Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
If you actually work for a living, though, this is terrible advice.
This is somewhat insulting to to those of us who, despite being "sophmoric" technologists, are actually quite well rounded.
On the other hand, it's not so dispiriting when you consider that you'd probably be the world's foremost authority on the topic... forever.
Only if you commit the logical fallacy of assuming that "a way" means "the only way". Saying that X is a way of getting to Y does not imply that !X is not a way of getting to Y.
Said differently: there are lots of different rites of passage in our world, and they're not universal. Jewish people see the Bat/Bar Mitzvah as a rite of passage to adulthood; Catholics have confirmation; certain young girls have debutante balls. This guy thinks a liberal arts degree is one particular rite of passage, and it's no more or less insulting than any of the others.
There are lots of different rites of passage in every culture/subculture, and most people ignore most of them. If you're atheist, is it "insulting" that Jewish kids have Bar/Bat Mitzvahs?
No.
If a someone told me I am not an adult because I had not had a bar mitzvah, I might be insulted.
Yes this is an ad-hominem attack, but this guy is full of s--- and deserves it.
Furthermore, I do not consent to the core conceit that a college humanities program is either a good, reliable, or even sufficient mechanism for instilling humanities values and knowledge or even the fundamental skills of intellectualism, critical thinking, and basic reasoning.
Apparently when he abandoned his sophomore technologist beliefs, he also abandoned the need to provide evidence.
Yeah, that'll go away in short order after taking a few AI classes.
Consider the Chinese room argument, where is the brain? It's the arrangement of all the players and their rule sets. What is consciousness, it's their internal state etc.
Redness seems to refer to some sort of external stimulus, but both redness and red are really internal qualifications of some external stimulus. So, I can point you to a red filter that looks at color codes and compares them to FF0000. If I then run that filter on FF0000 I get an internal state of 100%. But what that does not create something with emotions and your linking them in that sentence so what's wrong? I would suggest it's not the fact that the code does not produce emotion that's the problem it's your assumption that anything that understands redness must include an emotional context. Still, if you want both a test for redness and an emotional response you could code a simple AI with competing goals who responds emotionally to increasing amounts of red in it's environment.
Granted, you could then argue that such a simplistic representation of internal state is to simplistic a response to cover the full range of emotions. But a that point your not talking about 'redness of red' in the abstract but getting into mimicking your personal emotional responses. Which could be done to some reasonable level of accuracy.
PS: I could also have completely missed what you where trying to communicate, but I hope that line of reasoning demonstrated what I was talking about. Namely that in the context of AI you can translate abstract philosophical ideas into a meaningful context but they stop being interesting somewhere in the process.
Take some acid, and that sentence might make perfect sense.
It does have some meaning, in that it implies that the one who wrote it has synesthesia.
I'm sorry if this seems unsubstantiated and unsatisfactory, but I'm afraid that you just do not yet understand the profoundness of the problem 'derrida' refers to. Your proposed way of attacking the problem is too naive.
[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/ [2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/
Suppose you walk into a room who's walls are covered in fresh blood. Now Suppose instead you walked into an identical room that was identical room except the blood was green. What separates those two rooms is at some level a simple color filter, but your internal responses are going to be vary different. If you could slow down time and look at the individual responses to each room you could watch as the red or green information propagated around your individual neurons.
But at what part of that does 'redness' apply? The individual rods and cones independently respond to photons but you have to go into post processing before the concept of red is separate from white or black. If you look at the way neurons work there is some computation involved and comparison between individual sensor neurons but at some point that neuron fires and guess what that's what redness means. It's the internal state of on ore more neurons looking at those signals. Now you can ask about memory but it terns out that's a recording of internal states which is not really a copy of some RGB value but a copy of some of your internal state while the event was gong on. And when it comes to language you are communicating internal physical states. You can describe your dopamine levels in flowery language but there are underlying physical processes which your are describing.
