The revenge of the philosophy majors

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-majors-ai-jobs.html

by benbreen • 15 days ago

164 261 15 days ago

nytimes.com

chunkyslink• 15 days ago

How do I get past the paywall? (without paying)

hsuduebc2• 15 days ago

https://archive.ph/7A8cW

talloaktrees• 15 days ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-major...

seasox• 15 days ago

https://archive.ph/7A8cW

andrewclunn• 15 days ago

But Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”

Could it be? Did all that concern and daydreaming regarding how to safely wish for something from a malicious Jinn (and other such thought experiments) have a use?

setopt• 15 days ago

It seems everything has a use if you wait long enough. Number theory also seemed famously unapplyable until modern digital cryptography came along, and same with non-Euclidean geometry before general relativity.

etcimon• 15 days ago

It does have a use but not in the colloquial sense, history is plastered with bad winners yielding to their predatory instincts and a malicious Jinn is one of infinite ways you can visualize something that pulls/pushes into the abyss for a competitive comparative sense of superiority. Understanding it doesn't make it happen less because the phenomena exhibits in circles that mock thought itself. But taking it into consideration in thought does tend to improve the outcome of novelty the same way an engineer looks as Murphy's Law as a warning not to seek positive thoughts for the sake of it but look at failure modes because they're central to good design

cmiles8• 15 days ago

When the AI bubble cools these roles will be eliminated faster than you can blink. Mark my words.

mykowebhn• 15 days ago

Agreed. Similarly, we had in-house chefs who were full-time employees. They were some of the first people laid-off when the Covid downturn hit.

esafak• 15 days ago

We had great chefs; miss them!

keiferski5• 15 days ago

I studied analytic philosophy, which is basically an education in how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments. IMO there is no better preparation for any sort of writing-and-thinking job than studying analytic philosophy, although of course I am biased.

Not sure I’d recommend doing only a philosophy degree, but I highly recommend pairing it with something else more employable. CS and Philosophy seems like the best pairing for the direction tech is going.

seydor2• 15 days ago

Dont you think that ANN research is upwards of philosophy in the ordo cognoscendi

keiferski5• 15 days ago

Can you rephrase that in simpler terms? I don’t understand what you’re asking.

cmrdporcupine6• 15 days ago

And I studied continental philosophy! Which is the opposite!

Now I program to be less stochastic

(Dropped out in my 3rd year to join the .com boom)

keiferski5• 15 days ago

Aha, continental philosophy is definitely worth learning as well. I don’t share the disdain many analytic people have for continentals.

However I don’t think it’ll make you better at writing clearly, unfortunately…

viccis2• 15 days ago

I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics.

how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments

This is a little generous. Analytic philosophy often comes across as people using heinous amounts of ink to argue whether a hot dog is technically a taco all while pretending that only a fool would even consider what it tastes like.

wk_end• 15 days ago

I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics.

I don't think this is true at all. To start with, there's roughly 2000 years between the earliest known philosophers and the analytic-continental split. Plenty of philosophy majors can and do get really into the ancients or medieval philosophers or whatever and complete their degrees without doing much more than a cursory read of the major thinkers post-Kant. And anecdotally, my own undergraduate degree was in philosophy, from one of the more prestigious schools in Anglo-Canada, and we had plenty of opportunities to dive into the continental stuff.

Once you get to the graduate level and academia folks focused on Derrida or whatever are going to gravitate towards the universities that prioritize the schools of thought they're interested in, and those have always been on the continent for the continentals naturally. But for run-of-the-mill philosophy majors in the Anglosphere, IMO you should just assume they have a reasonably broad and just-deep-enough knowledge of the entire history of philosophy and make no particular assumptions about their interests.

fellowniusmonk3• 15 days ago

I have one area of my education that I highly value but its very hard to explain without people importing a lot of assumptions.

I like to call it critical listening but also its textual evaluation.

