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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

#71

Post by adamnemecek »

gargarplex wrote: post #48
pfarnsworth wrote: post #20

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…

All those things are a result of the first thing.

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

#72

Post by gargarplex »

adamnemecek wrote: post #71
gargarplex wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All those things are a result of the first thing.

I don't see the point to your comment and I would also say it's more complex than simply the deterministic result of selling Broadcast to Yahoo! and smartly locking in the stock price with a collar trade... I'd say it's the product of his charisma, natural talent, work ethic, experience at previous companies such as Micro-Solutions and like ventures, etc.

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

#73

Post by SerLava »

majos wrote: 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…

>AI will mean that software development itself is soon automated away

People don't seem to realize that while individual tasks are being automated away, we're not even remotely close to the ceiling on what we want programmed.

The farther it goes, the more we'll want to do with it.

"Oh did you get a chance to build that 3d engine this morning? I'm actually going to need it to simulate most of the physical objects San Diego today. For a thing. A report or whatever."

"No, there were a couple of issues. Might have to wait til tomorrow morning."

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

#74

Post by cre8 »

curiousgal wrote: post #2

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.

Probably the reason manifests through his parody in the show, Silicon Valley.

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

#75

Post by cre8 »

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…

I major in Math, so which did you think was more interesting?

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

#76

Post by gremlinsinc »

While I agree someday, (more likely 40+ years from now) AI might be general enough to code new/better ai... I don't think philosophy will be the goto college degree...

I think the arts will possibly, because if AI is doing all the work, building the industries, and technologies we want then I feel science and entertainment will be two things ai can't do.. Science because it takes human curiosity to even know what we want to know or search, and the whole point of knowing is curiosity -- I think science will exist for awhile, albeit augmented fiercely by ai.

Entertainment because if there are no jobs as accountants, lawyers, or doctors, or any other jobs if--we end up in post-scarcity one thing we will need is something to do in all our free time, that something will be binging on netflix and social media 24/7.

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

#77

Post by pasabagi »

mistermann wrote: post #69
freedomben wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from what I can tell its main selling point is that it teaches you to examine things in a critical way that's very aware of the argument in question, the assumptions made, and the structure the argument sits in. That's definitely a big (and important) part of it. There's an unfortunate dearth of critical thinking and examination of ideas these days. I have theories as to why that is, but it's out of scope for this…

> There's an unfortunate dearth of critical thinking and examination of ideas these days. I have theories as to why that is, but it's out of scope for this discussion so I will abstain. As someone who sees the same things but has no theories, I for one would like to hear a few of yours.

I'm not the other poster, and this isn't my theory - but for people like Adorno or Hegel the go-to explanation for this phenomenon is basically that reasoning in our society is ends-rational. We're very good at considering ideas insofar as they relate to a goal - for instance, the geometry of transistors in relation to their performance. That's because we're a culture of employees - and in such a culture, you don't need to think about goals, just about means.

This kind of thought process is pretty toxic to critical thinking and examination of ideas, since the most central elements (our goals) are almost entirely unexamined - and we don't really include their examination in our education, since we're only interested in preparing children to be good 'problem solvers', or in other words, employees.

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

#78

Post by koonsolo »

Reminds me of what an ex colleague used to say: Every scientist is a philosopher, but not every philosopher is a scientist.

Let me explain: Philosophers love questions and problems, but the difference with scientists is that the latter like to find answers to those questions and solutions to those problems. It seems in practice, that philosophers like the questions more than the answers, and like them more to be "unsolved".

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

#79

Post by ilaksh »

Personally I think that computer programming AIs that can really replace humans (beyond just programming automation) will need to be AGIs. Those AGIs will be able to do philosophy just as well as they can program.

I also personally believe that we currently have most if not all of the ingredients necessary for AGI. My prediction is that in 2018 or 2019 we will see public demonstrations of AGI. These initial demos will be underwhelming and not have the capacity of humans or even animals -- but nonetheless will be truly general intelligences with significant human- and animal-like abilities. It will take another few years before the technology is widely recognized to be human-equivalent or better, but the initial systems will be trained in numerous fields quickly. There will be very powerful general systems available by 2021.

Some of the pieces necessary for general intelligence as I see them are truly general purpose inputs and outputs (like a body or virtual body), highly efficient processing of high bandwidth input and output, fast online (immediate) learning, hierarchical learning and computation, the ability to learn and recombine flexible sequences and time-based data. Advanced neural net-based systems, especially ones that are inspired by animal cognition systems, are providing all of these features. Its mainly a matter of integrating existing leading edge neural-net research with a good understanding of AGI.

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

#80

Post by dcdanko »

adventured wrote: post #70
plorkyeran wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

His compound rate of wealth increase, post paying taxes on the sale, is around ~7.5%. That beats the S&P 500 over that time, which very few professional money managers can do. $1.1 billion to $4.08 billion [1]. His primary business holding, the Dallas Mavericks, has increased in value from $285 million to $1.9 billion [2] (per the latest Forbes estimate). For that investment, he has seen a rate of value increase of a…

> His compound rate of wealth increase, post paying taxes on the sale, is around ~7.5%. That beats the S&P 500 over that time, which very few professional money managers can do.

Very few money managers that are accessible to people with less than 10^8 USD can beat the S&P after fees.

Bridgewater, (Ray Dalio's fund mentioned above) regularly gets 12.5% annual returns and they are most notable for being consistent, not high. Pre-2008 some investment banks were getting up to 20%.

A billionaire making 7.5% annually is fairly unimpressive if their goal was to make money (which it might not have been for Cuban).

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