive, alienating central protocol."
TLDR: society is made up of individuals, but every single individual thinks they are the main character. We all view ourselves as independent and self-sufficient. And because we all act like we are the centre of the universe, we don't naturally form a harmonious blob. We look at other people and see them as external objects -- NPCs who are separate from us. To interact, we have to invent a third party that sits between us—money, laws, government, social norms. ("The unity thus emerges as a mediating middle which is excluded and distinguished from the departed actuality of the two aspects; thus it itself has an actual objectivity...")
IMHO it's actually really just bog standard liberalism / social contract stuff masquerading behind obscurantist German / high-philosophical language. Though it's probably more mmeant to be more about knowledge and experience and human spirit than boring market relationships etc.
No, Hegel was attempting to figure out the problematic of the gap between universal knowledge (of specific categories) and individual substance (of particular things) by recasting the resolution of this problematic in social development, that the way in which Science resolved the “truth” of our own understanding of the gap between our individual experience and our place in the world (most basically, perhaps, between our beliefs and so-called “objective reality”), was a historical process that could be observed in both the development of the Idea and its concretization in society, and this process is called “Spirit.” That the resolution of this problem would lead to absolute knowledge, because the individual would then be identified with the universal, means that social development is dependent on the assumption of such knowledge, but one which is always missing something extra or excessive to it, some exception to the universal which also expands and deepens it. Hegel claims that this has always been happening, but what is unique about our era is that we are actually consciously aware of this process—-but he was the first person to demonstrate it explicitly, whereas, for him, it was only implicit before in thinker such as Kant.
Much of the apparent obscurantism in continental philosophy is a product frankly of bad translations.
That and much of it was meant to be read somewhat poetically not prescriptively.
I am also not convinced that today's distracted and scattered brains are even capable of reading and digesting something like Kant or Hegel fully. I have a hard time slowing down and thinking at the slow but detailed pace the text requires. I used to read this stuff on the bus or plane before smart phones and even then it was hard to focus deeply enough.
Also, now I old and just fall asleep.
It is only within the horizon of a presumed transparency - already inscribed by the metaphysics of immediacy - that the demand for “clarity” emerges as an unquestioned norm. Thus the Continental philosopher, precisely insofar as they decline this foreclosure of meaning, demonstrates beyond ambiguity that they are entirely capable of writing clearly, choosing instead, with impeccable lucidity, not to.
Insufficient semicolons, sentences too short.
Well sure if you want to actually be right. If you just care about looking right rhetoric might be a better fit.
CS degree? Employable?
Dont you think that ANN research is upwards of philosophy in the ordo cognoscendi
Can you rephrase that in simpler terms? I don’t understand what you’re asking.
I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics.
>how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments
This is a little generous. Analytic philosophy often comes across as people using heinous amounts of ink to argue whether a hot dog is technically a taco all while pretending that only a fool would even consider what it tastes like.
> I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics.
I don't think this is true at all. To start with, there's roughly 2000 years between the earliest known philosophers and the analytic-continental split. Plenty of philosophy majors can and do get really into the ancients or medieval philosophers or whatever and complete their degrees without doing much more than a cursory read of the major thinkers post-Kant. And anecdotally, my own undergraduate degree was in philosophy, from one of the more prestigious schools in Anglo-Canada, and we had plenty of opportunities to dive into the continental stuff.
Once you get to the graduate level and academia folks focused on Derrida or whatever are going to gravitate towards the universities that prioritize the schools of thought they're interested in, and those have always been on the continent for the continentals naturally. But for run-of-the-mill philosophy majors in the Anglosphere, IMO you should just assume they have a reasonably broad and just-deep-enough knowledge of the entire history of philosophy and make no particular assumptions about their interests.
I have to disagree here. The split is not incidental, and studying medieval/ancient philosophy naturally means that you are going to concern yourself with Ontology, which is expressely ignored by the “analytic” tradition. If you come to ancient philosophy through your typical post-quinian formal reasoning education, you are going to view such ontology with the weight of thousands of years of translation which you will not realize contains its own tradition and its own truth. You will be stuck in a very narrow, and, frankly, uncritical interpretation. It was Hegel’s fundamental insight (into Kant) that any epistemology fundamentally requires the enclosure of the problem of ontology; that, on account of the schema, the entire Critique of Pure Reason is such an enclosure—-but we cannot genuinely go beyond such an enclosure if we view everything from within it, ie “analytically.”
The average American philosophy undergrad gets very little of any philosopher pre-Russell other than a very skewed review of Aristotle. I have no idea about Canada, and there are some exceptions in the US, but average philosophy undergrad will get a very cursory skimming of pre-analytic thought, with basically none I've ever met having read Kant's first Critique, much less Hegel or any 20th century continental philosopher. Instead they are mostly moved into the only things analytics care about: logic and ethics. The former because they are always temporarily embarrassed mathematicians and the latter because teaching students the sophistry needed to morally justify building bombs for Raytheon that kill thousands of poor people is the bread and butter that keeps American philosophy departments funded. About metaphysics, ontology, etc., they care not at all. Those fields tend to try their best at ambitious answers to unanswerable questions whereas the analytics strive for unusable answers to banal questions.
td;dr: I think you give Anglo philosophy students FAR too much credit. In my experience they aren't well read at all and their departments are staffed by professors who aren't well read.
But then how is analytic philosophy a philosophy.
I've spent a surprising amount of time reading philosophy of language, and it's probably done more for my AI prompting than most of the "prompt engineering" articles I've read.
Speech Act Theory, Austin's How to Do Things with Words, and Searle's work changed how I think about prompts. Instead of asking, "What words should I use?", I ask, "What action am I trying to perform?" Is this a request? A commitment? A declaration? An instruction? It turns out LLMs respond differently when you think in terms of acts instead of sentences. With AI able to hallucinate context, facts, intent, and answers, keeping AI on track is much like herding cats.
I've been borrowing those ideas for prompts, reusable skills, and even governance. The side effect of making me look smarter than I really am.
I even ended up writing an article about baseball umpires through the lens of Speech Act Theory: https://pitcherlist.com/umpires-dont-make-calls-they-make-hi.... Baseball, as usual, turns out to be an excellent way to explain philosophy. Or philosophy is an excellent way to explain baseball. I'm currently working on a update, since the ABS challenge system helps improve my position.
My suspicion is philosophy has a lot more to offer AI than ethics alone. Philosophy of language seems like an obvious fit, but epistemology ("what does it mean to know?") and philosophy of mind also seem increasingly practical once you're building systems instead of just chatting with them.
Maybe the shortage isn't philosophy majors. Maybe it's people who can translate philosophy into engineering without making everyone read Kant first.
Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.
Even before LLMs I used to joke with my traditional SE coworkers that "philosophy is very practical." On nearly every project we'd have to talk to stakeholders and ask questions like, "But when you say X, what do you mean?" Establishing definitions, relationships between concepts, etc etc turns out to be really important when you're encoding ideas into a block of silicon. (Yes I know other fields do versions of the same thing too.)
And encoding context, governance, and intent. I hate guessing that but too often I must.
> Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.
The mark of a true philosopher.
I don't know about that but thanks. I tend to think of myself as a baseball enthusiast with a philosophy problem.
In summary, AI has tricked a bunch of philosophy majors into not only thinking it's more than linear algebra but changing their entire life trajectories because of their confusion. AI seems to be a very alluring tar pit for the non-technical. The sad part is how this negative externality of AI is being actively encouraged for political ends.
To be fair, AI is also a very alluring tar pit for the technical.
Philosophers were discussing that question far before LLMs were around.
Sure, but is there any evidence that psychology and for that matter, any animal intelligence, is anything more than linear algebra?
I think the main problem is whether intelligence is a computable function (or at least approximable by ones, like AIXI is), and then whether it's of the form that NNs implement (linear algebras plus sigmoids and all that jazz).
I think it should be shown that intelligence is linear algebra. Not that it's not linear algebra. Russell's teapot etc.
> In summary, AI has tricked a bunch of philosophy majors ...
OTOH, their bank accounts is likely not complaining very loudly
That's not actually the part that bothers me, but it's good to caution about envy.
The reality is it would be a very small % of philosophy majors or the philosophically interested who would be able to shape their approach or personal opinions to match what the AI labs are looking for anyways.
Only particular schools / kinds of philosophy need apply.
I'm a (dropout) philosophy major, but for 30 years (last month!) have been doing SWE instead. The tar pit of being able to use my brain to make money instead of navigating politics inside academia... happened for most of us a long time before AI.
>> The tar pit of being able to use my brain to make money instead of navigating politics inside academia... happened for most of us a long time before AI.
Anecdotal evidence to support your point.
