NYT: Philosophy majors in demand at AI labs
the world if we banned engineering and philosophy as majors bsky.app/profile/inka...
Buddy Toledo32Banned as majors, encouraged as minors. Both highly useful sets of tools to apply to reality, but even worse ones than the others to try to fully apprehend it with.
AlphaTrion2I was almost a philosophy major until one semester of philosophy and realized and I can not sit in the same classroom as these people and listen to their arguments for the next 4 years of my life.
Casey1My only retort is to insist that we have a class of tech bro that work in tech but who themselves aren't able to do any of the actual labor within it. Definitely have had far more success working with skilled tech workers with a humanities background than a BS tho.
A lot of jerks will smugly ask undergraduate philosophy majors ‘what are you gonna do with that?’ and it can be hard to know how to respond. One option, though, is ‘dress up marketing for AI firms as profound philosophy ahead of their IPOs’
Shen-yi Liao 廖顯禕11It's just so funny how every major outlet, from New Yorker to Economist to Atlantic to NYT, are running the same story in their business section, as if there were a coordinated PR campaign. Of course, that's not going to stop me as dept chair from putting them on the department bulletin board.
ʤan~ʤɑn~ʤɔn7setting aside noam's point here, but i used to do a bit in undergrad where i'd ask engineering, pre med, business, etc majors "what can you even do with that?" as my own little personal recompense
The Revenue of the Philosophy Majors A.I. labs are hiring contrarian, chin-stroking, finger-steepling sages. Who’s underemployed now? By Benjamin Wallace (Posted by a philosophy major. Hello Immanuel Kant) www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/b...
I don’t dispute this point at all, but my solution is “philosophy majors are the least human of the humanities”
Snowden St.14don’t bang on the entire liberal arts traditions because some of our worst psychopaths got their first scars in the pedant camps
Jeremy Pober6Tbh philosophy and math should probably be their own fourth thing like "conceptual and formal foundations of everything else"
ApocalypticaNow4IME, philosophy seemed to attract guys who weren't naturally good at math but wanted to be seen as studying something 'rigorous'
Megan Wachspress2Certainly the gender politics and valorization of youth and "genius" in philosophy much more closely resemble mathematics or STEM than sociology or English literature. Dare I say the explanatory variable is not the form of knowledge but the form of social organization in the field?
andrewtheblueskier2Linguistics is the most STEM of the humanities
jcc3332It’s also stunningly easy to end up with a Phil Major if you’re a CS student you could almost do it by accident
The "actually, companies want to hire humanities majors instead of STEMlords bc we have critical thinking skills" has been nearly two decades of cope at this point. The last gasp of this philosophy died during the GFC
Matt Darling18I love how it's an anonymous financier reporting his impressions of what others think. Extremely credible.
papabearp.bsky.social6Vividly remember people saying this when I went into my Philosophy major like 15 years ago. I think it has staying power because if you’re 18 and considering the humanities, you need to believe it on some level for sanity.
Kolmogorov’s Ghost2To their credit, philosophy students seem to fare pretty well in their careers no?
369enthusiast.bsky.social1it seems pretty likely that humanities undergrads are also letting claude write their essays or whatever
Caesar Catalina Wine Mixer1Mostly, but a few years ago I saw a Yale dean give a talk where she said that their most successful (academically and after graduating) STEM majors were consistently the ones who took lots of humanities classes, and/or chose Yale because of its humanities programs. So there’s something to it I think
