consider the difference between,
“All I knew at the time was that I kept taking philosophy courses and they kept being boring.”
and,
“All I knew at the time was that I kept taking philosophy courses and I kept finding them boring.”
recasting the first as the second puts some of the onus on the author, pg is too good of an essayist and too thoughtful a writer to inadvertently overlook this distinction.
and consider the whole paragraph beforehand,
“Though I liked programming, I didn't plan to study it in college. In college I was going to study philosophy, which sounded much more powerful. It seemed, to my naive high school self, to be the study of the ultimate truths, compared to which the things studied in other fields would be mere domain knowledge. What I discovered when I got to college was that the other fields took up so much of the space of ideas that there wasn't much left for these supposed ultimate truths. All that seemed left for philosophy were edge cases that people in other fields felt could safely be ignored.”
that last sentence is a remarkably dismissive throwaway statement.
just because something doesn't have value for you or you don't see how something might have value for you, you don't need to make out that it has very little intrinsic value.