Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities

http://chronicle.com/article/From-Technologist-to/128231/#

by drewda • 15 years ago

82 49 15 years ago

zdw• 15 years ago

I see a humanities degree as nothing less than a rite of passage to intellectual adulthood. A way of evolving from a sophomoric wonderer and critic into a rounded, open, and engaged intellectual citizen.

This is somewhat insulting to to those of us who, despite being "sophmoric" technologists, are actually quite well rounded.

_delirium• 15 years ago

Despite actually being a big fan of the humanities (though a computer scientist myself), it's sadly not really what the median humanities degree gets you either. You can learn a lot of interesting stuff and become well-rounded, like in many fields. But, also like in many fields, you can also become the world's foremost expert on an extremely narrow subject that may or may not be even on the right track to anything. I believe this is one of several reasons for the big dropout rate in humanities PhDs--- signed up for the broad education in philosophy and knowledge, but dropped out when it became clear that it was a path to becoming the world's expert on Gendered Discourse in the Hungarian Mining Industry, 1872-1876; or perhaps on a very narrow technical problem in analytic philosophy.

noblethrasher• 15 years ago

> but dropped out when it became clear that it was a path to becoming the world's expert on Gendered Discourse in the Hungarian Mining Industry, 1872-1876; or perhaps on a very narrow technical problem in analytic philosophy.

On the other hand, it's not so dispiriting when you consider that you'd probably be the world's foremost authority on the topic... forever.

timr2• 15 years ago

"This is somewhat insulting to to those of us who, despite being "sophmoric" technologists, are actually quite well rounded."

Only if you commit the logical fallacy of assuming that "a way" means "the only way". Saying that X is a way of getting to Y does not imply that !X is not a way of getting to Y.

Said differently: there are lots of different rites of passage in our world, and they're not universal. Jewish people see the Bat/Bar Mitzvah as a rite of passage to adulthood; Catholics have confirmation; certain young girls have debutante balls. This guy thinks a liberal arts degree is one particular rite of passage, and it's no more or less insulting than any of the others.

zinkem2• 15 years ago

I think the term "rite of passage" may have prompted the response. A rite of passage is generally something that every member of a culture (or subculture) goes through to get from X to Y.

asknemo• 15 years ago

The author's view is strange indeed. To be a "rounded, open and engaged intellectual citizen" we can well just get out of the room and put curiosity and action into people's lives and matters, and reflect on what you see and do. In my experience that works much better.

twilsndfdf• 15 years ago

Well, that's putting it mildly. This is, in fact, the humanities kool-aid. It's all very emperors-new-clothes. But think of it this way: this guy just got himself a degree of questionable worth. He has to justify it to himself somehow, and "I'm part of a special club and you aren't" is one way to do that.

Yes this is an ad-hominem attack, but this guy is full of s--- and deserves it.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

I studied Mathematics, Chemistry, and Computer Science in college. I'd put my well-roundedness and intellectualism up against ANY humanities degree holder in the blink of an eye.

Furthermore, I do not consent to the core conceit that a college humanities program is either a good, reliable, or even sufficient mechanism for instilling humanities values and knowledge or even the fundamental skills of intellectualism, critical thinking, and basic reasoning.

phyllotaxis• 15 years ago

The sentiment is unimpeachable- but the advice isn't. Get the education, and the perspective that come with it- absolutely. But it doesn't require a retreat to academia for several years to gain it anymore.

The internet is the collective knowledge and experience of all humanity. To seek this information is wise and wonderful- but I respectfully suggest that dropping ones life to go back to school, chained anew in debt, isn't necessary for the attainment of that wisdom.

gruseom2• 15 years ago

I don't see the internet as a source of wisdom, or even knowledge, depending on what one means by the word. Information, certainly. But the mental habits that the internet as a mass medium fosters are antithetical to study and reflection.

I love the internet, not least because of the ease with which I can obtain information that used to take hours in the library. But obtaining specific facts is not the same thing as learning or thinking.

From observing myself and others, I believe that something is wrong. I'm getting way more brain stimulation from the internet than I used to without it, but in terms of things that matter to me in the long run -- growth and learning -- it is of poor quality. I remember the quality of a life spent with books, and this is definitely not it. I feel like I'm experiencing my own atrophy, and it dismays me. Sometimes I think that one of these days I should post a list of books to HN and promise not to come back until I've read them.