Have a degree in Anthropology. Took copious amounts of philosophy classes as part of my major. Took some CS classes just to stay on top of the stuff happening in tech.
I wasn't able do what I wanted in Anthropology, so I took the same route and ended up in SWE. To a degree, I have monetized my degree because everything I learned while obtaining my degree I use almost every day in SWE. I was jaded by the toxic politics of academia and it finally pushed me out as well.
Good news, you can become jaded by the toxic politics of corporate software development now, too!
When I worked at Google it was the thing that drove me nuts the most. It was very much a "publish or perish" kind of environment with performance and evaluation structures very obviously inspired by academia. (And just like academia, there was sometimes a culture of stealing other people's projects to get credit, with credit and kudos more important than any kind of monetary success since the company was run by an absolute firehose of revenue anyways... )
The strange part is that they seemed to have tricked AI companies too.
I am not trolling or anything, just have genuine question.
What is the expected deliverable of philosophy degree and of its holders in 21st century? What do they produce. I can understand stem - the ones who have it presumably can do math, engineering, construction, even pure math I can to some extent understand. I can understand, to some extent, even memetic English language, women studies, dance etc.
But what is philosophy degree? I don’t think that it’s just history of philosophy.
Like when I was in college I read history of western philosophy. And for majority of philosophers there the thought was that yes, maybe at a time it was reasonable opinion, but looking back from 21st century it was often pretentious nonsense. So what are modern philosophers doing, especially run of the mill philosophy majors? Again, I’m not trying to be rude or anything, I just don’t even know how to formulate that question :)
I think this line of thinking is a bit dangerous. It reminds me when I used to teach in a Civil Engineering department and the other faculty members focused exclusively on how well our coursework prepared our students to become civil engineers. Of course, very few of our students actually did become civil engineers and those that did both required years of additional training and often didn't last long in the profession before transitioning to something else. I used to teach maths and decision making. Had numerous students thank me later on for teaching some of the only material they actually used in their (non-civil-engineering) careers. No one knows what students will do post graduation. One of the best things we can do is to give them tools that are broadly useful.
"the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into"...
There's about 20 philosophers employed by AI labs worldwide, vs 1000s of software engineers, product managers, designers, etc. There's probably more economists working in these labs than philosophers...
I would have thought so too, a priori, but at this point three former colleagues are working for Anthropic; the most extraordinary case, one of the brainiest people I have known, was announced this week.
Starbucks employs orders of magnitude more philosophers than any AI labs.
Ok, you got me. It took me a minute.
If pay, hours, benefits, and type of work mean nothing to you, then maybe this is an apt point.
If service to others and to society mean anything to you, working in Starbucks or any fast food job will teach you more about humanity and human society than most college grads learn from a humanities degree.
It’s difficult to articulate the tedium and monotony of a Starbucks gig. There’s so little intellectual stimulation available in that setting. If you managed to learn more from your fast food than your humanities degree, then I think that’s on you for not paying attention at college (perhaps because you were exhausted from your job?).
> If you managed to learn more from your fast food than your humanities degree...
It's not about learning "more". It's that earning a degree is an academic undertaking whereas working at a coffee shop is "real life".
There is no need to treat one as more or less valuable/useful than the other. They're just different kinds of human experiences. Learning is possible from both.
If you find that sort of work, tedious and monotonous, then I think that says more about you than the job. I’ve been a janitor, a barista and a software developer, and they all are fascinating and fulfilling in different ways. Of course if purely measuring on status, comfort and financial renumeration software dev currently beats them all handily, but to imagine there is nothing you could learn, nothing interesting, nothing fulfilling in other types of work is pretty arrogant. The lefties might even call it privileged.
But will it help those baristas pay off the student loans that paid for their philosophy degrees?
Helping a mega-corporation make an extra buck is not "service to society".
If you meant doing a service job at a small business, where you can have real ownership over how it treats its customers, I would agree with you.
The mega corp is making 3.98% profit. Sure you could focus all your time at Starbucks on that 3.98%, but most of us would focus on the other 96% which is helping customers.
and famously doesn't require a degree
... and why would they train for a job where everything they say that seeks to curtail expansion would be ignored.
If the AI is digesting all the philosophy material ever published then why do they need philosophers?
knowing all the philosophy every published is not being a philosopher
there was literature about 15 years or so ago stating Philosophy as being an uncommonly lucrative course of study, in part citing Reid Hoffman
it is a way of thinking
Philosopher vs MBA. Everyone dogs on MBAs.
