181–190 of 292 posts
I am considering getting a CS degree now mostly for the knowledge, but I doubt it would advance my career meaningfully.
“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
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What you're missing is that this is approximately at least a half-dozen more jobs than open tenure-track positions at research universities.
Wouldn't the correct comparison would be filled positions tenure and tenure-track positions?
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.
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Interested to hear how you think one "bluffs" their way through a philosophy degree. Could you sketch that out?
Philosophy treatises don’t trigger compiler errors. 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.
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I've worked with some professional coders who were philosophy majors - there's some overlap between formal computer science and philosophy for sure. I was sort of surprised when one guy started talking about using diagonalization to prove Godels theorem of incompleteness - I thought, "ok, I guess they do teach y'all a thing or two". On the whole, though, it's _way_ easier to bluff your way through a philosophy degree…
Something to ponder... 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 think…
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.
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I mean, theology and philosophy could be argued endlessly to be interchangeable, go ask Wittgenstein. He just argues that things that are 'truly argued' with language are philosophy, while things that are bullshit is more or less theology. 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…
I like the notion that religions prescribe a philosophy of life. That’s really all they are, with 1+ deities to justify the basis for it. Or, you know, you pick a philosophy that makes sense without the fear of god(s).
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Interested to hear how you think one "bluffs" their way through a philosophy degree. Could you sketch that out?
Philosophy treatises don’t trigger compiler errors. 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.
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"Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject." 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 mean, theology and philosophy could be argued endlessly to be interchangeable, go ask Wittgenstein. He just argues that things that are 'truly argued' with language are philosophy, while things that are bullshit is more or less theology. 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…
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.