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Mark Cuban says studying philosophy may soon be worth more than computer science

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Re: Mark Cuban says studying philosophy may soon be worth more than computer science

#31

Post by plorkyeran »

bdcravens wrote: post #30
jacquesm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mark Cuban got supremely lucky selling broadcast.com to Yahoo in the deal that best illustrated the crazy boom years of the .com bubble and believes that this makes him some kind of sage instead of a lottery winner. You just can't compare him to Gates who got where he is today through a combination of luck at birth and supremely hard work (and some questionable business tactics).

Cuban's stake in Broadcast.com's was worth about $100M before they sold to Yahoo, and since the sale to Yahoo, he's managed to over double his net worth via the Mavericks and his business interests. He may not be Gates, but I think he's more than a lottery winner.

Doubling your money over 18 years is a only 4% rate of return. Not terrible, but also not impressive.

Re: Mark Cuban says studying philosophy may soon be worth more than computer science

#32

Post by jacquesm »

bdcravens wrote: post #30
jacquesm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mark Cuban got supremely lucky selling broadcast.com to Yahoo in the deal that best illustrated the crazy boom years of the .com bubble and believes that this makes him some kind of sage instead of a lottery winner. You just can't compare him to Gates who got where he is today through a combination of luck at birth and supremely hard work (and some questionable business tactics).

Cuban's stake in Broadcast.com's was worth about $100M before they sold to Yahoo, and since the sale to Yahoo, he's managed to over double his net worth via the Mavericks and his business interests. He may not be Gates, but I think he's more than a lottery winner.

8% will double your money in 9 years. It's been almost 20.

Re: Mark Cuban says studying philosophy may soon be worth more than computer science

#33

Post by zitterbewegung »

smt88 wrote: post #16
zitterbewegung wrote: post #9

I studied philosophy in College but got my CS degree. I think some guy called Paul Graham did so too. I think philosophy is useful for detecting if someone is lying to you or doesn't know what they are talking about. It does stress critical thinking in different ways than say studying math (I also studied math also). I can't really take what he is saying though at any serious level though and I don't believe what he…

> philosophy is useful for detecting if someone is lying to you What do you mean? What did philosophy teach you about lie detection?

Asking the right questions and seeing how people view the world.

Re: Mark Cuban says studying philosophy may soon be worth more than computer science

#35

Post by debt »

danbruc wrote: post #19

Firstly, AI is currently massively overhyped and people are overestimating the progress we are making. What we are currently doing is curve fitting and searching on steroids enabled by the ever increasing availability of computing power, what we know about general intelligence hasn't changed much in a long time, at least as far as I know. I won't rule out that we may build an AGI by just throwing enough computing pow…

“Firstly, AI is currently massively overhyped and people are overestimating the progress we are making.“

And I love AI! What programmer doesn’t?

But I completely agree and I think it’s really difficult for people to understand why this it true!

Re: Mark Cuban says studying philosophy may soon be worth more than computer science

#36

Post by pkaye »

bdcravens wrote: post #30
jacquesm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mark Cuban got supremely lucky selling broadcast.com to Yahoo in the deal that best illustrated the crazy boom years of the .com bubble and believes that this makes him some kind of sage instead of a lottery winner. You just can't compare him to Gates who got where he is today through a combination of luck at birth and supremely hard work (and some questionable business tactics).

Cuban's stake in Broadcast.com's was worth about $100M before they sold to Yahoo, and since the sale to Yahoo, he's managed to over double his net worth via the Mavericks and his business interests. He may not be Gates, but I think he's more than a lottery winner.

Doubling an investment is not too hard over 20 years.

Re: Mark Cuban says studying philosophy may soon be worth more than computer science

#37

Post by dannylandau »

bdcravens wrote: post #30
jacquesm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mark Cuban got supremely lucky selling broadcast.com to Yahoo in the deal that best illustrated the crazy boom years of the .com bubble and believes that this makes him some kind of sage instead of a lottery winner. You just can't compare him to Gates who got where he is today through a combination of luck at birth and supremely hard work (and some questionable business tactics).

Cuban's stake in Broadcast.com's was worth about $100M before they sold to Yahoo, and since the sale to Yahoo, he's managed to over double his net worth via the Mavericks and his business interests. He may not be Gates, but I think he's more than a lottery winner.

I think it was around $1.4B, not $100M -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com

Re: Mark Cuban says studying philosophy may soon be worth more than computer science

#38

Post by JoshMnem »

> Cuban advises ditching degrees that teach specific skills or professions and opting for degrees that teach you to think in a big picture way, like philosophy.

I'm not sure if big picture thinking skills come from studying one specific field like philosophy by itself. I'd expect interdisciplinary thinking and life experiences to be more important.

Examples: meet many different kinds of people from around the world who challenge your preconceived ideas, and listen with an open mind. Work many different kinds of jobs (or volunteer). Approach learning from an interdisciplinary perspective and study multiple fields.

Studying philosophy isn't a bad idea, but I don't think that one field by itself is the solution.

Re: Mark Cuban says studying philosophy may soon be worth more than computer science

#39

Post by kabdib »

"We don't need people to engineer buildings any more, because we have architects and city planners."

I wouldn't expect a philosophy major to leapfrog into a similar compensation package as a competent engineer. At best they're going to be like PMs with domain knowledge, and working experience building software will be required for folks on product teams. Just another case of individual with cross-discipline expertise being more valuable than ones with narrower focus, which is nothing new in the workforce.

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