The revenge of the philosophy majors
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I am now a senior engineer at a F500 and I just have a BA in Phil.
It is a highly underrated degree, and going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject for 4-8 years for a PHD dissertation, it will probably end up being one of the only remaining degrees left.
Academia may be going back to its roots; Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject. Once capital accumulation through job training stops being the focus of academics, it can go back to being what it once was. University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge.
Hard no. Theology was first, and will forever be.
Where was Plato's Akademia? In a chapel of Athena, goddess of wisdom. In Aristotle you'll often find that philosophy is actually a method of theology, it's a way to figure out the divine, and what is most or least divine.
I usually stick to the analytical stuff, the continental stuff was pretty traumatizing honestly, reading through Being-and-Time in a couple days on Adderall fried some brain cells and my perception of reality permanently.
Infamously analytical philosophy quickly turned out to be a dead end and led them to metaphysics to try and salvage their community.
Being and Time has a lot of interesting material but it is ill advised to approach it without having spent quite some time studying the philosophical tradition from Plato up until Heidegger himself, including Nietzsche. The old nazi presupposes a firm grasp of this history of ideas and makes an attempt at a 'reboot', which unsurprisingly turns out rather inscrutable without this background.
As for traumatising, in my experience Heidegger just lays down some groundwork for Derrida and Baudrillard. They're seriously efficient at questioning the foundations of language, thinking and society. Though I'd sooner recommend Merleu-Ponty, whose phenomenological achievements are more accessible and more easily applied in everyday life.
One could make the claim that some knowledge and experience does not fit into language and writing, the primary vehicles of philosophy. Here theology is a long tradition of approaches to such knowing and experience, which tends to be more foundational than the problem domains of philosophy.
Philosophy is a broad, vague category.
On the whole, though, it's _way_ easier to bluff your way through a philosophy degree than a CS degree.
Coding was always the easy part of a CS major. Claude won't help you on a proctored Differential Equations exam.
More seriously, the main issue with most philosophical investigations is a question of grounding.
When you start stacking abstract concepts on top of each other, things can get dicey very quickly. Moreso if you are smart.
Few things are as difficult to check as a philosophical argument.
Category error: Theory of compiler != compiler
Some philosophy study is very good for raising the questions one should always ponder in life, but building a career on philosophy very easily leads you astray.
I have studied philosophy, literature and physics. In literature you know everything is made up, that is the point of literature, creating art, but in philosophy many people make up things and then pretend they are real. Objective ethics? Postulating the nature of reality? Please.
Compiler errors make programming easier, not harder. They are firm, clear rules about how something needs to be in order to work
Philosophy has no such constraints or automated checks, it's harder
I have a PhD in mathematics and have worked in tech for more than 30 years as a programmer. I went to a Renaissance era university in Scotland which is required by law to require of me a broad education rather than something very specialised. Because I entered the science faculty, as an undergraduate, I had to balance that with something from the humanities and I chose Philosophy, naïvely thinking that it would be easy. Philosophy is in no sense of the word "easy" and not something you can "bluff your way through". In fact, it is more difficult than mathematics and more difficult and arduous than computer science.
I also teach at a university level and would advise young people reading this to pursue, these days, a philosophy education (or a mathematics education) over a software engineering/computer science education.
However even I can see that philosophy as a field is flawed and generic advice to tell students to go philosophy is incredibly problematic. As someone with philosophical tendencies this is incredibly obvious to me but and I must suggest that those who keep endorsing philosophy as a professional discipline for "success reasons" are putting forth a deeply prejudiced argument due to certain blinders.
For example as soon as you claimed "philosophy is harder than math", then I cannot take this line of argument seriously. The entire statement is a bad and unphilosophical statement. Anyone with an intuition for good philosophy, who is well read and has the wisdom of life experience, who is scientifically literate, should have known that before saying it. It actually offends me. It is intellectually insulting.
What is a philosophical statement?
One tendency I've noticed is that people well versed in philosophy can communicate well. Just anecdotally. Not something I am seeing here in this response.
I think you're strawmanning my point - no one asks you to act like a philosopher 24/7, but this exchange shows you're very far away from that bar.
