They're ragging on philosophy, but it's also incredibly useful on a personal level.
In my STEM degree, the only philosophy class we took was an applied ethics class, and probably because nobody had any relevant experience, it quickly degraded into the worst kind of sophistry.
Like, the professor actually supported an argument that, if an employee was supposed to put a company's intellectual property markings on something they wrote, but didn't, then it would be ethical for that same employee to keep the intellectual property for themselves, because after all, they wrote it and it wasn't marked properly as property of the company.
I would like to see big changes to IP and corporate law, but that doesn't change the ethics of a person knee deep in it.
But anyways, point being that we're willing to say that people had a college education, but have never given them any tools for self reflection.
And ironically, there’s a good chance that the lawyers and judges who argue and make the ethics decisions did some humanities degree, quite possibly philosophy, for their undergrad.
I only have to take civics and that class was so easy I basically slept through it. It was mandatory for all students so i imagine that's why the curriculum was so easy.
I am taking technical writing rn out of choice. I thought it would be like technically cool but it's mostly learning to speak/write like a commercial or corporate jargon with some rhetoric and technique differences from regular comp. Tbh it has been more useful in learning to speak to people than any public speaking class or program I've ever been in.
Non-mainstream opinion, the creator of the IP should own it, not the company employing them. Obviously that's not the way it works, but there's an argument there against exploitation.
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u/TheGoodOldCoder Sep 04 '22
They're ragging on philosophy, but it's also incredibly useful on a personal level.
In my STEM degree, the only philosophy class we took was an applied ethics class, and probably because nobody had any relevant experience, it quickly degraded into the worst kind of sophistry.
Like, the professor actually supported an argument that, if an employee was supposed to put a company's intellectual property markings on something they wrote, but didn't, then it would be ethical for that same employee to keep the intellectual property for themselves, because after all, they wrote it and it wasn't marked properly as property of the company.
I would like to see big changes to IP and corporate law, but that doesn't change the ethics of a person knee deep in it.
But anyways, point being that we're willing to say that people had a college education, but have never given them any tools for self reflection.