Quit Your Technology Job and Get a Humanities Ph.D.

[EltBerserker]

Hmm, this is an interesting video. Science and technology are great, but so are the humanities, I wonder what the fuss-

>As seen on...

oh.

[chansetwo]

Great video. One cannot truely be an educated member of society without a solid foundation in philosophy.

[Zralf]

i don't need to go to school for 5 years to learn how to be a human.

[DSBrekus]

What an idiot. He had to get a philosophy degree to figure out what everyone should be able to figure out on their own. It doesn't take a useless degree or meaningless terminology to be intelligent or caring about society and anyone who things so is extremely narrow minded.

[DSBrekus]

@DSBrekus thinks* not things* lololol

[cowpacino]

um

[omghai2u]

occupy protestors should live outside of this guys house

[dojohansen123]

Oh my.. what an exercise in mediocrity. So he didn't realize tech is providing means to an end until he went to philosophy class. Pity his philosophy class hasn't equipped him to understand not all are like him.

I guess MY personal experience is about as interesting. It is this: techies tend to be intellectuals; the humanists I've known are comparative lightweights and often only superficially interested in understanding or truth.

If you can't build it, you don't understand it.

[omghai2u]

@dojohansen123 "the humanists I've known are comparative lightweights and often only superficially interested in understanding or truth" spot on my good sir, well put

[theInsertionPoint]

@dojohansen123 Technology is overrated

[Beast9156]

Looks like stanfords humanitites department is lacking enrollment!

[tubub]

This is exactly what people SHOULDN'T be hearing.

Go into technology. Forget taking humanities in college.

[theInsertionPoint]

@tubub This is exactly what people SHOULD be hearing. Go into humanities, technology is destroying our world. The world is losing its culture, language, integrity, health, and nature. All that technology is doing is facilitating human laziness, destroying the environment, inducing obesity, and disconnecting us from each other and the natural world.

[tubub]

@theInsertionPoint

The world is losing poverty, which you mistake for culture. Human life spans have never been longer, people have never enjoyed the kind of knowledge they do today, and more people live in relative prosperity than ever in the history of the world. All of this due to technology.

Technology does not facilitate laziness. I'm sorry you and a few others in this country use it that way.

Humanities is worthless today, unless you're living on a hippie commune. You can use it there

[theInsertionPoint]

@tubub The world is not losing poverty; the gap between rich and poor is getting bigger in many countries. About half the world lives in third world or relatively poor countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. You might say they are poor because they lack technology but its technology that allows them to live so long and overpopulate their countries. This overpopulation is a cause of the poverty. Also, living longer is not necessarily positive. Its about quality over quantity.

[The3xcal1bur]

The lady "knowingly" eyeing the younger woman chewing between 3:31 and 3:43 was well spotted (perhaps her daughter). I think the camcorder operator definitely combined technology with morality. Well worth watching for that. This video should be watched with his speech at TED ("moral operating system"). He makes a valid point.

[grunder20]

good video about man and its fields

[Dagothdaleet]

forgot to take speech class "um"

[wattyofthewattykins]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi It can help shape the conversation that may allow for the creation of AI. Also: philosophy is not evil. Your rant seems to target one aspect of philosophical discussion: rhetoric. However, you should remember that in philosophy, rhetoric's purpose is to convince others of goodness for goodness sake (whatever you may define that as) if you want to use rhetoric as a ploy to do things that aren't good then you're a sophist and not a philosopher.

[wattyofthewattykins]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi A human brain is not the only place intelligence can exist. If we can define intelligence, something that philosophy can help you do, then you can begin to work through how to replicate it.

Asking the right questions is imperative to solving a problem.

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi Machines will get smarter and faster no doubt. But sentience is not in technology. If you think its a hardware configuration, algorithm or quantum processor that will get you there..ask the AI researchers ..they have no clue :-)

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi Empiricism sounds like the religion you follow. The accuracy of the "scientific" results you study is your faith, since you haven't performed the experiments yourself. Stop being programmed by textbooks and confining yourself to one method of learning. Logic, intuition and meditation are tools of knowledge just as much as empirical observation. The objective of philosophy is not different from science - it is just another way to pursue reality.

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi Again I understand why the word soul makes you uncomfortable - The Bible is so full of crap that the scientific community assumes other religions are the same. After all you guys are still fighting about evolution Vs creation. The 10 Avatars of Hinduism are a mythological parallel of the evolution of species - thousands of years before Darwin was born.

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi We aren't talking about belief in the existence of a "Soul" which again is a Christian concept. In Hinduism it is called Aatman. Unlike the soul which is supposed to be "contained" inside a human being like any other organ the Aatman is not a physical entity. The Aatman is the "Self" or the Seer we talked about. It is attributeless, is never born or dies, is beyond space, time and matter. Vedanta explains this concept through logic without the need for blind faith.

