Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 144 posts

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#121

Post by bane »

mcguire wrote: post #108
bane wrote: post #87

I keep hearing about how miserable things are in academia and have come to perhaps a surprising conclusion: research and education need to be broken up. I know that there's arguments that the two should stay entangled, and that new research feeds quickly into education blah blah blah. But I personally think that the world is far better off with large, dedicated, quasi-commercial R&D labs and institutions like Xerox-P…

" I know that there's arguments that the two should stay entangled... " I've just got one, but it's pretty compelling: the best instructors I've seen have been researchers teaching about the subject they're researching. That might be an introductory, undergraduate AI class taught by a senior AI researcher, or a new faculty member effectively teaching about his dissertation topic. Sure, I've seen plenty of researchers…

I'm not sure that it's not possible for top rate researches to teach at attached universities if they care to. There's plenty of professionals who work in the commercial world and teach a class or two a semester because they love it but hate working in the academic world -- I work with two PhDs who do exactly that.

Anecdotally, many of the worst teachers I had were researchers in their field. It was clear that they wanted to just research in their field and teaching was something the school forced them into doing and they did the bare minimum.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#123

Post by Dylan16807 »

cma wrote: post #119
Dylan16807 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very funny, but we're talking about a situation where they were fully capable of designing and building the device.

A system that needs to have no filtering so that kids don't get filtered out is unnecessarily broad. If it hits this one comic book false negative, too bad.

In a world where children are as competent as they think they are, the system should let confident children have a shot (they don't need much funding anyway).

More seriously you're taking the analogy a bit too literally. It's about time spent using competency vs. time spent signalling competency. The latter should be nowhere near a majority.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#124

Post by hugh4 »

lutorm wrote: post #52
return0 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can go work elsewhere. Part of the problem is that academic pipelines are clogged with too many PhDs who are not motivated by scientific curiosity.

I think that is completely false. Why would you go into a career with little prospects for a permanent job that if you get it might pay half of what you could get elsewhere if not for scientific curiosity and the desire to make a difference in students' lives? The problem is, like this article alludes to, that the field does not reward scientific curiosity or even serious scientific advancement.

For many students, the answer is "to get a visa to move to a first-world country".

If you're a smart first-worlder, there's many careers more lucrative than scientific research, so you'd only go into it because of passion. But if you're a smart third-worlder, a scientific career is often your best shot at emigrating to a rich country, so it becomes rational to do it whether you're passionate or not.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#125

Post by jcranmer »

bane wrote: post #121
mcguire wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I know that there's arguments that the two should stay entangled... " I've just got one, but it's pretty compelling: the best instructors I've seen have been researchers teaching about the subject they're researching. That might be an introductory, undergraduate AI class taught by a senior AI researcher, or a new faculty member effectively teaching about his dissertation topic. Sure, I've seen plenty of researchers…

I'm not sure that it's not possible for top rate researches to teach at attached universities if they care to. There's plenty of professionals who work in the commercial world and teach a class or two a semester because they love it but hate working in the academic world -- I work with two PhDs who do exactly that. Anecdotally, many of the worst teachers I had were researchers in their field. It was clear that they w…

I've noticed that a few research professors have struggled to teach courses. It's not a problem of being unable to convey the information (since CS is conference-heavy in publications, you can't become a good researcher without getting good at presenting), but rather that they can't write do homework assignments or tests very well.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#126

Post by jashephe »

pcrh wrote: post #54
w1ntermute wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4 papers in a second lab since 2013 Out of those 4 papers in his postdoc lab, two are reviews[0,1] and one is a peer commentary[2], so only the second-author paper I linked before counts as original research. Similarly, one of his (three) first-author publications from his PhD lab is also a review[3]. He does have two first-author publications from that lab, including one in PNAS[4], but neither of them seem to hav…

There are only 3 authors on the Nat. Neurosci. paper, so he likely spent a large amount of his time working on this project. So it would be a bit unfair to compare his output in that lab to that of the first author of the same paper. Metrics are fine and all, but rarely tell the full picture. Not that I know what the full picture really looks like in this case...

The Nat. Neurosci. paper lists author contributions at the bottom (Gariépy is J.F.G).

> S.W.C.C and M.L.P. designed the research and wrote the paper. S.W.C.C. and J.F.G. performed the research and S.W.C.C analyzed the data.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#127

Post by tsotha »

protomyth wrote: post #44
javert wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say that. But, he's still right.

Not the OP, but of course he's right. On the other hand, there is bit of a different between one of the princes of the kingdom abdicating his title while leaving the kingdom and a common person leaving the kingdom. Grant writing is a very painful form of writing and I have relatives that have made good money by being good at it[1]. I do believe it would be tough to do research and put the time in to be an acceptable…

>Grant writing is a very painful form of writing and I have relatives that have made good money by being good at it[1]. I do believe it would be tough to do research and put the time in to be an acceptable grant writer. Something has got to give.

I have tenured professor relatives and the thing that usually "gives" is the time spent on the actual research. From what I can see they spend a little time teaching, a little time managing grad students, and a lot of time grubbing for grants. I don't consider them scientists at all - they're middle managers.

It's an enormous waste of talent.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#128

Post by freshhawk »

This is a sentiment I've heard from a lot of my friends in academia.

I hope the author isn't also similar to those friends of mine in another way: assuming that the marketing job that private industry has done when comparing themselves to academia is true. That things are more rational and productive outside academia. That they won't just enter another game played by chickens with no heads that has slightly different rules. That they won't spend most of their time doing useless bullshit that the system demands they produce even though it does nothing to further the goals they are supposed to be advancing.

I liked the piece, so I do hope the author ends up preferring the different kind of pointless make-work the alternatives provide him.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#130

Post by aflyax »

sciencedangyou wrote: post #98
qCOVET wrote: post #21

I absolutely agree with everything in this post. When I was a post doctoral fellow, my principal investigator would publish at least one paper a month. She was celebrated in the department. (a) The papers were published in journals like - Journal of Green Donkey Testicles, Journal of differentiation of dying mouse ... Journals that I had never heard of, had no impact and every tiny bit of an experiment that was condu…

I have a friend getting her PhD in neuroscience who constantly told me about absurd things matching your (a) and (b) examples. In her lab, (b) was particularly prevalent--she estimated, based on that experience, that ~90 percent of what is published in neuroscience today would be completely unreproducible because of these statistical factors introduced to "massage" data into a more impressive-looking form. Photoshop…

tell her to switch to data science
Post reply on HN