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The revenge of the philosophy majors

nytimes.com

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Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#211

Post by Avicebron »

lapcat wrote: post #203
Avicebron wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

In the gentlest way possible you are responding to "he thinks he's Napolean" with minutia about troop movements in Austerlitz. But you do you lapcat, you do you.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#212

Post by joshinkler »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #165
wk_end wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cur…

I have to disagree here. The split is not incidental, and studying medieval/ancient philosophy naturally means that you are going to concern yourself with Ontology, which is expressely ignored by the “analytic” tradition. If you come to ancient philosophy through your typical post-quinian formal reasoning education, you are going to view such ontology with the weight of thousands of years of translation which you wil…

[dead]

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#213

Post by skeeter2020 »

No doubt there's great programmers with philosophy backgrounds, just like I've worked with many from chemistry, physics and music. The conversation here though, is a bunch of pompous arguing over minutiae and correctness, trying to win using the densest phrasing and allusion to deep knowledge of esoteric readings and history, i.e. much like my one university philosophy class. Meanwhile people from all backgrounds are busy getting shit done and actually winning.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#214

Post by lapcat »

Avicebron wrote: post #211
lapcat wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"…

In the gentlest way possible you are responding to "he thinks he's Napolean" with minutia about troop movements in Austerlitz. But you do you lapcat, you do you.

No, I was reponding to "It explains a hell of a lot."

You would have had the same problem if you had said, "Look up Napolean. It explains a lot." The problem is that it explains nothing. Neither Plato nor Napolean helps to explain Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk for that matter. "Philosopher-king wannabe" or "Napolean wannabe" is nothing but an insult wrapped in an historical reference, with no intellectual or explanatory value, and no specific connection to Thiel.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#215

Post by layer8 »

john_strinlai wrote: post #174
malfist wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not being downvoted because you're wrong, but because the general rule of thumb is that replies should be _more interesting_ than what is being replied too.

i find it hard to remember what non-interesting things i can write and get upvoted ("this is ai", "slop", "awfully designed site", "clickbait title", "typical microslop", "fuck microsoft", etc.) and the non-interesting stuff i am downvoted for ("that was rude").

As far as I’m concerned, using the Shift key would already help.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#216

Post by [deleted] »

layer8 wrote: post #215
john_strinlai wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i find it hard to remember what non-interesting things i can write and get upvoted ("this is ai", "slop", "awfully designed site", "clickbait title", "typical microslop", "fuck microsoft", etc.) and the non-interesting stuff i am downvoted for ("that was rude").

As far as I’m concerned, using the Shift key would already help.

[deleted]

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#217

Post by mkovach »

thisoneisreal wrote: post #117
mkovach wrote: 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…

And encoding context, governance, and intent. I hate guessing that but too often I must.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#218

Post by mkovach »

antonvs wrote: post #67
mkovach wrote: 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…

> Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that. The mark of a true philosopher.

I don't know about that but thanks. I tend to think of myself as a baseball enthusiast with a philosophy problem.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#219

Post by NonHyloMorph »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #208
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 n…

What is your argument exactly?

You establish, that it is virtuous to not fall for the hybris that claiming knowledge beyond the scope of your domain is. (i.e. the virtuous physisit who does not mistake his encounter with some institutional courses in chemistry for a foundation to transgress against "the chemist" by pretending to grasp chemistry like the latter does)

Now what is it exactly that you want to put forward regarding the faculty of philosophically trained cognition again?

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#220

Post by consensus1 »

gregates wrote: post #187
consensus1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philosophy majors. That piece of paper does not make you a philosopher.

The title of the article is misleading -- they're pretty clearly talking about philosophy PhDs here.

By my personal standards for the term, the majority of philosophers don't have PhDs and the vast majority of philosophy PhDs are not philosophers.
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