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My personal theory is that tech folks are often under-educated -- in the sense that they've specialized so much, that they missed out on a well-rounded human education.

This makes it easy to hijack the "ooh look! shiny/sexy technology" part of their brain, to work on Palantir-type stuff, whereas anyone with a more liberal, broad education would go "wtf! I don't want to help build that!"

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I don't think it's entirely wrong as a model but it struggles to explain thiel himself having degrees in philosophy and law. I think there is a certain contempt engineers can have for other domains and ways of knowing that might be closer to the source of this. But I'm not very confident in that explanation either fwiw.

I've heard that people who study philosophy often come away with less deeply held positions on ethics. Philosophy doesn't teach you to live ethically

I think majoring in philosophy makes people want to work on weapons and buy themselves ownership of the state.

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