Philosophy can have strong mid career earnings especially if you go into law. Or get lucky like Reid did.
> knowing all the philosophy every published is not being a philosopher
Debatable. We may need to ask a philosopher.
That is not what AI is. AI is a powerful tool, a semiautonomous set of wood working tools that still need a master craftsperson to use. You need the tool+genius to drive it. Everyone wants to shoot down AI but they think AI will do everything. Being proud of a creation where someone did style transfer between spongebob and Rembrandt and they think they made art. About as responsible for actual art as just downloading images from google.
I'm not seeing any evidence of this. Precision tools raise the ceiling. AI mostly just raises the floor. Ease of use is a focus point for all AI labs and it's what they're constantly trying to improve. Yes, an expert can juice these models for all they've got, but an average Joe today is probably getting better results than the best power users had a year ago. Extrapolate this a bit and ask yourself if businesses will ever want to pay your geniuses and craftspeople a professional's wage if they could get 'good enough' results from any desperate minimum wage worker, or even by doing the work themselves.
It’s actually pretty bad at it. I think there just isn’t enough literature to get a good effect from the LLM approach. Good luck with verifiable rewards when the target discourse is effectively pure self-criticism. Maybe ‘disputable rewards’ …
I have found that with proper framing I can get good help from Claude and ChatGPT on questions of translation of haute German philosophy and, to my amazement, Ancient Greek. An immediate ‘translate this passage’ request is a cataclysmic disaster. The nexus of sentences differs from other forms of discourse.
Philosophy is a living process of integrating ideas. Classical materials are the whetstone upon which the mind is sharpened. Unlike history, where literal established accounts are ideal, in philosophy one is expected to view today (or the future) through the lens of contextual discourse.
While there is “no right answer” understanding what the issues are and how the discussion plays out is relevant.
I believe that you mean “whetstone”.
Hilarious that the article is framed as a humanities vs sciences thing even though the caliber of philosophers who can get these jobs at labs are the top 0.1% in their field, and wouldn't have trouble finding a job elsewhere, whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile.
> whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile.
Well, at least until recently.
They're doing well because philosophy majors are usually just very smart people.
Not sure if the degree itself is necessarily that helpful beyond signaling intellectual competence.
There are only a few thousand academic philosophers in America total. 0.1% is thus … a few
How do you judge the caliber of a philosopher?
> …‘‘computer science’’ is not a science and…its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology – the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view
-- SICP
I studied both in undergrad. They're more similar than different.
David Chalmers has been doing this for a long time. The fun thing about successful philosophers is it is a very small club and given their nature a lot of them have kind of humorous beef with each other. To make a name for yourself you often have to find a credible target whose intelligence you can insult. This sort of philosophical rivalry is a common historical occurrence as well, and common to the nature of philosophy itself. As such, it feels wrong to mention Chalmers without mentioning some of his famous detractors.
Personally, I miss when Dennett was around to tell Chalmers he was being annoying. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...
Dennett was a philosophical zombie, so his opinion doesn’t really matter.
Everyone is debating the merits of philosophy and education without stating the elephant in the room: these AI companies hired these philosophy majors to launder their reputation and obfuscate the horrible anti-social products they are making.
https://archive.ph/7A8cW
They are also hiring cooks and cleaners, talk about their revenge
Same group
I would much rather hear that they were hiring theoretical logicians than philosophers.We could use more people exploring the limits of prepositional and propositional logic and set theory than we need philosophy. AI is never going to become conscious, at least not the kind we have right now.
You mean mathematicians? CS majors also all study logic to some degree. I think we have enough of both in AI. Philosophers of mind, not so much.
Logicians are typically part of the philosophy department, at least in the US.
You do realize that propositional logic, set theory, and mapping the limits of formal systems are philosophy, right? You're literally describing mathematical logic and philosophy of language.
Logicians' training is so different from philosophers' that it should be considered a separate discipline, or under the branch of computer science.
When I was a young man I took three philosophy courses from a very old man who, when he was a young man, was the dissertation director of Alan Turing. The latter, by the way, was an habitué of the seminar of Wittgenstein.
I studied it getting my CS degree - you can literally write mathematical formulas using symbols and you can perform operations in logic. Very different from a philosophy class - excuse me if you were already aware.
When I was in college, a philosophy degree was seen as excellent training for a career in Law.
