10 ms·
The revenge of the philosophy majors
- Kaibeezy 2mo agoPosted days ago ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793297
- amuseorielle 2mo ago[dead]
- pouetpouetpoue 2mo agorevenge for 2 or maybe 10 philosophy majors, not for the cohorts of philosophy majors.
- smcg 2mo agoEveryone is debating the merits of philosophy and education without stating the elephant in the room: these AI companies hired these philosophy majors to launder their reputation and obfuscate the horrible anti-social products they are making.
- galkk 2mo agoI am not trolling or anything, just have genuine question. What is the expected deliverable of philosophy degree and of its holders in 21st century? What do they produce. I can understand stem - the ones who have it presumably can do math, engineering, construction, even pure math I can to some extent understand. I can understand, to some extent, even memetic English language, women studies, dance etc. But what is philosophy degree? I don’t think that it’s just history of philosophy. Like when I was in college I read history of western philosophy. And for majority of philosophers there the thought was that yes, maybe at a time it was reasonable opinion, but looking back from 21st century it was often pretentious nonsense. So what are modern philosophers doing, especially run of the mill philosophy majors? Again, I’m not trying to be rude or anything, I just don’t even know how to formulate that question :)
- kj4211cash 2mo agoI think this line of thinking is a bit dangerous. It reminds me when I used to teach in a Civil Engineering department and the other faculty members focused exclusively on how well our coursework prepared our students to become civil engineers. Of course, very few of our students actually did become civil engineers and those that did both required years of additional training and often didn't last long in the profession before transitioning to something else. I used to teach maths and decision making. Had numerous students thank me later on for teaching some of the only material they actually used in their (non-civil-engineering) careers. No one knows what students will do post graduation. One of the best things we can do is to give them tools that are broadly useful.
- galkk 2mo agoHonestly, I’m super tired of the trope “we at college teach to learn” And that’s what I’m asking. What is philosophy major? What he supposed to do. Is he philosopher? What does it mean? Like I, with my cs major, at least in my country can go and teach cs in school, my diploma presumably allows me to do so. I can imagine that there are similar occupations for philosophy majors. But this is not the goal of the education, and I’m trying to understand what is the goal.
- chunkyslink 2mo agoHow do I get past the paywall? (without paying)
- hsuduebc2 2mo agohttps://archive.ph/7A8cW https://archive.ph/7A8cW
- talloaktrees 2mo agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-majors-ai-jobs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.v1A.sRD0.97_nQ2W3e43o&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-major...
- seasox 2mo agohttps://archive.ph/7A8cW https://archive.ph/7A8cW
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- andrewclunn 2mo ago> But Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.” Could it be? Did all that concern and daydreaming regarding how to safely wish for something from a malicious Jinn (and other such thought experiments) have a use?
- setopt 2mo agoIt seems everything has a use if you wait long enough. Number theory also seemed famously unapplyable until modern digital cryptography came along, and same with non-Euclidean geometry before general relativity.
- etcimon 2mo agoIt does have a use but not in the colloquial sense, history is plastered with bad winners yielding to their predatory instincts and a malicious Jinn is one of infinite ways you can visualize something that pulls/pushes into the abyss for a competitive comparative sense of superiority. Understanding it doesn't make it happen less because the phenomena exhibits in circles that mock thought itself. But taking it into consideration in thought does tend to improve the outcome of novelty the same way an engineer looks as Murphy's Law as a warning not to seek positive thoughts for the sake of it but look at failure modes because they're central to good design
- cmiles8 2mo agoWhen the AI bubble cools these roles will be eliminated faster than you can blink. Mark my words.
- keiferski 2mo agoI studied analytic philosophy, which is basically an education in how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments. IMO there is no better preparation for any sort of writing-and-thinking job than studying analytic philosophy, although of course I am biased. Not sure I’d recommend doing only a philosophy degree, but I highly recommend pairing it with something else more employable. CS and Philosophy seems like the best pairing for the direction tech is going.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- seydor 2mo agoDont you think that ANN research is upwards of philosophy in the ordo cognoscendi
- keiferski 2mo agoCan you rephrase that in simpler terms? I don’t understand what you’re asking.
