Discussion summary
The discussion covers the value of philosophy degrees, AI's impact on jobs, and access to paywalled content. Participants share personal experiences, concerns about automation, and methods to bypass paywalls.
What the discussion says
- Philosophy degrees provide valuable teaching and insight.
- AI and automation threaten traditional roles in various industries.
- Paywalls can sometimes be bypassed using archive links.
“It was really just the luck of the draw for me ending up in the undergrad program.”
“When the AI bubble cools these roles will be eliminated faster than you can blink.”
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- Hacker News
- They are also hiring cooks and cleaners, talk about their revengeby seydor
- Same groupby datakan
- by seasox
- > …‘‘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.
by jmoss20 - I 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 :)
by galkk - I 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.by kj4211cash
- 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...
- Dennett was a philosophical zombie, so his opinion doesn’t really matter.by antonvs
- 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.
- > whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile.
Well, at least until recently.
by cliglot - There are only a few thousand academic philosophers in America total. 0.1% is thus … a fewby applicative
- How do you judge the caliber of a philosopher?by kbelder
- They'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.
by asdfman123 - "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...
by jipl104 - If the AI is digesting all the philosophy material ever published then why do they need philosophers?by datakan
- ... and why would they train for a job where everything they say that seeks to curtail expansion would be ignored.by sleepybrett
- 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.by applicative
- Starbucks employs orders of magnitude more philosophers than any AI labs.by deadbabe
- 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.by cgyvbunji
- The strange part is that they seemed to have tricked AI companies too.by consensus1
- Sure, but is there any evidence that psychology and for that matter, any animal intelligence, is anything more than linear algebra?by satellite2
- > In summary, AI has tricked a bunch of philosophy majors ...
OTOH, their bank accounts is likely not complaining very loudly
by ur-whale - 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.
- Philosophers were discussing that question far before LLMs were around.by missingrib
- To be fair, AI is also a very alluring tar pit for the technical.by mrhottakes
- 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.
by mkovach - > Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.
The mark of a true philosopher.
by antonvs - 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.)
- 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.
by keiferski - Dont you think that ANN research is upwards of philosophy in the ordo cognoscendiby seydor