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Comment by jipl104 | Hacker News Reader

"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"...

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...

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Starbucks employs orders of magnitude more philosophers than any AI labs.

and famously doesn't require a degree

If pay, hours, benefits, and type of work mean nothing to you, then maybe this is an apt point.

If service to others and to society mean anything to you, working in Starbucks or any fast food job will teach you more about humanity and human society than most college grads learn from a humanities degree.

But will it help those baristas pay off the student loans that paid for their philosophy degrees?

Helping a mega-corporation make an extra buck is not "service to society".

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.

The mega corp is making 3.98% profit. Sure you could focus all your time at Starbucks on that 3.98%, but most of us would focus on the other 96% which is helping customers.

It’s difficult to articulate the tedium and monotony of a Starbucks gig. There’s so little intellectual stimulation available in that setting. If you managed to learn more from your fast food than your humanities degree, then I think that’s on you for not paying attention at college (perhaps because you were exhausted from your job?).

> If you managed to learn more from your fast food than your humanities degree...

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.

If you find that sort of work, tedious and monotonous, then I think that says more about you than the job. I’ve been a janitor, a barista and a software developer, and they all are fascinating and fulfilling in different ways. Of course if purely measuring on status, comfort and financial renumeration software dev currently beats them all handily, but to imagine there is nothing you could learn, nothing interesting, nothing fulfilling in other types of work is pretty arrogant. The lefties might even call it privileged.

Ok, you got me. It took me a minute.

I would have thought so too, a priori, but at this point three former colleagues are working for Anthropic; the most extraordinary case, one of the brainiest people I have known, was announced this week.

... and why would they train for a job where everything they say that seeks to curtail expansion would be ignored.

If the AI is digesting all the philosophy material ever published then why do they need philosophers?

knowing all the philosophy every published is not being a philosopher

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

> knowing all the philosophy every published is not being a philosopher

Debatable. We may need to ask a philosopher.

Philosopher vs MBA. Everyone dogs on MBAs.

Philosophy can have strong mid career earnings especially if you go into law. Or get lucky like Reid did.

Philosophy is a living process of integrating ideas. Classical materials are the whetstone upon which the mind is sharpened. Unlike history, where literal established accounts are ideal, in philosophy one is expected to view today (or the future) through the lens of contextual discourse.

While there is “no right answer” understanding what the issues are and how the discussion plays out is relevant.

I believe that you mean “whetstone”.

That is not what AI is. AI is a powerful tool, a semiautonomous set of wood working tools that still need a master craftsperson to use. You need the tool+genius to drive it. Everyone wants to shoot down AI but they think AI will do everything. Being proud of a creation where someone did style transfer between spongebob and Rembrandt and they think they made art. About as responsible for actual art as just downloading images from google.

I'm not seeing any evidence of this. Precision tools raise the ceiling. AI mostly just raises the floor. Ease of use is a focus point for all AI labs and it's what they're constantly trying to improve. Yes, an expert can juice these models for all they've got, but an average Joe today is probably getting better results than the best power users had a year ago. Extrapolate this a bit and ask yourself if businesses will ever want to pay your geniuses and craftspeople a professional's wage if they could get 'good enough' results from any desperate minimum wage worker, or even by doing the work themselves.

It’s actually pretty bad at it. I think there just isn’t enough literature to get a good effect from the LLM approach. Good luck with verifiable rewards when the target discourse is effectively pure self-criticism. Maybe ‘disputable rewards’ …

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.

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