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It's not bullshit. But at the same time, I wonder why so many people do these majors. They mostly end up working on a unrelated field. If they go to university

It's not bullshit. But at the same time, I wonder why so many people do these majors. They mostly end up working on a unrelated field. If they go to university just because they are passionate about learning the subject and are willing to pay for it, that's great! But I feel it's just that they are pressured to go to college, they are pressured to "follow their passions" even when it will not work out, and in fact some menial jobs require a degree nowadays. We don't really need (economically speaking) lots of philosophy majors. And maybe that's okay if people are doing philosophy majors for the knowledge, but I don't think that's the case. And if they want a good job, I think we should discourage these majors. That doesn't mean we don't need philosophy. It's really important. But it doesn't make much difference if the people who have a degree on that work on unrelated things.

codingdave 7y ago
Philosophy teaches logic and analysis, and teaches you to break down texts into their core points and arguments, then both support and refute them as well as apply them to other situations. It teaches you to see multiple perspectives, to compare and synthesize them, and use them in practice, whether or not you actually agree with them. Those abilities are needed in the working world, (and not just by lawyers), and absolutely could help our economy. We can even look at my Fine Arts degree the same way. My whole career people have said it is odd for a Fine Arts major to be a coder, until I explain what that degree really taught me - to look at the existing body of work in a field, learn the techniques, and look for new and innovative ways to change those techniques. Then to create a vision of something you want to deliver, start from scratch, and build up to a final product that takes the field a step or two forward, while also effectively communicating with, and engaging, your audience. You could draw similar parallels with any humanities degree. That process of deconstructing an entire body of work, learning the ins and out of its components, and reconstructing it into something completely new is common to all liberal arts educations. And that is why people with liberal arts degrees are often not the slightest bit concerned whether their degree and their career are a 'match'.
- lame88 7y ago
  Glad to hear that - I can share my perspective too. Even given my graduate computer science degree, I only apply what I learned in a very shallow way to my work, which has generally been apps of some sort or another, web mobile etc. For example I studied a lot about operating systems that don't even come up in my projects, other than a process vs thread vs coroutine, blocking or nonblocking io. Similarly with algorithms and architecture. Of course, it's easy to shrug off what you already know as supposedly obvious, but I sure as hell never had to implement a complex algorithm and perform asymptotic analysis on it for my CRUD app, and all the concurrency and object-oriented programming stuff I learned has become more obsolete now that we have horizontal/vertical scaling, databases and cache servers handling concurrent state, and a tendency toward trivially parallelized code and event loops. What has really stuck? Discrete mathematics and deductive systems, theory of computation - abstract stuff I could not appreciate at the time and now wish I really tried at. So altogether, I feel that my CS degree helped in the short term, but on the long term, has left me only marginally advantaged over either not having a degree or having an unrelated degree, and still leaves me unsatisfied with my understanding of honestly more fulfilling subjects. And while I can pick up plenty of books and information on the engineering side, I face a much more uphill battle trying to understand concepts in economics, math, and physics, and my comprehension of creative writing, art, and philosophy is still really lackluster.
lame88 7y ago
There is absolutely pressure to go to college, but there is hardly pressure to follow passions. If there was, then the two would be in conflict. The pressure is: don't follow your passions, go to college, major in STEM or "something useful". What has that resulted in? An inflation of watered-down STEM-lite degrees not just from the standard degree factories but accredited state research universities, that provide none of the benefits of a liberal arts education and still leaving one poorly trained to produce. I am willing to bet that given a population of philosophy majors and a population of engineering majors, if you gave them an equivalent year of quality mentorship in programming, the philosophy majors would perform better. Because philosophy heavily emphasizes critical and abstract thinking. Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus. Engineers learn how to do now the stuff that is relevant now. As a software engineer I am constantly battling with abstraction, and I constantly feel held back by my limited understanding of math, science, and philosophy. The cost of college is an issue of its own and it's irrelevant to choice of major. School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole, which teach us how we got here, what we value, and how we ought to live. One episode of The Wire should be sufficient demonstration of the need for our understanding of sociology to improve, among other things. Discouraging any of the liberal arts due to the overwhelming cost of college exacerbates our problems and risks turning universities into trade schools, directionless and with all the volatility of economic cycle.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Because philosophy heavily emphasizes critical and abstract thinking. I've taken a few classes in philosophy (it was my major for a while), and I can't tell if this is super different in the US vs Europe or you're just making stuff up, but this is just not what I saw. Yes, logic is part of philosophy, and everybody needs to take that class, but it's not heavily emphasized for the majority of students. Being able to write summaries and essays is, and learning the lingo, and reading (and hopefully understanding, or being able to pretend so well enough) the classics. > Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus. Please don't. Studying in the humanities doesn't make you a better person, and it doesn't make you consider ethics in everything you do either. > School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole Except not everybody agrees that is what life is all about, what's best for society, the country, humanity or whatever you choose. Somebody has to do the actual work, you know? Sure, we can all become philosophers and then starve to death, or we can make sure that we have enough people that know how to grow food. When it comes down to it, yeah, with all of my ethics training, I very much prefer people that know how to grow food over people that will explain that the ethical thing to do is to feed them first, because only they can lead progress and advance the liberal arts. But then again, I always had a thing for utilitarianism and was highly suspicious of the bourgeois elitism in intellectual circles.

