Why I Left Academic Philosophy

This is just a list of the usual gripes about academia. It applies to almost every subject. Including Biology, which I work in. I like how the author explains the pyramid scheme of academia:

>The task of standing out is nearly impossible. Usually it comes down to informal factors, like having an influential advisor or coming from a “top program.” My school was ranked ~25–30ish (in the world) for its philosophy PhD program, and it would be polite to say most grad students struggled on the job market. “Struggling” doesn’t begin to describe the pain and anguish of sending hundreds of job applications and not landing a single interview. That’s not uncommon.

As a PhD dropout and research assistant in a large lab filled with overworked students, it hurts me to think about their futures. Because of my position I can't say much, but I would love for them to look around and take note of the ratio of post-docs to PhD students. If every lab has 5 students for each post-doc, then the odds can't be good.

Reminds me of an anecdote. GE Moore's wife met Wittgenstein, at the time GE Moore and Wittgenstein were some of the most famous philosophers in the world. Wittgenstein asked what she did, and she said "I work at a jam factory". Wittgenstein was apparently delighted and said, "thank god someone is doing something useful."

Some of the things described are eerily similar to what I observe in IT.

> As an end-result, academic papers usually end up popularity contests, a game of who’s-who where the goal is to develop incestuous citation networks so that your impact factor will look better for hiring and/or tenure committees.

Not specific to IT: This description applies to management behavior in large corps as well. In fact, a lot of things humans do end up popularity contests.

> I could hear [the protesters outside the lecture hall] chanting; the stark contrast between the esoteric subtleties of meta-ethics vs. the concrete realities of what would be considered “applied ethics” — a term usually uttered with slight contempt — made me deeply uncomfortable.

Programmers arguing about indentation styles while their inventions drastically change how society works on all scales.

> [Image]

> An accurate representation of your average philosophy grad student.

Also an accurate representation of your average Silicon Valley startup "C" "E" "O" if you add a Macbook and a Starbucks cup.

There is some point in history of a profession where the people engaging in this profession begin to look and sound like a parody of it. When the stereotype (stuff of jokes) is status quo and any deviance or individualism is considered "not serious enough" or unprofessional. Why is that? Is that a thing of academia? Can we do something about it, or is it just the way it goes?

I realize it's a bit cynical of me to say this, but this is the free market at work.

There can only be oh so many philosophy professors. Assuming a professor career lasts 40 years and each of these programs produces 10 graduates a year, how can they fit in academia? Maybe before you enroll you need to be made to sign a disclaimer that the opportunities are very scarce in the field.

For those who care about the shortcomings of academic philosophy, I just wrote a blog post on why I'm switching from academic philosophy to computer science at least for a while. https://dstrohmaier.github.io/life/2018/04/20/restarting-my-...

I recognise at least some of the points, although I'm much less bothered by philosophy having little connection to the pragmatic purposes of many people. The abstract she uses to illustrate her point is also a infelicitous choice. It is from Sinhababu's "Possible Girls" and that guy is a weirdo, in the best sense of the word, even for philosophy.

I admire the work of academic philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer or David Chalmers (which, yes, includes the "metametaphysics" mocked in the OP). And the few philosophers I've talked to in person, like Huw Price, left a very good impression on me. And their work is important to the future of humanity: I've talked to many people who changed their whole careers after reading Singer's The Life You Can Save or Bostrom's Superintelligence.

At the same time, it's true that academic careers are surprisingly terrible on average and fewer people should choose them.

Philosophy was actually pretty popular in the US up until 1950 or so. In particular, for the latter part of the 19th and first part of the 20th century the country had Pragmatism, a philosophy designed for America.

But then the field got taken over by Logical Positivists and Analytic philosophers following Russell and early Wittgenstein,and they tried to turn it into a rigorous and mostly irrelevant science. And in the meantime in the humanities people turned to continental philosophy and eventually postmodernism,and in political science there were the Straussians. All of these went off in very different directions from the country, and as a consequence attracted followers who didn't have much useful or persuasive to say to the vast majority of people.

There are exceptions, like Martha Nussbaum or Peter Singer. But academic philosophy today is mostly irrelevant.

How can you be smart enough to get into an elite graduate program in Philosophy and not be aware that this is exactly what academic life is going to be like?

In the 1990s in Computer Science people were well aware that being an academic could result in Professors getting less money than their graduates first jobs.

Is it because everyone still thinks they are a special snowflake and they will get great prizes immediately or something?

(edit) Should have added. Some of the smarted people I know also went into academia and some have really made it. It's just that well, there are so many academic 'refugees' who leave because the job prospects are dire and this has been the case for decades. And so many of those people are very bright and hardworking too.

You don't become a philosopher when you are a researcher at a philosophy department. If departments do this, they are mistaken. What you do is basically history of philosophy. You can be a philosopher / thinker at the same time, but you are not necessarily a philosopher if you are a researcher in philosophy, or you don't necessarily need to participate in academia if you want to do philosophy.

Summary: it was academic and she didn`t like it, finding it too abstract and disconnected from the real world.

I don`t see much else, sure there is the section on sexism, but she spends more time talking about how boring her chosen subject was.

Seems true for academia in general. Most CS papers are utterly useless drivel, too (speaking from my own stuff; nice projects, but completely useless from an academic point of view).

The 97% white men stat is easy to explain: I imagine it difficult to really prove yourself against implicit bias in the humanities.

HN has a fascination for the downfall of humanities career.