So no, consuming information from the internet is in practice nothing like getting an education in the humanities, for anyone whose brain is wired like mine and those of people I know.

Books are food, the internet is a drug.

karamazov• 15 years ago

It all depends on what you view with the Internet, just like the quality of a life spent with books depends on exactly what books you're reading. If all you read is romance novels, you won't be stimulating yourself adequately; the same is true online. If you choose to access only brief news articles and simulator entries, for example, you may learn a lot; but you won't stretch your mind.

Every now and again read something difficult; something that makes you think and leaves you confused. You'll learn more in the long run. A great place start, if you happen to be interested in math, is Terence Tao's blog, and a number of the blogs he links to. (At the least, I find it challenging; the blog is over at http://terrytao.wordpress.com/ .)

trengof• 15 years ago

This post really resonates with me. I feel that the brain suffers without being used as a "memory store" of some kind. Maybe we use the same brain action to access memory as to access thought processes so that without the constant need to access memory we lose the other portion as well.

I am going to follow your advice, disconnect, and try to really understand some books.

tptacek• 15 years ago

List of books before you can visit HN: I'm on board with that idea. HN study group. Let's make it happen.

No books on entrepreneurship allowed. :|

cbo• 15 years ago

If the only reason to do so is to become a "rounded, open, and engaged intellectual citizen", why not just read a few books?

Advanced humanities degrees are great, if you're into advanced humanities.

jobeirne• 15 years ago

To a young undergraduate, frustrated with the lack of rapid progress on tough philosophical questions, AI seemed like the great hope, the panacea—the escape from the frustrations of thinking.

Yeah, that'll go away in short order after taking a few AI classes.

Jach2• 15 years ago

It might also give you a clear insight on so-called tough philosophical questions.

Retric3• 15 years ago

Yea, after studding AI I find most philosophical debate boring. There may be interesting areas in philosophy outside arguing about unspecified definitions but I have not found any.

Consider the Chinese room argument, where is the brain? It's the arrangement of all the players and their rule sets. What is consciousness, it's their internal state etc.

gwern• 15 years ago

> If you are worried about your career, I must tell you that getting a humanities Ph.D. is not only not a danger to your employability, it is quite the opposite. I believe there no surer path to leaping dramatically forward in your career than to earn a Ph.D. in the humanities. Because the thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder. The leaders are the ones who took chances and developed unique perspectives.

Apparently when he abandoned his sophomore technologist beliefs, he also abandoned the need to provide evidence.

zwieback• 15 years ago

Why does everything have to be so extreme - what's wrong with studying some humanities without quitting your job?

burgerbrain• 15 years ago

What's wrong with that is that it's common sense, non-offensive, and won't get pageviews. ;)

ctl• 15 years ago

This article is almost 100% fluff.

dfc• 15 years ago

I have a lot of friends who are in the middle of their dissertations or freshly minted philosophy PhDs. From what they tell me the job market for philosophy profs is awful; in fact the job market for any professorial (tenure track mainly but also non-tenure) positions in the humanities is not a lot better.

lsb• 15 years ago

As one who's gotten a Master's in Classics, I can say that my timeline for reference is about 3000 years, and more if I think about Egyptian papryri, and Indo-European Poetics. Most technical people have a timeline of only about 50 to 75 years, maximum, and it's quite a beneficial change of perspective.

zyfo• 15 years ago

This is a very good point. Reading old philosophers really open ones eyes to the things that have changed little in human culture throughout the centuries or even millenniums.

simonsarris• 15 years ago

Man this guy seems to take his train of thought to a bit of an extreme.

"Hard distinctions make bad philosophy" - John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp, coined the term "AI")

I did both. I got a degree in Computer Science and Philosophy. I loved it. But I didn't have to do something drastic to get there. I enjoy humanities greatly, so I incorporated them into my study along with technology.

jarek• 15 years ago

As an aside, this is the fourth time this article has been posted to HN, and I say this as the person who posted it the second time around, a day after it first failed to gain traction, with a slightly modified URL.

zeteo• 15 years ago

I'm really curious how he used his philosophy studies to "make major progress in AI". I've spent several years avidly reading philosophy, and ultimately found the field quite sterile. Granted it raises interesting questions, but the answers are too varied and contested to be of much practical use.

