
Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department? - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/why-did-a-billionaire-give-75-million-to-a-philosophy-department
======
meri_dian
This is why philosophy is important:

Education has two related yet distinct purposes. The first is to endow us with
specific domain knowledge and reasoning. The second is to endow us with
general reasoning and critical thinking skills.

The value of natural language philosophy - not formal logic and other
mathematically adjacent subfields - is that it teaches us to be as rigorous as
possible when reasoning in natural language.

Given that so much of our lives and the events of history and society unfold
in natural language and that it is in natural language that we do much of our
critical thinking and reasoning, it's important that we hold ourselves to as
high a standard as is reasonably possible when talking (either to ourselves or
others) as when performing mathematical calculations.

It's often said that one of the benefits of studying math is that it improves
critical thinking skills. I believe this to be true, but I also believe that
if our primary concern is improving our day to day critical thinking skills,
then we would be better served studying natural language philosphy than
mathematics, because on a day to day basis we tend to think and reason and
debate and engage with one another in natural language.

~~~
stdbrouw
The irony is that when philosophers make statements like these, they never
provide any empirical evidence to back it up. Does philosophy really improve
critical thinking and reasoning skills? We're told it does, based on nothing
more than "that's what it feels like to me". Rigorous reasoning is worthless
without facts to reason on.

~~~
tommorris
There's some evidence that philosophy majors score pretty high on the GMAT
(for graduate admissions to business school) and on the LSAT (for law school),
as well as pretty good on the GRE Verbal and GRE Analytical Writing tests.

Less good at the GRE Quantitative Reasoning than all the science disciplines
(and economics) but better than the rest of the arts and humanities subjects
(and better than accounting, which is slightly worrying).

See [http://dailynous.com/value-of-philosophy/charts-and-
graphs/](http://dailynous.com/value-of-philosophy/charts-and-graphs/)

Also:
[https://www.salon.com/2013/07/01/be_employable_study_philoso...](https://www.salon.com/2013/07/01/be_employable_study_philosophy_partner/)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-philosophy-
majors-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-philosophy-majors-
rule_n_4891404)

(I may be biased on this though: I have a BA and MA in Philosophy.)

~~~
sevenfive
> There's some evidence that philosophy majors score pretty high on the GMAT
> (for graduate admissions to business school) and on the LSAT (for law
> school), as well as pretty good on the GRE Verbal and GRE Analytical Writing
> test

As a philosophy major you should be the first to point out this doesn't imply
causation.

~~~
tommorris
> you should be the first to point out this doesn't imply causation

Nah, I'd rather just go nuclear on causation, with the assistance of Hume...

"...experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another;
without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and
renders them inseparable... It is allowed on all hands that there is no known
connexion between the sensible qualities and the secret powers; and
consequently, that the mind is not led to form such a conclusion concerning
their constant and regular conjunction, by anything which it knows of their
nature."

~~~
visarga
Why doesn't Hume believe in human mind grasping causal reasoning? Even in non-
scientific settings, causal reasoning is fundamental for humans.

~~~
wsy
Humes point is that we can't perceive causal relationships, even if we think
we do. We can only perceive events, and then our mind constructs causal
relationships on top of them. But these relationships are not inherent to the
world, they are only in our minds.

~~~
trendia
Judea Pearl wrote a whole book about proving causality (and when it can't be
proven).

A rough summary is available as a YouTube video:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HUti6vGctQM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HUti6vGctQM)

~~~
a_humean
They are very very closely related, and philosophers and Pearl cite each other
on the topic of causation, but Hume and philosophers are usually concerned
with a slightly different problem. Hume is concerned about the nature of the
necessity between any cause and effect which seemed to be implied by our
experience of events. Whereas Pearl (much less knowledgeable about Pearl) is
interested in how we can model events to give us high confidence in the
relation applying in a particular case while leaving the topic of necessity
and the fundamental nature of causation to the side and assuming a much more
vague /ad hoc notion of what causation is.

------
eddd
Philosophy today is one of the most undervalued discipline. It doesn't yield
any return on investment immediately and is mostly confusing at the beginning,
so people don't tend to have interest in it.

I think we have some sort global identity crisis because of that. Religions
are not sufficient enough and science doesn't even try to answer the question
of "why?" but rather "how?". In result of that, we ended up with no ideology
and no tools to build one for ourselves.

