7 ms·

Why I Left Academic Philosophy

54 points by xkr 8y ago

SiempreViernes 8y ago
Summary: it was academic and she didn`t like it, finding it too abstract and disconnected from the real world. I don`t see much else, sure there is the section on sexism, but she spends more time talking about how boring her chosen subject was.
- dieterrams 8y ago
  You left out the combativeness, the fact that hardly anyone will read your work, the unnecessary inaccessibility of the field, the low pay of post-grad work and poor odds of getting tenure, and the academic equivalent of pagerank gaming to gain notice. Even by an analytic philosopher’s standard, your summary is rather uncharitable and reductive.
  - tejaswidp 8y ago
    Sure, but the primary point of her article was the abstract nature of academia which they should have expected going in.
  - SiempreViernes 8y ago
    I would characterize that as the standard “I didn’t like it” for academia, listing its well known problems. More interesting would be a discussion about why the support systems in place didn’t protect her from them, but this is simply a list of common problems.
    - dieterrams 8y ago
      Sure, but you might be surprised how many undergrads go in not realizing how common these are.
- eyerow 8y ago
  And the fact that you can spend 2 years writing a dissertation that 3 people will read and maybe fewer will understand or connect with.
  - SiempreViernes 8y ago
    That's common for many kinds of specialised work of any kind I feel, and certainly for academia. Or just in general actually, how many man-years of work aren't floating around unread on the bottom ends of amazon book lists for instance? Also, the number of people that have to read it should be more like 5: yourself, your supervisor, and the examination committee that is at least 3 other people.
    - madcaptenor 8y ago
      You're assuming the committee actually reads the dissertation.
majewsky 8y ago
Some of the things described are eerily similar to what I observe in IT. > As an end-result, academic papers usually end up popularity contests, a game of who’s-who where the goal is to develop incestuous citation networks so that your impact factor will look better for hiring and/or tenure committees. Not specific to IT: This description applies to management behavior in large corps as well. In fact, a lot of things humans do end up popularity contests. > I could hear [the protesters outside the lecture hall] chanting; the stark contrast between the esoteric subtleties of meta-ethics vs. the concrete realities of what would be considered “applied ethics” — a term usually uttered with slight contempt — made me deeply uncomfortable. Programmers arguing about indentation styles while their inventions drastically change how society works on all scales. > [Image] > An accurate representation of your average philosophy grad student. Also an accurate representation of your average Silicon Valley startup "C" "E" "O" if you add a Macbook and a Starbucks cup.
- mnky9800n 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure the grad student has the MacBook and coffee too.
jimmytidey 8y ago
Reminds me of an anecdote. GE Moore's wife met Wittgenstein, at the time GE Moore and Wittgenstein were some of the most famous philosophers in the world. Wittgenstein asked what she did, and she said "I work at a jam factory". Wittgenstein was apparently delighted and said, "thank god someone is doing something useful."
- lou1306 8y ago
  After all, Wittgenstein also studied mechanical engineering.
dstrohmaier 8y ago
For those who care about the shortcomings of academic philosophy, I just wrote a blog post on why I'm switching from academic philosophy to computer science at least for a while. https://dstrohmaier.github.io/life/2018/04/20/restarting-my-life.html https://dstrohmaier.github.io/life/2018/04/20/restarting-my-... I recognise at least some of the points, although I'm much less bothered by philosophy having little connection to the pragmatic purposes of many people. The abstract she uses to illustrate her point is also a infelicitous choice. It is from Sinhababu's "Possible Girls" and that guy is a weirdo, in the best sense of the word, even for philosophy.
ImaCake 8y ago