- cmrdporcupine 2mo agoAnd I studied continental philosophy! Which is the opposite! Now I program to be less stochastic :) (Dropped out in my 3rd year to join the .com boom)
- keiferski 2mo agoAha, 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…
- antonvs 2mo agoIt is only within the horizon of a presumed transparency - already inscribed by the metaphysics of immediacy - that the demand for “clarity” emerges as an unquestioned norm. Thus the Continental philosopher, precisely insofar as they decline this foreclosure of meaning, demonstrates beyond ambiguity that they are entirely capable of writing clearly, choosing instead, with impeccable lucidity, not to.
- speak_plainly 2mo ago[dead]
- matltc 2mo agoI got a degree in philosophy. Couldn't be less interested in this kind of job. I hate philosophy now One of my biggest regrets is not getting into this stuff when I was in school. Didn't know about tech at all when I was going, just picked whatever was easy to major in and somewhat bearable. Had zero interest in school until later adulthood
- beepbooptheory 2mo agoIt was really just the luck of the draw for me ending up in the undergrad program that I did, but every day I am grateful to have spent both my degrees and a decade mostly just teaching Kant or Descartes and reading Derrida, Marx, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Deleuze, etc. Meaningful, sometimes beautiful, thought which maybe never made me feel "smarter" than other people, but undeniably taught me how to live and navigate the world. That is, instead of the Analytic hokum these nerds are selling to literal billionaires! Can you imagine the meetings these guys are having?
- MSkill1 2mo agoI would much rather hear that they were hiring theoretical logicians than philosophers.We could use more people exploring the limits of prepositional and propositional logic and set theory than we need philosophy. AI is never going to become conscious, at least not the kind we have right now.
- speak_plainly 2mo agoYou do realize that propositional logic, set theory, and mapping the limits of formal systems are philosophy, right? You're literally describing mathematical logic and philosophy of language.
- programjames 2mo agoLogicians' training is so different from philosophers' that it should be considered a separate discipline, or under the branch of computer science.
- applicative 2mo agoWhen I was a young man I took three philosophy courses from a very old man who, when he was a young man, was the dissertation director of Alan Turing. The latter, by the way, was an habitué of the seminar of Wittgenstein.
- MSkill1 2mo agoI studied it getting my CS degree - you can literally write mathematical formulas using symbols and you can perform operations in logic. Very different from a philosophy class - excuse me if you were already aware.
- virissimo 2mo agoLogicians are typically part of the philosophy department, at least in the US.
- andrewlin247 2mo agoYou mean mathematicians? CS majors also all study logic to some degree. I think we have enough of both in AI. Philosophers of mind, not so much.
- jipl104 2mo ago"the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into"... There's about 20 philosophers employed by AI labs worldwide, vs 1000s of software engineers, product managers, designers, etc. There's probably more economists working in these labs than philosophers...
- deadbabe 2mo agoStarbucks employs orders of magnitude more philosophers than any AI labs.
- airstrike 2mo agoand famously doesn't require a degree
- jayd16 2mo agoIf pay, hours, benefits, and type of work mean nothing to you, then maybe this is an apt point.
- appreciatorBus 2mo agoIf service to others and to society mean anything to you, working in Starbucks or any fast food job will teach you more about humanity and human society than most college grads learn from a humanities degree.
- pohl 2mo agoBut will it help those baristas pay off the student loans that paid for their philosophy degrees?
- quixoticaxolotl 2mo agoHelping a mega-corporation make an extra buck is not "service to society". If you meant doing a service job at a small business, where you can have real ownership over how it treats its customers, I would agree with you.
- em500 2mo agoThis article seems high on vibes, low on metrics. > While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.” But wait, there's this: > Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers. So, between 6 and 12 each?
- taeric 2mo agoWow, it is hard not to immediately think of that meme. There are indeed dozens of them!
- Pamar 2mo agoHalf-dozens of them, apparently.
- vitorfblima 2mo agomore than half a dozen, probably, so safe to say there could be as much as ten.
- zombot 2mo agoCan earth's population fill that demand?
