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I have an undergrad in Philosophy. Our required math classes were formal logic, which we shared with the comp sci. majors. Those classes basically taught me how

I have an undergrad in Philosophy. Our required math classes were formal logic, which we shared with the comp sci. majors. Those classes basically taught me how to program. I am now a senior engineer at a F500 and I just have a BA in Phil. It is a highly underrated degree, and going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject for 4-8 years for a PHD dissertation, it will probably end up being one of the only remaining degrees left. Academia may be going back to its roots; Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject. Once capital accumulation through job training stops being the focus of academics, it can go back to being what it once was. University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge.

cess11 3mo ago
"Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject." Hard no. Theology was first, and will forever be. Where was Plato's Akademia? In a chapel of Athena, goddess of wisdom. In Aristotle you'll often find that philosophy is actually a method of theology, it's a way to figure out the divine, and what is most or least divine.
- Wissenschafter 3mo ago
  I mean, theology and philosophy could be argued endlessly to be interchangeable, go ask Wittgenstein. He just argues that things that are 'truly argued' with language are philosophy, while things that are bullshit is more or less theology. I usually stick to the analytical stuff, the continental stuff was pretty traumatizing honestly, reading through Being-and-Time in a couple days on Adderall fried some brain cells and my perception of reality permanently.
  - port11 3mo ago
    I like the notion that religions prescribe a philosophy of life. That’s really all they are, with 1+ deities to justify the basis for it. Or, you know, you pick a philosophy that makes sense without the fear of god(s).
    - rendx 3mo ago
      I would think they're on opposite ends: philosophy teaches you autonomous experiential thinking, religion asks you to follow some third party authority.
      - metalspot 3mo ago
        this is a modernist misconception. ancient religions are philosophical frameworks and the texts are internally coherent arguments for those frameworks. They are just expressed in language that modern audiences without formal training don't understand.
        amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
        Which texts are internally coherent? The religion I grew up with certainly wasn't.
        metalspot 3mo ago
        How would you know? Are you an expert in the language and culture that its texts were originally written in? Even an expert would qualify their interpretation by saying that it is only an educated guess. Look at how easy it is for humans to misunderstand each other, even in direct verbal communication, then extend that to the level of misunderstanding in email and text messages. Now tell me how well you think modern people actually understand the meaning of something written thousands of years ago.
        rendx 3mo ago
        I use "religion" to mean organized forms of spirituality, governed by "truths" you are supposed to "believe" in as member of the religion. Any such belief is a "third party truth": You do not know whether it is true or not. One may argue that this violates what "true" spirituality entails, which is experiental and not organized. For such spirituality, you can obviously read spiritual literature from whatever religion you please, like other philosophical works, but you read between the lines and don't follow some other person's interpretation (= third party authority).
  - cess11 3mo ago
    If you're referring to the finale in the Tractatus, then I'd recommend you spend some time with the late Wittgenstein, like On Certainty or perhaps some of his letters to Drury, e.g. https://externalword.blog/2013/10/19/ludwig-wittgenstein-letter-to-drury/ https://externalword.blog/2013/10/19/ludwig-wittgenstein-let... . Infamously analytical philosophy quickly turned out to be a dead end and led them to metaphysics to try and salvage their community. Being and Time has a lot of interesting material but it is ill advised to approach it without having spent quite some time studying the philosophical tradition from Plato up until Heidegger himself, including Nietzsche. The old nazi presupposes a firm grasp of this history of ideas and makes an attempt at a 'reboot', which unsurprisingly turns out rather inscrutable without this background. As for traumatising, in my experience Heidegger just lays down some groundwork for Derrida and Baudrillard. They're seriously efficient at questioning the foundations of language, thinking and society. Though I'd sooner recommend Merleu-Ponty, whose phenomenological achievements are more accessible and more easily applied in everyday life. One could make the claim that some knowledge and experience does not fit into language and writing, the primary vehicles of philosophy. Here theology is a long tradition of approaches to such knowing and experience, which tends to be more foundational than the problem domains of philosophy.