Both professions require writing detailed, overly specific, reasonably watertight arguments that will be read by only a handful of people, so that tracks
Arguments so watertight that none of them ever agree with each other and have argued for thousands of years without a resolution to even the most basic of questions.
The appearance of a logical argument is easier to achieve and often good enough for their purposes (publishing papers, winning lawsuits).
Connections are far more important IMO. The opinion itself is there for the plebs so they don't revolt when the high-IQ trickery flagrantly mismatches the plain language of the constitution. The courts are really the main thing nowadays that can provide legitimacy to the acts of the state since it doesn't follow the people or the documents authorizing it.
Using a vocabulary that is known only to themselves.
> Using a vocabulary that is known only to themselves.
So? Almost all professions have jargon known only to themselves. You think most people have any clue what a garbage collector is?
Law and medicine seems to go overboard with e.g. latin terms for everything.
A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, after all.
But a law degree is probably even better. I know what you mean though, consulting companies also hire the (top 1-3%) philosophy majors and math/physics majors for the same reason. Good thought processes.
Philosophy undergrad here and yeah I’d say law school was the typical next step. A few medical school as well.
Philosophy, and more specifically, epistemology is one of the most important disciplines in the world and it would do a lot to help our societal discourse if people studied it from an early age. Most people never ask the questions of what knowledge actually is and what constitutes knowing something vs assuming something vs motivated reasoning, bias, etc.
I know that many people don't care about Knowledge™ and are more motivated by winning but perhaps it would be easier to counter these people if the language of knowledge was more broadly spoken, understood, and internalized.
I wanted to major in Philosophy but was worried I wouldn’t make enough money to support the lifestyle I wanted so majored in Computer Science instead. What irony.
Someday I hope to go back to school to get a PhD in philosophy with a focus on logic. :)
I got a degree in philosophy. Couldn't be less interested in this kind of job. I hate philosophy now
One of my biggest regrets is not getting into this stuff when I was in school. Didn't know about tech at all when I was going, just picked whatever was easy to major in and somewhat bearable. Had zero interest in school until later adulthood
I am a humanities major and never faced any real push back in my software dev/devops career (CTO of a $15M a year company now).
I am considering getting a CS degree now mostly for the knowledge, but I doubt it would advance my career meaningfully.
No doubt there's great programmers with philosophy backgrounds, just like I've worked with many from chemistry, physics and music. The conversation here though, is a bunch of pompous arguing over minutiae and correctness, trying to win using the densest phrasing and allusion to deep knowledge of esoteric readings and history, i.e. much like my one university philosophy class. Meanwhile people from all backgrounds are busy getting shit done and actually winning.
I've noticed that many famous billionaires want to be viewed as philosophers: Thiel obviously, Musk arguably.
For this they do need ideological coherency and the ability to order their arguments logically, ideally as part of a larger program. Since it is such a popular destination late in life, you'd think it would be a good choice for a major too.
Look up "Philosopher-King" from Plato. It explains a hell of a lot.
I don't think it does explain anything. I've seen no evidence that Thiel takes any particular inspiration from Plato. Rather, Thiel seems to be much more focused on Christianity and libertarianism, and those would be the sources of Thiel's anti-democratic predilections, not Plato's Republic. I think philosopher-king is more of a label that other people are trying to pin on Thiel. The Republic actually said that the philosopher-kings should have no private property, and children should be raised by the community.
Moreover, I've seen no evidence whatsoever that Elon Musk is looking to be considered a philosopher. He writes short meme tweets, not treatises.
I think you're reading my comment too literally. The concept of philosopher-king has moved beyond literal reading of Plato and into the broader concept of epistocracy.
> I think you're reading my comment too literally.
Well, I agree that the concept of philosopher-king is applied by people nonliterally to Thiel, though mainly because those people are ignorant of Plato. But if we interpret your comment nonliterally and remove the "from Plato" part, I still don't see how the nonliteral concept helps to explain anything. Unless we're supposed to interpret "It explains a hell of a lot" nonliterally too?
As I see it, calling Thiel a philosopher-king wannabe is nothing more than a hand-wavy insult. He's a politically powerful billionaire, he has an undergraduate philosophy degree, and he likes to spout about politics and apparently the Antichrist. That's really all there is to it. The use of the term philosopher-king has no intellectual value in this context.
In the gentlest way possible you are responding to "he thinks he's Napolean" with minutia about troop movements in Austerlitz. But you do you lapcat, you do you.