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi Since the Aatman is non-material and attributeless, it cannot be empirically measured. It can be postulated through logical discrimination like in Vedanta or it can be known through subjective self-experience through progressive meditation. The beauty is that only concepts such as Aatman, Brahman, Karma, Parana etc. give a complete explanation or "Grand Unified Theory" of reality of this universe. You will need to research it to appreciate it.

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi I am not taking about how to build sentient computers. The point is that when the reality of the world correctly understood by whatever means, we will realize 1) Sentient computers CANNOT be build 2) There is NO NEED for such machines. I will give you one word to start looking for answers VEDANTA.

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi Why the brain ? Even the food you eat, hormones secreted by the glands, and the weather outside can influence your behavior and abilities. The Seer is not the personality nor its knowledge, memories nor its thoughts - the Seer is attributeless. The Experiencer experiences the thoughts that come and go. Anything which can be objectified - a thought, time, space, matter etc. is NOT the Subject. The Subject is the I, separate from the objects of experience.

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi No faith will not move mountains. We are still limited by physical laws in the field of matter and energy. You have read the wrong religion if that is what you were made to believe. Hinduism literally has several thousand texts on agriculture, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, physics, anatomy etc... So if you really studied Hinduism, you would not compare Brahman to Yahweh. Hinduism is based on science and logic, NOT blind faith like Christianity, Islam or Judaism.

[acidcrashguy]

@acidcrashguy The gods you see in Hinduism don't exist - it is mere symbolism to pass on a scientific message through generations. "God", "faith", "prayer" are western words - they are not part of Sanskrit. There is no heaven, hell, sin, curse etc.. in Hinduism. Again these are bullshit from the Bible.

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi All you are saying is that you don't know what happens when someone dies. The human brain may have billions of synapses, but you cant even explain the death of a fly. I have programmed neural nets, evolutionary and machine learning algorithms for a long time - it has nothing to do with general intelligence. "Hardware" is necessary for input (sense organs), output (action) and processing (cognition). But the Seer or Experiencer is not the same as his hardware.

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi Alright question for you: You have the hardware - the brain of a dead person who died of say heart attack. This way you don't have to build from scratch. Now take it and fit it into a robot and make it self aware. Something is missing isn't it ?

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi In other words - you can build eyes, ears and even a brain into a robot. But unless it becomes self-aware, it can never think. Awareness is not an emergent property of evolution or complexity. Neither is it a chemical reaction or quantum mechanics of the brain. It is the basis of all reality. We ourselves are vibrations or energy and matter - the subjective world we create every moment exists only in our thoughts. It is not "out there".

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi The reason we perceive a reality around us is because we are conscious. Consciousness is not a bio-chemical process - and hence is not a physical law. It is a natural law much subtler than the physics we know. Consciousness cannot be programmed or manufactured - it comes from a field of universal consciousness that the Hindus call the "Brahman".

[acidcrashguy]

@acidcrashguy Western science is materialistic - hence the search to find the Higgs-Boson in the LHC, or the quest to find other planets with life, machines, robots - its all about the control of matter. But theoretical physics, AI, search of extra terrestrials and other kinds of fundamental research are stuck without progress for decades. Because these questions cannot be answered unless we change the paradigm from matter to consciousness.

[DjPacific2011]

This guy needs to take another Public Speech class, because he says "umm" and "uhh" way too many times. It's distracting from his message...

[37Dionysos]

I have a Brown University Ph.D. in the Humanities and I live like an ex-con. Must be my fault.

[michalchik]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi I think sentience is probably much harder or more confusing without massive parallelism. The thing is that von neumann machines (the type of computer we have) can simulate all these features to an arbitrary level of accuracy. It is just a question of speed that is why they can handle massively parallel processes like protein folding, weather simulation, and the like but it requires supercomputers or distributed computing.

[michalchik]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi LOL, Sorry I screwed up the, LTD is the more common one. I had a prof that always used to write that and we made fun of him. Now after 20 years I do it ;-)

[michalchik]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi LDP (long term deprssion) it is the opposite of LTP. STP is short term potentiation and is thought to be important in working memory and perhaps sense memory. Sensitization is a non associative learning process that aids sense memory and probably object reacquisition in noisy data streams.

[michalchik]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi Look up neural network software. There is a huge amount of it some free available for home PC's. It is not even close to powerful enough for useful AI but it will show you what is possible. You might also be interested in cellular automata if you are not familiar with them.

[michalchik]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi Information structure not physical structure. Parallel systems can be simulated on serial ones and visa versa. Computers are getting better and better at pattern recognition. In some pattern recognition tasks they are better than biological systems but biological systems are still far more flexible. That aside, the important point is that human brains are just one small type of parallel system which is one small type of pattern recognition system.