  - gowld 3mo ago
    A PhD is a doctor of philosophy. Science is a natural philosophy. Philosophy is a broad, vague category.
nezi 3mo ago
[flagged]
- john_strinlai 3mo ago
  there is no reason to be this rude edit: okay, considering im downvoted more than you, apparently you should be more rude. lesson learned.
  - malfist 3mo ago
    You're not being downvoted because you're wrong, but because the general rule of thumb is that replies should be _more interesting_ than what is being replied too.
    - john_strinlai 3mo ago
      i find it hard to remember what non-interesting things i can write and get upvoted ("this is ai", "slop", "awfully designed site", "clickbait title", "typical microslop", "fuck microsoft", etc.) and the non-interesting stuff i am downvoted for ("that was rude").
      - layer8 3mo ago
        As far as I’m concerned, using the Shift key would already help.
        deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
        pirates 3mo ago
        why does this matter to people so much? i’ve been typing without much regard to capitalization case since AIM 25 years ago. this is an internet forum, it’s really not that important. if you aren’t going to engage with the substance you’re just taking swipes for no good reason.
xaPe 3mo ago
Brave statements only boys
commandlinefan 3mo ago
I've worked with some professional coders who were philosophy majors - there's some overlap between formal computer science and philosophy for sure. I was sort of surprised when one guy started talking about using diagonalization to prove Godels theorem of incompleteness - I thought, "ok, I guess they do teach y'all a thing or two". On the whole, though, it's _way_ easier to bluff your way through a philosophy degree than a CS degree.
- port11 3mo ago
  It was easier, I imagine. Now you can vibe code your way out, no?
  - ramesh31 3mo ago
    >"It was easier, I imagine. Now you can vibe code your way out, no?" Coding was always the easy part of a CS major. Claude won't help you on a proctored Differential Equations exam.
  - commandlinefan 3mo ago
    I hear from my son that, yes.
- gopher_space 3mo ago
  The difficulty scale starts with o chem and then goes through all of the arts before it hits another STEM discipline.
  - doodlesarefun 3mo ago
    Sorry, please elaborate.
    - gopher_space 3mo ago
      Imagine being asked to publish 'beautiful' code for an audience comfortable with doing so themselves. On top of all the theory and practice needed to produce a complete system you're expected to develop a point of view your peers want to engage with.
port11 3mo ago
I had a mandatory philosophy course as part of high-school, and as lucky to pick a practical-yet-philosophical degree. You can easily pick up other skills, but it’s lovely to learn philosophy early on. I spent my 20s trying to become a Stoic and/or finding ways to practice a secular form o Taoism. I’m very, very grateful for these pursuits.
- baajoddd 3mo ago
  if you don’t mind my asking, what was your degree?
  - port11 3mo ago
    It’s officially titled Multimedia and there are lots of practical classes. But about half of it was Sociology, Anthropology, journalism-related stuff, theory of symbols, screenwriting, analysing media, etc. We also had a semester of counter-cultural reading, people such as Jaron Lanier and Lawrence Lessig. Very conceptual and the theoretical bits were great to retain, even if they feel ‘useless’ when you’re young.
Forgeties79 3mo ago
> University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge. Universities were historically finishing schools for the sons of rich families at one time. There was never some era where it was some bastion of truth and knowledge. I am deeply passionate about the value of a college education and how beneficial an educated population is for basically every conceivable metric, but let’s not get too rose tinted about what universities were. The truth is important here!