This is just a list of the usual gripes about academia. It applies to almost every subject. Including Biology, which I work in. I like how the author explains the pyramid scheme of academia: >The task of standing out is nearly impossible. Usually it comes down to informal factors, like having an influential advisor or coming from a “top program.” My school was ranked ~25–30ish (in the world) for its philosophy PhD program, and it would be polite to say most grad students struggled on the job market. “Struggling” doesn’t begin to describe the pain and anguish of sending hundreds of job applications and not landing a single interview. That’s not uncommon. As a PhD dropout and research assistant in a large lab filled with overworked students, it hurts me to think about their futures. Because of my position I can't say much, but I would love for them to look around and take note of the ratio of post-docs to PhD students. If every lab has 5 students for each post-doc, then the odds can't be good.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  Happily (/s) by the time people are done with their PhD's many know not to continue and the odds improve. I think the over-subscription on PhD positions is far worse than the one on post docs, the latter in general being very specialised and so restricting the application pool.
- mseebach 8y ago
  I know it's not exactly a sympatic line of inquiry, but how good are you actually at philosophy, if you expect a philosophy degree from a 25-30-rank university to be a marketable credential? I agree fully that education for educations sake is valuable, but that line of argument generally explicitly rejects first class consideration of commercial applications. Just don't be surprised when there turn out to be no commercial applications (or very, very few, and those few getting snapped up by the top members of the field).
  - pfortuny 8y ago
    25-30 in the World may possibly be first in most countries...
- SeanLuke 8y ago
sien 8y ago
How can you be smart enough to get into an elite graduate program in Philosophy and not be aware that this is exactly what academic life is going to be like? In the 1990s in Computer Science people were well aware that being an academic could result in Professors getting less money than their graduates first jobs. Is it because everyone still thinks they are a special snowflake and they will get great prizes immediately or something? (edit) Should have added. Some of the smarted people I know also went into academia and some have really made it. It's just that well, there are so many academic 'refugees' who leave because the job prospects are dire and this has been the case for decades. And so many of those people are very bright and hardworking too.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  Lets consider the other side, how can a "elite" graduate program in philosophy be dumb enough to accept someone with very incorrect expectations? A PhD student dropping out is costly for them too.
  - sien 8y ago
    The graduate program gets money and cheap labour from enrolling students.
    - rohit2412 8y ago
      Then a smart program will find ones who won't drop out
  - nitwit005 8y ago
    Probably because she had excellent grades, and was very enthused at the start of the program. There's no magic way to determine, years in advance, that someone will become disenchanted with their career choices.
cousin_it 8y ago
I admire the work of academic philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer or David Chalmers (which, yes, includes the "metametaphysics" mocked in the OP). And the few philosophers I've talked to in person, like Huw Price, left a very good impression on me. And their work is important to the future of humanity: I've talked to many people who changed their whole careers after reading Singer's The Life You Can Save or Bostrom's Superintelligence. At the same time, it's true that academic careers are surprisingly terrible on average and fewer people should choose them.
Shaddox 8y ago
I realize it's a bit cynical of me to say this, but this is the free market at work. There can only be oh so many philosophy professors. Assuming a professor career lasts 40 years and each of these programs produces 10 graduates a year, how can they fit in academia? Maybe before you enroll you need to be made to sign a disclaimer that the opportunities are very scarce in the field.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  Why does everything have to be labelled a "market"? Is it really helpful to talk about an exchange of "goods" to explain the poor treatment of PhD students in academia?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - VHRanger 8y ago
    It's not goods, it's a labor market. And when supply is out of whack with demand, your bargaining power goes through the floor -- which leads to situations like this.
    - 131012 8y ago
      What is really nasty is the fact that there is a huge demand for phd students as they drive research forward. So they deduce there will be demand once they graduate, which is not the case.
      - haihaibye 8y ago
        Elastic demand for labor - people want more when it's cheap, as much as they can get when it's free (or the government pays you for each student)
- mnky9800n 8y ago
  In STEM there is certainly a shortage of academic jobs for qualified PhD holders. Not everyone who gets a PhD is equal, but academic stem wouldn't lose anything by being able to recruit more of the people they train.
johnchristopher 8y ago