The only example the article gives is "when you have a question, we connect you to another person who can give you a live answer". But this seems more like avoiding the problem than like major progress in AI.

ahi• 15 years ago

The guy is a bit of a masochist isn't he? Bouncing from one intractable problem to the next.

keypusher• 15 years ago

This advice is ridiculous. First, I don't believe the intent of most Ph.D programs is even to create "a rounded, open, and engaged intellectual citizen". I know quite a few people with doctorate degrees, and while most were quite happy with their educational experience, I doubt they would describe it as he frames it. Second, most of the great programmers I know are deeply interested in the humanities and tend to be quite well read in many disciplines. They just prefer to spend their creative energies and career creating software.

Furthermore, I am highly skeptical of the idea that you need a Ph.D to have a meaningful understanding of the humanities. Despite his assertions about the "thought leaders", it seems to me that those who have made the most progress on the big questions in the last 100+ years did so through science and technology, not through the humanities.

aik• 15 years ago

Completely agree. I find the article slightly silly in that what he is suggesting is the same thing as the purpose of any Liberal Arts degree... to create a "rounded, open, and engaged intellectual citizen."

It's interesting how we've fallen so out of touch with what our universities were created for in the first place, or rather that we're never told what we're going to school for and what our options are.

forkandwait• 15 years ago

I wish I thought that getting an advanced degree in the humanities would give you a background in the (ever evolving group of) classics, but I am afraid academics must specialize and so don't actually get to be well-rounded (Oh, I don't do Plato, I just do Kant...) I have always found my advisors to be disturbed that I thought it important to read widely...

ChristianMarks• 15 years ago

The author has the good fortune to assume the critical stance of the philosopher and to enjoy unfettered intellectual freedom within a corporate institution such as Google. I myself prefer not to uncritically internalize the values of the workplace. My saying so at my own place of work was not appreciated, and culminated in an exit interview, a dramatization of which is available here: http://christianmarks.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/exit-intervie...

sayemm• 15 years ago

Damon Horowitz is an extremely talented and smart guy who's proven himself in the startup world, but I don't think he's giving the best advice here.

He mentions Steve Jobs at the end as a technologist who's clear evidence of the importance of a liberal arts education. Jobs does credit a lot of Apple's design to that calligraphy class he walked into in his early days (while he was a college drop-out)... but if there's anything to be gleaned from the best and brightest, and the most creative, in industry, it's that they're self-taught - their creativity isn't a product of the humanities in academia.

Who was the last Philosophy PhD who went on to start the next great tech company? Or do anything particularly innovative?

patio11• 15 years ago

Rich technologists are exactly the type of people who should get PhDs in the humanities, since they require either a) you to have sufficient resources to live a life of leisure or b) external support by an organization which has a pile of rent and a big desire to spend some to signal status. Sell your startup, go get a degree in English. Become a Scholar in Residence at e.g. Google, do some pathbreaking anthropological work about youths' use of mobile devices. Whatever.

If you actually work for a living, though, this is terrible advice.

chegra84• 15 years ago

There is nothing wrong with suggesting something radical. At the same time, you have to be able to show the strength of your beliefs. A strong signal of belief is your willingness to place money behind an idea. Probably the best example of someone placing money behind a radical idea is Peter Thiel when he created Thiel Fellowship.

I think you would be well received if you were to offer full scholarship and stipend equal to the participants salary.

michaelochurch• 15 years ago

A few things ignored:

A. The PhD concept, like academia itself, is broken. For most people, it's 5-7 years to get narrow training for an industry that has sold out a generation and a half and probably won't exist, in any meaningful way, in 40 years on account of how badly it has treated young entrants. The last time a disaster as bad as the academic job market occurred in the U.S., two countries got invaded.

B. You'd think the philosophy degree would give him the ability to avoid inverted-causality fallacies, e.g. "I know how to think a certain way because I got a philosophy Ph.D."

