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Some random thoughts that come to mind. 1. Philosophy is worth studying for many different reasons. 2. It is known that Philosophy majors have higher IQs and
by bugsy 15y ago
Some random thoughts that come to mind.
1. Philosophy is worth studying for many different reasons.
2. It is known that Philosophy majors have higher IQs and SAT/ACT scores than students in any other specialty.
3. Philosophy graduates make fantastic software engineers. It's a better screening degree than computer science (which is actually a pretty bad screening degree).
4. Pragmatism is an illusion.
- ristretto 15y agoInteresting that intelligent students choose philosophy. Is that choice justified, though, or just a relic of the old glory of philosophy?
- discreteevent 15y agoProbably because a function of intelligence is to get to the root of things fairly quickly so intelligent students invariably come around to: "what about knowledge itself?" "what about thinking?" etc. They are a bit more meta. Problem is if you ever go down that route you find its hard tI distinguish meta from bullshit because its so abstracted from reality where you can verify things by trying them out or observing. Maybe they attend philosophy for help with this and later when they grow up realize that actually, no, they really attended because it was a good place to just shoot the shit. And what a lot of fun it was.
- spindritf 15y ago> 2. It is known that Philosophy majors have higher IQs and SAT/ACT scores than students in any other specialty. Source? I'm pretty biased so I mostly came here to ask "what about physicists?" but I'm also pretty curious about these relations in general. Anyway, this might be relevant: > Philosophers are the smartest humanists, physicists the smartest scientists, economists the smartest social scientists. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/verbal-vs-mathematical-aptitude-in-academics/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/verbal-vs-mat...
- MaysonL 15y agoWell, according to this table, it changes in grad school, where they seem to come in in 9th place: http://web.archive.org/web/20070104093613/http://www.econphd.net/guide.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20070104093613/http://www.econphd...
- bugsy 15y agoThanks for digging that up, that is a good source. Combined with spindrift's reference he dug up from 2010 (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/verbal-vs-mathematical-aptitude-in-academics/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/verbal-vs-mat...), they show a much fuller and more accurate picture than I portrayed. Philosophy students are the best at verbal and writing on the GRE, but are only at the top of the humanities in math ranking, and are below the levels of STEM subject applicants.