Why Philosophers make formidable entrepreneurs (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Why Philosophers make formidable entrepreneurs (2010)

blog.samidh.com

7 pointsekm27 comments

Anyone interested in how to put philosophy/psychology to use in business should check out Charles Munger's essays. He is Warren Buffet's partner with great set of talks on good decision making.

This is one of my favorite talks from him: http://www.rbcpa.com/Mungerspeech_june_95.pdf

Yes! Philosophy, imo, is the most important subject that anyone can take in college. It's the meta subject because it helps you figure out HOW to think about any other subject which is way more useful than WHAT to think about any particular subject (e.g. CS, biology, history).

I disagree with your comment completely. It's not that philosophy teaches us how to think, and sciences teach us what to think. Philosophy teaches us how to pose questions. As soon as we are able to address those questions the problem becomes science (e.g. natural philosophy--> physics, philosophy of mind--> psychology, etc.)

Saying that all philosophical topics are just embryonic scientific topics is just as reductive and rigid as dividing the two by "how" and "what".

Philosophy of mind is probably the dominant research area in contemporary philosophy, and I think you'd find a lot that doesn't overlap at all with empirical psychology.

>Philosophy of mind is probably the dominant research area in contemporary philosophy, and I think you'd find a lot that doesn't overlap at all with empirical psychology.

It's not really my area of expertise, but maybe the reason that philosophy of mind is such a big research area in contemporary philosophy is because we haven't figured out how to study mind yet. Once we figure out the correct questions about things like consciousness, we should be able to address them scientifically (much like we are doing with perception, learning, etc. through neuroscience), or figure out why it can't be addressed scientifically, or come to some kind of other logical conclusion.

Given that dialectal reasoning (e.g. Socrates, Hegel, Marx) is essentially the thought process through questioning logical discrepancies, we're basically saying that same thing.

Proof: If philosophy teaches us how to pose questions And posing questions is the basic of dialectical thought Then philosophy teaches us how to think.

My undergrad used to offer an inter-departmental major between Computer Science and Philosophy. At first I thought it was crazy, but there were many overlaps: formal proving, digital logic and hardware, AI, and many more.

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