[Sirened]

It's not that other paths are not powerful but rather that its relatively rare for someone to fuck things up catastrophically with said career paths because society doesn't quite enable philosophers in the same way as SWEs. There is so much money being thrown around, so much critical infrastructure is digitized, and we're increasingly trusting models to make critical decisions.

One dude in a cardboard box down by the river with PyTorch on his laptop can convince your local court to contract with him for a model that predicts recidivism, and then suddenly your county is rejecting bail for black people at an alarming rate because said guy trained his model wrong. Achieving a similar fuck up with a degree in philosophy or polisci would require a _lot_ more work (you'd have to get elected to office or create _more_ racisim!). Software and the power we entrust in it has made fuckups faster and easier than ever, and it's only going to get worse.