Having said all that you could talk about the platonic ideal form for redness, but just because what he said sounds like it has meaning does not mean it does. He did not understand what was going on so he built up complex ideas that don't apply in the abstract instead he is describing your internal classification of things. When I look at this picture my internal chair classifier goes off etc.
PS: I am of course greatly simplifying my description of how the brain works but from a philosophical perspective the details are not vary important.
For example, few ever use the tactic of "dissolving the question". In this case, Mary's Room has had a basic treatment of that over at Less Wrong.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/5n9/seeing_red_dissolving_marys_room...
Advanced humanities degrees are great, if you're into advanced humanities.
He mentions Steve Jobs at the end as a technologist who's clear evidence of the importance of a liberal arts education. Jobs does credit a lot of Apple's design to that calligraphy class he walked into in his early days (while he was a college drop-out)... but if there's anything to be gleaned from the best and brightest, and the most creative, in industry, it's that they're self-taught - their creativity isn't a product of the humanities in academia.
Who was the last Philosophy PhD who went on to start the next great tech company? Or do anything particularly innovative?
If the point is to become a well rounded person, think widely and read widely, then getting a PhD isn't going to help you much. I think of PhD's as very driven, focused, able to take a lot of abuse, able to write and research for several years. I don't think of them as particularly well rounded.
In particular, getting a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford after a BS in CS from Columbia and an MS from MIT is going to give you a couple of survey courses in Philosophy, and then a very deep knowledge of a very, very narrow band of philosophy..
I learned how the quantifiable, individualistic, ahistorical—that is, computational—view I had of cognition failed to account for whole expanses of cognitive experience (including, say, most of Shakespeare). I learned how pragmatist and contextualist perspectives better reflect the diversity and flexibility of our linguistic practices than do formal language models.
QED.
If the point is to be well read, well rounded, and be able to think broadly about a variety of topics, then... read a book. Read a lot of books. Read broadly. Read widely. Read people that you disagree with. Argue with writers.
Read literature, comparative religions, philosophy, cultural anthropology, sociology, history, science fiction, mythology, fantasy, psychology, biography, poetry.
Read Carl Jung, Freud, Neitsche, Marx, Kant, Dickenson, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Plato, Aristotle, the Bhagvad Gita, the Koran, the Tao, The Tao of Poo, Luther, Martin Luther King, Tolstoy and Doestoyevsky, Adams, St. John of the Cross, the Mystics--Christian, Bhuddist, Kabbalist, and Sufi, Gleick, Feynman, Shakespeare, Chaucer.
Chances are, if they say it's a "classic" it's probably hung around for a long time because it's good. (Except for Kant. He couldn't write worth crap). And, in reading we learn that we are not alone. We learn that perhaps creating a True AI isn't something to be desired anyway. We learn that maybe consciousness is more than a deterministic bunch of bio-chemical reactions taking place in our frontal lobes that can be modeled via neural networks and computer processors. And, we start to wonder, if perhaps as the poets proclaim... there something called a Soul. And if there is a Soul, can we actually create that via silicon, light, magnetics and electricity?
You can get that education in $1.50 in late charges at the library. You don't have to spend 3 years and $150k at Stanford working on your Phd.
Now, the process of advancing the state-of-the-art is unusually hard and there exists a good deal of very good write-ups of the intricacies involved (such as "So long and thanks for the PhD") which requires people to be driven and focused. But, at the same time, before actually starting the research that gets them their PhDs, gradute students spend time in advanced courses and later on read lots of research papers and additional textbooks. This is an invaluable process of unsupervised learning (hence the first paragraph), and I think that getting a PhD also gives you the abilities and experience to autonomously go from zero knowledge in an area to contributing new knowledge by reading. Of course, studying at a university saves you a lot of time, because somebody else--the professor--who is already very knowledgeable in the target area has already broken down his knowledge in edible--and ideally pedagogically-sound--pieces ready to be sucked up. But if time is not of the essence, and since you are already a driven and focused person, you should be able to do it by yourself.