- fellowniusmonk 2mo agoThe revenge of the _nearly a dozen_ philosophers.
- kazinator 2mo agoThose are dining philosophers!
- seydor 2mo agoThey are also hiring cooks and cleaners, talk about their revenge
- datakan 2mo agoSame group
- giantg2 2mo ago"Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers." I would hardly call that the revenge of the philosophy majors.
- JauntTrooper 2mo agoWhen I was in college, a philosophy degree was seen as excellent training for a career in Law.
- wongarsu 2mo agoBoth professions require writing detailed, overly specific, reasonably watertight arguments that will be read by only a handful of people, so that tracks
- datakan 2mo agoArguments so watertight that none of them ever agree with each other and have argued for thousands of years without a resolution to even the most basic of questions.
- programjames 2mo agoThe appearance of a logical argument is easier to achieve and often good enough for their purposes (publishing papers, winning lawsuits).
- mothballed 2mo agoConnections are far more important IMO. The opinion itself is there for the plebs so they don't revolt when the high-IQ trickery flagrantly mismatches the plain language of the constitution. The courts are really the main thing nowadays that can provide legitimacy to the acts of the state since it doesn't follow the people or the documents authorizing it.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoUsing a vocabulary that is known only to themselves.
- palmotea 2mo ago> Using a vocabulary that is known only to themselves. So? Almost all professions have jargon known only to themselves. You think most people have any clue what a garbage collector is?
- cgyvbunji 2mo agoIn summary, AI has tricked a bunch of philosophy majors into not only thinking it's more than linear algebra but changing their entire life trajectories because of their confusion. AI seems to be a very alluring tar pit for the non-technical. The sad part is how this negative externality of AI is being actively encouraged for political ends.
- consensus1 2mo agoThe strange part is that they seemed to have tricked AI companies too.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mrhottakes 2mo agoTo be fair, AI is also a very alluring tar pit for the technical.
- missingrib 2mo agoPhilosophers were discussing that question far before LLMs were around.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- cmrdporcupine 2mo agoThe reality is it would be a very small % of philosophy majors or the philosophically interested who would be able to shape their approach or personal opinions to match what the AI labs are looking for anyways. Only particular schools / kinds of philosophy need apply. I'm a (dropout) philosophy major, but for 30 years (last month!) have been doing SWE instead. The tar pit of being able to use my brain to make money instead of navigating politics inside academia... happened for most of us a long time before AI.
- lapcat 2mo ago> “Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year. According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.
- throw4847285 2mo agoThat's a common misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, and it's intellectually lazy.
- lapcat 2mo agoPlease read and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html It's funny how many years I had to spend in philosophy grad school to become "intellectually lazy".
- throw4847285 2mo agoSorry for the rudeness. It is my understanding that early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus was mostly critical of logical positivism as opposed to philosophy as a whole, and that late Wittgenstein of the Investigations embraced philosophical inquiry, only abandoning the idea of language as a precise tool (and in fact embracing it). I have heard that Kierkegaard was one of his favorite philosophers, which challenges the idea that people seem to have of Wittgenstein as a precise purely logical thinker who disdained ambiguity.
- lapcat 2mo agoWhat do you make of quotes such as the following? The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose. A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”. The problems, are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.—Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off.—Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies. https://ia803103.us.archive.org/23/items/philosophicalinvestigations_201911/Philosophical%20Investigations_text.pdf https://ia803103.us.archive.org/23/items/philosophicalinvest... It's also the case that Wittgenstein left academic philosophy, as did Richard Rorty.
- kriro 2mo agoI find it a bit strange to assume you can only understand these topics with a philosophy degree. My CS degree had a good chunk of philosophy baked in (philosophy of science) and parts of it strongly encouraged you to dive into philosophy. AI 101 introduced me to Gödel for example and logic in general. From the article it seems like they mostly do "is AI conscious" and ethics work. Call me a skeptic (no pun intended) but it looks like "hiring some philosophers to confirm the things we want to keep saying for the sweet AGI-race-$$$ to flow". Kind of like these tobacco studies way back when.
