Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

41–50 of 86 posts

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

#41
Utter non-sense for two reasons.

First, he is reversing cause and effect in that AI is a philosophic problem (more specifically an epistemological problem). The philosophy departments have been doubting the efficacy of reason for over a century now, a process that started with Descartes, advanced by Hume and cashed-in by Kant to save faith from reason (i.e. subjectivism). If modern philosophy had been actually working to validate reason and explain how it works we would already have AI. AI is on hold until someone explains how reason works, and more specifically concepts, in enough detail so that we can program a machine to do it.[1]

Second, if you signed up for philosophy courses or a PhD today, perhaps you would learn how to be a more critical thinker but the danger is you would be infected with navel-gazing skepticism and impotence of reason and thus wreck your ability to think, big or small picture. If you are really talented you can get tenure writing essays destroying the work of your colleagues without generating a shred of original work.[2]

[1] Someone from the early work on computers said (I paraphrase); "Show me what the mind is doing and I can make a machine that can think". I want to say von Neumann but I've never found a source for that statement. If anyone knows who said it and where I would be very grateful for a reference.

[2] LBJ: “Any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a good carpenter to build one."

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

#42

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.

He would be wealthier today if he had immediately put everything in an S&P 500 index fund and spent the last 20 years ignoring it.

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

#43
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except he sold his Yahoo stock pretty early so he then had to make decisions on how to invest and grow the cash.

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

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's the sale to Yahoo.

From that article: "After the IPO, the company was worth $1 billion, Mark Cuban was worth $300 million" (obviously a little more than the $100m I thought)

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

#45
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He would be wealthier today if he had immediately put everything in an S&P 500 index fund and spent the last 20 years ignoring it.

Sure, though given his investments in startups etc he could easily have lost 90% of it.

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

#46

For some reason, despite him being extremely well-accomplished, I just can't take any advice he gives seriously, compared to Bill Gates or even Ray Dalio.

He’s from the “got lucky” school of billionairing, but he has the ego of a Jobs or Gates. A well funded blowhard in other words; your instincts are on target. That, and evaluating statements on their own (dubious in this case) merit is a good thing, always. Even very smart and accomplished people can say things which deserve careful scrutiny, and may come up short.

Lol. You guys crack me up. He built a company and sold it for a bucket of money. This board talks about trying to do that ALL DAMN DAY. He did it Lol.

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

#48

Why do people keep quoting Mark Cuban? He got lucky by selling his company to Yahoo just before the dotcom crash. I don't know any other worthy thing he's done since then. I really wish reporters weren't so lazy and just keep parroting things from people that they've heard of without qualifying how useful or effective the source is.

If you define "worthy" as "financially successful" then there is a lot

HDNet

So many media appearances that he's a celebrity and his appearance at a location becomes valuable/monetizable. (Dancing With The Stars, Entourage, etc.)

Shark Tank (9 seasons of broadcast /syndicated tv - think about money from the reruns)

Dallas Mavericks (NBA sports team) owner who has appreciated the value of the franchise not to mention won championships

And last but not least he is accessible to entrepreneurs and responsive via email.

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

#49
post #15

His argument seems to be that advances in AI will mean that software development itself is soon automated away, in which case a CS degree will be useless. Then, he advocates studying philosophy because this future will need "big picture" thinkers. I don't know how much substance there is to discuss here. It pretty much hinges on how you think AI will develop over the coming decades. I am skeptical that software devel…

Philosophy is great stuff, I've read my share. I've also got a few linear foot of questionable material on my bookshelf. The Carlos Castenada stuff is clearly bullshit and mostly there just as a cautionary tale. I can't make up my mind about Heidegger because I just don't understand his writing . . . he's either brilliant, or he's blowing smoke up the world's fundament; heck, maybe both.

One of my cow-orkers took a bunch of philosophy in college (I think he was at Stanford, in the mid 1970s). He said his course on logic spent a lot of time on DeMorgan's theorem. I don't know about other s/w engineers, but this is something that I use practically every day, usually without even thinking about it -- I don't even remember being taught it, I just sort of figured it out one day early in my career, while I was cleaning up some badly written conditionals.

Cuban's point about knowing philosophy (... which branch? who knows?) is still useful. But it's equally useful to have a wide background in other things than software, when you're writing software. I had a manager once who had a law degree and a Jesuit education, and he was formidable when it came to dealing with department politics and HR bullshit. Just about any value of X in the phrase, "I can write software and do X..." will do you well.

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

#50
Many people think the current buzz in AI is about intelligent machines instead of highly repeatable pattern recognition. I suspect we are several major advancements away from sentient machines and in a few years the buzz over ML will die down as we realize that it isn't much more than a great at sorting inputs.
Post reply on HN