For example if you knew about STEM-elitism, it is not many mental steps to "philosophy-elitism" of the sort of sentiment "Philosophy >_hard Math". Why exactly does omitting this explication make my opinion a fallacy? It doesn't. It's an online forum with people handwaving their opinions, just as the people above me were already doing.
For me at least, I found CS the easiest, followed by math, with philosophy the most difficult and challenging. With philosophy, you need to be as rigorous as when writing a mathematical paper, but at least with math there is a highly structured and rigid format. I can easily see why mathematics, for a very long time, was considered a subfield of philosophy.
Personally though, I'd challenge framing entire disciplines as easier or harder than each other, I think that's an individualized thing. Some people could easily find philosophy much easier than a computer science course. For me, I'd really struggle and probably couldn't complete a fine arts degree. I've just never been able to draw or paint, it's just a skill I've tried but failed to be able to develop. So in general understanding an art degree is the easy degree to BS your way through, but I'd find a fine art bachelor's degree harder to complete than a math PhD. At least unless it was a degree that didn't require any studio classes, so maybe art history?
2. The fact that you completely failed to read this exchange context carefully, such casual prejudice toward the argument from authority ("I am a teacher, take it from me, philosophy > math blah blah blah"), also raises doubt in the quality of actually existing philosophy education. It is a lot more like court philosopher behavior than any regard for close reading and actual research-level rigor.
3a. There's an objective, rational argument as to why philosophy is "hard" (emphasis on the quotes). A lot of it has to do with the fact that it is about speculatively complex questions. See for example Noam Chomsky's elaboration on this, he generally philosophy as a field as having deflationary characteristic in relation to scientific progress.
3b. What this also means is that "hardness" is not a good measure at all of a human discipline being actually a good discipline--astrology can also be very "hard", so can Derrida, etc. Simply writing a good piece of fiction is also cognitively hard. But where is this nuance, I ask you, in the OP comments? I do not see it. Where is the impact of philosophy, then?
All of these ought to part and parcel of students who actually learned philosophy well. The fact that multiple top comments do not evince this level of learning, at least on a tech social media forum, says a lot and it should trouble you.
(Having written all this, I think there is a further elaboration on 3a that makes the question/issue much more interesting, but it does not excuse the attitude of philosophy-chauvinism which is well known as thing in academia, analogous to how math/physics has their share of hardness chauvinists over other disciplines, ad infinitum.)
My general opinion is the same: saying "philosophy > math", and variations thereof, is generally an uneducated, absurd, stupid, unwise comment. I won't mince words with that. Nor am I being paid to write a proper article as to why such a view is deeply misled. It's an online forum.
I spent my 20s trying to become a Stoic and/or finding ways to practice a secular form o Taoism.
I’m very, very grateful for these pursuits.
Very conceptual and the theoretical bits were great to retain, even if they feel ‘useless’ when you’re young.
Universities were historically finishing schools for the sons of rich families at one time. There was never some era where it was some bastion of truth and knowledge.
I am deeply passionate about the value of a college education and how beneficial an educated population is for basically every conceivable metric, but let’s not get too rose tinted about what universities were. The truth is important here!
Historically, universities BECAME bastions of truth and knowledge, particularly with the introduction of Alexander von Humboldt's ideas for research. And that was already happening by the mid-end of the 19th century. You can not seek seriously truth and knowledge before the establishment of serious metrics and research methodology.
Depends. US had the land grant system going back to the end of the civil war. It was very much oriented towards practical and marketable skills such as agriculture and engineering that were deemed to be in short supply. Still is in these land grant (now also sea grant and space grant) schools. Engineering departments will be massive with a huge campus footprint of a half dozen or more buildings. Liberal arts departments, not so much, relegated to the most ancient of buildings oftentimes.
To your point on being able to argue transferable skills, I think you got in at a great time. It is very difficult to do this now that there are a plethora of actual domain trained candidates for just about any role, far in excess of hiring needs. They can be choosy and wait for the perfect engineer trained in the stack in question. They don't have to settle for someone who took a unit of formal logic anymore.
Really miss working with him, but he has since moved on to better things in his choice of locale.
I agree with that. A philosophy major is the ultimate interdisciplinary major because it is essentially the theory of knowledge. That said, I wish universities mandated humanities and social science majors dual major with a STEM field and vice versa.
