Live data from Hacker News

The revenge of the philosophy majors

nytimes.com

111–120 of 292 posts

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#111
post #82

I studied analytic philosophy, which is basically an education in how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments. IMO there is no better preparation for any sort of writing-and-thinking job than studying analytic philosophy, although of course I am biased. Not sure I’d recommend doing only a philosophy degree, but I highly recommend pairing it with something else more emplo…

I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics. >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 li…

> I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics.

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.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#112
post #18

"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...

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

[deleted]

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#113
post #66

Philosophy 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…

The experts on hospital ethics panels are trained internally by medical schools, which are like little universities inside universities. There has not been philosophical access for about thirty years.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#114
I have an undergrad in Philosophy. Our required math classes were formal logic, which we shared with the comp sci. majors. Those classes basically taught me how to program.

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.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#115

Hilarious that the article is framed as a humanities vs sciences thing even though the caliber of philosophers who can get these jobs at labs are the top 0.1% in their field, and wouldn't have trouble finding a job elsewhere, whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile.

> whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile.

Well, at least until recently.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that propositional logic, set theory, and mapping the limits of formal systems are philosophy, right? You're literally describing mathematical logic and philosophy of language.

Logicians' training is so different from philosophers' that it should be considered a separate discipline, or under the branch of computer science.

When I was a young man I took three philosophy courses from a very old man who, when he was a young man, was the dissertation director of Alan Turing. The latter, by the way, was an habitué of the seminar of Wittgenstein.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#117
post #60

I'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…

Even before LLMs I used to joke with my traditional SE coworkers that "philosophy is very practical." On nearly every project we'd have to talk to stakeholders and ask questions like, "But when you say X, what do you mean?" Establishing definitions, relationships between concepts, etc etc turns out to be really important when you're encoding ideas into a block of silicon. (Yes I know other fields do versions of the same thing too.)

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#118

Hilarious that the article is framed as a humanities vs sciences thing even though the caliber of philosophers who can get these jobs at labs are the top 0.1% in their field, and wouldn't have trouble finding a job elsewhere, whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile.

There are only a few thousand academic philosophers in America total. 0.1% is thus … a few

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of a survey that found that in the entire field of Social Psychology, there was something like eight people that indicated they would vote for Romney over Obama.

Well yeah rightwing people are not the kind of people to take up psychology. I also don’t think you will find many Marxists in corporate law .

[dead]

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#120
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." If you view the story of Wittgenstein and Rorty as primarily one of leaving academia, I believe you are telling on yourself.

> "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." 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 ph…

I think the quote doesn't say what you think it says. Wittgenstein loved philosophy, and it's frustrating when people cherry pick his work to try and dunk on the entire field.

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?

Post reply on HN