The revenge of the philosophy majors
Comments
Wissenschafter
commandlinefan
I've worked with some professional coders who were philosophy majors - there's some overlap between formal computer science and philosophy for sure. I was sort of surprised when one guy started talking about using diagonalization to prove Godels theorem of incompleteness - I thought, "ok, I guess they do teach y'all a thing or two".
On the whole, though, it's _way_ easier to bluff your way through a philosophy degree than a CS degree.
port11
It was easier, I imagine. Now you can vibe code your way out, no?
cess11
"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
I 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.
xaPe
Brave statements only boys
nezi
Wow, what an arrogant, self centered, pat yourself on the back take. Did you learn about open mindedness and humility in all of those philosophy courses or should you go back for a masters in the only useful academic subject left?
6510
He was praising the degree not himself. The exercise doesn't make philosophers, they study their work. If your only tool is a hammer that doesn't mean it isn't a marvelous tool.
john_strinlai
there is no reason to be this rude
edit: okay, considering im downvoted more than you, apparently you should be more rude. lesson learned.
em500
This 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?
why_at
There was another article on this recently[1], if I didn't know better I would suspect this narrative is being pushed by some PR firm. Maybe it's coming from AI companies trying to imply their models are so advanced that they need philosophers to determine if they're conscious or something?
throwaway27448
> each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.
Imagine knowing that you're hired to launder regulatory capture for a trillion dollar corporation lol
jambalaya8
Imagine explaining Nietzsche's relationship with his sister to an AI. :/
gregates
What you're missing is that this is approximately at least a half-dozen more jobs than open tenure-track positions at research universities.
cwillu
Wouldn't the correct comparison would be filled positions tenure and tenure-track positions?
taeric
Wow, it is hard not to immediately think of that meme. There are indeed dozens of them!
Pamar
Half-dozens of them, apparently.
vitorfblima
more than half a dozen, probably, so safe to say there could be as much as ten.
dlcarrier
That reminds me of a survey that found that in the entire field of Social Psychology, there was something like eight people that indicated they would vote for Romney over Obama.
FranzFerdiNaN
Well yeah rightwing people are not the kind of people to take up psychology. I also don’t think you will find many Marxists in corporate law .
dlcarrier
Romney was even pretty centrist, to the point that Obamacare was based on Romney's plan. A similar analogy would be if only a half dozen employees in some field were willing to vote for Fetterman.
UncleOxidant
At this point I wouldn't consider Romney "rightwing", more of a centrist by current standards. Heck, the president probably thinks Romney is a socialist.
onraglanroad
I suppose that makes sense if you assume that people who aren't right wing must be Marxist.
I'm neither and am labelled left wing because I think everyone deserves some basic level of life and dignity.
throwaway27448
> I also don’t think you will find many Marxists in corporate law .
I imagine you'd find more than average, actually. You have a front-row seat to how the sausage is made.
fellowniusmonk
The revenge of the _nearly a dozen_ philosophers.
Izkata
Hey now, that might be infinite% growth compared to just a couple of years ago!
consensus1
Philosophy majors. That piece of paper does not make you a philosopher.
c7b
Bit of a tangent, but it's fun to think about how much it takes to become a -er, -ian or -ist in a given field. Philosophy is probably one of the hardest, you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats. In history or physics you probably need to be faculty, in economics you need to have a PhD, in engineering you don't even need a degree but you need to be practicing,...
chasd00
> you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats
when in school i hung out with a lot of architecture students. They were all told and taught that they will be the next Frank Lloyd Wright or a failure. Then they graduate and end up getting a job drawing construction documents for Taco Bell. Heh they're a pretty jaded bunch.
glaring
Reminds me of section 211 in Beyond Good and Evil (and all of part 6, for that matter)
alfiedotwtf
> a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes…
The irony
mrhottakes
> This article seems high on vibes, low on metrics.
That's the in-house style for the WSJ
beastman82
Not sure if it changed but this is written by NYTimes.
FWIW I think the WSJ is the best news source available and does not match this description.
talon8635
Agree 100%
keiferski
I 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.
jnwatson
I graduated a long time ago with a degrees in CS and philosophy.