Interdisciplinary knowledge is critical now that fields are starting to merge and overlap heavily.
Why would Philosophy still be a better major than say, English or Physics? In that world, you should still pursue whatever interests you most because critical thinking is fostered regardless of major.
It is literally very badly taught if four years of such an undergrad degree program creates such students with lack of technical background to evaluate AI. It is like vibe coding except the soft sciences departments were already doing it all along. And I suspect it is part of the way philosophy as a program has to work, it is essentially pre-scientific so students that specialize in philosophy, of either the analytic or continental kind, don't actually do enough scientific research and/or some kind of real-world moral and social testing to balance that out. In that sense philosophy as an institution is medieval and for society to go back to that way due to AI would be an intellectual regression.
Basically the mistake here was to conflate the purpose of the university with philosophy, they are very different things. A philosocratic university would be incredibly problematic for humanity. Truth and knowledge in isolation, under a philosophical quarantine, was precisely one of things that thinkers of the scientific revolution like Noam Chomsky warned against.
The idea that you need to be familiar with Hegel as a prerequisite means you’re looking at graduate level classes if we’re taking it seriously.
What in some countries is grad studies, is in other places undergrad, and in a personal high point, high school extension studies. In contemporary rich country education systems, it’s not just grade inflation, it’s very low expectations of the student population’s capabilities, in my opinion.
I'm from such a country and this tracks. I often look to individuals of the past with the same academic credentials as me and it seems they are much better read & educated. And when I was in school, it often felt like my education was diluted to cater to the LCD.
Of course, the thought process of "I'm trying my best, but sometimes failing", could push someone in both directions of the answer, but striving to be better only works when honestly acknowledging failures. In my experience, the majority of people tend to construct their moral views conveniently along the lines of their preferred actions, but principles built on convenience usually don't hold up to scrutiny.
A physicist will have studied atomic and molecular physics courses, and some intro to chemistry course, and there will be some overlap with thermodynamics. But no physicist pretends to grasp chemistry like chemists do, even though chemistry is technically a branch of physics.
Technically mathematics is a branch of philosophy, but the sheer diversity of statements in mathematics, the nearly endless constellations of symmetries and structures described in mathematics make the few "deep insights" from philosophy pale in comparison.
It's great that the important sliver of your philosophy courseware (the formal logic part) essentially taught you programming, but that is you pivoting to computer science and enjoying success, its not really the non-formal-logic parts of philosophy that propelled you forward.
Relying on ML/AI to solve your problems, and effectively advocating to stop understanding or stop thinking is advice that will not age well. Meritocratically what is supposed to set a "philosopher" ahead of their peers?
Picture a philosopher managing a cloud of AI agents, trying to break RSA-grade products, without the philosopher understanding the intermediate insights.
Contrast with what some human individuals can achieve without AI, they will break it long before the philosopher with AI will!
You establish, that it is virtuous to not fall for the hybris that claiming knowledge beyond the scope of your domain is. (i.e. the virtuous physisit who does not mistake his encounter with some institutional courses in chemistry for a foundation to transgress against "the chemist" by pretending to grasp chemistry like the latter does)
Now what is it exactly that you want to put forward regarding the faculty of philosophically trained cognition again?
Philosophy is not mathematics. Philosophy asks you the question of what is a theorem in the context of philosophical thought, why should the fractal of reality be reduced to a reductionist theorem in the first place, and what consists as sufficient proof for said theorems.
I will take the other end of this bet
Do you have any particular reason to believe that this is a likely outcome, other than assuming that you can tell the difference between an exponential curve and a logistical one before the inflection point? I've heard a lot of people make predictions like yours over the past year or so but I've yet to hear any basis for it that doesn't end up being essentially just a hunch that there can't possibly be any diminishing returns before then.
Did your philospophy degree not teach you to think "what could go wrong?".
> While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”
But wait, there's this:
> Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.
So, between 6 and 12 each?
when in school i hung out with a lot of architecture students. They were all told and taught that they will be the next Frank Lloyd Wright or a failure. Then they graduate and end up getting a job drawing construction documents for Taco Bell. Heh they're a pretty jaded bunch.
Imagine not reading up on it after reading Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead", and deciding to major in architecture in college. I would have felt brutally misled.