So this was (quite unexpectedly) rather long, a more detailed discussion and probably a very good book to read for anybody can be found in: Mortimer Jerome Adler's wonderful "How to read a book". A brief summary for tl;dr reasons: I love and totally support your reading advice, but since the PhD experience enables you to work your way through literature in unknown territory, it might very well be worth the effort.
Furthermore, I am highly skeptical of the idea that you need a Ph.D to have a meaningful understanding of the humanities. Despite his assertions about the "thought leaders", it seems to me that those who have made the most progress on the big questions in the last 100+ years did so through science and technology, not through the humanities.
It's interesting how we've fallen so out of touch with what our universities were created for in the first place, or rather that we're never told what we're going to school for and what our options are.
"Hard distinctions make bad philosophy" - John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp, coined the term "AI")
I did both. I got a degree in Computer Science and Philosophy. I loved it. But I didn't have to do something drastic to get there. I enjoy humanities greatly, so I incorporated them into my study along with technology.
The only example the article gives is "when you have a question, we connect you to another person who can give you a live answer". But this seems more like avoiding the problem than like major progress in AI.
I think you would be well received if you were to offer full scholarship and stipend equal to the participants salary.
The internet is the collective knowledge and experience of all humanity. To seek this information is wise and wonderful- but I respectfully suggest that dropping ones life to go back to school, chained anew in debt, isn't necessary for the attainment of that wisdom.
I love the internet, not least because of the ease with which I can obtain information that used to take hours in the library. But obtaining specific facts is not the same thing as learning or thinking.
From observing myself and others, I believe that something is wrong. I'm getting way more brain stimulation from the internet than I used to without it, but in terms of things that matter to me in the long run -- growth and learning -- it is of poor quality. I remember the quality of a life spent with books, and this is definitely not it. I feel like I'm experiencing my own atrophy, and it dismays me. Sometimes I think that one of these days I should post a list of books to HN and promise not to come back until I've read them.
So no, consuming information from the internet is in practice nothing like getting an education in the humanities, for anyone whose brain is wired like mine and those of people I know.
Books are food, the internet is a drug.
Every now and again read something difficult; something that makes you think and leaves you confused. You'll learn more in the long run. A great place start, if you happen to be interested in math, is Terence Tao's blog, and a number of the blogs he links to. (At the least, I find it challenging; the blog is over at http://terrytao.wordpress.com/ .)
Tao's blog is excellent, but how does one acquire the background necessary to understand his mathematical posts? By rolling up one's sleeves and doing hard work, most of which is likely done away from the internet. And this is the kind of thing that spending a lot of time on the internet makes it harder to do. That's my experience, anyway, as well as my observation of others'.
I am going to follow your advice, disconnect, and try to really understand some books.
No books on entrepreneurship allowed. :|
A. The PhD concept, like academia itself, is broken. For most people, it's 5-7 years to get narrow training for an industry that has sold out a generation and a half and probably won't exist, in any meaningful way, in 40 years on account of how badly it has treated young entrants. The last time a disaster as bad as the academic job market occurred in the U.S., two countries got invaded.
B. You'd think the philosophy degree would give him the ability to avoid inverted-causality fallacies, e.g. "I know how to think a certain way because I got a philosophy Ph.D."
Don't get me wrong. I think there can be a lot of value in a Ph.D. program. But I think for a successful person in technology, it's a really bad idea from a career perspective. I'll focus on this:
Because the thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder. The leaders are the ones who took chances and developed unique perspectives.
Does he really think that everyone who takes 5-7 years off to pursue a humanities Ph.D. gets some kind of magical career rocket fuel that propels him or her into a decision-making role where broad-based perspective is crucial? I doubt it.
Now, I will agree that society would benefit immensely if our leaders (including in technology) actually understood the humanities, and many don't. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that taking 5-7 years off to study philosophy increases your chance of becoming one of those leaders; I think it lowers it, sadly.