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Comment by dgut | Hacker News Reader

That PhD means "Doctor of Philosophy" is just an artifact of the fact that all doctoral degrees were once subcategories of "Philosophy".

Philosophy today is pretty useless.

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"Philosophy today is pretty useless."

Studying philosophy teaches you how to think. If you consider that useless...

You claim that. Yet none of the most mentally demanding tasks were done by philosophers. Today philosophy is mostly meaningless intellectual posturing. In the past, it was the act of thinking without applying the scientific method. As Feynman said of Spinoza "meaningless chewing around".

If philosophy (and only philosophy) teaches people how to think, then who taught the first philosopher?

No one claimed only philosophy taught people how to think.

How do you know it doesn't just draw out a capacity to think that you already have, and that you could equally well have drawn out by studying or working at something else?

Maybe you could, but that still doesn't make philosophy useless.

I'd argue that philosophy may become more important than ever as we contemplate the ethics of handing decisions like who's going to die in a trolley-problem type self-driving car accident over to machines.

It'll be easier to (metaphorically) untie people from the tracks.

Program slow speed limits in dangerous areas, install sensor augmentation in areas where vehicle located sensors don't work well, rebuild roads to work better, etc.

Most philosophers throughout history would laugh at their body of knowledge being measured in terms of utility. And then would become saddened that economics has become the dominant global value system.

Economics is the word for the dominant global value system. I think a sad philosopher has more work to do.

A bit parochial to say that Philosophy--as it is taught or studied today--is useless, in my opinion. You're entitled to that thought but you might be surprised by the utility Philosophy has to offer.

I think Philosophy studied with other disciplines is a particularly potent combination. Of my friends who have done this (they are very few) they are perhaps the most inspiring and trenchant thinkers I know.

I think it's sad that your view that philosophy is worthless has become more of a mainstream feeling than it ought to be. Not everything needs to be measured in terms of usefulness. Interestingly enough, I think you find many developers have a natural affinity for philosophy. All this talk about AI, for example, is just philosophy.

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