philosophy major

I majored in Philosophy at UC Berkeley. People sometimes ask about my philosophy training and say things like, “there should be more Philosophy majors in tech.” I’m never quite sure what they mean by that. I do know that I loved studying Philosophy. Here’s a picture of me from 2007 in Tours, France, thrilled to have found a statue of Descartes (and also to have finished the end-of-year exams): My wife likes to remind me how in college I would spend hours lying on a couch, deep in thought. When she’d ask me what I was doing, I’d just mutter, “working.” That was the semester I took upper-division Kant. She went with me to one of the lectures. Heavy stuff: the nature of reality, the limits of human knowledge. She thought it was funny how the professor pulled at his shirt buttons, while the grad students fidgeted in their seats and stroked their beards. I studied some famous thought experiments: brains in vats, zombies, twin earth. Some of them aren’t so theoretical anymore. After all,…