- kensai 3mo ago
  That's a very harsh take. Most of us would not be alive by the end of the century to personally witness or attend the 1000 years of the University of Bologna, but that goes enough to say how ancient these institutions are: meaning their role obviously changed over time. Historically, universities BECAME bastions of truth and knowledge, particularly with the introduction of Alexander von Humboldt's ideas for research. And that was already happening by the mid-end of the 19th century. You can not seek seriously truth and knowledge before the establishment of serious metrics and research methodology.
  - Forgeties79 3mo ago
    Not saying that’s all they were. I’m just saying they’ve been many things throughout history.
asdff 3mo ago
>University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge. Depends. US had the land grant system going back to the end of the civil war. It was very much oriented towards practical and marketable skills such as agriculture and engineering that were deemed to be in short supply. Still is in these land grant (now also sea grant and space grant) schools. Engineering departments will be massive with a huge campus footprint of a half dozen or more buildings. Liberal arts departments, not so much, relegated to the most ancient of buildings oftentimes. To your point on being able to argue transferable skills, I think you got in at a great time. It is very difficult to do this now that there are a plethora of actual domain trained candidates for just about any role, far in excess of hiring needs. They can be choosy and wait for the perfect engineer trained in the stack in question. They don't have to settle for someone who took a unit of formal logic anymore.
- smcg 3mo ago
  Land grant system actually started during the civil war.
WillAdams 3mo ago
One of the best programmers I have ever met/worked with had a degree in philosophy, having started in the computer industry before there was widespread adoption of it as a formal subject --- he is one of only two people I've ever met outside of TeX User's Group Conferences who had read TAoCP (and kept a well-thumbed set of the first 3 volumes on a shelf at his desk). Really miss working with him, but he has since moved on to better things in his choice of locale.
alephnerd 3mo ago
> I have an undergrad in Philosophy ... It is a highly underrated degree I agree with that. A philosophy major is the ultimate interdisciplinary major because it is essentially the theory of knowledge. That said, I wish universities mandated humanities and social science majors dual major with a STEM field and vice versa. Interdisciplinary knowledge is critical now that fields are starting to merge and overlap heavily.
dgs_sgd 3mo ago
Hypothetically if universities were a place for knowledge and truth instead of vocational training then would it really matter what my major was? Why would Philosophy still be a better major than say, English or Physics? In that world, you should still pursue whatever interests you most because critical thinking is fostered regardless of major.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
calf 3mo ago
As a counterargument, it is a bad degree if philosophy led you to jump a foregone conclusion that "AI will surely render knowledge specialization by humans useless". It is literally very badly taught if four years of such an undergrad degree program creates such students with lack of technical background to evaluate AI. It is like vibe coding except the soft sciences departments were already doing it all along. And I suspect it is part of the way philosophy as a program has to work, it is essentially pre-scientific so students that specialize in philosophy, of either the analytic or continental kind, don't actually do enough scientific research and/or some kind of real-world moral and social testing to balance that out. In that sense philosophy as an institution is medieval and for society to go back to that way due to AI would be an intellectual regression. Basically the mistake here was to conflate the purpose of the university with philosophy, they are very different things. A philosocratic university would be incredibly problematic for humanity. Truth and knowledge in isolation, under a philosophical quarantine, was precisely one of things that thinkers of the scientific revolution like Noam Chomsky warned against.
evantbyrne 3mo ago