Computer game programming probably felt like that to a lot of people in the 80s and 90s.
Honestly, can't think of many fields that would not feel disappointingly limited and too competitive for 'the good projects' now. :(
The irony
That's the in-house style for the WSJ
FWIW I think the WSJ is the best news source available and does not match this description.
I imagine you'd find more than average, actually. You have a front-row seat to how the sausage is made.
I'm neither and am labelled left wing because I think everyone deserves some basic level of life and dignity.
Chalmers is stating that there's more demand for philosophers with the right sort of training to work at AI companies (whatever that is) than there are philosophers with that training. (I don't really believe this, but that's what he says.)
He's making this claim for two reasons: (1) to respond to the argument (not directly stated in the article, but quite commonly understood to be sound in the profession field) that it's unwise to get a PhD in philosophy because there are not enough jobs and (2) to suggest that if you do want to get a PhD in philosophy and use it professionally, you'd be wise to study with Chalmers at NYU in order to get placed into these tech-industry jobs.
Imagine knowing that you're hired to launder regulatory capture for a trillion dollar corporation lol
Not sure I’d recommend doing only a philosophy degree, but I highly recommend pairing it with something else more employable. CS and Philosophy seems like the best pairing for the direction tech is going.
Now I program to be less stochastic
:)
(Dropped out in my 3rd year to join the .com boom)
However I don’t think it’ll make you better at writing clearly, unfortunately…
That and much of it was meant to be read somewhat poetically not prescriptively.
I am also not convinced that today's distracted and scattered brains are even capable of reading and digesting something like Kant or Hegel fully. I have a hard time slowing down and thinking at the slow but detailed pace the text requires. I used to read this stuff on the bus or plane before smart phones and even then it was hard to focus deeply enough.
Also, now I old and just fall asleep.
"Spirit contains this actuality here because the extremes whose unity it is just as immediately each have the determination to be for itself its own actuality. Their unity is subverted into aloof aspects, each of which is for the other an actual object excluded from it. The unity thus emerges as a mediating middle which is excluded and distinguished from the departed actuality of the two aspects; thus it itself has an actual objectivity differentiated from its aspects, and it is for them, i.e., it is existent. The spiritual substance enters into existence, first while it has gained for its aspects the sort of self-consciousness which knows this pure self to be an actuality which is immediately in force, and therein it just as immediately knows that it is this actuality only through the alienating mediation. Through the former, the moments are refined into the self-knowing category and thereby are refined right up to the point that they are moments of spirit. Through the latter, spirit comes into existence as spirituality."
wtf is Hegel saying?
If I recall "Spirit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and makes it sound more mystical than it probably is.
And Hegel was obsessed with trying to find out how apparent contradictions really... weren't?
So Gemini actually did a great "translation" of this paragraph into something people on this forum could understand:
"If it helps to view it as a distributed architecture problem, Hegel is basically describing how autonomous nodes (individuals) form a network (Spirit).
Because the individual nodes don't trust each other and act strictly in their own self-interest, they can't simply mesh. Instead, their "unity" emerges as a shared, externalized protocol or state machine (the mediating middle). The network actually "comes into existence" when the nodes are fully initialized and aware of their local state, but simultaneously realize they can only achieve anything by serializing their data and passing it through this massive, alienating central protocol."
TLDR: society is made up of individuals, but every single individual thinks they are the main character. We all view ourselves as independent and self-sufficient. And because we all act like we are the centre of the universe, we don't naturally form a harmonious blob. We look at other people and see them as external objects -- NPCs who are separate from us. To interact, we have to invent a third party that sits between us—money, laws, government, social norms. ("The unity thus emerges as a mediating middle which is excluded and distinguished from the departed actuality of the two aspects; thus it itself has an actual objectivity...")
IMHO it's actually really just bog standard liberalism / social contract stuff masquerading behind obscurantist German / high-philosophical language. Though it's probably more mmeant to be more about knowledge and experience and human spirit than boring market relationships etc.
>how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments
This is a little generous. Analytic philosophy often comes across as people using heinous amounts of ink to argue whether a hot dog is technically a taco all while pretending that only a fool would even consider what it tastes like.