This is laughably ironic, because we really want some change in the way we
live and think and yet, we don't turn back and evaluate what people came out
with in the history.

edit: if you want to start with it:
[http://philosophizethis.org/category/episode/](http://philosophizethis.org/category/episode/)

~~~
fjsolwmv
Philosophy gets a bad rep for the same reason psychology and sociology and
applied macroeconomics do: because there is no way to clearly distinguish
right ideas from wrong ones, so the field is flooded with junk.

~~~
jm__87
Not sure I would lump economics and psychology in there. Economics tries to
explain some observable phenomenon which arises from human behavior which we
don't fully understand. Psychology again, tries to understand human behavior.
In theory, if we measured the correct things and the measurements were
accurate, we'd be able to make accurate predictions based on those
measurements in both fields. The problem is that we aren't able to do that
currently.

Philosophy is asking way more subjective questions, like "what should we do,
and why?". The answer will always vary by context and individual and there
will never be a "right" answer.

~~~
mcguire
Ok, I will say something. Economics had a problem in that it is partially
descriptive, as you say, but it is also partially normative: it wants to say
how things should be. Then it gets the two parts confused a lot, leading to
_homo economicus_ stuff.

Behavioral economics is more relevant to both the fields you describe.

~~~
jm__87
Do you mind giving an example?

~~~
mcguire
In _Misbehaving_ , Richard Thaler describes a meeting of psychologists where
he describes the best current thinking of economists as to what a "rational"
person would do if the government were to give a payment to all citizens as an
economic stimulus. I don't remember the details, but it involves the
recognition that a citizen would have to pay the money back (as taxes) at some
point, and that the citizen would have descendants in perpetuity---as a
result, the economic stimulus would fail because the citizen would lock the
payment into a 0-risk savings account. He had to have another economist at the
meeting reassure everyone that that was indeed the current best economic
thinking in order to stop them from laughing at him.

He recalls telling the story to Some Fameous Economist and being told that (a)
yes, that was the most rational thing to do in that situation, and (b) that it
was indeed what everyone would do.

------
oftenwrong
To answer the baity headline:

>William H. “Bill” Miller III ... attributes “much” of his success ... to the
“analytical training and habits of mind” his philosophical study at Johns
Hopkins inculcated. The way he sees it, more students should have the chance
for that intellectual stimulation.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
As SMBC put it - is philosophy valuable? Yes, every day, a thousand times. Is
a philosophy credential valuable? No.

~~~
dajohnson89
FWIW I would consider philosophy degree a plus when reviewing job
applications.

~~~
dsacco
In what context, and a plus over what other degrees? I don't agree that it's a
plus unless the candidate has double majored in a relevant degree, or did a
philosophy BSc. and a relevant MSc afterwards.

If I were reviewing applications for a software engineering role, I would
primarily prioritize computer science and electrical engineering degrees, then
secondarily mathematics and physics degrees. Of the subset without a degree in
STEM, I'd probably weight philosophy higher than some alternatives, but they
still wouldn't have priority unless their professional experience was more
impressive than other candidates.

I was initially a philosophy major during my undergrad (up to and including
300 and 400 level courses in Kant). I don't think philosophy degrees are a
useful signal to compare against more targeted degrees. They can certainly
teach logical and abstract thinking; however, at at the default level of
effort I've observed, most students do not graduate a philosophy degree with
significant enough critical thinking skills to overcome the sheer amount of
domain knowledge they're missing by not having studied computer science. And
it gets difficult to specify exactly what it would look like for a philosophy
major to make up for the lack of computer science education by having
superlative reasoning ability, if that's the case.

Ideally you want a student who demonstrated that they put significant effort
into their academic work, enough to intellectually grasp it, apply it and
reason about it. If you have two students who appear to have put equal effort
into their studies, I can't see why philosophy would be a plus. A philosophy
degree will be a net negative for the professional functions of a software
engineering role unless the applicant has spent significant time overcoming
the lag in programming experience and computer science understanding.

In other words, I think people use philosophy degrees as a proxy for overall
intelligence and reasoning ability, or maybe even academic effort. But I
consider that to be a red herring - philosophy studies are useful, but they
don't intrinsically encourage more effort and engagement than more relevant
degrees do, and the skills they offer are far less relevant for the
professional work of engineers (not _irrelevant_ , just missing quite a lot).
If a candidate demonstrates strong suitability for a software engineering role
with a philosophy degree, they probably would have excelled with or without it
because they had to be motivated enough to self-study computer science anyway.
The philosophy major in particular doesn't encapsulate or confer that kind of
motivation and engagement, so it's better to just look for a targeted degree.

Again, this isn't to say philosophy isn't useful - much of my dialectic style
comes from Wittgenstein. It's just that on its own philosophy is like
arithmetic: fundamentally useful and broadly applicable in everyday life, but
not nearly enough to prepare one for a _software engineering_ job.

