Like many young, aspirational CEOs, I often read biographies of successful CEOs, and what always drew my attention was the over-representation of philosophy majors. Philosophers were weird hyper-verbal creatures – many of whom were also quantitatively talented – and who showed up again and again in American business success. I grew up in a quantitative-heavy household where verbal excellence was not expected: an A on a math test was more impressive than an A in English. I also grew up associating philosophy majors with stoner and ‘I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-school’ culture, but that also might have just been the snobbery of an aspirational engineering major.
The complex fascination I had with philosophy lurked in the back of my head until my sophomore year at Swarthmore. I had committed to studying computer science, quelling any family fears I was going to be brainwashed by a ‘liberal arts college’, but I was already feeling restless. I started to complete my (dreaded) humanities requirement with a philosophy class, which if anything, was the perfect opportunity to try this elusive discipline out. The class wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad. I couldn’t really understand any of the readings, and my essays weren’t dazzling either. But I found my first interesting philosophical puzzle: science.
Could science, as we know it, be false – or even worse, logically reductive? This was a philosophical provocation introduced by David Hume, an Enlightenment-era Scottish philosopher, and is known as the ‘problem of induction’. It goes as follows: science rests on the premise that if X and Y happen enough times in a similar pattern, we say X causes Y. This logical generalization is called induction, and Hume asks whether we should believe in induction. The only justification for induction is that it worked well in the past, but that argument becomes circular quickly.
I was intoxicated by Hume and his musings on science. I felt my fervent belief in the rationality of science under serious scrutiny. But science is empirically so successful. How do I reconcile my understanding of scientific reality with this devastating logical critique? I was hungry to hunt down responses to this question. There are some notable good ones, my favorite being from the 1900s American philosopher Nelson Goodman – who separated the justification of a logical system with the justification of logic within the system – but the problem of induction remains a foundational problem in the philosophy of science today.
And I begin to understand the power of philosophy. If a good thinker could rationally undermine the validity of all science and force conversations with scientists on what scientific truth is, philosophy could probably be useful with an MBA and on Wall Street.
Before my business aspirations, when I just wanted to read philosophy in the library at night, a specific place on Earth kept popping up in my reading: the University of Oxford. Just like many business giants had philosophy on their academic transcripts, every major philosophical subfield had a group of generationally influential thinkers at Oxford. I had never really considered studying abroad – I had just moved out of Texas for the first time, and suburban Quaker Philadelphia was its own version of foreign. I was intrigued, and the opportunity to study abroad at Oxford for a full year was an option for Swarthmore students.
I signed myself up to literally go on a philosophical adventure for a year in another country.
I took three eight-week philosophy classes while at Oxford, each requiring me to produce an essay every two weeks and present it in front of a tutor who would critique it based on an unknown-to-me rubric. I wrote 12 essays. Each one was dissected sentence by sentence. I received the highest density and directness of academic criticism ever. I came back from England the year later confident in my philosophical acumen.
The three classes spanned three different domains: science, ethics, and Immanuel Kant.
I had to take a Philosophy of Science course because the ‘problem of induction’ had been my gateway drug. I was drawn to Thomas Kuhn and his notion of paradigm shifts – he brought in a historical and sociological perspective to understand the core philosophical problem: scientific progress. His notion of revolutionary science is where the real discontinuities emerge, and I stored it in the back pocket as I thought about technological discontinuities (e.g. Omaha as Judgment Day for AGI).
I also appreciated the level of rigor undertaken by these philosophers. For example, philosophers of physics have the enviable task of telling physicists where they’re right and wrong about physics – and, well, they better know their physics (in addition to their philosophy) at that point. I could never comprehend much philosophy of physics, but this intersection of philosophy and science resonated with me, and something I engaged in heavily with when at Princeton cognitive science.
The second philosophy class at Oxford I took was ethics. My rebellious youth had rejected organized religion at the age of 5, and so I never had adopted an official moral code, but I held multiple strong ethical beliefs (e.g. keeping secrets). Oxford is an interesting place to study ethics, and it is not neutral. It is known for being one of the greatest, most influential centers of utilitarianism, namely that every single person is equally weighted when it comes to moral good, and the moral goal of the world is to maximize everyone’s utilities.
My year overlapped with a very influential utilitarian social movement originating at Oxford: effective altruism. The tactical question was how do we make the world a better place with our charitable resources. There had been significant criticism of – for example – charities that felt like executive money laundering schemes. One of the first projects was to formalize charity effectiveness, and define the ROI for donating to any given charity.
Effective altruism attracted many to artificial intelligence for being a primary frontier for maximizing global utility, specifically through the lens of the ‘alignment problem‘—how to prevent AI from killing us all. The major AI labs are fundamentally entangled with these questions of catastrophic risk, much of which traces back to the intellectual gravity of the same Oxford philosophical cohort. In my own work, my team and I are tackling one aspect of this equation: identifying and safeguarding the essential qualities of humanness as our tools achieve unprecedented levels of intelligence.
The last philosophy class I took at Oxford was on Immanuel Kant. Kant is what the streets of philosophy would call one of the ‘GOATs.’ He is a German Englightenment-era philosopher who dropped massive integrative treatises on epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. His Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most vaulted, hard-to-decipher texts in philosophical canon. Oxford was the perfect place to study him. I came out four essays later having learned something, though I still can’t name it. I wouldn’t trust my current Kantian expertise in any formal environment, but I hope to return and summit the text one day.
Philosophy introduced me to a new facet of society, not just math and physics. I learned about debate, law, ethics, personhood, beauty – just to name a few. I understood coming out of the year in Oxford why so many CEOs I read about had studied philosophy in college. At its core, it teaches you to think, to communicate, to write, and to read – and it does so in a highly rigorous and systematic way. So even if the Quarterly Board Meeting dilemma is not exactly about Plato’s allegory of the cave, developing the expertise to comprehend dense pieces of information and chart the path forward creates a serious leadership advantage.