I don't think this is true at all. To start with, there's roughly 2000 years between the earliest known philosophers and the analytic-continental split. Plenty of philosophy majors can and do get really into the ancients or medieval philosophers or whatever and complete their degrees without doing much more than a cursory read of the major thinkers post-Kant. And anecdotally, my own undergraduate degree was in philosophy, from one of the more prestigious schools in Anglo-Canada, and we had plenty of opportunities to dive into the continental stuff.
Once you get to the graduate level and academia folks focused on Derrida or whatever are going to gravitate towards the universities that prioritize the schools of thought they're interested in, and those have always been on the continent for the continentals naturally. But for run-of-the-mill philosophy majors in the Anglosphere, IMO you should just assume they have a reasonably broad and just-deep-enough knowledge of the entire history of philosophy and make no particular assumptions about their interests.
td;dr: I think you give Anglo philosophy students FAR too much credit. In my experience they aren't well read at all and their departments are staffed by professors who aren't well read.
I like to call it critical listening but also its textual evaluation.
In addition to some didactic instruction my Father gave me a short book on the principles of hermeneutics around 13. We went to different churches over the years growing up but I would bring my bible, take notes, and on the drive home from service he would ask me if anything unsubstantiated by the text was snuck in, anything against the text, etc.
In the hundreds of sermons I took notes on over the years there were only 3 without obvious butchering of the text, statements directly contradicting the very text being examined, nightmarish hermenutical implications, outright fabrications, etc.
The shear volume of evaluation I did against a static text was interesting.
It helped me understand how to parse language, how to do evaluation, just a lot of stuff in a way that was more dynamic than something like debate club.
It also helped me understand how self servingly imprecise people can be and the ways in which deceptive and misleading language is used.
I've never understand the hate for philosophy; I think more about my philosophy classes now than my CS classes.
Speech Act Theory, Austin's How to Do Things with Words, and Searle's work changed how I think about prompts. Instead of asking, "What words should I use?", I ask, "What action am I trying to perform?" Is this a request? A commitment? A declaration? An instruction? It turns out LLMs respond differently when you think in terms of acts instead of sentences. With AI able to hallucinate context, facts, intent, and answers, keeping AI on track is much like herding cats.
I've been borrowing those ideas for prompts, reusable skills, and even governance. The side effect of making me look smarter than I really am.
I even ended up writing an article about baseball umpires through the lens of Speech Act Theory: https://pitcherlist.com/umpires-dont-make-calls-they-make-hi.... Baseball, as usual, turns out to be an excellent way to explain philosophy. Or philosophy is an excellent way to explain baseball. I'm currently working on a update, since the ABS challenge system helps improve my position.
My suspicion is philosophy has a lot more to offer AI than ethics alone. Philosophy of language seems like an obvious fit, but epistemology ("what does it mean to know?") and philosophy of mind also seem increasingly practical once you're building systems instead of just chatting with them.
Maybe the shortage isn't philosophy majors. Maybe it's people who can translate philosophy into engineering without making everyone read Kant first.
Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.
The mark of a true philosopher.
Only particular schools / kinds of philosophy need apply.
I'm a (dropout) philosophy major, but for 30 years (last month!) have been doing SWE instead. The tar pit of being able to use my brain to make money instead of navigating politics inside academia... happened for most of us a long time before AI.
Anecdotal evidence to support your point.
Have a degree in Anthropology. Took copious amounts of philosophy classes as part of my major. Took some CS classes just to stay on top of the stuff happening in tech.
I wasn't able do what I wanted in Anthropology, so I took the same route and ended up in SWE. To a degree, I have monetized my degree because everything I learned while obtaining my degree I use almost every day in SWE. I was jaded by the toxic politics of academia and it finally pushed me out as well.
When I worked at Google it was the thing that drove me nuts the most. It was very much a "publish or perish" kind of environment with performance and evaluation structures very obviously inspired by academia. (And just like academia, there was sometimes a culture of stealing other people's projects to get credit, with credit and kudos more important than any kind of monetary success since the company was run by an absolute firehose of revenue anyways... )
OTOH, their bank accounts is likely not complaining very loudly
There's about 20 philosophers employed by AI labs worldwide, vs 1000s of software engineers, product managers, designers, etc. There's probably more economists working in these labs than philosophers...
If you meant doing a service job at a small business, where you can have real ownership over how it treats its customers, I would agree with you.
