If you think an education can be reduced to simply-stated aphorisms you can follow, you're missing the point. If that's all there was, you wouldn't need to spend years in school.
It's like thinking you can become a tennis player by watching a single instructional video. There's no substitute for doing the work. The result is the skilled person.
It's interesting that you seemingly want to erase the humans from the humanities in order to distill the "insights".
I thought the humanities were supposed to train you to better express and share ideas? Seems like a major failure if they can't communicate to those outside their field.
> I thought the humanities were supposed to train you to better express and share ideas?
Of course. But that applies to ideas broadly, whatever you happen to be working on.
Whereas the OP apparently wants something like a top 10 list of brilliant humanities insights, which is a misunderstanding of what students are learning: skills, not atomistic facts.
Even in the sciences, students are learning skills, not just facts and equations. The key is the ability to use them, and that takes a lot of practice. The result is a skilled scientist, not a container of facts.
I don't think so. Is the OP not asking for some kind of simple universal aphorism? On the contrary, I think that the OP is making a straw man out of the humanities.
The usefulness to tech of those trained in the humanities is not to apply a few "brilliant" insights but rather to apply their "ordinary" but trained insights every day to ordinary tasks. In a meeting, you might say, "That's a good idea, Chris", but it would be so specific to the task that you couldn't state it as a "brilliant humanities insight". What you want is someone who "thinks different", as the saying goes.
This is not intended as an insult to Marshall McLuhan. It would be an insult to reduce his work to a pithy quote. As I said, there's no substitute for doing the work. One has to study his work, not just grab excerpts.
As a former philosophy PhD student, I don't think it's good career advice. My philosophy degrees got me precisely zero jobs in tech. Nobody cares.
The best career decision I ever made wasn't studying philosophy; it was starting my own business. I hired myself, because nobody else would, and now I don't have to worry about layoffs, job interviews, or all the other employer BS.
An anecdote from the book "Steve Jobs in Exile" I just read: at the beginning of one product announcement, Jobs told the audience that he was a little nervous, but his coworkers said that he was never nervous for keynotes. It was pure manipulation.
He doesn't actually answer the question until over 25 seconds have passed!
He takes a sip of water, sits in silence, the crowd starts heckling. Jobs gives a small quip to buy time. Sits in silence again. It's an eternity on stage.
There were what I would graciously call zealots who were adamant Apple had to build on OpenDoc to break Microsoft’s nascent monopoly with Office. When Jobs adequately cancelled all efforts on OpenDoc under the very correct vision that you can’t ship OpenDoc in a shrink wrap package, those zealots were furious.
I assume the coworkers were talking about the practice talks, since we are as good judges of the real talks as the coworkers are, the talks being publicly available.
Or are you saying that they claimed he was nervous before the talks or backstage, but that the nerves went away once he stepped onstage? If so, why would he need to manipulate his coworkers into thinking he's nervous?
Or are you saying that he was nervous during the talks in a way that couldn't be captured by the cameras or the audience? In which case again - manipulation wouldn't have worked.
Or am I missing something?
EDIT: It seems I misread the original comment - he actually told the audience he was nervous. I'd love to know which product announcement that was and see it for myself. I'm still not sure how a coworker would be able to know what he was feeling any better than the audience did.
> > I'm still not sure how a coworker would be able to know what he was feeling any better than the audience did.
> Because his coworkers had known him for years, worked through many product announcements with him, and the audience did not?
I'm skeptical. There are video interviews from that era (I think) where he appears very nervous on camera, asking repeatedly if "we're on", self-interrupting and asking for a second try to attempt an answer, taking lots of sips of water, etc. I'd have to try to find the video.
EDIT: here it is, his first TV appearance (1978), he is extremely nervous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODMJE6lDbY. So it doesn't contradict the anecdote from the NeXT era, but certainly seems like he got used to the job rather than simply being some kind of psychopath/manipulator.
Sounds like an interesting book though, I'll check it out.
Obviously lying to people you know is generally unhealthy but when you are putting on a performance to an audience I don’t judge so harshly. Of course I imagine he did both.