I've never understand the hate for philosophy; I think more about my philosophy classes now than my CS classes.
AdamN
I did Philosophy and Physics - each of which I have fond memories of.
satellite2
Well sure if you want to actually be right. If you just care about looking right rhetoric might be a better fit.
viccis
I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics.
>how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments
This is a little generous. Analytic philosophy often comes across as people using heinous amounts of ink to argue whether a hot dog is technically a taco all while pretending that only a fool would even consider what it tastes like.
wk_end
> 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 cursory read of the major thinkers post-Kant. And anecdotally, my own undergraduate degree was in philosophy, from one of the more prestigious schools in Anglo-Canada, and we had plenty of opportunities to dive into the continental stuff.
Once you get to the graduate level and academia folks focused on Derrida or whatever are going to gravitate towards the universities that prioritize the schools of thought they're interested in, and those have always been on the continent for the continentals naturally. But for run-of-the-mill philosophy majors in the Anglosphere, IMO you should just assume they have a reasonably broad and just-deep-enough knowledge of the entire history of philosophy and make no particular assumptions about their interests.
fellowniusmonk
I have one area of my education that I highly value but its very hard to explain without people importing a lot of assumptions.
I like to call it critical listening but also its textual evaluation.
In addition to some didactic instruction my Father gave me a short book on the principles of hermeneutics around 13. We went to different churches over the years growing up but I would bring my bible, take notes, and on the drive home from service he would ask me if anything unsubstantiated by the text was snuck in, anything against the text, etc.
In the hundreds of sermons I took notes on over the years there were only 3 without obvious butchering of the text, statements directly contradicting the very text being examined, nightmarish hermenutical implications, outright fabrications, etc.
The shear volume of evaluation I did against a static text was interesting.
It helped me understand how to parse language, how to do evaluation, just a lot of stuff in a way that was more dynamic than something like debate club.
It also helped me understand how self servingly imprecise people can be and the ways in which deceptive and misleading language is used.
towledev
To my ear, that sounds very much like the GRE Verbal.
pragmatic
CS degree? Employable?
calf
But then how is analytic philosophy a philosophy.
cmrdporcupine
And 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
Aha, 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…
cmrdporcupine
Much of the apparent obscurantism in continental philosophy is a product frankly of bad translations.
That and much of it was meant to be read somewhat poetically not prescriptively.
I am also not convinced that today's distracted and scattered brains are even capable of reading and digesting something like Kant or Hegel fully. I have a hard time slowing down and thinking at the slow but detailed pace the text requires. I used to read this stuff on the bus or plane before smart phones and even then it was hard to focus deeply enough.
Also, now I old and just fall asleep.
antonvs
It 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.
cmrdporcupine
Insufficient semicolons, sentences too short.
seydor
Dont you think that ANN research is upwards of philosophy in the ordo cognoscendi
keiferski
Can you rephrase that in simpler terms? I don’t understand what you’re asking.
jmoss20
> …‘‘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.
atleastoptimal
Hilarious 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.
cliglot
> whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile.
Well, at least until recently.
applicative
There are only a few thousand academic philosophers in America total. 0.1% is thus … a few
cgyvbunji
In 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.
mrhottakes
To be fair, AI is also a very alluring tar pit for the technical.
missingrib
Philosophers were discussing that question far before LLMs were around.
satellite2
Sure, but is there any evidence that psychology and for that matter, any animal intelligence, is anything more than linear algebra?
cmrdporcupine
The 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.
burningChrome
>> 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.
Anecdotal evidence to support your point.
Have a degree in Anthropology. Took copious amounts of philosophy classes as part of my major. Took some CS classes just to stay on top of the stuff happening in tech.
I wasn't able do what I wanted in Anthropology, so I took the same route and ended up in SWE. To a degree, I have monetized my degree because everything I learned while obtaining my degree I use almost every day in SWE. I was jaded by the toxic politics of academia and it finally pushed me out as well.
cmrdporcupine
Good news, you can become jaded by the toxic politics of corporate software development now, too!