Don't get me wrong. I think there can be a lot of value in a Ph.D. program. But I think for a successful person in technology, it's a really bad idea from a career perspective. I'll focus on this:

Because the thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder. The leaders are the ones who took chances and developed unique perspectives.

Does he really think that everyone who takes 5-7 years off to pursue a humanities Ph.D. gets some kind of magical career rocket fuel that propels him or her into a decision-making role where broad-based perspective is crucial? I doubt it.

Now, I will agree that society would benefit immensely if our leaders (including in technology) actually understood the humanities, and many don't. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that taking 5-7 years off to study philosophy increases your chance of becoming one of those leaders; I think it lowers it, sadly.

iamelgringo• 15 years ago

Why not read a bunch of books instead?

If the point is to become a well rounded person, think widely and read widely, then getting a PhD isn't going to help you much. I think of PhD's as very driven, focused, able to take a lot of abuse, able to write and research for several years. I don't think of them as particularly well rounded.

In particular, getting a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford after a BS in CS from Columbia and an MS from MIT is going to give you a couple of survey courses in Philosophy, and then a very deep knowledge of a very, very narrow band of philosophy..

I learned how the quantifiable, individualistic, ahistorical—that is, computational—view I had of cognition failed to account for whole expanses of cognitive experience (including, say, most of Shakespeare). I learned how pragmatist and contextualist perspectives better reflect the diversity and flexibility of our linguistic practices than do formal language models.

QED.

If the point is to be well read, well rounded, and be able to think broadly about a variety of topics, then... read a book. Read a lot of books. Read broadly. Read widely. Read people that you disagree with. Argue with writers.

Read literature, comparative religions, philosophy, cultural anthropology, sociology, history, science fiction, mythology, fantasy, psychology, biography, poetry.

Read Carl Jung, Freud, Neitsche, Marx, Kant, Dickenson, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Plato, Aristotle, the Bhagvad Gita, the Koran, the Tao, The Tao of Poo, Luther, Martin Luther King, Tolstoy and Doestoyevsky, Adams, St. John of the Cross, the Mystics--Christian, Bhuddist, Kabbalist, and Sufi, Gleick, Feynman, Shakespeare, Chaucer.

Chances are, if they say it's a "classic" it's probably hung around for a long time because it's good. (Except for Kant. He couldn't write worth crap). And, in reading we learn that we are not alone. We learn that perhaps creating a True AI isn't something to be desired anyway. We learn that maybe consciousness is more than a deterministic bunch of bio-chemical reactions taking place in our frontal lobes that can be modeled via neural networks and computer processors. And, we start to wonder, if perhaps as the poets proclaim... there something called a Soul. And if there is a Soul, can we actually create that via silicon, light, magnetics and electricity?

You can get that education in $1.50 in late charges at the library. You don't have to spend 3 years and $150k at Stanford working on your Phd.

sb• 15 years ago

While I agree with your suggestion of reading books (which is IMHO in general a good advice), I have to sort of disagree with your description of a PhD: The goal of getting a PhD at least in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is to autonomously advance the state-of-the-art of any chosen field, to contribute new knowledge to humanity without a supervisor giving directions.

Now, the process of advancing the state-of-the-art is unusually hard and there exists a good deal of very good write-ups of the intricacies involved (such as "So long and thanks for the PhD") which requires people to be driven and focused. But, at the same time, before actually starting the research that gets them their PhDs, gradute students spend time in advanced courses and later on read lots of research papers and additional textbooks. This is an invaluable process of unsupervised learning (hence the first paragraph), and I think that getting a PhD also gives you the abilities and experience to autonomously go from zero knowledge in an area to contributing new knowledge by reading. Of course, studying at a university saves you a lot of time, because somebody else--the professor--who is already very knowledgeable in the target area has already broken down his knowledge in edible--and ideally pedagogically-sound--pieces ready to be sucked up. But if time is not of the essence, and since you are already a driven and focused person, you should be able to do it by yourself.

So this was (quite unexpectedly) rather long, a more detailed discussion and probably a very good book to read for anybody can be found in: Mortimer Jerome Adler's wonderful "How to read a book". A brief summary for tl;dr reasons: I love and totally support your reading advice, but since the PhD experience enables you to work your way through literature in unknown territory, it might very well be worth the effort.

Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities

Related Stories