(August 23, 2025 at 4:41 pm)Sheldon Wrote:(August 23, 2025 at 4:36 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: A fascinating read. It's a paper in a non-reviewed journal penned by two philosophers extolling the virtues of philosophy. No discussion of any statistical treatment of the data is presented, in fact, you're left wondering what the data actually was. This is what they're fobbing off as evidence of philosophy being useful for anything? I give them an E for Effort.I withdraw my edit in that case, and go back to "might help", which as we know is the same as "might not help".
"Philosophy majors rank higher than all other majors on verbal and logical reasoning, according to our new study published in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association."
It is actually a peer reviewed journal.
That is to say peer reviewed by other philosophers.
Ah, so it's an advertisement for their actual paper. I went and read it and it's drek. Their "stas" consisted of normalizing a bunch of test scores, many of which were self-reported. They ignored massive methodological problems, dismissing a really obvious selection bias out of hand. All that they're really measuring is that law schools are using philosophy departments as pre-Law filters. The budding law students are the ones with the best grades, and they need the GRE and LSAT tests to get into law school, which biases the results high. Tellingly, they found that philosophy students were three times more likely to take the GRE and LSAT, which pretty much tells you what a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy is worth. Interestingly, they didn't follow that avenue of thought. I'll keep their grade an E but add some glitter to make them feel better.