HN has a fascination for the downfall of humanities career.
lsd5you 8y ago
Anyone notice the casual racism in the article (97% white men). Would she be ok bemoaning (inaccurately) the disproportion of Jews?
- adrianN 8y ago
  Many people believe that you can't be racist against whites or sexist against men.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- furiens 8y ago
  It's curious that you see that as the racism of the author, rather than an indicator of racism within the field.
  - d33 8y ago
    Would you say that a disproportion alone is an indication of racism? If so, would you expect every single metric to be a perfect 50/50 proportion or are we doomed to always be confined to - a bigger or smaller - discrimination, because we'll always deviate in some metrics?
    - furiens 8y ago
      Not necessarily, but for a field that concerns itself with drawing conclusions about the human condition, often relying on experiential evidence, something has certainly gone very wrong if so few women are part of it.
  - lsd5you 8y ago
    It is of course more akin to anti-semitism. Which is in essence a resentment against a more successful and influential class of people. To be sure in all of these divides there is some substance to both sides (otherwise there wouldn't be an issue, all racism would marginalised flat earth level nonsense). Also there are big problems with your conclusion. Philosophy departments are going to be overwhelmingly left leaning, so shouldn't that be an environment that doesn't exclude? Unless we conclude that virtually all left wing positions are just posturing, or that the problem isn't racism.
_pmf_ 8y ago
Seems true for academia in general. Most CS papers are utterly useless drivel, too (speaking from my own stuff; nice projects, but completely useless from an academic point of view).
dschuetz 8y ago
There is some point in history of a profession where the people engaging in this profession begin to look and sound like a parody of it. When the stereotype (stuff of jokes) is status quo and any deviance or individualism is considered "not serious enough" or unprofessional. Why is that? Is that a thing of academia? Can we do something about it, or is it just the way it goes?
- analog31 8y ago
  Is that a thing of academia? Middle management. (Disclosure: I was a middle manager).
  - 616c 8y ago
    In academia though?
    - analog31 8y ago
      In business. I'm kind of a jerk of all trades, with a science degree and some tech skills that got me into an engineering job. From there, to project management, and eventually to people management. I got sick of it and went back to being a regular worker. Oddly enough they were willing to promote me out of management, so I made out OK in the bargain.
auggierose 8y ago
The 97% white men stat is easy to explain: I imagine it difficult to really prove yourself against implicit bias in the humanities.
- dibstern 8y ago
  Bias is certainly possible, but you need proof of racism before you proclaim it
  - jcadam 8y ago
    Ha! Since when has that ever stopped anyone?
- naasking 8y ago
  > The 97% white men stat is easy to explain: I imagine it difficult to really prove yourself against implicit bias in the humanities. Or an even better explanation which also explains STEM disparities: men tend to like subjects that deal with things, women tend to like subjects that deal with people (things vs. people is well studied gendered phenomenon). Notice how she seems to spend a lot of time talking about how boring, unimportant and disconnected her topic is from the real world...
woodandsteel 8y ago
Philosophy was actually pretty popular in the US up until 1950 or so. In particular, for the latter part of the 19th and first part of the 20th century the country had Pragmatism, a philosophy designed for America. But then the field got taken over by Logical Positivists and Analytic philosophers following Russell and early Wittgenstein,and they tried to turn it into a rigorous and mostly irrelevant science. And in the meantime in the humanities people turned to continental philosophy and eventually postmodernism,and in political science there were the Straussians. All of these went off in very different directions from the country, and as a consequence attracted followers who didn't have much useful or persuasive to say to the vast majority of people. There are exceptions, like Martha Nussbaum or Peter Singer. But academic philosophy today is mostly irrelevant.
gkya 8y ago
You don't become a philosopher when you are a researcher at a philosophy department. If departments do this, they are mistaken. What you do is basically history of philosophy. You can be a philosopher / thinker at the same time, but you are not necessarily a philosopher if you are a researcher in philosophy, or you don't necessarily need to participate in academia if you want to do philosophy.