- godwinson__4-8 2mo agoDavid Chalmers has been doing this for a long time. The fun thing about successful philosophers is it is a very small club and given their nature a lot of them have kind of humorous beef with each other. To make a name for yourself you often have to find a credible target whose intelligence you can insult. This sort of philosophical rivalry is a common historical occurrence as well, and common to the nature of philosophy itself. As such, it feels wrong to mention Chalmers without mentioning some of his famous detractors. Personally, I miss when Dennett was around to tell Chalmers he was being annoying. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...
- antonvs 2mo agoDennett was a philosophical zombie, so his opinion doesn’t really matter.
- dmfdmf 2mo agoThis is an interesting development. I think trying to program a computer to be "intelligent" without a valid theory of concepts is a fool's errand.
- mkovach 2mo agoI'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 declaration? An instruction? It turns out LLMs respond differently when you think in terms of acts instead of sentences. With AI able to hallucinate context, facts, intent, and answers, keeping AI on track is much like herding cats. I've been borrowing those ideas for prompts, reusable skills, and even governance. The side effect of making me look smarter than I really am. I even ended up writing an article about baseball umpires through the lens of Speech Act Theory: https://pitcherlist.com/umpires-dont-make-calls-they-make-history/ https://pitcherlist.com/umpires-dont-make-calls-they-make-hi.... Baseball, as usual, turns out to be an excellent way to explain philosophy. Or philosophy is an excellent way to explain baseball. I'm currently working on a update, since the ABS challenge system helps improve my position. My suspicion is philosophy has a lot more to offer AI than ethics alone. Philosophy of language seems like an obvious fit, but epistemology ("what does it mean to know?") and philosophy of mind also seem increasingly practical once you're building systems instead of just chatting with them. Maybe the shortage isn't philosophy majors. Maybe it's people who can translate philosophy into engineering without making everyone read Kant first. Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.
- antonvs 2mo ago> Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that. The mark of a true philosopher.
- mkovach 2mo agoI don't know about that but thanks. I tend to think of myself as a baseball enthusiast with a philosophy problem.
- thisoneisreal 2mo agoEven 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 same thing too.)
- b450 2mo agoPhilosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates! It's great preparation for law school, as a commenter has already pointed out, since skill in one game carries over to the other. The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious, and I think one can reasonably argue that philosophical training does more harm than good by inculcating bizarre/narrow/counterproductive intellectual habits/commitments/bugaboos. But philosophers have tricked themselves into places where they really have no business being, like hospital ethics panels. Cool for these guys though, it seems harmless.
- samrus 2mo ago> The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious I wouldnt go that far. I think your clutching at straws a little bit. Its a real stretch from philosohers are insecure to they are useless. This is the sort of thing confident ignorance gets you, when you dont know how philophy impacts mpdern life so you assume it doesnt because you think you know everything
- doctor235 2mo ago[dead]
- applicative 2mo agoThe experts on hospital ethics panels are trained internally by medical schools, which are like little universities inside universities. There has not been philosophical access for about thirty years.
- satellite2 2mo agoYou have a great build up for an argument but why this conclusion? At some point who should be doing ethics? Lawyers? Computer scientists? (I'm not asking ironically, who really is well placed to make population level and extremely though questions like balancing the protection of the few against a global important health interest/gain?)
- julianeon 2mo agoI've noticed that many famous billionaires want to be viewed as philosophers: Thiel obviously, Musk arguably. For this they do need ideological coherency and the ability to order their arguments logically, ideally as part of a larger program. Since it is such a popular destination late in life, you'd think it would be a good choice for a major too.
- Avicebron 2mo agoLook up "Philosopher-King" from Plato. It explains a hell of a lot.
- lapcat 2mo agoI 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 philosopher-kings should have no private property, and children should be raised by the community. Moreover, I've seen no evidence whatsoever that Elon Musk is looking to be considered a philosopher. He writes short meme tweets, not treatises.
- Avicebron 2mo agoI 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.
- lapcat 2mo ago> 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.
- nytimesceo 2mo agothe nytimes is the worst content to consume if you want to become smarter
- atleastoptimal 2mo agoHilarious 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.