[acidcrashguy]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi AI has failed, yes failed, because western thought/philosophy has failed. Human beings aren't machines, we are conscious entities. Learn eastern philosophy and indigenous sciences - yoga, ayurveda, charkra, vaastu, etc.. and may be, just may be your thinking about "how the brain works" will change.

[Icemario87]

Awesome. Too bad I'm not a "technologist"

[JennyFarlopez]

You don't need to study a PhD in humanities to learn about all these topics. Regular people who work on science-related jobs also have curiosity for other subjects. Only mediocre people are so focused in their job they don't know anything else about the world.

[luigisopa]

"erm"

[michalchik]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi My masters degree was in neuroscience and I worked on AI design for A2I2 so yes i am familiar with LTP, LDP, STP, sensitization, etc, They are all easily modeled on computers and have been so for decades. You might want to look at Peter Voss's papers on AI. They are relatively nontechnical.

[michalchik]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi This is a deep question That I don't really know how to address in a forum this small. Suffice it to say that I and other people believe they understand the general principles of mind well enough that it is clear that there are other ways to implement it. The brain is not archetypal but just one case of many and a case that does not come close to fulfilling the meaningful range of what intelligence can be. If you are genuinely interested I will chat with you more.

[D503z]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi

I totally understand you. I had a pshychology teacher in high school who was unable to tell her 8 year old son to behave himself, and was becoming hysterical. On the other hand, she was full of theoretical knowledge about how to raise your child perfectly. My girlfriend is about to become a teacher, an on her college she is taught by people who spent 20 years in academia, without EVER having to teach average kids in school, not even for one day. That's humanities for you.

[michalchik]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi Yes, but this kind of dynamic quasi stability can be modeled on other substrates including binary Von Neumann type machines (i.e. regular computers). 

[DavidAKZ]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi See 'Fear of Freedom' Erich Fromm. Sounds like you need to avoid the possibility of quiet desperation. Physical, spiritual and emotional health have nothing to do with logic and rationalisation

[D503z]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi

Yes, but that does not imply that there is no progression without empty blabber. If I were to go out and give lessons on how fantastic the flat Earth theory is, that would not be my contribution to progress, it would be just nonsense. :-)

Btw, I am not bothered by this guys opinion of how "higher" or more noble philosophy is, I am bothered by his narcissistic view on technology and science, and most of all on his utter ignorance of basic economy.

[enedene1]

The title should be "Quit your technology job to become an ego maniac".

[DavidAKZ]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi and the world is full of intellectual derelicts

[D503z]

I really don't understand why this guy is giving a lesson on Stanford. Here in Zagreb, Croatia, we have a faculty of philosophy, and I can tell you that any freshman can give you this speach after a bottle of wine. Maybe we should start exporting those guys to elite universities abroad.

[BlueAvenue22]

@D503z Pretentious much? He was just sharing his experiences and it was far from low brow.

[DavidAKZ]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi Gillain Tett who is Deputy Editor of the Financial TImes has a PhD in Anthropology

[DavidAKZ]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi ontological ?

[michalchik]

@SamaelTePersigoaTi I doubt the shortest path to AI is designing it to imitate the human brain. Evolution does not build things that are conceptually simple or globally optimal. We will get good ideas from biology but not clear design specifications.

[saris42]

this should be called, listen to a man say UM...... Jesus! good topic, BAD public speaking

[ragsiruh]

@saris42 :-). yeah, he sounds like a wildebeest who has good thoughts

[lilchimy]

@saris42 haha, whyyy did you say that?? now I can't watch the video, the UMs are just too distracting :)))

[saris42]

@lilchimy

Sorry :(...

I liked the Presentation, Made me think about things, wasn't boring or anything, the information presented was good. Just mentioning that the man giving it, should have paid a little bit more attention in his public speaking classes. 

[mumbles005]

This should be titled "How a Humanities Ph.D. can compliment your Graduate degree from MIT in A.I."

[cskvarma6]

Insightful talk even though I do not agree to all the points made in it. Surprised to find myself being the first user to view and like this video

[DarthKazi]

Good idea. Put yourself in a lifetime of debt, just so the other guys at the burger joint can call you "Doctor". ;)

[thebradybrunsh]

@DarthKazi Why this isn't an argument is explained in the last 3 minutes. This video doesn't explain why you should live off just a PhD, or why just anyone should get a PhD, it explains why 'technologists' - people already in the technology sector - can benefit from adding experience with the humanities to their education. Also PhD programs tend to be funded; you don't take out loans or work at burger joints.

[AndreGole]

@DarthKazi man, is really money the only thing which counts for you?