Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this sarcastic?
Satire :)
Excellent.
Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories
141–150 of 186 posts
Re: Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents to have society employing you full-time to make rich people richer via gambling in the financial markets rather than something more beneficial to society? I don't blame you at all (I'm sure your quality of life is magnitudes of order better, and I'd do the same in your position) and this isn't personal at all, it just pains me that our brightest graduates are working in fi…
This question comes up in most discussions about finance and trading. I think it's the wrong question to ask. Academic research jobs, despite poor pay and conditions, are still some of the hardest positions to get . The demand for those jobs far, far outstrips supply. It's hard to get into a decent PhD program and then basically impossible to get a decent faculty position (or join MSR or whatever). Candidates aren't…
> Academic research jobs, despite poor pay and conditions, are still some of the hardest positions to get. The demand for those jobs far, far outstrips supply.
Well that's exactly the problem. We as a society have decided that our brightest minds should be working in finance. I think that's outrageous, and that we should be utilizing their minds for the greater good instead. In other words, we need to increase the supply of these research jobs, and make them more attractive then working in finance.
Of course certain fields of finance benefit society. That doesn't mean their talents wouldn't be better off to society elsewhere. Also, certain jobs like proprietary trading are the equivalent of gambling and on a net basis don't make society any better off.
Re: Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost of education (Fees) are going higher. Research/Researchers are not getting funded. Where is the money going to? Infrastructure of the universities?
My younger brothers undergraduate research mostly focused on answering this question in the University of California system. His conclusion is that funding was overwhelmingly going to the administrative faculty and has been doing so since UC let the administrative faculty have the most say in how he universities are run.
What could be done to change this?
Re: Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
This question comes up in most discussions about finance and trading. I think it's the wrong question to ask. Academic research jobs, despite poor pay and conditions, are still some of the hardest positions to get . The demand for those jobs far, far outstrips supply. It's hard to get into a decent PhD program and then basically impossible to get a decent faculty position (or join MSR or whatever). Candidates aren't…
> It's hard to get into a decent PhD program Is it though? I got into the (top 2 or 3) program for my field with a middling GPA and a decent GRE. Compared to e.g. law and medicine, I think it was substantially easier for a given level of 'prestige'. > just look at how faculty members are selected In my experience, nepotism, later-career candidates, and some shiny publications. All the talk about hiring some younger c…
> Is it though?
I think it is. That's certainly my experience with CS. You need some combination of GPA, recommendations from known researchers in the field, research experience/accomplishments and a strong undergraduate school. You don't need all of these always, but they all have an effect.
Most of the grad students I knew at Berkeley CS came in with at least one good publication and high GPAs. Similarly, some very capable people I know from less-well-known universities (in the US and internationally) were rejected from most programs they applied to. My observations combined with the low % acceptance rates lead me to believe it's definitely difficult—especially if you come from an even slightly non-standard background. And this is in a field where most people don't pursue PhDs—I don't even want to think about what Math and Physics programs must be like.
On the other hand, you can get some pretty deep (and well-paying!) positions in industry without having a degree at all, and people won't even look at your GPA. It's a lot more flexible.
Re: Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents to have society employing you full-time to make rich people richer via gambling in the financial markets rather than something more beneficial to society? I don't blame you at all (I'm sure your quality of life is magnitudes of order better, and I'd do the same in your position) and this isn't personal at all, it just pains me that our brightest graduates are working in fi…
Do you ever feel that maybe you shouldn't talk about things you don't understand? Working a prop trading firm is nowhere near "making rich people richer via gambling in the financial markets". Furthermore, the majority of software/engineering jobs out there are not doing "something more beneficial to society". How many companies are really just ad-driven, marketing-driven. Yes, it would be nice if the entire world co…
Looks like the purpose of my comment went totally over your head.
I was simply addressing the absurdity that our smartest minds are incentivized to go into finance rather than work on the most difficult and important problems in the world. The modern day Albert Einstein is probably working at a hedge fund. If we allocated humanity's resources differently, then we could be so much more technologically advanced.
Re: Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
This question comes up in most discussions about finance and trading. I think it's the wrong question to ask. Academic research jobs, despite poor pay and conditions, are still some of the hardest positions to get . The demand for those jobs far, far outstrips supply. It's hard to get into a decent PhD program and then basically impossible to get a decent faculty position (or join MSR or whatever). Candidates aren't…
> Academic research jobs, despite poor pay and conditions, are still some of the hardest positions to get. The demand for those jobs far, far outstrips supply. Well that's exactly the problem. We as a society have decided that our brightest minds should be working in finance. I think that's outrageous, and that we should be utilizing their minds for the greater good instead. In other words, we need to increase the su…
> In other words, we need to increase the supply of these research jobs, and make them more attractive then working in finance.
That's a fair summary. My core point was that it's far more a matter of constrained research positions rather than finance being so alluring. It's not hard to make a research position more attractive to most bright minds than finance: you just have to offer autonomy, a bit of prestige and working conditions that aren't absolutely terrible.
> certain jobs like proprietary trading are the equivalent of gambling
The proprietary trading firms I'm familiar tend to be risk averse and specialize in things like market making and arbitrage. This is probably some of the most unambiguously useful activity on the markets: it's companies like that that make things like ETFs and less liquid securities work efficiently. Without market makers, various useful but niche securities would be significantly more painful to trade in practice.
Re: Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen this used to explain the odd dovetailing of research and lecturing. There was a point where this made inherent sense - no one but research experts could educate new students, and students were attempting to quickly reach the state of the art. That's long past - a complex analysis expert with no training in education is a terrible candidate to teach basic multivariable calculus. And yet the whole thing makes…
"When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any…
Ideas that generate a breakthrough are the exception not the rule. Sometimes, like in the case of Einstein all the ideas appear in one or two years and then nothing else. Newton with Calculus was another leap.
Expecting ideas to appear, no matter what you do, is not a good idea. One difficulty is that is very difficult to estimate the probability of rare events. Perhaps having more free time can increase the probability of having new deep ideas, but that is not easy to measure. Furthermore, another key ingredient is communication with people full of energy, like P. Erdos, perhap some people can generate a hub of ideas.
Edit: Added A little more of money in the table not in the hands of political but directed to those that can do real research is a real innovation.
Re: Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories
#148The main problem with science is the lack of agile methodologies -- the scientific process is ripe for disruption.
CAPITALIST SCIENCE!
https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2474
(which may or may not bear an odd resemblance to insider trading)
Re: Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories
#149Re: Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree on your first point- I think that there could be someone else who could write a grant proposal for me, provided that they a) expressed an interest in grant writing over benchwork / data analysis and b) were fluent enough in the field's literature to be able to translate my ideas into bureaucratic prose more elegantly and efficiently than me. Such a hypothetical individual might have some overlap with the "…
As an aside, I doubt that psychology would be experiencing nearly the number of issues that it is now with replicability if psychologists were able to delegate their analysis to an in-house statistician for verification. Or maybe it would (assuming that the poor application of statistics is more of a socio-political issue, which might very well be the case).
>"the poor application of statistics"
It is actually statisticians who are at the root of the problem. There is no proper way to apply the statistics most people are taught (NHST). However, everyone tries (and fails) to come up with some way to use the stats because they can't believe they were taught to perform such a waste of time ritual. See here for a decent overview: http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf