Solid life advice.
On the other hand, it's all relative. After having worked in Silicon Valley for over 15 years, I think the more common mistake is knowing too little philosophy rather than too much. (Of course, I agree that 5 dollar words confuse issues more often than they illuminate them.)
It wouldn't hurt a lot of engineers and tech companies to learn more about the past and be more literate.
As an example, off the top of my head, here is a concept which comes up a lot in software:
"The Map is not the Territory"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
Likewise:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy
You don't have to do statistics / big data for very long before you hit philosophy. It bottoms out pretty quickly, i.e. how do you learn about the world. Likewise programming is about making things, and sometimes about modelling the world, and there are a lot of useful philosophical concepts in that realm too.
This is without even getting into the "morals" of technology, which is a big thing in the news lately.
"The server is an order of magnitude faster than our old one."
"The server is 10 times faster than our old one."
--
More often heard: "The server is an order of magnitude more performant than our legacy server."
You probably hear it a lot, because it's generally important to make functions orthogonal with respect to each other so they may be modified without effecting one another.
I'll agree that order of magnitude is starting to feel like it's overused as rhetoric in programming circles, even though it too is a very important concept in engineering.
I suspect there are many others in my situation here, specially those whose native language is of latin origin, because latin-based words are considered more formal/academic in english, yet they're much easier for us to learn!
Just keep that in mind when judging other's comments please ;)
I'm talking about comments that my younger self would have written when I thought I would add weight to my argument by trying to sound smarter (so I'd be a hypocrite to judge comments harshly anyway).
I consider myself guilty of doing this, but that's because (most of the time) I actually proof-read my comments before posting them, and consider whether they provide a useful addition to the discussion. If one of my comments look like they're going to be peer-reviewed, it's because they're self-reviewed, and you don't get to see the long tail of comments that I typed out and then deleted because a) they didn't add anything useful to the discussion or b) I could not express my thoughts clearly enough.
You could've written something like this instead:
I'm guilty of this, but that's because I self-review and consider whether I'm actually contributing to the discussion before posting. You don't get to see vast majority of un-submitted comments because they either didn't add anything useful or they weren't clear enough.
Same message, but much easier to read.