54 points by xkr 8y ago

Summary: it was academic and she didn`t like it, finding it too abstract and disconnected from the real world. I don`t see much else, sure there is the section on sexism, but she spends more time talking about how boring her chosen subject was.

dieterrams 8y ago
You left out the combativeness, the fact that hardly anyone will read your work, the unnecessary inaccessibility of the field, the low pay of post-grad work and poor odds of getting tenure, and the academic equivalent of pagerank gaming to gain notice. Even by an analytic philosopher’s standard, your summary is rather uncharitable and reductive.
- tejaswidp 8y ago
  Sure, but the primary point of her article was the abstract nature of academia which they should have expected going in.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  I would characterize that as the standard “I didn’t like it” for academia, listing its well known problems. More interesting would be a discussion about why the support systems in place didn’t protect her from them, but this is simply a list of common problems.
  - dieterrams 8y ago
    Sure, but you might be surprised how many undergrads go in not realizing how common these are.
eyerow 8y ago
And the fact that you can spend 2 years writing a dissertation that 3 people will read and maybe fewer will understand or connect with.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  That's common for many kinds of specialised work of any kind I feel, and certainly for academia. Or just in general actually, how many man-years of work aren't floating around unread on the bottom ends of amazon book lists for instance? Also, the number of people that have to read it should be more like 5: yourself, your supervisor, and the examination committee that is at least 3 other people.
  - madcaptenor 8y ago
    You're assuming the committee actually reads the dissertation.

majewsky 8y ago

Some of the things described are eerily similar to what I observe in IT. > As an end-result, academic papers usually end up popularity contests, a game of who’s-who where the goal is to develop incestuous citation networks so that your impact factor will look better for hiring and/or tenure committees. Not specific to IT: This description applies to management behavior in large corps as well. In fact, a lot of things humans do end up popularity contests. > I could hear [the protesters outside the lecture hall] chanting; the stark contrast between the esoteric subtleties of meta-ethics vs. the concrete realities of what would be considered “applied ethics” — a term usually uttered with slight contempt — made me deeply uncomfortable. Programmers arguing about indentation styles while their inventions drastically change how society works on all scales. > [Image] > An accurate representation of your average philosophy grad student. Also an accurate representation of your average Silicon Valley startup "C" "E" "O" if you add a Macbook and a Starbucks cup.

mnky9800n 8y ago
I'm pretty sure the grad student has the MacBook and coffee too.

jimmytidey 8y ago

Reminds me of an anecdote. GE Moore's wife met Wittgenstein, at the time GE Moore and Wittgenstein were some of the most famous philosophers in the world. Wittgenstein asked what she did, and she said "I work at a jam factory". Wittgenstein was apparently delighted and said, "thank god someone is doing something useful."

lou1306 8y ago
After all, Wittgenstein also studied mechanical engineering.

dstrohmaier 8y ago

For those who care about the shortcomings of academic philosophy, I just wrote a blog post on why I'm switching from academic philosophy to computer science at least for a while. https://dstrohmaier.github.io/life/2018/04/20/restarting-my-life.html https://dstrohmaier.github.io/life/2018/04/20/restarting-my-... I recognise at least some of the points, although I'm much less bothered by philosophy having little connection to the pragmatic purposes of many people. The abstract she uses to illustrate her point is also a infelicitous choice. It is from Sinhababu's "Possible Girls" and that guy is a weirdo, in the best sense of the word, even for philosophy.

ImaCake 8y ago

This is just a list of the usual gripes about academia. It applies to almost every subject. Including Biology, which I work in. I like how the author explains the pyramid scheme of academia: >The task of standing out is nearly impossible. Usually it comes down to informal factors, like having an influential advisor or coming from a “top program.” My school was ranked ~25–30ish (in the world) for its philosophy PhD program, and it would be polite to say most grad students struggled on the job market. “Struggling” doesn’t begin to describe the pain and anguish of sending hundreds of job applications and not landing a single interview. That’s not uncommon. As a PhD dropout and research assistant in a large lab filled with overworked students, it hurts me to think about their futures. Because of my position I can't say much, but I would love for them to look around and take note of the ratio of post-docs to PhD students. If every lab has 5 students for each post-doc, then the odds can't be good.

SiempreViernes 8y ago
Happily (/s) by the time people are done with their PhD's many know not to continue and the odds improve. I think the over-subscription on PhD positions is far worse than the one on post docs, the latter in general being very specialised and so restricting the application pool.
mseebach 8y ago
I know it's not exactly a sympatic line of inquiry, but how good are you actually at philosophy, if you expect a philosophy degree from a 25-30-rank university to be a marketable credential? I agree fully that education for educations sake is valuable, but that line of argument generally explicitly rejects first class consideration of commercial applications. Just don't be surprised when there turn out to be no commercial applications (or very, very few, and those few getting snapped up by the top members of the field).
- pfortuny 8y ago
  25-30 in the World may possibly be first in most countries...
SeanLuke 8y ago

sien 8y ago

How can you be smart enough to get into an elite graduate program in Philosophy and not be aware that this is exactly what academic life is going to be like? In the 1990s in Computer Science people were well aware that being an academic could result in Professors getting less money than their graduates first jobs. Is it because everyone still thinks they are a special snowflake and they will get great prizes immediately or something? (edit) Should have added. Some of the smarted people I know also went into academia and some have really made it. It's just that well, there are so many academic 'refugees' who leave because the job prospects are dire and this has been the case for decades. And so many of those people are very bright and hardworking too.

SiempreViernes 8y ago
Lets consider the other side, how can a "elite" graduate program in philosophy be dumb enough to accept someone with very incorrect expectations? A PhD student dropping out is costly for them too.
- sien 8y ago
  The graduate program gets money and cheap labour from enrolling students.
  - rohit2412 8y ago
    Then a smart program will find ones who won't drop out
- nitwit005 8y ago
  Probably because she had excellent grades, and was very enthused at the start of the program. There's no magic way to determine, years in advance, that someone will become disenchanted with their career choices.

cousin_it 8y ago

I admire the work of academic philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer or David Chalmers (which, yes, includes the "metametaphysics" mocked in the OP). And the few philosophers I've talked to in person, like Huw Price, left a very good impression on me. And their work is important to the future of humanity: I've talked to many people who changed their whole careers after reading Singer's The Life You Can Save or Bostrom's Superintelligence. At the same time, it's true that academic careers are surprisingly terrible on average and fewer people should choose them.

Shaddox 8y ago

I realize it's a bit cynical of me to say this, but this is the free market at work. There can only be oh so many philosophy professors. Assuming a professor career lasts 40 years and each of these programs produces 10 graduates a year, how can they fit in academia? Maybe before you enroll you need to be made to sign a disclaimer that the opportunities are very scarce in the field.

SiempreViernes 8y ago
Why does everything have to be labelled a "market"? Is it really helpful to talk about an exchange of "goods" to explain the poor treatment of PhD students in academia?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- VHRanger 8y ago
  It's not goods, it's a labor market. And when supply is out of whack with demand, your bargaining power goes through the floor -- which leads to situations like this.
  - 131012 8y ago
    What is really nasty is the fact that there is a huge demand for phd students as they drive research forward. So they deduce there will be demand once they graduate, which is not the case.
    - haihaibye 8y ago
      Elastic demand for labor - people want more when it's cheap, as much as they can get when it's free (or the government pays you for each student)
mnky9800n 8y ago
In STEM there is certainly a shortage of academic jobs for qualified PhD holders. Not everyone who gets a PhD is equal, but academic stem wouldn't lose anything by being able to recruit more of the people they train.

johnchristopher 8y ago

HN has a fascination for the downfall of humanities career.

