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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

> (I chose philosophy, much more relevant and practical than I think many realize).

As others have already asked, could you expand on this? Very interested.

I’m a philosophy grad who learned to code a couple years out of school.

Philosophy gives you a set of meta cognitive skills that help everywhere. It teaches you how to think. It shows you what class of problems are soluble, and which are things where we just have to accept tradeoffs. And it’s really focused, in a funny way, on economy: does your argument actually do something? Does this theory offer clarity and bring us closer to truth? If not, well, why are you wasting your breath on it? Philosophy teaches you to see that some avenues are fruitless or just kinda not worth the effort.

Also, non-practically, it shows you the full depth of wonder in the world. Wherever there is capacity for thinking to be done, philosophy says, you can elucidate something important to our human condition.

Not exclusive to philosophy but a strong emphasis within philosophy is the focus on developing the ability to:

- Intelligently entertain various perspectives

- Effectively imagine "possible worlds" where positions may be held or refuted

- Formalize language and all of its "fuzzy" characteristics into clear positions

- Hypothesize generalizations and abstractions to map across domains

- Think from first principles and explore their logical conclusions in conceptual and foreign territories

These were my big takeaways from philosophy undergrad and I find them increasingly important in my various technical careers.

I hear a lot of non-engineers say this. Talking about formal logic, and how philosophy and math were once the same discipline, how math proofs are akin to philosophical arguments etc.

I don't think this crowd would get much out of it.

It depends. Some people have really weak philosophical foundations and really need to hear about it if there is something out there that grounds them a bit better.

We can't say if any particular approach to life is the best, but we can say that if you change your mind about which approach is best at age 70 you've spent a lot of years setting up for the wrong outcome. It is never to late in theory. But as a practical matter 70 is a bit late to sit down, take a step back, ask why and try to act on it. Better for people to line themselves up with good foundations from their 20s or maybe 30s. It is good to explore the options early, and think a bit about what the word 'option' even means philosophically.

I agree. Philosophy gives you a level of abstract reasoning of the form: "if we agree (with Kant) that we should only take those actions which could be universal law, does it follow that the death penalty is morally justifiable?" There is some degree of reasoning from premises here, but all of the objects you deal with are things that you come into with a bunch of intuition that you never really leave behind.

On the other hand, something like:

> Given a one-dimensional invariant subspace, prove that any nonzero vector in that space is an eigenvector and all such eigenvectors have the same eigenvalue.

really forces you to grapple with an entirely different level of abstraction

If you get spooked by deontology in most philosophy classes, than maybe it's better to not take those philosophy classes in the first place.

This world needs more utilitarianism and less categorical imperatives...

Kant is actually towards the top of my list of "stuff I thought was dumb before I read the actual source material but which I now have a lot of respect for." The categorical imperative stuff is a reflection of a really profound value that Kant assigns to human life.

Utilitarianism benefits a lot from having a Cliff notes version that sounds less dumb than the Cliff notes versions of other ethical frameworks, but I don't think that is the right way to evaluate ethics. Besides, philosophy class ethics is really more of an exercise in "let's construct a formal framework that matches our intuitions" rather than "let's make normative judgements about stuff in the real world."

In the very least, I think every engineer should take a "philosophy of science" class. We tend to focus quite intensely on how to do things. Borrow a little bit of "where do proofs and the scientific method sit in the grand pantheon of human knowledge" from philosophy is a bit grounding. Anyway it is probably a gen-ed that is at least somewhat useful.

As an engineer I got into logic through the philosophy department. It was very eye opening for me.

Engineers are not models of logical thinking that they assume they are. Illogic is everywhere and it takes constant vigilance to avoid always going with your gut feelings.

> As others have already asked, could you expand on this? Very interested.

I started undergrad in my 30s, and also majored philosophy for similar reasons. It really is the most rigorous non-STEM undergrad degree you can get. And for people (like myself) who can’t pass calculus, but are still fairly intelligent, it can easily be parlayed into a more technical graduate program.

Everybody can pass calculus. The only way one can fail at math is gaps in knowledge. If you managed to get through something like Kant or Hegel, you can get through any math subject provided you have the necessary prerequisites.

I was a double major in philosophy and CS in my undergrad. Philosophy was fun, but in hindsight I wish I did math or stats or some other STEM instead. I would say my main takeaway from the philosophy degree was developing a sense of intellectual respect for big, important ideas that I don't personally agree with (various religious thinkers, Marx, Aristotle etc), but it really doesn't compare to the actual nuts-and-bolts abstract reasoning skills you pick up in an abstract algebra course, for example.

I also found that I could consistently get As in humanities courses with ~20-40 hours of work per quarter (the time to write 1-3 papers) once I picked up the skill of "writing like an academic", vs my CS courses which continued to be challenging and require a ton of effort to succeed in up until my graduation. My senior year, for example, I had some core-requirement course about theater -- I attended zero classes and did zero readings until I sat down to write the paper, and I got As with compliments from the professor on how well-written my papers were. YMMV.

I doubt there is significant transfer between philosophy education and other tasks (like programming). Curiously, the people who should doubt this conclusion (the educated philosophers) are the ones that jump to accept it. Anyways, the literature on this matter is wide enough that our prior should be that there is no transfer and evidence to the contrary must be stated.

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