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The revenge of the philosophy majors

nytimes.com

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Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#201

Post by joshinkler »

EoinB wrote: post #180
commandlinefan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#202

Post by metalspot »

rendx wrote: post #188
port11 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I would think they're on opposite ends: philosophy teaches you autonomous experiential thinking, religion asks you to follow some third party authority.

this is a modernist misconception. ancient religions are philosophical frameworks and the texts are internally coherent arguments for those frameworks. They are just expressed in language that modern audiences without formal training don't understand.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#203

Post by lapcat »

Avicebron wrote: post #196
lapcat wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it does explain anything. I've seen no evidence that Thiel takes any particular inspiration from Plato. Rather, Thiel seems to be much more focused on Christianity and libertarianism, and those would be the sources of Thiel's anti-democratic predilections, not Plato's Republic. I think philosopher-king is more of a label that other people are trying to pin on Thiel. The Republic actually said that the p…

I think you're reading my comment too literally. The concept of philosopher-king has moved beyond literal reading of Plato and into the broader concept of epistocracy.

> I think you're reading my comment too literally.

Well, I agree that the concept of philosopher-king is applied by people nonliterally to Thiel, though mainly because those people are ignorant of Plato. But if we interpret your comment nonliterally and remove the "from Plato" part, I still don't see how the nonliteral concept helps to explain anything. Unless we're supposed to interpret "It explains a hell of a lot" nonliterally too?

As I see it, calling Thiel a philosopher-king wannabe is nothing more than a hand-wavy insult. He's a politically powerful billionaire, he has an undergraduate philosophy degree, and he likes to spout about politics and apparently the Antichrist. That's really all there is to it. The use of the term philosopher-king has no intellectual value in this context.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#204

Post by jibal »

calf wrote: post #186
EoinB wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was born a philosopher, people were telling me to study philosophy when I was in high school. But instead my formal education choices took a more circuitous route that included the fine arts, physics, electrical engineering, computer engineering, and eventually theoretical computer science. However even I can see that philosophy as a field is flawed and generic advice to tell students to go philosophy is incredibly…

If you actually studied philosophy you would realize that your comment is riddled with fallacies.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#205

Post by arjie »

When I was young, they said this about Mathematics degrees. "You can do anything with Mathematics degrees." and so on and so forth. But no one ever said that about CS/EE degrees then. Those ones needed no justification or anything. And that seems to be the general case in the world. People will tell you "actually, X is amazing" because there's some countercultural need for us to say "it's not the thing everyone thinks that is right; it's this other thing" but then you check and it turns out the normie thing is correct.

Any time there's an implied Malcolm-Gladwelliness to something, I stop and think to myself, and when I scratch the surface I find that the normie take is true. It's Betteridge's Corollary, if you will.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#206

Post by cmrdporcupine »

wcfrobert wrote: post #195
keiferski wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like the _idea_ of reading continental philosophy, and then I opened up Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Here is a random sentence from a random page verbatim: "Spirit contains this actuality here because the extremes whose unity it is just as immediately each have the determination to be for itself its own actuality. Their unity is subverted into aloof aspects, each of which is for the other an actual object exclu…

Yeah I've mostly come around to the idea that Hegel is a Bad Influence and German philosophy should have just stopped at Kant :-)

If I recall "Spirit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and makes it sound more mystical than it probably is.

And Hegel was obsessed with trying to find out how apparent contradictions really... weren't?

So Gemini actually did a great "translation" of this paragraph into something people on this forum could understand:

"If it helps to view it as a distributed architecture problem, Hegel is basically describing how autonomous nodes (individuals) form a network (Spirit).

Because the individual nodes don't trust each other and act strictly in their own self-interest, they can't simply mesh. Instead, their "unity" emerges as a shared, externalized protocol or state machine (the mediating middle). The network actually "comes into existence" when the nodes are fully initialized and aware of their local state, but simultaneously realize they can only achieve anything by serializing their data and passing it through this massive, alienating central protocol."

TLDR: society is made up of individuals, but every single individual thinks they are the main character. We all view ourselves as independent and self-sufficient. And because we all act like we are the centre of the universe, we don't naturally form a harmonious blob. We look at other people and see them as external objects -- NPCs who are separate from us. To interact, we have to invent a third party that sits between us—money, laws, government, social norms. ("The unity thus emerges as a mediating middle which is excluded and distinguished from the departed actuality of the two aspects; thus it itself has an actual objectivity...")

IMHO it's actually really just bog standard liberalism / social contract stuff masquerading behind obscurantist German / high-philosophical language. Though it's probably more mmeant to be more about knowledge and experience and human spirit than boring market relationships etc.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#208

Post by DoctorOetker »

Wissenschafter wrote: post #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 f…

There is substance in philosophy, don't get me wrong, but just not that much of it, theres only a handful of real theorems with proofs (like the deduction theorem etc., which is basically some syntactic sugar correctness proof, if I may put it barbarically).

A physicist will have studied atomic and molecular physics courses, and some intro to chemistry course, and there will be some overlap with thermodynamics. But no physicist pretends to grasp chemistry like chemists do, even though chemistry is technically a branch of physics.

Technically mathematics is a branch of philosophy, but the sheer diversity of statements in mathematics, the nearly endless constellations of symmetries and structures described in mathematics make the few "deep insights" from philosophy pale in comparison.

It's great that the important sliver of your philosophy courseware (the formal logic part) essentially taught you programming, but that is you pivoting to computer science and enjoying success, its not really the non-formal-logic parts of philosophy that propelled you forward.

Relying on ML/AI to solve your problems, and effectively advocating to stop understanding or stop thinking is advice that will not age well. Meritocratically what is supposed to set a "philosopher" ahead of their peers?

Picture a philosopher managing a cloud of AI agents, trying to break RSA-grade products, without the philosopher understanding the intermediate insights.

Contrast with what some human individuals can achieve without AI, they will break it long before the philosopher with AI will!

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#209

Post by jhanschoo »

port11 wrote: post #151
Wissenschafter wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Religious traditions tend to hold that certain claims or parts of their canon are infallible, whereas academic philosophy is more welcoming of the critical and argumentative process.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#210

Post by kbelder »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #108

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.

How do you judge the caliber of a philosopher?
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