lsd5you 8y ago

Anyone notice the casual racism in the article (97% white men). Would she be ok bemoaning (inaccurately) the disproportion of Jews?

adrianN 8y ago
Many people believe that you can't be racist against whites or sexist against men.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
furiens 8y ago
It's curious that you see that as the racism of the author, rather than an indicator of racism within the field.
- d33 8y ago
  Would you say that a disproportion alone is an indication of racism? If so, would you expect every single metric to be a perfect 50/50 proportion or are we doomed to always be confined to - a bigger or smaller - discrimination, because we'll always deviate in some metrics?
  - furiens 8y ago
    Not necessarily, but for a field that concerns itself with drawing conclusions about the human condition, often relying on experiential evidence, something has certainly gone very wrong if so few women are part of it.
- lsd5you 8y ago
  It is of course more akin to anti-semitism. Which is in essence a resentment against a more successful and influential class of people. To be sure in all of these divides there is some substance to both sides (otherwise there wouldn't be an issue, all racism would marginalised flat earth level nonsense). Also there are big problems with your conclusion. Philosophy departments are going to be overwhelmingly left leaning, so shouldn't that be an environment that doesn't exclude? Unless we conclude that virtually all left wing positions are just posturing, or that the problem isn't racism.

_pmf_ 8y ago

Seems true for academia in general. Most CS papers are utterly useless drivel, too (speaking from my own stuff; nice projects, but completely useless from an academic point of view).

dschuetz 8y ago

There is some point in history of a profession where the people engaging in this profession begin to look and sound like a parody of it. When the stereotype (stuff of jokes) is status quo and any deviance or individualism is considered "not serious enough" or unprofessional. Why is that? Is that a thing of academia? Can we do something about it, or is it just the way it goes?

analog31 8y ago
Is that a thing of academia? Middle management. (Disclosure: I was a middle manager).
- 616c 8y ago
  In academia though?
  - analog31 8y ago
    In business. I'm kind of a jerk of all trades, with a science degree and some tech skills that got me into an engineering job. From there, to project management, and eventually to people management. I got sick of it and went back to being a regular worker. Oddly enough they were willing to promote me out of management, so I made out OK in the bargain.

auggierose 8y ago

The 97% white men stat is easy to explain: I imagine it difficult to really prove yourself against implicit bias in the humanities.

dibstern 8y ago
Bias is certainly possible, but you need proof of racism before you proclaim it
- jcadam 8y ago
  Ha! Since when has that ever stopped anyone?
naasking 8y ago
> The 97% white men stat is easy to explain: I imagine it difficult to really prove yourself against implicit bias in the humanities. Or an even better explanation which also explains STEM disparities: men tend to like subjects that deal with things, women tend to like subjects that deal with people (things vs. people is well studied gendered phenomenon). Notice how she seems to spend a lot of time talking about how boring, unimportant and disconnected her topic is from the real world...

woodandsteel 8y ago

Philosophy was actually pretty popular in the US up until 1950 or so. In particular, for the latter part of the 19th and first part of the 20th century the country had Pragmatism, a philosophy designed for America. But then the field got taken over by Logical Positivists and Analytic philosophers following Russell and early Wittgenstein,and they tried to turn it into a rigorous and mostly irrelevant science. And in the meantime in the humanities people turned to continental philosophy and eventually postmodernism,and in political science there were the Straussians. All of these went off in very different directions from the country, and as a consequence attracted followers who didn't have much useful or persuasive to say to the vast majority of people. There are exceptions, like Martha Nussbaum or Peter Singer. But academic philosophy today is mostly irrelevant.

gkya 8y ago

You don't become a philosopher when you are a researcher at a philosophy department. If departments do this, they are mistaken. What you do is basically history of philosophy. You can be a philosopher / thinker at the same time, but you are not necessarily a philosopher if you are a researcher in philosophy, or you don't necessarily need to participate in academia if you want to do philosophy.