In addition to some didactic instruction my Father gave me a short book on the principles of hermeneutics around 13. We went to different churches over the years growing up but I would bring my bible, take notes, and on the drive home from service he would ask me if anything unsubstantiated by the text was snuck in, anything against the text, etc.

In the hundreds of sermons I took notes on over the years there were only 3 without obvious butchering of the text, statements directly contradicting the very text being examined, nightmarish hermenutical implications, outright fabrications, etc.

The shear volume of evaluation I did against a static text was interesting.

It helped me understand how to parse language, how to do evaluation, just a lot of stuff in a way that was more dynamic than something like debate club.

It also helped me understand how self servingly imprecise people can be and the ways in which deceptive and misleading language is used.

towledev• 15 days ago

To my ear, that sounds very much like the GRE Verbal.

zuzuleinen• 15 days ago

Do you remember the title of the book on principles of hermeneutics?

calf8• 15 days ago

But then how is analytic philosophy a philosophy.

pragmatic• 15 days ago

CS degree? Employable?

jnwatson• 15 days ago

I graduated a long time ago with a degrees in CS and philosophy.

I've never understand the hate for philosophy; I think more about my philosophy classes now than my CS classes.

AdamN• 15 days ago

I did Philosophy and Physics - each of which I have fond memories of.

satellite23• 15 days ago

Well sure if you want to actually be right. If you just care about looking right rhetoric might be a better fit.

matltc• 15 days ago

I got a degree in philosophy. Couldn't be less interested in this kind of job. I hate philosophy now

One of my biggest regrets is not getting into this stuff when I was in school. Didn't know about tech at all when I was going, just picked whatever was easy to major in and somewhat bearable. Had zero interest in school until later adulthood

beepbooptheory• 15 days ago

It was really just the luck of the draw for me ending up in the undergrad program that I did, but every day I am grateful to have spent both my degrees and a decade mostly just teaching Kant or Descartes and reading Derrida, Marx, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Deleuze, etc. Meaningful, sometimes beautiful, thought which maybe never made me feel "smarter" than other people, but undeniably taught me how to live and navigate the world.

That is, instead of the Analytic hokum these nerds are selling to literal billionaires! Can you imagine the meetings these guys are having?

MSkill12• 15 days ago

I would much rather hear that they were hiring theoretical logicians than philosophers.We could use more people exploring the limits of prepositional and propositional logic and set theory than we need philosophy. AI is never going to become conscious, at least not the kind we have right now.

speak_plainly• 15 days ago

You do realize that propositional logic, set theory, and mapping the limits of formal systems are philosophy, right? You're literally describing mathematical logic and philosophy of language.

programjames2• 15 days ago

Logicians' training is so different from philosophers' that it should be considered a separate discipline, or under the branch of computer science.

MSkill12• 15 days ago

I studied it getting my CS degree - you can literally write mathematical formulas using symbols and you can perform operations in logic. Very different from a philosophy class - excuse me if you were already aware.

virissimo• 15 days ago

Logicians are typically part of the philosophy department, at least in the US.

andrewlin247• 15 days ago

You mean mathematicians? CS majors also all study logic to some degree. I think we have enough of both in AI. Philosophers of mind, not so much.

jipl104• 15 days ago

"the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into"...

There's about 20 philosophers employed by AI labs worldwide, vs 1000s of software engineers, product managers, designers, etc. There's probably more economists working in these labs than philosophers...

deadbabe• 15 days ago

Starbucks employs orders of magnitude more philosophers than any AI labs.

airstrike• 15 days ago

and famously doesn't require a degree

jayd16• 15 days ago

If pay, hours, benefits, and type of work mean nothing to you, then maybe this is an apt point.

fearmerchant• 15 days ago

Ok, you got me. It took me a minute.

datakan3• 15 days ago

If the AI is digesting all the philosophy material ever published then why do they need philosophers?