Philosophy of science went hard and was hands down the most valuable course in my education. It's very strange that they don't force everyone to take at least some philosophy in university. Can you imagine living in a world where the average person not only thought about what they believed, but were also equipped to ask themselves hard questions about the nature of belief itself?
- skirmish 3mo ago
  Marxist-Leninist Philosophy was a required course for all undergrads in my time studying in USSR. Strangely enough, the professors made it into an overview course on history of philosophy, which was quite enjoyable, with just some mention of Marxism-Leninism in the last lecture.
  - scoofy 3mo ago
    Without getting into a big fight, Marxist-Leninist Philosophy is not, like, general philosophy in the conceptual sense. The idea that you need to be familiar with Hegel as a prerequisite means you’re looking at graduate level classes if we’re taking it seriously.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - com 3mo ago
      Just to add to your “no big fight” observation: What in some countries is grad studies, is in other places undergrad, and in a personal high point, high school extension studies. In contemporary rich country education systems, it’s not just grade inflation, it’s very low expectations of the student population’s capabilities, in my opinion.
      - doodlesarefun 3mo ago
        >contemporary rich country education systems I'm from such a country and this tracks. I often look to individuals of the past with the same academic credentials as me and it seems they are much better read & educated. And when I was in school, it often felt like my education was diluted to cater to the LCD.
DoctorOetker 3mo ago
There is substance in philosophy, don't get me wrong, but just not that much of it, theres only a handful of real theorems with proofs (like the deduction theorem etc., which is basically some syntactic sugar correctness proof, if I may put it barbarically). A physicist will have studied atomic and molecular physics courses, and some intro to chemistry course, and there will be some overlap with thermodynamics. But no physicist pretends to grasp chemistry like chemists do, even though chemistry is technically a branch of physics. Technically mathematics is a branch of philosophy, but the sheer diversity of statements in mathematics, the nearly endless constellations of symmetries and structures described in mathematics make the few "deep insights" from philosophy pale in comparison. It's great that the important sliver of your philosophy courseware (the formal logic part) essentially taught you programming, but that is you pivoting to computer science and enjoying success, its not really the non-formal-logic parts of philosophy that propelled you forward. Relying on ML/AI to solve your problems, and effectively advocating to stop understanding or stop thinking is advice that will not age well. Meritocratically what is supposed to set a "philosopher" ahead of their peers? Picture a philosopher managing a cloud of AI agents, trying to break RSA-grade products, without the philosopher understanding the intermediate insights. Contrast with what some human individuals can achieve without AI, they will break it long before the philosopher with AI will!
- NonHyloMorph 3mo ago
  What is your argument exactly? You establish, that it is virtuous to not fall for the hybris that claiming knowledge beyond the scope of your domain is. (i.e. the virtuous physisit who does not mistake his encounter with some institutional courses in chemistry for a foundation to transgress against "the chemist" by pretending to grasp chemistry like the latter does) Now what is it exactly that you want to put forward regarding the faculty of philosophically trained cognition again?
  - DoctorOetker 3mo ago
    "There is substance in philosophy, don't get me wrong, but just not that much of it"
dmitrygr 3mo ago
> with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, I will take the other end of this bet
saghm 3mo ago
> with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject for 4-8 years Do you have any particular reason to believe that this is a likely outcome, other than assuming that you can tell the difference between an exponential curve and a logistical one before the inflection point? I've heard a lot of people make predictions like yours over the past year or so but I've yet to hear any basis for it that doesn't end up being essentially just a hunch that there can't possibly be any diminishing returns before then.
never_inline 3mo ago
> going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject Did your philospophy degree not teach you to think "what could go wrong?".

cess11 3mo ago

"Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject." Hard no. Theology was first, and will forever be. Where was Plato's Akademia? In a chapel of Athena, goddess of wisdom. In Aristotle you'll often find that philosophy is actually a method of theology, it's a way to figure out the divine, and what is most or least divine.

Wissenschafter 3mo ago
I mean, theology and philosophy could be argued endlessly to be interchangeable, go ask Wittgenstein. He just argues that things that are 'truly argued' with language are philosophy, while things that are bullshit is more or less theology. I usually stick to the analytical stuff, the continental stuff was pretty traumatizing honestly, reading through Being-and-Time in a couple days on Adderall fried some brain cells and my perception of reality permanently.
- port11 3mo ago
  I like the notion that religions prescribe a philosophy of life. That’s really all they are, with 1+ deities to justify the basis for it. Or, you know, you pick a philosophy that makes sense without the fear of god(s).
  - rendx 3mo ago
    I would think they're on opposite ends: philosophy teaches you autonomous experiential thinking, religion asks you to follow some third party authority.
    - metalspot 3mo ago
      this is a modernist misconception. ancient religions are philosophical frameworks and the texts are internally coherent arguments for those frameworks. They are just expressed in language that modern audiences without formal training don't understand.
      - amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
        Which texts are internally coherent? The religion I grew up with certainly wasn't.
        metalspot 3mo ago
        How would you know? Are you an expert in the language and culture that its texts were originally written in? Even an expert would qualify their interpretation by saying that it is only an educated guess. Look at how easy it is for humans to misunderstand each other, even in direct verbal communication, then extend that to the level of misunderstanding in email and text messages. Now tell me how well you think modern people actually understand the meaning of something written thousands of years ago.
      - rendx 3mo ago
        I use "religion" to mean organized forms of spirituality, governed by "truths" you are supposed to "believe" in as member of the religion. Any such belief is a "third party truth": You do not know whether it is true or not. One may argue that this violates what "true" spirituality entails, which is experiental and not organized. For such spirituality, you can obviously read spiritual literature from whatever religion you please, like other philosophical works, but you read between the lines and don't follow some other person's interpretation (= third party authority).
- cess11 3mo ago
  If you're referring to the finale in the Tractatus, then I'd recommend you spend some time with the late Wittgenstein, like On Certainty or perhaps some of his letters to Drury, e.g. https://externalword.blog/2013/10/19/ludwig-wittgenstein-letter-to-drury/ https://externalword.blog/2013/10/19/ludwig-wittgenstein-let... . Infamously analytical philosophy quickly turned out to be a dead end and led them to metaphysics to try and salvage their community. Being and Time has a lot of interesting material but it is ill advised to approach it without having spent quite some time studying the philosophical tradition from Plato up until Heidegger himself, including Nietzsche. The old nazi presupposes a firm grasp of this history of ideas and makes an attempt at a 'reboot', which unsurprisingly turns out rather inscrutable without this background. As for traumatising, in my experience Heidegger just lays down some groundwork for Derrida and Baudrillard. They're seriously efficient at questioning the foundations of language, thinking and society. Though I'd sooner recommend Merleu-Ponty, whose phenomenological achievements are more accessible and more easily applied in everyday life. One could make the claim that some knowledge and experience does not fit into language and writing, the primary vehicles of philosophy. Here theology is a long tradition of approaches to such knowing and experience, which tends to be more foundational than the problem domains of philosophy.
- gowld 3mo ago
  A PhD is a doctor of philosophy. Science is a natural philosophy. Philosophy is a broad, vague category.

nezi 3mo ago

[flagged]

john_strinlai 3mo ago
there is no reason to be this rude edit: okay, considering im downvoted more than you, apparently you should be more rude. lesson learned.
- malfist 3mo ago
  You're not being downvoted because you're wrong, but because the general rule of thumb is that replies should be _more interesting_ than what is being replied too.
  - john_strinlai 3mo ago
    i find it hard to remember what non-interesting things i can write and get upvoted ("this is ai", "slop", "awfully designed site", "clickbait title", "typical microslop", "fuck microsoft", etc.) and the non-interesting stuff i am downvoted for ("that was rude").
    - layer8 3mo ago
      As far as I’m concerned, using the Shift key would already help.
      - deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
      - pirates 3mo ago
        why does this matter to people so much? i’ve been typing without much regard to capitalization case since AIM 25 years ago. this is an internet forum, it’s really not that important. if you aren’t going to engage with the substance you’re just taking swipes for no good reason.

xaPe 3mo ago

Brave statements only boys

commandlinefan 3mo ago

I've worked with some professional coders who were philosophy majors - there's some overlap between formal computer science and philosophy for sure. I was sort of surprised when one guy started talking about using diagonalization to prove Godels theorem of incompleteness - I thought, "ok, I guess they do teach y'all a thing or two". On the whole, though, it's _way_ easier to bluff your way through a philosophy degree than a CS degree.

port11 3mo ago
It was easier, I imagine. Now you can vibe code your way out, no?
- ramesh31 3mo ago
  >"It was easier, I imagine. Now you can vibe code your way out, no?" Coding was always the easy part of a CS major. Claude won't help you on a proctored Differential Equations exam.
- commandlinefan 3mo ago
  I hear from my son that, yes.
gopher_space 3mo ago
The difficulty scale starts with o chem and then goes through all of the arts before it hits another STEM discipline.
- doodlesarefun 3mo ago
  Sorry, please elaborate.
  - gopher_space 3mo ago
    Imagine being asked to publish 'beautiful' code for an audience comfortable with doing so themselves. On top of all the theory and practice needed to produce a complete system you're expected to develop a point of view your peers want to engage with.