It's not about learning "more". It's that earning a degree is an academic undertaking whereas working at a coffee shop is "real life".
There is no need to treat one as more or less valuable/useful than the other. They're just different kinds of human experiences. Learning is possible from both.
there was literature about 15 years or so ago stating Philosophy as being an uncommonly lucrative course of study, in part citing Reid Hoffman
it is a way of thinking
Debatable. We may need to ask a philosopher.
Philosophy can have strong mid career earnings especially if you go into law. Or get lucky like Reid did.
While there is “no right answer” understanding what the issues are and how the discussion plays out is relevant.
I have found that with proper framing I can get good help from Claude and ChatGPT on questions of translation of haute German philosophy and, to my amazement, Ancient Greek. An immediate ‘translate this passage’ request is a cataclysmic disaster. The nexus of sentences differs from other forms of discourse.
Well, at least until recently.
Not sure if the degree itself is necessarily that helpful beyond signaling intellectual competence.
Personally, I miss when Dennett was around to tell Chalmers he was being annoying. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...
What is the expected deliverable of philosophy degree and of its holders in 21st century? What do they produce. I can understand stem - the ones who have it presumably can do math, engineering, construction, even pure math I can to some extent understand. I can understand, to some extent, even memetic English language, women studies, dance etc.
But what is philosophy degree? I don’t think that it’s just history of philosophy.
Like when I was in college I read history of western philosophy. And for majority of philosophers there the thought was that yes, maybe at a time it was reasonable opinion, but looking back from 21st century it was often pretentious nonsense. So what are modern philosophers doing, especially run of the mill philosophy majors? Again, I’m not trying to be rude or anything, I just don’t even know how to formulate that question :)
And that’s what I’m asking.
What is philosophy major? What he supposed to do. Is he philosopher? What does it mean?
Like I, with my cs major, at least in my country can go and teach cs in school, my diploma presumably allows me to do so. I can imagine that there are similar occupations for philosophy majors. But this is not the goal of the education, and I’m trying to understand what is the goal.
-- SICP
I studied both in undergrad. They're more similar than different.
So? Almost all professions have jargon known only to themselves. You think most people have any clue what a garbage collector is?
One of my biggest regrets is not getting into this stuff when I was in school. Didn't know about tech at all when I was going, just picked whatever was easy to major in and somewhat bearable. Had zero interest in school until later adulthood
Someday I hope to go back to school to get a PhD in philosophy with a focus on logic. :)
I am considering getting a CS degree now mostly for the knowledge, but I doubt it would advance my career meaningfully.
For this they do need ideological coherency and the ability to order their arguments logically, ideally as part of a larger program. Since it is such a popular destination late in life, you'd think it would be a good choice for a major too.
Moreover, I've seen no evidence whatsoever that Elon Musk is looking to be considered a philosopher. He writes short meme tweets, not treatises.
Well, I agree that the concept of philosopher-king is applied by people nonliterally to Thiel, though mainly because those people are ignorant of Plato. But if we interpret your comment nonliterally and remove the "from Plato" part, I still don't see how the nonliteral concept helps to explain anything. Unless we're supposed to interpret "It explains a hell of a lot" nonliterally too?
As I see it, calling Thiel a philosopher-king wannabe is nothing more than a hand-wavy insult. He's a politically powerful billionaire, he has an undergraduate philosophy degree, and he likes to spout about politics and apparently the Antichrist. That's really all there is to it. The use of the term philosopher-king has no intellectual value in this context.
You would have had the same problem if you had said, "Look up Napolean. It explains a lot." The problem is that it explains nothing. Neither Plato nor Napolean helps to explain Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk for that matter. "Philosopher-king wannabe" or "Napolean wannabe" is nothing but an insult wrapped in an historical reference, with no intellectual or explanatory value, and no specific connection to Thiel.
I know that many people don't care about Knowledge™ and are more motivated by winning but perhaps it would be easier to counter these people if the language of knowledge was more broadly spoken, understood, and internalized.
I would hardly call that the revenge of the philosophy majors.
It's great preparation for law school, as a commenter has already pointed out, since skill in one game carries over to the other. The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious, and I think one can reasonably argue that philosophical training does more harm than good by inculcating bizarre/narrow/counterproductive intellectual habits/commitments/bugaboos. But philosophers have tricked themselves into places where they really have no business being, like hospital ethics panels. Cool for these guys though, it seems harmless.