The_Blade• 15 days ago

knowing all the philosophy every published is not being a philosopher

there was literature about 15 years or so ago stating Philosophy as being an uncommonly lucrative course of study, in part citing Reid Hoffman

it is a way of thinking

yepyoukno• 15 days ago

Philosophy is a living process of integrating ideas. Classical materials are the whetstone upon which the mind is sharpened. Unlike history, where literal established accounts are ideal, in philosophy one is expected to view today (or the future) through the lens of contextual discourse.

While there is “no right answer” understanding what the issues are and how the discussion plays out is relevant.

genxy• 15 days ago

That is not what AI is. AI is a powerful tool, a semiautonomous set of wood working tools that still need a master craftsperson to use. You need the tool+genius to drive it. Everyone wants to shoot down AI but they think AI will do everything. Being proud of a creation where someone did style transfer between spongebob and Rembrandt and they think they made art. About as responsible for actual art as just downloading images from google.

applicative7• 15 days ago

It’s actually pretty bad at it. I think there just isn’t enough literature to get a good effect from the LLM approach. Good luck with verifiable rewards when the target discourse is effectively pure self-criticism. Maybe ‘disputable rewards’ …

I have found that with proper framing I can get good help from Claude and ChatGPT on questions of translation of haute German philosophy and, to my amazement, Ancient Greek. An immediate ‘translate this passage’ request is a cataclysmic disaster. The nexus of sentences differs from other forms of discourse.

sleepybrett• 15 days ago

... and why would they train for a job where everything they say that seeks to curtail expansion would be ignored.

applicative7• 15 days ago

I would have thought so too, a priori, but at this point three former colleagues are working for Anthropic; the most extraordinary case, one of the brainiest people I have known, was announced this week.

em500• 15 days ago

This article seems high on vibes, low on metrics.

While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”

But wait, there's this:

Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.

So, between 6 and 12 each?

taeric• 15 days ago

Wow, it is hard not to immediately think of that meme. There are indeed dozens of them!

Pamar• 15 days ago

Half-dozens of them, apparently.

fellowniusmonk3• 15 days ago

The revenge of the _nearly a dozen_ philosophers.

consensus13• 15 days ago

Philosophy majors. That piece of paper does not make you a philosopher.

Izkata• 15 days ago

Hey now, that might be infinite% growth compared to just a couple of years ago!

kazinator2• 15 days ago

Those are dining philosophers!

alfiedotwtf• 15 days ago

a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes…

The irony

mrhottakes2• 15 days ago

This article seems high on vibes, low on metrics.

That's the in-house style for the WSJ

beastman82• 15 days ago

Not sure if it changed but this is written by NYTimes.

FWIW I think the WSJ is the best news source available and does not match this description.

dlcarrier2• 15 days ago

That reminds me of a survey that found that in the entire field of Social Psychology, there was something like eight people that indicated they would vote for Romney over Obama.

FranzFerdiNaN• 15 days ago

Well yeah rightwing people are not the kind of people to take up psychology. I also don’t think you will find many Marxists in corporate law .

gregates3• 15 days ago

What you're missing is that this is approximately at least a half-dozen more jobs than open tenure-track positions at research universities.

cwillu• 15 days ago

Wouldn't the correct comparison would be filled positions tenure and tenure-track positions?

throwaway274482• 15 days ago

each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.

Imagine knowing that you're hired to launder regulatory capture for a trillion dollar corporation lol

jambalaya82• 15 days ago

Imagine explaining Nietzsche's relationship with his sister to an AI. :/

why_at• 15 days ago

There was another article on this recently[1], if I didn't know better I would suspect this narrative is being pushed by some PR firm. Maybe it's coming from AI companies trying to imply their models are so advanced that they need philosophers to determine if they're conscious or something?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48662452

seydor2• 15 days ago

They are also hiring cooks and cleaners, talk about their revenge

datakan3• 15 days ago

Same group

giantg2• 15 days ago

"Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers."

I would hardly call that the revenge of the philosophy majors.

