A response to Your Comments on "Why Paul Graham is (sort of) wrong about philosophy"

2014-05-27

First, I want to thank you guys for reading, criticizing, and commenting on my post. Given that there’s so many other excellent things you could have been reading, I’m honored that you spent a little time on what I’ve written. Now, let’s respond to some comments: Credentials A couple of comments came up about my “credentials.” Here’s some info: I studied philosophy and religion as an undergrad at the University of Central Florida.…

Why Paul Graham is (sort of) Wrong About Philosophy

2014-05-26

A couple years ago, Paul Graham wrote an essay about philosophy. The essay, on my reading, makes three central claims: Philosophy has largely been driven by our failure to realize that our words are imprecise. This failure is the result of failing to search for useful knowledge. We can do philosophy better if we filter out thoughts that don’t meet a usefulness criterion. While I agree with a lot of what Graham says about philosophy in his essay, I think Graham is wrong on some of the more important points he makes.…

How to Break into a Mobile Dev Career in 10 months or less

2014-05-22

A little less than a year ago, I decided that the philosophy professor scam was too risky for my wife and I. Instead, I decided to pursue a career in app development (and maybe do a tech startup). About 10 months after that decision, I got two internships at two companies as an Android Developer.¹ Hopefully, one of these internships will turn in to a full-time gig (and I have some reason to think that this will happen).…

Why I'll Probably Try to Manipulate You

2014-05-21

I became a hippie when I was a freshman in college. When I say I became a hippie, I don’t mean that I wore tie dye t-shirts all the time, smoked a lot of weed, and listened to “All you need is love” all day. I was a hippie even though I owned zero tie dye t-shirts, wasn’t cool enough to get invited to the weed parties, and had never heard that famous Beatles song that more conventional hippies love.…

Should the Idea Person get Extra Equity?

2014-04-24

As I mentioned in my last post, I have some ideas for a startup, and I’m excited to start working on them.¹ Unfortunately, doing a startup raises a lot of questions that I, as a former wannabe philosophy professor, haven’t really considered. Since its probably not a good idea to dive in to a venture that I don’t really understand, it seems like I should spend some time wrestling with what we might call “startup questions.…

Why I'm Glad my Dream Job Didn't work out

2014-04-22

For the past 5 years of my life, I’ve dreamed of having a job where I would get paid to think about interesting and important ideas and to try to get young people to be so passionate about those ideas that they would want to fight anyone who disagrees with them. For the past 5 years, I hoped I was going to be a philosophy professor I say “hoped” because I’ve always realized that philosophy professors have a sweet gig and a scandalous job description.…