port11 3mo ago

I had a mandatory philosophy course as part of high-school, and as lucky to pick a practical-yet-philosophical degree. You can easily pick up other skills, but it’s lovely to learn philosophy early on. I spent my 20s trying to become a Stoic and/or finding ways to practice a secular form o Taoism. I’m very, very grateful for these pursuits.

baajoddd 3mo ago
if you don’t mind my asking, what was your degree?
- port11 3mo ago
  It’s officially titled Multimedia and there are lots of practical classes. But about half of it was Sociology, Anthropology, journalism-related stuff, theory of symbols, screenwriting, analysing media, etc. We also had a semester of counter-cultural reading, people such as Jaron Lanier and Lawrence Lessig. Very conceptual and the theoretical bits were great to retain, even if they feel ‘useless’ when you’re young.

Forgeties79 3mo ago

> University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge. Universities were historically finishing schools for the sons of rich families at one time. There was never some era where it was some bastion of truth and knowledge. I am deeply passionate about the value of a college education and how beneficial an educated population is for basically every conceivable metric, but let’s not get too rose tinted about what universities were. The truth is important here!

kensai 3mo ago
That's a very harsh take. Most of us would not be alive by the end of the century to personally witness or attend the 1000 years of the University of Bologna, but that goes enough to say how ancient these institutions are: meaning their role obviously changed over time. Historically, universities BECAME bastions of truth and knowledge, particularly with the introduction of Alexander von Humboldt's ideas for research. And that was already happening by the mid-end of the 19th century. You can not seek seriously truth and knowledge before the establishment of serious metrics and research methodology.
- Forgeties79 3mo ago
  Not saying that’s all they were. I’m just saying they’ve been many things throughout history.

asdff 3mo ago

>University was never meant to be a training-ground for jobs, it was meant to be a place to seek truth and knowledge. Depends. US had the land grant system going back to the end of the civil war. It was very much oriented towards practical and marketable skills such as agriculture and engineering that were deemed to be in short supply. Still is in these land grant (now also sea grant and space grant) schools. Engineering departments will be massive with a huge campus footprint of a half dozen or more buildings. Liberal arts departments, not so much, relegated to the most ancient of buildings oftentimes. To your point on being able to argue transferable skills, I think you got in at a great time. It is very difficult to do this now that there are a plethora of actual domain trained candidates for just about any role, far in excess of hiring needs. They can be choosy and wait for the perfect engineer trained in the stack in question. They don't have to settle for someone who took a unit of formal logic anymore.

smcg 3mo ago
Land grant system actually started during the civil war.

WillAdams 3mo ago

One of the best programmers I have ever met/worked with had a degree in philosophy, having started in the computer industry before there was widespread adoption of it as a formal subject --- he is one of only two people I've ever met outside of TeX User's Group Conferences who had read TAoCP (and kept a well-thumbed set of the first 3 volumes on a shelf at his desk). Really miss working with him, but he has since moved on to better things in his choice of locale.

alephnerd 3mo ago

> I have an undergrad in Philosophy ... It is a highly underrated degree I agree with that. A philosophy major is the ultimate interdisciplinary major because it is essentially the theory of knowledge. That said, I wish universities mandated humanities and social science majors dual major with a STEM field and vice versa. Interdisciplinary knowledge is critical now that fields are starting to merge and overlap heavily.

dgs_sgd 3mo ago

Hypothetically if universities were a place for knowledge and truth instead of vocational training then would it really matter what my major was? Why would Philosophy still be a better major than say, English or Physics? In that world, you should still pursue whatever interests you most because critical thinking is fostered regardless of major.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

calf 3mo ago

As a counterargument, it is a bad degree if philosophy led you to jump a foregone conclusion that "AI will surely render knowledge specialization by humans useless". It is literally very badly taught if four years of such an undergrad degree program creates such students with lack of technical background to evaluate AI. It is like vibe coding except the soft sciences departments were already doing it all along. And I suspect it is part of the way philosophy as a program has to work, it is essentially pre-scientific so students that specialize in philosophy, of either the analytic or continental kind, don't actually do enough scientific research and/or some kind of real-world moral and social testing to balance that out. In that sense philosophy as an institution is medieval and for society to go back to that way due to AI would be an intellectual regression. Basically the mistake here was to conflate the purpose of the university with philosophy, they are very different things. A philosocratic university would be incredibly problematic for humanity. Truth and knowledge in isolation, under a philosophical quarantine, was precisely one of things that thinkers of the scientific revolution like Noam Chomsky warned against.