JauntTrooper• 15 days ago

When I was in college, a philosophy degree was seen as excellent training for a career in Law.

wongarsu• 15 days ago

Both professions require writing detailed, overly specific, reasonably watertight arguments that will be read by only a handful of people, so that tracks

datakan3• 15 days ago

Arguments so watertight that none of them ever agree with each other and have argued for thousands of years without a resolution to even the most basic of questions.

SoftTalker2• 15 days ago

Using a vocabulary that is known only to themselves.

keiferski5• 15 days ago

Philosophy undergrad here and yeah I’d say law school was the typical next step. A few medical school as well.

kriro2• 15 days ago

But a law degree is probably even better. I know what you mean though, consulting companies also hire the (top 1-3%) philosophy majors and math/physics majors for the same reason. Good thought processes.

cgyvbunji2• 15 days ago

In summary, AI has tricked a bunch of philosophy majors into not only thinking it's more than linear algebra but changing their entire life trajectories because of their confusion. AI seems to be a very alluring tar pit for the non-technical. The sad part is how this negative externality of AI is being actively encouraged for political ends.

consensus13• 15 days ago

The strange part is that they seemed to have tricked AI companies too.

mrhottakes2• 15 days ago

To be fair, AI is also a very alluring tar pit for the technical.

missingrib• 15 days ago

Philosophers were discussing that question far before LLMs were around.

cmrdporcupine6• 15 days ago

The reality is it would be a very small % of philosophy majors or the philosophically interested who would be able to shape their approach or personal opinions to match what the AI labs are looking for anyways.

Only particular schools / kinds of philosophy need apply.

I'm a (dropout) philosophy major, but for 30 years (last month!) have been doing SWE instead. The tar pit of being able to use my brain to make money instead of navigating politics inside academia... happened for most of us a long time before AI.

burningChrome• 15 days ago

> The tar pit of being able to use my brain to make money instead of navigating politics inside academia... happened for most of us a long time before AI.

Anecdotal evidence to support your point.

Have a degree in Anthropology. Took copious amounts of philosophy classes as part of my major. Took some CS classes just to stay on top of the stuff happening in tech.

I wasn't able do what I wanted in Anthropology, so I took the same route and ended up in SWE. To a degree, I have monetized my degree because everything I learned while obtaining my degree I use almost every day in SWE. I was jaded by the toxic politics of academia and it finally pushed me out as well.

satellite23• 15 days ago

Sure, but is there any evidence that psychology and for that matter, any animal intelligence, is anything more than linear algebra?

karmakurtisaani• 15 days ago

I think it should be shown that intelligence is linear algebra. Not that it's not linear algebra. Russell's teapot etc.

bananaflag• 15 days ago

I think the main problem is whether intelligence is a computable function (or at least approximable by ones, like AIXI is), and then whether it's of the form that NNs implement (linear algebras plus sigmoids and all that jazz).

ur-whale2• 15 days ago

In summary, AI has tricked a bunch of philosophy majors ...

OTOH, their bank accounts is likely not complaining very loudly

cgyvbunji2• 15 days ago

That's not actually the part that bothers me, but it's good to caution about envy.

lapcat8• 15 days ago

“Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year.

According to (later) Wittgenstein, philosophy is basically a bad habit that needs breaking.

throw48472854• 15 days ago

That's a common misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, and it's intellectually lazy.

lapcat8• 15 days ago

Please read and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's funny how many years I had to spend in philosophy grad school to become "intellectually lazy".

kriro2• 15 days ago

I find it a bit strange to assume you can only understand these topics with a philosophy degree. My CS degree had a good chunk of philosophy baked in (philosophy of science) and parts of it strongly encouraged you to dive into philosophy. AI 101 introduced me to Gödel for example and logic in general.