When I worked at Google it was the thing that drove me nuts the most. It was very much a "publish or perish" kind of environment with performance and evaluation structures very obviously inspired by academia. (And just like academia, there was sometimes a culture of stealing other people's projects to get credit, with credit and kudos more important than any kind of monetary success since the company was run by an absolute firehose of revenue anyways... )
consensus1
The strange part is that they seemed to have tricked AI companies too.
jipl104
"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...
applicative
I would have thought so too, a priori, but at this point three former colleagues are working for Anthropic; the most extraordinary case, one of the brainiest people I have known, was announced this week.
deadbabe
Starbucks employs orders of magnitude more philosophers than any AI labs.
jayd16
If pay, hours, benefits, and type of work mean nothing to you, then maybe this is an apt point.
appreciatorBus
If 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.
OtherShrezzing
It’s difficult to articulate the tedium and monotony of a Starbucks gig. There’s so little intellectual stimulation available in that setting. If you managed to learn more from your fast food than your humanities degree, then I think that’s on you for not paying attention at college (perhaps because you were exhausted from your job?).
ElProlactin
> If you managed to learn more from your fast food than your humanities degree...
It's not about learning "more". It's that earning a degree is an academic undertaking whereas working at a coffee shop is "real life".
There is no need to treat one as more or less valuable/useful than the other. They're just different kinds of human experiences. Learning is possible from both.
quixoticaxolotl
Helping 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.
pohl
But will it help those baristas pay off the student loans that paid for their philosophy degrees?
fearmerchant
Ok, you got me. It took me a minute.
airstrike
and famously doesn't require a degree
datakan
If the AI is digesting all the philosophy material ever published then why do they need philosophers?
The_Blade
knowing all the philosophy every published is not being a philosopher
there was literature about 15 years or so ago stating Philosophy as being an uncommonly lucrative course of study, in part citing Reid Hoffman
it is a way of thinking
bix6
Philosopher vs MBA. Everyone dogs on MBAs.
Philosophy can have strong mid career earnings especially if you go into law. Or get lucky like Reid did.
antonvs
> knowing all the philosophy every published is not being a philosopher
Debatable. We may need to ask a philosopher.
genxy
That is not what AI is. AI is a powerful tool, a semiautonomous set of wood working tools that still need a master craftsperson to use. You need the tool+genius to drive it. Everyone wants to shoot down AI but they think AI will do everything. Being proud of a creation where someone did style transfer between spongebob and Rembrandt and they think they made art. About as responsible for actual art as just downloading images from google.
tavavex
I'm not seeing any evidence of this. Precision tools raise the ceiling. AI mostly just raises the floor. Ease of use is a focus point for all AI labs and it's what they're constantly trying to improve. Yes, an expert can juice these models for all they've got, but an average Joe today is probably getting better results than the best power users had a year ago. Extrapolate this a bit and ask yourself if businesses will ever want to pay your geniuses and craftspeople a professional's wage if they could get 'good enough' results from any desperate minimum wage worker, or even by doing the work themselves.
applicative
It’s actually pretty bad at it. I think there just isn’t enough literature to get a good effect from the LLM approach. Good luck with verifiable rewards when the target discourse is effectively pure self-criticism. Maybe ‘disputable rewards’ …
I have found that with proper framing I can get good help from Claude and ChatGPT on questions of translation of haute German philosophy and, to my amazement, Ancient Greek. An immediate ‘translate this passage’ request is a cataclysmic disaster. The nexus of sentences differs from other forms of discourse.
yepyoukno
Philosophy is a living process of integrating ideas. Classical materials are the whetstone upon which the mind is sharpened. Unlike history, where literal established accounts are ideal, in philosophy one is expected to view today (or the future) through the lens of contextual discourse.
While there is “no right answer” understanding what the issues are and how the discussion plays out is relevant.
ButlerianJihad
I believe that you mean “whetstone”.
sleepybrett
... and why would they train for a job where everything they say that seeks to curtail expansion would be ignored.
b450
Philosophy 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
> 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
satellite2
You 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?)
applicative
The 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.
plastic-enjoyer
This just reeks of Dunning-Kruger
mkovach
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 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-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.
thisoneisreal
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 same thing too.)
antonvs
> Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.