evantbyrne 3mo ago

Philosophy of science went hard and was hands down the most valuable course in my education. It's very strange that they don't force everyone to take at least some philosophy in university. Can you imagine living in a world where the average person not only thought about what they believed, but were also equipped to ask themselves hard questions about the nature of belief itself?

skirmish 3mo ago
Marxist-Leninist Philosophy was a required course for all undergrads in my time studying in USSR. Strangely enough, the professors made it into an overview course on history of philosophy, which was quite enjoyable, with just some mention of Marxism-Leninism in the last lecture.
- scoofy 3mo ago
  Without getting into a big fight, Marxist-Leninist Philosophy is not, like, general philosophy in the conceptual sense. The idea that you need to be familiar with Hegel as a prerequisite means you’re looking at graduate level classes if we’re taking it seriously.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - com 3mo ago
    Just to add to your “no big fight” observation: What in some countries is grad studies, is in other places undergrad, and in a personal high point, high school extension studies. In contemporary rich country education systems, it’s not just grade inflation, it’s very low expectations of the student population’s capabilities, in my opinion.
    - doodlesarefun 3mo ago
      >contemporary rich country education systems I'm from such a country and this tracks. I often look to individuals of the past with the same academic credentials as me and it seems they are much better read & educated. And when I was in school, it often felt like my education was diluted to cater to the LCD.

DoctorOetker 3mo ago

There is substance in philosophy, don't get me wrong, but just not that much of it, theres only a handful of real theorems with proofs (like the deduction theorem etc., which is basically some syntactic sugar correctness proof, if I may put it barbarically). A physicist will have studied atomic and molecular physics courses, and some intro to chemistry course, and there will be some overlap with thermodynamics. But no physicist pretends to grasp chemistry like chemists do, even though chemistry is technically a branch of physics. Technically mathematics is a branch of philosophy, but the sheer diversity of statements in mathematics, the nearly endless constellations of symmetries and structures described in mathematics make the few "deep insights" from philosophy pale in comparison. It's great that the important sliver of your philosophy courseware (the formal logic part) essentially taught you programming, but that is you pivoting to computer science and enjoying success, its not really the non-formal-logic parts of philosophy that propelled you forward. Relying on ML/AI to solve your problems, and effectively advocating to stop understanding or stop thinking is advice that will not age well. Meritocratically what is supposed to set a "philosopher" ahead of their peers? Picture a philosopher managing a cloud of AI agents, trying to break RSA-grade products, without the philosopher understanding the intermediate insights. Contrast with what some human individuals can achieve without AI, they will break it long before the philosopher with AI will!

NonHyloMorph 3mo ago
What is your argument exactly? You establish, that it is virtuous to not fall for the hybris that claiming knowledge beyond the scope of your domain is. (i.e. the virtuous physisit who does not mistake his encounter with some institutional courses in chemistry for a foundation to transgress against "the chemist" by pretending to grasp chemistry like the latter does) Now what is it exactly that you want to put forward regarding the faculty of philosophically trained cognition again?
- DoctorOetker 3mo ago
  "There is substance in philosophy, don't get me wrong, but just not that much of it"

dmitrygr 3mo ago

> with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, I will take the other end of this bet

saghm 3mo ago

> with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject for 4-8 years Do you have any particular reason to believe that this is a likely outcome, other than assuming that you can tell the difference between an exponential curve and a logistical one before the inflection point? I've heard a lot of people make predictions like yours over the past year or so but I've yet to hear any basis for it that doesn't end up being essentially just a hunch that there can't possibly be any diminishing returns before then.

never_inline 3mo ago

> going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject Did your philospophy degree not teach you to think "what could go wrong?".