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.
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.
Very conceptual and the theoretical bits were great to retain, even if they feel ‘useless’ when you’re young.
On the whole, though, it's _way_ easier to bluff your way through a philosophy degree than a CS degree.
Coding was always the easy part of a CS major. Claude won't help you on a proctored Differential Equations exam.
More seriously, the main issue with most philosophical investigations is a question of grounding.
When you start stacking abstract concepts on top of each other, things can get dicey very quickly. Moreso if you are smart.
Category error: Theory of compiler != compiler
Few things are as difficult to check as a philosophical argument.
Some philosophy study is very good for raising the questions one should always ponder in life, but building a career on philosophy very easily leads you astray.
I have studied philosophy, literature and physics. In literature you know everything is made up, that is the point of literature, creating art, but in philosophy many people make up things and then pretend they are real. Objective ethics? Postulating the nature of reality? Please.
Compiler errors make programming easier, not harder. They are firm, clear rules about how something needs to be in order to work
Philosophy has no such constraints or automated checks, it's harder
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.
However even I can see that philosophy as a field is flawed and generic advice to tell students to go philosophy is incredibly problematic. As someone with philosophical tendencies this is incredibly obvious to me but and I must suggest that those who keep endorsing philosophy as a professional discipline for "success reasons" are putting forth a deeply prejudiced argument due to certain blinders.
For example as soon as you claimed "philosophy is harder than math", then I cannot take this line of argument seriously. The entire statement is a bad and unphilosophical statement. Anyone with an intuition for good philosophy, who is well read and has the wisdom of life experience, who is scientifically literate, should have known that before saying it. It actually offends me. It is intellectually insulting.
For example if you knew about STEM-elitism, it is not many mental steps to "philosophy-elitism" of the sort of sentiment "Philosophy >_hard Math". Why exactly does omitting this explication make my opinion a fallacy? It doesn't. It's an online forum with people handwaving their opinions, just as the people above me were already doing.
What is a philosophical statement?
One tendency I've noticed is that people well versed in philosophy can communicate well. Just anecdotally. Not something I am seeing here in this response.
I think you're strawmanning my point - no one asks you to act like a philosopher 24/7, but this exchange shows you're very far away from that bar.
For me at least, I found CS the easiest, followed by math, with philosophy the most difficult and challenging. With philosophy, you need to be as rigorous as when writing a mathematical paper, but at least with math there is a highly structured and rigid format. I can easily see why mathematics, for a very long time, was considered a subfield of philosophy.
Personally though, I'd challenge framing entire disciplines as easier or harder than each other, I think that's an individualized thing. Some people could easily find philosophy much easier than a computer science course. For me, I'd really struggle and probably couldn't complete a fine arts degree. I've just never been able to draw or paint, it's just a skill I've tried but failed to be able to develop. So in general understanding an art degree is the easy degree to BS your way through, but I'd find a fine art bachelor's degree harder to complete than a math PhD. At least unless it was a degree that didn't require any studio classes, so maybe art history?
2. The fact that you completely failed to read this exchange context carefully, such casual prejudice toward the argument from authority ("I am a teacher, take it from me, philosophy > math blah blah blah"), also raises doubt in the quality of actually existing philosophy education. It is a lot more like court philosopher behavior than any regard for close reading and actual research-level rigor.
3a. There's an objective, rational argument as to why philosophy is "hard" (emphasis on the quotes). A lot of it has to do with the fact that it is about speculatively complex questions. See for example Noam Chomsky's elaboration on this, he generally philosophy as a field as having deflationary characteristic in relation to scientific progress.
3b. What this also means is that "hardness" is not a good measure at all of a human discipline being actually a good discipline--astrology can also be very "hard", so can Derrida, etc. Simply writing a good piece of fiction is also cognitively hard. But where is this nuance, I ask you, in the OP comments? I do not see it. Where is the impact of philosophy, then?
All of these ought to part and parcel of students who actually learned philosophy well. The fact that multiple top comments do not evince this level of learning, at least on a tech social media forum, says a lot and it should trouble you.
(Having written all this, I think there is a further elaboration on 3a that makes the question/issue much more interesting, but it does not excuse the attitude of philosophy-chauvinism which is well known as thing in academia, analogous to how math/physics has their share of hardness chauvinists over other disciplines, ad infinitum.)
My general opinion is the same: saying "philosophy > math", and variations thereof, is generally an uneducated, absurd, stupid, unwise comment. I won't mince words with that. Nor am I being paid to write a proper article as to why such a view is deeply misled. It's an online forum.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Philosophy is a broad, vague category.
edit: okay, considering im downvoted more than you, apparently you should be more rude. lesson learned.
i suppose its a good example of another non-interesting comment that gets upvoted, though.
if that is the case, don't engage. seems simple enough to me.
you went out of your way to read that many layers deep into a flagged comment chain, just to make a completely unrelated comment to try and dunk on me. it makes no sense.
the only reason i can think of is wanting to score some cheap karma, as the tides were already against me after i made the egregious faux pas of saying someone was being rude.
Really miss working with him, but he has since moved on to better things in his choice of locale.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
I will take the other end of this bet
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.
Did your philospophy degree not teach you to think "what could go wrong?".
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.