I wouldnt go that far. I think your clutching at straws a little bit. Its a real stretch from philosohers are insecure to they are useless. This is the sort of thing confident ignorance gets you, when you dont know how philophy impacts mpdern life so you assume it doesnt because you think you know everything
At some point who should be doing ethics? Lawyers? Computer scientists? (I'm not asking ironically, who really is well placed to make population level and extremely though questions like balancing the protection of the few against a global important health interest/gain?)
According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.
It's funny how many years I had to spend in philosophy grad school to become "intellectually lazy".
It is my understanding that early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus was mostly critical of logical positivism as opposed to philosophy as a whole, and that late Wittgenstein of the Investigations embraced philosophical inquiry, only abandoning the idea of language as a precise tool (and in fact embracing it).
I have heard that Kierkegaard was one of his favorite philosophers, which challenges the idea that people seem to have of Wittgenstein as a precise purely logical thinker who disdained ambiguity.
The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.
A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”.
The problems, are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.—Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off.—Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.
https://ia803103.us.archive.org/23/items/philosophicalinvest...
It's also the case that Wittgenstein left academic philosophy, as did Richard Rorty.
If you view the story of Wittgenstein and Rorty as primarily one of leaving academia, I believe you are telling on yourself.
I'm not sure why you're quoting the quote that I just quoted. I was hoping for an analysis.
> If you view the story of Wittgenstein and Rorty as primarily one of leaving academia, I believe you are telling on yourself.
I said that they left academic philosophy. Rorty didn't leave academia entirely. But yes, I left academic philosophy too, so in a sense I am telling on myself, though I don't accept the negative connotation.
And if you accept that you are telling on yourself, then don't you think it's awfully convenient that your perspective on philosophy as a discipline is a little skewed by personal hangups?
You still haven't said what you think it means!
> Wittgenstein loved philosophy
I think the phrase "loved philosophy" is way too vague to be informative.
> when people cherry pick his work
I picked some quotes for a Hacker News comment, necessarily brief. I also provided a link to the entire Philosophical Investigations, which I've course I've read more than once.
> dunk on the entire field.
The field of academic philosophy has a tendency to dunk on Wittgenstein. His previously biggest personal booster Bertrand Russell certainly did: "I have not found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations anything that seemed to me interesting and I do not understand why a whole school finds important wisdom in its pages." Many analytic philosophers feel the same way, ironically finding the Tractatus, which Wittgenstein repudiated, more to their liking.
They're probably correct to feel threatened. My own view, as I've stated, is that Wittgenstein's later work is a broad-based critique of philosophy, not aimed only at logical positivism, for example.
> skewed by personal hangups
What personal hangups do you mean?
I said that I left academic philosophy. After many years. I didn't say why. Do you think Wittgenstein and Rorty left academic philosophy due to personal hangups?
Could it be? Did all that concern and daydreaming regarding how to safely wish for something from a malicious Jinn (and other such thought experiments) have a use?
AI labs, I await your offers ;)
This is pretty interesting! I wouldn't know how easy such "surgery" on LLMs would be to do, if if they do have "knowledge" or "consciousness" as their proponents claim, there could be some profound outcomes from this.
“He thinks, therefore he isn’t”
Because it will have been so obsoleted as the medium of experience that those who think with depth and solve problems logically will seem like a primitive species.
Most of the intentionality and experience will happen at a spatial and relational level - unlike language and math.
High level abstraction and novelty.
More like design, intuition, and intention - fleeting and never lingering, searching, never defining.
Ephemera
From the article it seems like they mostly do "is AI conscious" and ethics work. Call me a skeptic (no pun intended) but it looks like "hiring some philosophers to confirm the things we want to keep saying for the sweet AGI-race-$$$ to flow". Kind of like these tobacco studies way back when.
Any time there's an implied Malcolm-Gladwelliness to something, I stop and think to myself, and when I scratch the surface I find that the normie take is true. It's Betteridge's Corollary, if you will.
That is, instead of the Analytic hokum these nerds are selling to literal billionaires! Can you imagine the meetings these guys are having?