This is an interesting development. I think trying to program a computer to be "intelligent" without a valid theory of concepts is a fool's errand.
The revenge of the philosophy majors
61–70 of 292 posts
Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?).
Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors
#63> “Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year. According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.
That's a common misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, and it's intellectually lazy.
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It's funny how many years I had to spend in philosophy grad school to become "intellectually lazy".
Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I studied continental philosophy! Which is the opposite! Now I program to be less stochastic :) (Dropped out in my 3rd year to join the .com boom)
Aha, continental philosophy is definitely worth learning as well. I don’t share the disdain many analytic people have for continentals. However I don’t think it’ll make you better at writing clearly, unfortunately…
It is only within the horizon of a presumed transparency - already inscribed by the metaphysics of immediacy - that the demand for “clarity” emerges as an unquestioned norm. Thus the Continental philosopher, precisely insofar as they decline this foreclosure of meaning, demonstrates beyond ambiguity that they are entirely capable of writing clearly, choosing instead, with impeccable lucidity, not to.
Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors
#65"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...
If the AI is digesting all the philosophy material ever published then why do they need philosophers?
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.
Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors
#66Philosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates!
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.
Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors
#67I've spent a surprising amount of time reading philosophy of language, and it's probably done more for my AI prompting than most of the "prompt engineering" articles I've read. 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 decla…
> Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.
The mark of a true philosopher.
Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors
#68David Chalmers has been doing this for a long time. The fun thing about successful philosophers is it is a very small club and given their nature a lot of them have kind of humorous beef with each other. To make a name for yourself you often have to find a credible target whose intelligence you can insult. This sort of philosophical rivalry is a common historical occurrence as well, and common to the nature of philos…
Dennett was a philosophical zombie, so his opinion doesn’t really matter.
Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using a vocabulary that is known only to themselves.
> Using a vocabulary that is known only to themselves. So? Almost all professions have jargon known only to themselves. You think most people have any clue what a garbage collector is?
A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, after all.
Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Philosophy majors. That piece of paper does not make you a philosopher.
Bit of a tangent, but it's fun to think about how much it takes to become a -er, -ian or -ist in a given field. Philosophy is probably one of the hardest, you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats. In history or physics you probably need to be faculty, in economics you need to have a PhD, in engineering you don't even need a degree but you need to be practicing,...
> you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats
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.