Serial Entrepreneur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities”

Um, I could and would love it to no end…but then how would I pay my mort­gage, food, and health insur­ance?

“As a stu­dent and teacher of the human­i­ties, I have watched with some dis­may as the cul­ture becomes increas­ing­ly dom­i­nat­ed by tech­ni­cians who often ignore or dis­miss press­ing philo­soph­i­cal and eth­i­cal prob­lems in their quest to build a bet­ter world.”

Yes. How­ev­er, there is a dan­ger here that we see the sit­u­a­tion sole­ly in terms of per­son­al­i­ties, when, in truth, the per­son­al­i­ties are large­ly irrel­e­vant now. The root prob­lem, let me sug­gest, is not so much with tech­nol­o­gy as with busi­ness. Tech is promi­nent only inso­far as it makes mon­ey. Our top­sy-turvy world is one in which every­thing is becom­ing busi­ness. If 10% of the ref­er­ences to the GDP in pub­lic dis­cus­sions were replaced by ref­er­ences to “civil­i­sa­tion”, things would look less dystopi­an. The books need to be bal­anced, but it would be great if we could bal­ance them while pick­ing up, trans­form­ing and car­ry­ing for­ward some of the old ideals.

OK, I just quit! Oh no, my mort­gage is due, and the enroll­ment process involves pay­ing a bunch of mon­ey. I don’t have much! Dang, this is going to be expen­sive. And where will I live? Oh crap, my car just ran out of gas.

Peo­ple here are tak­ing this far too seri­ous­ly. Look at it for what it is, and leave your own anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism at the door.

That said, I think the many peo­ple with ter­tiary qual­i­fi­ca­tions in human­i­ties already could fill the roles Mr. Horowitz describes here. For a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy to sug­gest peo­ple in oth­er fields should study human­i­ties and then fill these roles is a das­tard­ly move.

I had a real sense of déja vu as I read this arti­cle, Vivek Wad­hwa hav­ing said some­thing very sim­i­lar ear­li­er this year. Details on my blog http://westernindependent.blogspot.com/2012/05/ok-techies-have-their-limitations.html

Yeah, I agree with every­one here. This video is shit, and he is a shit speak­er. Both in con­tent and deliv­ery (um..um..um…um) I feel like I just wast­ed time hear­ing about a guy brag about how he got lucky. I got a bach­e­lor’s in phi­los­o­phy, and in biol­o­gy. I am going to med­ical school, phi­los­o­phy was for fun; it pays no bills, and I don’t want to be stuck doing dirty work for some guy with tenure. Because that is what get­ting a PhD in the human­i­ties real­ly entails.

The point of this is that he left the tech field to become study phi­los­o­phy. First, I am sure he had some mon­ey in the back to pay for this, so that’s nice for him. Sec­ond, he went from tech into the human­i­ties, and that’s going to give a phi­los­o­phy an ego boost (“You real­ly like us?!”), but real­ly? To encour­age peo­ple to do a PhD in the human­i­ties in the hope that maybe some open-mind­ed types in HR and man­age­ment (oxy­moron much?) will see their val­ue? That’s con­de­scend­ing, irre­spon­si­ble non­sense.

Okay, he’s not the best pre­sen­ter, and every­one should know the finan­cial bur­dens of earn­ing a PhD in medieval lit­er­a­ture at Ida­ho Tech Uni­ver­si­ty, but he’s spot on after 12:50:

“Would you real­ly val­ue your morta­gage more than the life of the mind?

What’s the point of your com­fort­able liv­ing if you don’t know what the human­i­ties have taught us about liv­ing well?

If you already have a job in the tech­nol­o­gy indus­try, you are already sig­nif­i­cant­ly more wealthy than the vast major­i­ty of our plan­et’s pop­u­la­tion. You already have enough.

No mat­ter how bad the econ­o­my is, you’re the lucky ones. With your back­ground and edu­ca­tion and expe­ri­ence, you will nev­er fall into pover­ty or sub­sis­tence liv­ing…”

And if you are a tech­nol­o­gist (or even just a reg­u­lar cit­i­zen of the web) and you _are_ inter­est­ed in the “big ques­tions,” what’s the extent of your self-direct­ed learn­ing? Brows­ing aldaily.com idly from time to time? If we all do this, who is going to pass on cul­ture to the next gen­er­a­tion, keep­ing the flame of civ­i­liza­tion alive through the gen­er­a­tions? See Lanier in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19fob-essay‑t.html

All of that said, remem­ber you don’t _have_ to spend $250,000 to study the West­ern canon at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. Find some­one you know who has a zest­ful and cre­ative mind, pick a clas­sic, start a blog, and explore the book togeth­er.

Daniel Scott Poyn­ter
daniel.poynter@gmail.com

I speak as a Math under­grad and 3rd-year Eng­lish Lit grad-school quit­ter who returned to soft­ware engi­neer­ing — and I say this is ridicu­lous and patron­iz­ing on so many lev­els. The gist: “I am a priv­i­leged white male who made boat­loads of mon­ey in tech, which enabled me to spend five years study­ing phi­los­o­phy, and now I look down my nose at tech. Every­one should do this!”

First, if he could get out of his Sil­i­con Val­ley bub­ble, he’d see that for the vast major­i­ty of human­i­ties grad stu­dents life is a thank­less, low-paid grind with dim employ­ment prospects and crush­ing debt. It is sim­ply untrue that employ­ers are slaver­ing to hire human­i­ties PhDs. You’d think a philoso­pher might be both­ered to col­lect a few facts to back up his asser­tions, but per­haps that is beneath him. Do some research and see for your­self how many MAs and PhDs are unem­ployed, under­em­ployed, on wel­fare, and/or strug­gling with stu­dent debt. Then flip­pant­ly dis­miss their con­cerns about pay­ing the bills by wav­ing your hand with plat­i­tudes about “the life of the mind.”

Sec­ond, the human­i­ties acad­e­my today — in my expe­ri­ence at least — is full of mud­dle-head­ed peo­ple who employ increas­ing­ly opaque jar­gon to hide the fact that they could­n’t rea­son their way out of paper bag, nor would they have any­thing use­ful to say once out of it. Lit­er­ary the­o­ry, for exam­ple, has become lit­tle more than a fad-dri­ven cir­cle-jerk.

Third, the real wis­dom of the human­i­ties (which *is* impor­tant), can and should be learned by high school stu­dents, under­grads (via core class­es), and adults (via enrich­ment class­es or book groups or self-study). But you don’t need to pay the edu­ca­tion­al-indus­tri­al com­plex a sec­ond mort­gage, plus lost wages, plus the mon­u­men­tal PITA of a dis­ser­ta­tion, in order to _learn some­thing from an effin’ book_, for God’s sake.

Fourth, “tech­ni­cians” and engi­neers and sci­en­tists have done more to give peo­ple a bet­ter life, heal their dis­eases, raise them out of pover­ty, relieve their back-break­ing labor, and enable them to even have a decent shot at “the life of the mind” than the whole army of self-stroking philoso­phers and ink-cough­ing pen-scratch­ers from Pla­to on down to Der­ri­da.

So, Mr. Horowitz, while I applaud your suc­cess, I must with all due respect ask you to drop the pompous wind-bag­gery and give us a real vision for edu­cat­ing the tech­no-myopic Philistines among us.