Since he's a professor, I have no doubt that what he says is true in his environment. On the other hand, it's all relative. After having worked in Silicon Val

Since he's a professor, I have no doubt that what he says is true in his environment. On the other hand, it's all relative. After having worked in Silicon Valley for over 15 years, I think the more common mistake is knowing too little philosophy rather than too much. (Of course, I agree that 5 dollar words confuse issues more often than they illuminate them.) It wouldn't hurt a lot of engineers and tech companies to learn more about the past and be more literate. As an example, off the top of my head, here is a concept which comes up a lot in software: "The Map is not the Territory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation Likewise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy You don't have to do statistics / big data for very long before you hit philosophy. It bottoms out pretty quickly, i.e. how do you learn about the world. Likewise programming is about making things, and sometimes about modelling the world, and there are a lot of useful philosophical concepts in that realm too. This is without even getting into the "morals" of technology, which is a big thing in the news lately.