I'm sure the pause is something he rehearsed at some point, but I've watched a few of his Q&As where he's done it. If I recall, he was even doing it in the 90s (the Q&A I'm thinking of is the one where he picks up a chair and pretends to use it as a shield). So while I'm sure it was something he originally rehearsed, it undoubtedly just became a habit of his over time.
> Hackenburg found that models trained to become more persuasive also ended up being less truthful.
> Even in Hackenburg’s recent preprint, Claude spouted numerous inaccuracies and falsehoods
> when Hackenburg ran his competition of coached elite debaters and AI, there was one way he could bring AI down to human levels of persuasiveness: by forcing it to write human-length messages at human writing speed.
> they found that an AI could talk people into conspiracy theories, and that the magnitude of their increase in belief was roughly the same as that of the decrease in belief after talking to a debunking bot.
> Some password managers will only fill if a domain matches, but IRL the response I've seen from most users when it doesn't match is to assume the integration broke and manually copy/paste it in. I've also seen lots of them do stuff like happily autofill on any prefix of the domain, so your credential for `something.example.com` will autofill into `fake-something.example.com`.
Why would you trust the very same password managers that don't handle passwords properly to handle passkeys properly?
You don't. The browser handles the passkey matching to the domain which is obviously a better place to do it. There could obviously still be bugs as with all things, but it's much more intentionally integrated into the flow which makes it much harder to bypass.
Right, I haven't seen that particular flaw in baked-into-the-browser ones (probably because they already having secure domain matching code ready to use), but the distinction is that doing the domain check is a part of the spec and standard, so e.g: sites aren't going to break it by changing the log-in subdomain routinely, as has been common historically.
Password managers have had to be permissive enough to work with most websites, and there is no standard for it. There have been sites that blocked the autofilling of passwords and so on as well.
My point wasn't this one particular flaw in some password managers is the reason to use passkeys (the copy/paste point is the much bigger issue anyway), just that it's an example of how relatively brittle the password manager process is. Having it a core part of the spec gives stronger guarantees.
“There have been sites that blocked the autofilling of passwords and so on as well.”
Sites that do this irritate me so much. Ones that try to block pasting and stuff… like somebody intentionally baked that into the site. Who? And what was their rationale? Are they really so arrogant to think people are going to carefully type in some elaborate password not once but twice?
That and blocking paste in fields like bank account numbers and stuff.
Surely somebody here has been asked to implement these mis-features. Please explain what went through the heads of the people responsible for it?
Blocking bank account numbers from being pasted is considered an error prevention measure. By forcing people to enter it manually at least once, you stop them from blindly pasting the wrong number twice.
There's no real regulation requiring blocking paste but it has become an annoying informal standard of sorts.
The users are the ones manually copy/pasting the password. There's no way the password manager could prevent this short of disallowing copying/viewing passwords.
Two crucial things you can do with a password that you can't do with a passkey:
1. Write it down on a piece of paper and put it in a safe deposit box.
2. Read it on one device (or from a piece of paper!) and enter it manually on another device.
Plain text is the ultimate form of cross-platform portability. Passkeys are the ultimate form of vendor lockdown. The passkey vendors won't even allow you to view the private key, unlike with ssh keys, which you can also write down on a piece of paper. It's vendor cabal to destroy computing freedom in the name of "security", always the excuse. Tech company paternalism at its worst.
If passkeys were meant to be user friendly then there'd be a secure optical transfer mode to QR code them from device to device with the screen and camera.
Easy to implement (receiver flashes a public key, sender encrypts to that key and flashes the QR code back).
That it doesn't exist for a protocol meant to work with phones tells you exactly where the thinking was headed.
That they have purposely put effort into preventing you from doing that shows you everything you should need to know.
The entire point of passkeys is yanking the control over authentication out of the hands of people. These companies don't want you to be able to let someone else log in as you.
That's the entire point.
The problem they are solving has absolutely nothing to do with security.
What they're missing is ethics, not education.
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