codingdave 7y ago

Philosophy teaches logic and analysis, and teaches you to break down texts into their core points and arguments, then both support and refute them as well as apply them to other situations. It teaches you to see multiple perspectives, to compare and synthesize them, and use them in practice, whether or not you actually agree with them. Those abilities are needed in the working world, (and not just by lawyers), and absolutely could help our economy. We can even look at my Fine Arts degree the same way. My whole career people have said it is odd for a Fine Arts major to be a coder, until I explain what that degree really taught me - to look at the existing body of work in a field, learn the techniques, and look for new and innovative ways to change those techniques. Then to create a vision of something you want to deliver, start from scratch, and build up to a final product that takes the field a step or two forward, while also effectively communicating with, and engaging, your audience. You could draw similar parallels with any humanities degree. That process of deconstructing an entire body of work, learning the ins and out of its components, and reconstructing it into something completely new is common to all liberal arts educations. And that is why people with liberal arts degrees are often not the slightest bit concerned whether their degree and their career are a 'match'.

lame88 7y ago
Glad to hear that - I can share my perspective too. Even given my graduate computer science degree, I only apply what I learned in a very shallow way to my work, which has generally been apps of some sort or another, web mobile etc. For example I studied a lot about operating systems that don't even come up in my projects, other than a process vs thread vs coroutine, blocking or nonblocking io. Similarly with algorithms and architecture. Of course, it's easy to shrug off what you already know as supposedly obvious, but I sure as hell never had to implement a complex algorithm and perform asymptotic analysis on it for my CRUD app, and all the concurrency and object-oriented programming stuff I learned has become more obsolete now that we have horizontal/vertical scaling, databases and cache servers handling concurrent state, and a tendency toward trivially parallelized code and event loops. What has really stuck? Discrete mathematics and deductive systems, theory of computation - abstract stuff I could not appreciate at the time and now wish I really tried at. So altogether, I feel that my CS degree helped in the short term, but on the long term, has left me only marginally advantaged over either not having a degree or having an unrelated degree, and still leaves me unsatisfied with my understanding of honestly more fulfilling subjects. And while I can pick up plenty of books and information on the engineering side, I face a much more uphill battle trying to understand concepts in economics, math, and physics, and my comprehension of creative writing, art, and philosophy is still really lackluster.

lame88 7y ago

There is absolutely pressure to go to college, but there is hardly pressure to follow passions. If there was, then the two would be in conflict. The pressure is: don't follow your passions, go to college, major in STEM or "something useful". What has that resulted in? An inflation of watered-down STEM-lite degrees not just from the standard degree factories but accredited state research universities, that provide none of the benefits of a liberal arts education and still leaving one poorly trained to produce. I am willing to bet that given a population of philosophy majors and a population of engineering majors, if you gave them an equivalent year of quality mentorship in programming, the philosophy majors would perform better. Because philosophy heavily emphasizes critical and abstract thinking. Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus. Engineers learn how to do now the stuff that is relevant now. As a software engineer I am constantly battling with abstraction, and I constantly feel held back by my limited understanding of math, science, and philosophy. The cost of college is an issue of its own and it's irrelevant to choice of major. School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole, which teach us how we got here, what we value, and how we ought to live. One episode of The Wire should be sufficient demonstration of the need for our understanding of sociology to improve, among other things. Discouraging any of the liberal arts due to the overwhelming cost of college exacerbates our problems and risks turning universities into trade schools, directionless and with all the volatility of economic cycle.

luckylion 7y ago
> Because philosophy heavily emphasizes critical and abstract thinking. I've taken a few classes in philosophy (it was my major for a while), and I can't tell if this is super different in the US vs Europe or you're just making stuff up, but this is just not what I saw. Yes, logic is part of philosophy, and everybody needs to take that class, but it's not heavily emphasized for the majority of students. Being able to write summaries and essays is, and learning the lingo, and reading (and hopefully understanding, or being able to pretend so well enough) the classics. > Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus. Please don't. Studying in the humanities doesn't make you a better person, and it doesn't make you consider ethics in everything you do either. > School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole Except not everybody agrees that is what life is all about, what's best for society, the country, humanity or whatever you choose. Somebody has to do the actual work, you know? Sure, we can all become philosophers and then starve to death, or we can make sure that we have enough people that know how to grow food. When it comes down to it, yeah, with all of my ethics training, I very much prefer people that know how to grow food over people that will explain that the ethical thing to do is to feed them first, because only they can lead progress and advance the liberal arts. But then again, I always had a thing for utilitarianism and was highly suspicious of the bourgeois elitism in intellectual circles.