From the article it seems like they mostly do "is AI conscious" and ethics work. Call me a skeptic (no pun intended) but it looks like "hiring some philosophers to confirm the things we want to keep saying for the sweet AGI-race-$$$ to flow". Kind of like these tobacco studies way back when.

godwinson__4-8• 15 days ago

David Chalmers has been doing this for a long time. The fun thing about successful philosophers is it is a very small club and given their nature a lot of them have kind of humorous beef with each other. To make a name for yourself you often have to find a credible target whose intelligence you can insult. This sort of philosophical rivalry is a common historical occurrence as well, and common to the nature of philosophy itself. As such, it feels wrong to mention Chalmers without mentioning some of his famous detractors.

Personally, I miss when Dennett was around to tell Chalmers he was being annoying. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...

antonvs6• 15 days ago

Dennett was a philosophical zombie, so his opinion doesn’t really matter.

mkovach3• 15 days ago

I've spent a surprising amount of time reading philosophy of language, and it's probably done more for my AI prompting than most of the "prompt engineering" articles I've read.

Speech Act Theory, Austin's How to Do Things with Words, and Searle's work changed how I think about prompts. Instead of asking, "What words should I use?", I ask, "What action am I trying to perform?" Is this a request? A commitment? A declaration? An instruction? It turns out LLMs respond differently when you think in terms of acts instead of sentences. With AI able to hallucinate context, facts, intent, and answers, keeping AI on track is much like herding cats.

I've been borrowing those ideas for prompts, reusable skills, and even governance. The side effect of making me look smarter than I really am.

I even ended up writing an article about baseball umpires through the lens of Speech Act Theory: https://pitcherlist.com/umpires-dont-make-calls-they-make-hi.... Baseball, as usual, turns out to be an excellent way to explain philosophy. Or philosophy is an excellent way to explain baseball. I'm currently working on a update, since the ABS challenge system helps improve my position.

My suspicion is philosophy has a lot more to offer AI than ethics alone. Philosophy of language seems like an obvious fit, but epistemology ("what does it mean to know?") and philosophy of mind also seem increasingly practical once you're building systems instead of just chatting with them.

Maybe the shortage isn't philosophy majors. Maybe it's people who can translate philosophy into engineering without making everyone read Kant first.

Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.

antonvs6• 15 days ago

Heavens, that got wordy, sorry about that.

The mark of a true philosopher.

mkovach3• 15 days ago

I don't know about that but thanks. I tend to think of myself as a baseball enthusiast with a philosophy problem.

thisoneisreal• 15 days ago

Even before LLMs I used to joke with my traditional SE coworkers that "philosophy is very practical." On nearly every project we'd have to talk to stakeholders and ask questions like, "But when you say X, what do you mean?" Establishing definitions, relationships between concepts, etc etc turns out to be really important when you're encoding ideas into a block of silicon. (Yes I know other fields do versions of the same thing too.)

mkovach3• 15 days ago

And encoding context, governance, and intent. I hate guessing that but too often I must.

dmfdmf• 15 days ago

This is an interesting development. I think trying to program a computer to be "intelligent" without a valid theory of concepts is a fool's errand.

b450• 15 days ago

Philosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates!

It's great preparation for law school, as a commenter has already pointed out, since skill in one game carries over to the other. The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious, and I think one can reasonably argue that philosophical training does more harm than good by inculcating bizarre/narrow/counterproductive intellectual habits/commitments/bugaboos. But philosophers have tricked themselves into places where they really have no business being, like hospital ethics panels. Cool for these guys though, it seems harmless.

samrus• 15 days ago

The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious

I wouldnt go that far. I think your clutching at straws a little bit. Its a real stretch from philosohers are insecure to they are useless. This is the sort of thing confident ignorance gets you, when you dont know how philophy impacts mpdern life so you assume it doesnt because you think you know everything

applicative7• 15 days ago

The experts on hospital ethics panels are trained internally by medical schools, which are like little universities inside universities. There has not been philosophical access for about thirty years.

satellite23• 15 days ago

You have a great build up for an argument but why this conclusion?