No, I was reponding to "It explains a hell of a lot."
You would have had the same problem if you had said, "Look up Napolean. It explains a lot." The problem is that it explains nothing. Neither Plato nor Napolean helps to explain Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk for that matter. "Philosopher-king wannabe" or "Napolean wannabe" is nothing but an insult wrapped in an historical reference, with no intellectual or explanatory value, and no specific connection to Thiel.
"Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers."
I would hardly call that the revenge of the philosophy majors.
I find it so exhausting how the analytic and classical traditions are the de-facto face of philosophy in the US. The Continental tradition has a _ton_ to say on the topic of AI, and is likely where you'll find the answer to your questions about why the vibes feel so bad in the post AI world.
I majored in both CS and Philosophy. I think the very first paper I submitted for my phi 101 course was on the topic of machine ethics.
AI labs, I await your offers ;)
Philosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates!
It's great preparation for law school, as a commenter has already pointed out, since skill in one game carries over to the other. The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious, and I think one can reasonably argue that philosophical training does more harm than good by inculcating bizarre/narrow/counterproductive intellectual habits/commitments/bugaboos. But philosophers have tricked themselves into places where they really have no business being, like hospital ethics panels. Cool for these guys though, it seems harmless.
> The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious
I wouldnt go that far. I think your clutching at straws a little bit. Its a real stretch from philosohers are insecure to they are useless. This is the sort of thing confident ignorance gets you, when you dont know how philophy impacts mpdern life so you assume it doesnt because you think you know everything
The experts on hospital ethics panels are trained internally by medical schools, which are like little universities inside universities. There has not been philosophical access for about thirty years.
You have a great build up for an argument but why this conclusion?
At some point who should be doing ethics? Lawyers? Computer scientists? (I'm not asking ironically, who really is well placed to make population level and extremely though questions like balancing the protection of the few against a global important health interest/gain?)
Presumably, a reasonably repræsentative cross section of society. So my cop out answer is "all of them, plus the stay at home mother, the farmer, and the lumberjack"
This just reeks of Dunning-Kruger
revenge for 2 or maybe 10 philosophy majors, not for the cohorts of philosophy majors.
the nytimes is the worst content to consume if you want to become smarter
>“We can do neuroscience on A.I. systems in a way that we kind of can’t with humans,” Mr. Long said, in that they “don’t have skulls.” The three jobs Eleos was hiring for would all be machine-learning research scientists who could design and perform experiments.
This is pretty interesting! I wouldn't know how easy such "surgery" on LLMs would be to do, if if they do have "knowledge" or "consciousness" as their proponents claim, there could be some profound outcomes from this.
I find it a bit strange to assume you can only understand these topics with a philosophy degree. My CS degree had a good chunk of philosophy baked in (philosophy of science) and parts of it strongly encouraged you to dive into philosophy. AI 101 introduced me to Gödel for example and logic in general.
From the article it seems like they mostly do "is AI conscious" and ethics work. Call me a skeptic (no pun intended) but it looks like "hiring some philosophers to confirm the things we want to keep saying for the sweet AGI-race-$$$ to flow". Kind of like these tobacco studies way back when.
Wait I have an MA in Philosophy and AI expertise, where is my $2mil comp?
When I was young, they said this about Mathematics degrees. "You can do anything with Mathematics degrees." and so on and so forth. But no one ever said that about CS/EE degrees then. Those ones needed no justification or anything. And that seems to be the general case in the world. People will tell you "actually, X is amazing" because there's some countercultural need for us to say "it's not the thing everyone thinks that is right; it's this other thing" but then you check and it turns out the normie thing is correct.
Any time there's an implied Malcolm-Gladwelliness to something, I stop and think to myself, and when I scratch the surface I find that the normie take is true. It's Betteridge's Corollary, if you will.
In the distant future, our cybernetic descendants will say:
“He thinks, therefore he isn’t”
Because it will have been so obsoleted as the medium of experience that those who think with depth and solve problems logically will seem like a primitive species.
Most of the intentionality and experience will happen at a spatial and relational level - unlike language and math.
High level abstraction and novelty.
More like design, intuition, and intention - fleeting and never lingering, searching, never defining.
Ephemera
Posted days ago ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793297
I have a phd in philosophy, but I think this is more like a return of the 'court philosopher' profession.
https://archive.ph/7A8cW
This is an interesting development. I think trying to program a computer to be "intelligent" without a valid theory of concepts is a fool's errand.