The mark of a true philosopher.
godwinson__4-8
David 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-dennett...
antonvs
Dennett was a philosophical zombie, so his opinion doesn’t really matter.
JauntTrooper
When I was in college, a philosophy degree was seen as excellent training for a career in Law.
kriro
But a law degree is probably even better. I know what you mean though, consulting companies also hire the (top 1-3%) philosophy majors and math/physics majors for the same reason. Good thought processes.
wongarsu
Both professions require writing detailed, overly specific, reasonably watertight arguments that will be read by only a handful of people, so that tracks
datakan
Arguments 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
The appearance of a logical argument is easier to achieve and often good enough for their purposes (publishing papers, winning lawsuits).
mothballed
Connections 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
Using a vocabulary that is known only to themselves.
palmotea
> 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?
antonvs
A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, after all.
keiferski
Philosophy undergrad here and yeah I’d say law school was the typical next step. A few medical school as well.
seydor
They are also hiring cooks and cleaners, talk about their revenge
datakan
Same group
matltc
I 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
MSkill1
I 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.
andrewlin247
You 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.
virissimo
Logicians are typically part of the philosophy department, at least in the US.
speak_plainly
You 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
Logicians' training is so different from philosophers' that it should be considered a separate discipline, or under the branch of computer science.
applicative
When 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
I 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.
giantg2
"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.
julianeon
I'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
Look up "Philosopher-King" from Plato. It explains a hell of a lot.
lapcat
I 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.
nytimesceo
the nytimes is the worst content to consume if you want to become smarter
kriro
I 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.
cmiles8
When the AI bubble cools these roles will be eliminated faster than you can blink. Mark my words.
mykowebhn
Agreed. Similarly, we had in-house chefs who were full-time employees. They were some of the first people laid-off when the Covid downturn hit.
esafak
We had great chefs; miss them!
dmfdmf
This 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.
lapcat
> “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
That's a common misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, and it's intellectually lazy.
lapcat
Please read and respect the HN guidelines: 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
Sorry 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
What 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/philosophicalinvest...
It's also the case that Wittgenstein left academic philosophy, as did Richard Rorty.
throw4847285
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
If you view the story of Wittgenstein and Rorty as primarily one of leaving academia, I believe you are telling on yourself.
lapcat
> "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
I'm not sure why you're quoting the quote that I just quoted. I was hoping for an analysis.
> If you view the story of Wittgenstein and Rorty as primarily one of leaving academia, I believe you are telling on yourself.
I said that they left academic philosophy. Rorty didn't leave academia entirely. But yes, I left academic philosophy too, so in a sense I am telling on myself, though I don't accept the negative connotation.
throw4847285
I think the quote doesn't say what you think it says. Wittgenstein loved philosophy, and it's frustrating when people cherry pick his work to try and dunk on the entire field.
And if you accept that you are telling on yourself, then don't you think it's awfully convenient that your perspective on philosophy as a discipline is a little skewed by personal hangups?
lapcat
> I think the quote doesn't say what you think it says.
You still haven't said what you think it means!
> Wittgenstein loved philosophy
I think the phrase "loved philosophy" is way too vague to be informative.
> when people cherry pick his work
I picked some quotes for a Hacker News comment, necessarily brief. I also provided a link to the entire Philosophical Investigations, which I've course I've read more than once.
> dunk on the entire field.
The field of academic philosophy has a tendency to dunk on Wittgenstein. His previously biggest personal booster Bertrand Russell certainly did: "I have not found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations anything that seemed to me interesting and I do not understand why a whole school finds important wisdom in its pages." Many analytic philosophers feel the same way, ironically finding the Tractatus, which Wittgenstein repudiated, more to their liking.
They're probably correct to feel threatened. My own view, as I've stated, is that Wittgenstein's later work is a broad-based critique of philosophy, not aimed only at logical positivism, for example.
> skewed by personal hangups
What personal hangups do you mean?
I said that I left academic philosophy. After many years. I didn't say why. Do you think Wittgenstein and Rorty left academic philosophy due to personal hangups?
andrewclunn
> 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?
etcimon
It 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
setopt
It 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.
chunkyslink
How do I get past the paywall? (without paying)
beepbooptheory
It 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?
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 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.