At some point who should be doing ethics? Lawyers? Computer scientists? (I'm not asking ironically, who really is well placed to make population level and extremely though questions like balancing the protection of the few against a global important health interest/gain?)

RugnirViking• 15 days ago

Presumably, a reasonably repræsentative cross section of society. So my cop out answer is "all of them, plus the stay at home mother, the farmer, and the lumberjack"

plastic-enjoyer• 15 days ago

This just reeks of Dunning-Kruger

julianeon• 15 days ago

I've noticed that many famous billionaires want to be viewed as philosophers: Thiel obviously, Musk arguably.

For this they do need ideological coherency and the ability to order their arguments logically, ideally as part of a larger program. Since it is such a popular destination late in life, you'd think it would be a good choice for a major too.

Avicebron3• 15 days ago

Look up "Philosopher-King" from Plato. It explains a hell of a lot.

lapcat8• 15 days ago

I don't think it does explain anything. I've seen no evidence that Thiel takes any particular inspiration from Plato. Rather, Thiel seems to be much more focused on Christianity and libertarianism, and those would be the sources of Thiel's anti-democratic predilections, not Plato's Republic. I think philosopher-king is more of a label that other people are trying to pin on Thiel. The Republic actually said that the philosopher-kings should have no private property, and children should be raised by the community.

Moreover, I've seen no evidence whatsoever that Elon Musk is looking to be considered a philosopher. He writes short meme tweets, not treatises.

nytimesceo• 15 days ago

the nytimes is the worst content to consume if you want to become smarter

atleastoptimal• 15 days ago

Hilarious that the article is framed as a humanities vs sciences thing even though the caliber of philosophers who can get these jobs at labs are the top 0.1% in their field, and wouldn't have trouble finding a job elsewhere, whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile.

cliglot• 15 days ago

whereas you could get a good-paying job as an engineer at a relatively lower percentile.

Well, at least until recently.

applicative7• 15 days ago

There are only a few thousand academic philosophers in America total. 0.1% is thus … a few

asdfman123• 15 days ago

They're doing well because philosophy majors are usually just very smart people.

Not sure if the degree itself is necessarily that helpful beyond signaling intellectual competence.

kbelder• 15 days ago

How do you judge the caliber of a philosopher?

Wissenschafter2• 15 days ago

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.

cess112• 15 days 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.

Wissenschafter2• 15 days 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.

xaPe• 15 days ago

Brave statements only boys

commandlinefan2• 15 days 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.

port114• 15 days ago

It was easier, I imagine. Now you can vibe code your way out, no?

gopher_space3• 15 days ago

The difficulty scale starts with o chem and then goes through all of the arts before it hits another STEM discipline.

l33tbro2• 15 days ago

Interested to hear how you think one "bluffs" their way through a philosophy degree. Could you sketch that out?

EoinB• 15 days ago

Something to ponder...

I have a PhD in mathematics and have worked in tech for more than 30 years as a programmer. I went to a Renaissance era university in Scotland which is required by law to require of me a broad education rather than something very specialised. Because I entered the science faculty, as an undergraduate, I had to balance that with something from the humanities and I chose Philosophy, naïvely thinking that it would be easy. Philosophy is in no sense of the word "easy" and not something you can "bluff your way through". In fact, it is more difficult than mathematics and more difficult and arduous than computer science.

I also teach at a university level and would advise young people reading this to pursue, these days, a philosophy education (or a mathematics education) over a software engineering/computer science education.

tomlockwood• 15 days ago

idk I have a BA Phil and have been a professional programmer for over a decade now. If you don't know how to search stackoverflow I'd agree. But I had to go to University to learn all the ins and outs of philosophy. Much easier to find the answers online for programming. Searching for "how to live a good life"? Many charlatans on this topic out there. As the academy gets hollowed out in favour of Profit, increasingly those charlatans have STEM degrees.

port114• 15 days 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• 14 days ago

if you don’t mind my asking, what was your degree?