~~~
fjsolwmv
Only the first 1 out of 4 years of a CS/EE degree is relevant to most
professional software "engineer" degrees. That's why Mathematicians and
Physicists have O problem joining the field. You can learn programming as a
hobby as well as you can learn philosophy as a hobby, as long as you have
foundational critical thinking skills

------
rz2k
Why on earth is the entire last paragraph devoted to Lawrence Krauss’s musings
on philosophy? It may represent a widespread attitude found among physicists,
but not one many people with a background in both disciplines shares. In
physics forums, the same dismissive attitude can also be found about pure math
for which a use in physics has not yet been found.

A fourth paragraph might talk about how any curriculum in financial
engineering begins with an even bigger assumption than in physics that the big
problems are already mostly understood, and that the rest is computation to
fill in a few gaps. And yet this donor thinks the formal study of philosophy
is important.

My understanding of what he is saying about philosophy and discipline has to
do with developing the capability to handle a _large_ problem analytically.
This is different than the type of discipline where you break things down into
small problems then work through them individually.

When Lawrence Krauss talks about philosophy, you get the impression that he
thinks it is all people in coffee shops in black turtlenecks being awed by
random thoughts rather than people doing anything formal or logically
rigorous.

------
vlunkr
I believe that at least an introductory philosophy course should be required
for all college students. (maybe high school, I don't know). Philosophy has a
bad reputation because 1) it's seen as the most pretentious of fields and 2)
getting a degree in it is not a quick path to making any money. But in my
experience, most people who haven't taken a course don't _really_ know what
philosophy is about.

I took a few courses and I consider them among the most valuable parts of my
college experience. You look at some of the oldest questions(and various
answers) around, and use those to learn how to really form and analyze
arguments objectively. I may be preaching to the choir here, but if you
haven't studied any philosophy, try it out!

~~~
dcow
Back in the seventies, physics was called natural philosophy. In college, it
amazed me how many people study sciences without even asking or caring why.
They don't know the limits of the knowledge they seek or of the tools
(repeatable observations) in their belt because they never learned how to ask
uncomfortable questions or learn formal logic. Most certainly some of this is
by design as colleges evolved into little businesses obsessed with crafting
financially successful students before well rounded ones. On the other hand,
some is probably just a reflection of the rationalist zeitgeist—philosophy
became supernatural. To me, it's sadly dogmatic. You stop asking existential
questions when your peers stop challenging your belief system.

~~~
nerfhammer
If by seventies you mean 1870s

~~~
dcow
At my liberal arts college, that "tradition" stuck around longer than other
places in what I imagine is at some level a statement of reverence.

------
nbulka
Only a truly great scientist gets mentioned as contributing to the philosophy
of science, or is characterized also as a logician on wikipedia.

That's often because they were pursuing some philosophical riddle which they
were more concerned about than the theories that would later become their
legacy.

Cantor and Godel wanted to find God, and in their search, provided much of the
early work for Turing and computer science to develop.

Einstein similarly wanted to know the mind of God, and in doing so contributed
to quantum mechanics and invented relativity.

Bell's explanation of his theorem in a 1985 BBC Radio interview includes an
appeal to the debate between free-will and determinism when interpreting his
results.

TL;DR — Important scientific and mathematical breakthroughs often come from a
deep exploration of metaphysics, epistemology, free-will, and ontological
truth.

~~~
Alekanekelo
> Bell's explanation of his theorem in a 1985 BBC Radio interview includes an
> appeal to the debate between free-will and determinism when interpreting his
> results.

That sounds very interesting. Is the radio interview (or a transcript) still
available? I tried searching for it and found a possible match for a show on
BBC Radio 3 in 1983 [1].