> “Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year.
According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.
That's a common misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, and it's intellectually lazy.
Please read and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's funny how many years I had to spend in philosophy grad school to become "intellectually lazy".
Sorry for the rudeness.
It is my understanding that early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus was mostly critical of logical positivism as opposed to philosophy as a whole, and that late Wittgenstein of the Investigations embraced philosophical inquiry, only abandoning the idea of language as a precise tool (and in fact embracing it).
I have heard that Kierkegaard was one of his favorite philosophers, which challenges the idea that people seem to have of Wittgenstein as a precise purely logical thinker who disdained ambiguity.
What do you make of quotes such as the following?
The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.
A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”.
The problems, are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.—Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off.—Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.
https://ia803103.us.archive.org/23/items/philosophicalinvest...
It's also the case that Wittgenstein left academic philosophy, as did Richard Rorty.
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
If you view the story of Wittgenstein and Rorty as primarily one of leaving academia, I believe you are telling on yourself.
> "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
I'm not sure why you're quoting the quote that I just quoted. I was hoping for an analysis.
> If you view the story of Wittgenstein and Rorty as primarily one of leaving academia, I believe you are telling on yourself.
I said that they left academic philosophy. Rorty didn't leave academia entirely. But yes, I left academic philosophy too, so in a sense I am telling on myself, though I don't accept the negative connotation.
I think the quote doesn't say what you think it says. Wittgenstein loved philosophy, and it's frustrating when people cherry pick his work to try and dunk on the entire field.
And if you accept that you are telling on yourself, then don't you think it's awfully convenient that your perspective on philosophy as a discipline is a little skewed by personal hangups?
> I think the quote doesn't say what you think it says.
You still haven't said what you think it means!
> Wittgenstein loved philosophy
I think the phrase "loved philosophy" is way too vague to be informative.
> when people cherry pick his work
I picked some quotes for a Hacker News comment, necessarily brief. I also provided a link to the entire Philosophical Investigations, which I've course I've read more than once.
> dunk on the entire field.
The field of academic philosophy has a tendency to dunk on Wittgenstein. His previously biggest personal booster Bertrand Russell certainly did: "I have not found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations anything that seemed to me interesting and I do not understand why a whole school finds important wisdom in its pages." Many analytic philosophers feel the same way, ironically finding the Tractatus, which Wittgenstein repudiated, more to their liking.
They're probably correct to feel threatened. My own view, as I've stated, is that Wittgenstein's later work is a broad-based critique of philosophy, not aimed only at logical positivism, for example.
> skewed by personal hangups
What personal hangups do you mean?
I said that I left academic philosophy. After many years. I didn't say why. Do you think Wittgenstein and Rorty left academic philosophy due to personal hangups?
Paywall. Is there an open link?
> But Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”
Could it be? Did all that concern and daydreaming regarding how to safely wish for something from a malicious Jinn (and other such thought experiments) have a use?
It seems everything has a use if you wait long enough. Number theory also seemed famously unapplyable until modern digital cryptography came along, and same with non-Euclidean geometry before general relativity.
It does have a use but not in the colloquial sense, history is plastered with bad winners yielding to their predatory instincts and a malicious Jinn is one of infinite ways you can visualize something that pulls/pushes into the abyss for a competitive comparative sense of superiority. Understanding it doesn't make it happen less because the phenomena exhibits in circles that mock thought itself. But taking it into consideration in thought does tend to improve the outcome of novelty the same way an engineer looks as Murphy's Law as a warning not to seek positive thoughts for the sake of it but look at failure modes because they're central to good design
Sounds like NYT is pushing another grift angle.
When the AI bubble cools these roles will be eliminated faster than you can blink. Mark my words.
Agreed. Similarly, we had in-house chefs who were full-time employees. They were some of the first people laid-off when the Covid downturn hit.
We had great chefs; miss them!
How do I get past the paywall? (without paying)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-major...
https://archive.ph/7A8cW
It was really just the luck of the draw for me ending up in the undergrad program that I did, but every day I am grateful to have spent both my degrees and a decade mostly just teaching Kant or Descartes and reading Derrida, Marx, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Deleuze, etc. Meaningful, sometimes beautiful, thought which maybe never made me feel "smarter" than other people, but undeniably taught me how to live and navigate the world.
That is, instead of the Analytic hokum these nerds are selling to literal billionaires! Can you imagine the meetings these guys are having?