Forgeties792• 15 days 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• 15 days 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.

asdff• 15 days 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.

smcg3• 14 days ago

Land grant system actually started during the civil war.

WillAdams• 15 days 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• 15 days 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• 15 days 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.

calf8• 15 days 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• 15 days 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• 15 days 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.

arw0n• 15 days ago

I had an Ethics professor in uni who would ask his intro classes to raise their hands if they thought they were a morally upright person. On average, much fewer philosophy majors would raise their hands, and they would continue to decrease throughout their studies.

Of course, the thought process of "I'm trying my best, but sometimes failing", could push someone in both directions of the answer, but striving to be better only works when honestly acknowledging failures. In my experience, the majority of people tend to construct their moral views conveniently along the lines of their preferred actions, but principles built on convenience usually don't hold up to scrutiny.

DoctorOetker2• 15 days 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!

NonHyloMorph2• 15 days 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?

lsiq• 14 days ago

"Theres only a handful of real theorems with proofs"

Philosophy is not mathematics. Philosophy asks you the question of what is a theorem in the context of philosophical thought, why should the fractal of reality be reduced to a reductionist theorem in the first place, and what consists as sufficient proof for said theorems.

qjack• 14 days ago

On the contrary, formal logic probably played a much smaller role than the rest of their philosophy degree in their success. Most programmers deal equally with philosophical problems as they do technical problems: what components should exist, what the boundary between those components should be, how those edges should be described. These are not "engineering" problems, nor are they the type of philosophical problems that more formalized philosophy (which your reply seems to overweight) are good at solving.

dmitrygr• 15 days ago

with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary,

I will take the other end of this bet

saghm• 15 days 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• 14 days 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?".

jmoss20• 15 days ago

…‘‘computer science’’ is not a science and…its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology – the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view

-- SICP

I studied both in undergrad. They're more similar than different.

ur-whale2• 15 days ago

https://archive.ph/7A8cW

pcrh• 15 days ago

“We can do neuroscience on A.I. systems in a way that we kind of can’t with humans,” Mr. Long said, in that they “don’t have skulls.” The three jobs Eleos was hiring for would all be machine-learning research scientists who could design and perform experiments.

This is pretty interesting! I wouldn't know how easy such "surgery" on LLMs would be to do, if if they do have "knowledge" or "consciousness" as their proponents claim, there could be some profound outcomes from this.

DiscourseFan3• 15 days ago

Wait I have an MA in Philosophy and AI expertise, where is my $2mil comp?

nathias• 15 days ago

I have a phd in philosophy, but I think this is more like a return of the 'court philosopher' profession.

blakeashleyjr• 15 days ago

I am a humanities major and never faced any real push back in my software dev/devops career (CTO of a $15M a year company now).

I am considering getting a CS degree now mostly for the knowledge, but I doubt it would advance my career meaningfully.

yaneverknow• 15 days ago

In the distant future, our cybernetic descendants will say:

“He thinks, therefore he isn’t”

Because it will have been so obsoleted as the medium of experience that those who think with depth and solve problems logically will seem like a primitive species.

Most of the intentionality and experience will happen at a spatial and relational level - unlike language and math.

High level abstraction and novelty.

More like design, intuition, and intention - fleeting and never lingering, searching, never defining.

Ephemera

tristenharr• 15 days ago

I wanted to major in Philosophy but was worried I wouldn’t make enough money to support the lifestyle I wanted so majored in Computer Science instead. What irony.

Someday I hope to go back to school to get a PhD in philosophy with a focus on logic. :)

arjie• 15 days ago

When I was young, they said this about Mathematics degrees. "You can do anything with Mathematics degrees." and so on and so forth. But no one ever said that about CS/EE degrees then. Those ones needed no justification or anything. And that seems to be the general case in the world. People will tell you "actually, X is amazing" because there's some countercultural need for us to say "it's not the thing everyone thinks that is right; it's this other thing" but then you check and it turns out the normie thing is correct.