- applicative 2mo agoThere are only a few thousand academic philosophers in America total. 0.1% is thus … a few
- cliglot 2mo ago> whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile. Well, at least until recently.
- asdfman123 2mo agoThey're doing well because philosophy majors are usually just very smart people. Not sure if the degree itself is necessarily that helpful beyond signaling intellectual competence.
- kbelder 2mo agoHow do you judge the caliber of a philosopher?
- Wissenschafter 2mo agoI 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 for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject for 4-8 years for a PHD dissertation, it will probably end up being one of the only remaining degrees left. Academia may be going back to its roots; Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject. Once capital accumulation through job training stops being the focus of academics, it can go back to being what it once was. University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge.
- never_inline 2mo ago> going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject Did your philospophy degree not teach you to think "what could go wrong?".
- cess11 2mo ago"Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject." Hard no. Theology was first, and will forever be. Where was Plato's Akademia? In a chapel of Athena, goddess of wisdom. In Aristotle you'll often find that philosophy is actually a method of theology, it's a way to figure out the divine, and what is most or least divine.
- Wissenschafter 2mo agoI 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 and my perception of reality permanently.
- jmoss20 2mo ago> …‘‘computer science’’ is not a science and…its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology – the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view -- SICP I studied both in undergrad. They're more similar than different.
- ur-whale 2mo agohttps://archive.ph/7A8cW https://archive.ph/7A8cW
- pcrh 2mo ago>“We can do neuroscience on A.I. systems in a way that we kind of can’t with humans,” Mr. Long said, in that they “don’t have skulls.” The three jobs Eleos was hiring for would all be machine-learning research scientists who could design and perform experiments. This is pretty interesting! I wouldn't know how easy such "surgery" on LLMs would be to do, if if they do have "knowledge" or "consciousness" as their proponents claim, there could be some profound outcomes from this.
- DiscourseFan 2mo agoWait I have an MA in Philosophy and AI expertise, where is my $2mil comp?
- nathias 2mo agoI have a phd in philosophy, but I think this is more like a return of the 'court philosopher' profession.
- blakeashleyjr 2mo agoI am a humanities major and never faced any real push back in my software dev/devops career (CTO of a $15M a year company now). I am considering getting a CS degree now mostly for the knowledge, but I doubt it would advance my career meaningfully.
- yaneverknow 2mo agoIn the distant future, our cybernetic descendants will say: “He thinks, therefore he isn’t” Because it will have been so obsoleted as the medium of experience that those who think with depth and solve problems logically will seem like a primitive species. Most of the intentionality and experience will happen at a spatial and relational level - unlike language and math. High level abstraction and novelty. More like design, intuition, and intention - fleeting and never lingering, searching, never defining. Ephemera
- ryss20 2mo ago[flagged]
- tristenharr 2mo agoI wanted to major in Philosophy but was worried I wouldn’t make enough money to support the lifestyle I wanted so majored in Computer Science instead. What irony. Someday I hope to go back to school to get a PhD in philosophy with a focus on logic. :)
- arjie 2mo agoWhen 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.
- skeeter2020 2mo agoNo 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.
- tonic_note 2mo agoI find it so exhausting how the analytic and classical traditions are the de-facto face of philosophy in the US. The Continental tradition has a _ton_ to say on the topic of AI, and is likely where you'll find the answer to your questions about why the vibes feel so bad in the post AI world.
- giardini 2mo agoPaywall. Is there an open link?
- tangenter 2mo agoSounds like NYT is pushing another grift angle.
- noman-land 2mo agoPhilosophy, and more specifically, epistemology is one of the most important disciplines in the world and it would do a lot to help our societal discourse if people studied it from an early age. Most people never ask the questions of what knowledge actually is and what constitutes knowing something vs assuming something vs motivated reasoning, bias, etc. I know that many people don't care about Knowledge™ and are more motivated by winning but perhaps it would be easier to counter these people if the language of knowledge was more broadly spoken, understood, and internalized.
- csh0 2mo agoI majored in both CS and Philosophy. I think the very first paper I submitted for my phi 101 course was on the topic of machine ethics. AI labs, I await your offers ;)