[1]
[http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/7c8c2aba48024a5e925d0aca69c57b21](http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/7c8c2aba48024a5e925d0aca69c57b21)

~~~
nbulka
[https://books.google.com/books?id=KHezRs7nsAgC&pg=PA45&sourc...](https://books.google.com/books?id=KHezRs7nsAgC&pg=PA45&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false)

------
sevenfive
Interesting to read all the responses in this thread observing incidental
correlations between intellectual or practical accomplishments and philosophy.
Famous scientists are sometimes interested in philosophy, philosophy majors
score high on the GRE, etc.

It does not follow at all that studying philosophy helped cause those
accomplishments.

The situation is similar to brain training games like Lumosity. They do not
make you smarter in general, just better at that particular game. People who
are already smart will do better.

Personally, my argument for philosophy is that I enjoy it.

~~~
nbulka
Many famous scientists were interested in philosophical questions like the
nature of reality or "is God real?" and are only known as scientists because
they had these ultimately philosophical concerns.

~~~
sevenfive
This is such a lame argument. Nobody is going to cure cancer or build a better
tokamak because they attended a fancy wood-paneled lecture on God at Johns
Hopkins.

~~~
nbulka
Well ...

The Institute for Advanced Study is perhaps best known as the academic home of
Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel, after their
immigration to the United States. ... founded in 1930 by American educator
Abraham Flexner, together with philanthropists Louis Bamberger and Caroline
Bamberger Fuld.

Why not Johns Hopkins?

------
megaman22
Why not? He can do whatever he wants with his money. He's spent $100M on a
yacht already[1].

I was a little surprised that this was the largest donation to a Johns Hopkins
humanities department. This may be wrong, but I think of Johns Hopkins as in
the upper echelon of schools that tends to have massive endowments and wealthy
alumni.

[1]
[https://www.superyachtfan.com/superyacht_utopia_dv.html](https://www.superyachtfan.com/superyacht_utopia_dv.html)

~~~
xioxox
True, but if your country gives you tax breaks for donations, by giving you're
depriving other tax payers of your money. You're saying that what you're
donating to is more worthwhile than the average government spending, which may
not be true for some "charities". (By the way, this argument is not originally
mine but was in an interesting comedy on BBC Radio 4 yesterday:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09ply4y](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09ply4y))

~~~
dougmwne
A more accurate way of looking at this is that the government is incentivizing
a desirable behavior by matching a portion of any money a person contributes
to the common good. You have to give up some of your own after-tax wealth to
get the govt to kick in 20-30%. Since an individual is mostly putting their
own money into the charity, they will want to maximize their good feelings by
chosing a charity that adds a lot to the common good. And this is especially
true for people who make large gifts.

...At least for the US tax system(where this gift was made)

~~~
fjsolwmv
That's the theory, ut in practice most people give not to charities for others
but to schools/clubs/churches they are a member of, so it's a form of
nongoverbmental State/Local taxes.

------
gallerdude
Philosophy is a great example of something that’s definitely helpful, just
tough to lay out concrete benefits. You can give it a lot of ham-fisted
examples (philosophy helps with maths), but at the end of the day philosophy
is about life itself.

~~~
eddd
I'd rather say, philosophy is about thinking, it is a tool. Tool that gives
you ability to reason about pretty much anything.

------
cornholio
While laudable, it has some ego trip elements - he's not only thankful for the
"mind discipline" his training endowed him with, but wants the department to
bear his name. Really, a philosophy department named not after a famous local
philosopher or distinguished scholar, but a wealthy financier that happened to
study there? It a telling sign of our times.

~~~
_rpd
There are a lot of ego games. Non-anonymous philanthropy is probably the last
one we should discourage.

------
primodemus
Philosopher Michael Huemer considers this one of the most wasteful charitable
donations:
[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2018/01/huemer_on_ultra....](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2018/01/huemer_on_ultra.html)

------
pnathan
Nice! My opinion is that philosophy is _the_ undervalued discipline in
American life today.

To back that up: I would rather work with a philosopher than an arbitrary
"other degree" holder outside of the Math/CS preference. Particularly as the
person grows in seniority, the education becomes more and more useful.

------
philip1209
It's less interesting of a donation to me because the donor studied philosophy
there. It makes it seem more reactive than proactive.

------
mygo
All roads link to philosophy. At least, all Wikipedia articles do.

------
snambi
Why do we need philosophy?