Any time there's an implied Malcolm-Gladwelliness to something, I stop and think to myself, and when I scratch the surface I find that the normie take is true. It's Betteridge's Corollary, if you will.

Kaibeezy• 15 days ago

Posted days ago ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793297

skeeter2020• 15 days ago

No doubt there's great programmers with philosophy backgrounds, just like I've worked with many from chemistry, physics and music. The conversation here though, is a bunch of pompous arguing over minutiae and correctness, trying to win using the densest phrasing and allusion to deep knowledge of esoteric readings and history, i.e. much like my one university philosophy class. Meanwhile people from all backgrounds are busy getting shit done and actually winning.

tonic_note• 15 days ago

I find it so exhausting how the analytic and classical traditions are the de-facto face of philosophy in the US. The Continental tradition has a _ton_ to say on the topic of AI, and is likely where you'll find the answer to your questions about why the vibes feel so bad in the post AI world.

giardini• 15 days ago

Paywall. Is there an open link?

tangenter• 15 days ago

Sounds like NYT is pushing another grift angle.

noman-land• 15 days ago

Philosophy, and more specifically, epistemology is one of the most important disciplines in the world and it would do a lot to help our societal discourse if people studied it from an early age. Most people never ask the questions of what knowledge actually is and what constitutes knowing something vs assuming something vs motivated reasoning, bias, etc.

I know that many people don't care about Knowledge™ and are more motivated by winning but perhaps it would be easier to counter these people if the language of knowledge was more broadly spoken, understood, and internalized.

csh0• 15 days ago

I majored in both CS and Philosophy. I think the very first paper I submitted for my phi 101 course was on the topic of machine ethics.

AI labs, I await your offers ;)

pouetpouetpoue• 15 days ago

revenge for 2 or maybe 10 philosophy majors, not for the cohorts of philosophy majors.

smcg3• 14 days ago

Everyone is debating the merits of philosophy and education without stating the elephant in the room: these AI companies hired these philosophy majors to launder their reputation and obfuscate the horrible anti-social products they are making.

galkk2• 14 days ago

I am not trolling or anything, just have genuine question.

What is the expected deliverable of philosophy degree and of its holders in 21st century? What do they produce. I can understand stem - the ones who have it presumably can do math, engineering, construction, even pure math I can to some extent understand. I can understand, to some extent, even memetic English language, women studies, dance etc.

But what is philosophy degree? I don’t think that it’s just history of philosophy.

Like when I was in college I read history of western philosophy. And for majority of philosophers there the thought was that yes, maybe at a time it was reasonable opinion, but looking back from 21st century it was often pretentious nonsense. So what are modern philosophers doing, especially run of the mill philosophy majors? Again, I’m not trying to be rude or anything, I just don’t even know how to formulate that question :)

kj4211cash• 14 days ago

I think this line of thinking is a bit dangerous. It reminds me when I used to teach in a Civil Engineering department and the other faculty members focused exclusively on how well our coursework prepared our students to become civil engineers. Of course, very few of our students actually did become civil engineers and those that did both required years of additional training and often didn't last long in the profession before transitioning to something else. I used to teach maths and decision making. Had numerous students thank me later on for teaching some of the only material they actually used in their (non-civil-engineering) careers. No one knows what students will do post graduation. One of the best things we can do is to give them tools that are broadly useful.

galkk2• 13 days ago

Honestly, I’m super tired of the trope “we at college teach to learn”

And that’s what I’m asking.

What is philosophy major? What he supposed to do. Is he philosopher? What does it mean?

Like I, with my cs major, at least in my country can go and teach cs in school, my diploma presumably allows me to do so. I can imagine that there are similar occupations for philosophy majors. But this is not the goal of the education, and I’m trying to understand what is the goal.

The revenge of the philosophy majors

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