191–200 of 313 posts
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Do you have any source on your claim? Because it sounds like an attempt to see racism in something that isn't racist.
American society isn't racist?
Why is academia a special case scenario where bureaucracy and regulations create unintended consequences and cause people to expend effort to get around them, but we can't say the same thing about the economy as a whole?
Why do we believe that people can't even manage PhD's at a university, but we can take the same people, put them in government, and expect them to, for example, manage the monetary supply or see bubbles in advance and create proper policy to avoid them?
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In a university setting, it seems to me that teaching in combination with support from endowment (not research grants) can be one of the scenario for this ... key is still to have fundamentally good people with passion and joy for the endeavor ..
The thing that always infuriated me about computer science (my field), is that I don't actually need the big research grant. There are people who do, of course, but I could do most of what I found interesting and useful with a high-end desktop PC and some free time. But universities don't operate that way anymore. It doesn't matter that all I need is $5K and some time -- the university needs their 40% cut of a multi-…
So - unless such research no longer interests you (or you have zero free time to devote to such) - it would seem like that since you don't need to kowtow to the academic whims on getting massive amounts of money for research - you should now be able to pursue these questions...
If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion. There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fun…
I have a different take its the lack of pay for professors and the lack of respect for public education (On average a college professor makes less then a public school teacher, in my discipline I would have averaged about $20k less IF I got tenure) As a former academic professional (Librarian at a college) The high cost of college is based on the demands of students. 30 years ago there was no internet, no smoothy bar…
Weirdly enough, I went to school 10 years ago, and there was crappy internet, ugly dormitories with housing shortages, and decades-old gyms with "smoothy bar" being a totally unknown term. They finished building a new gym with a smoothy bar in my senior year.
They didn't add new dorms until after I graduated.
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I tend to find people with your view have never been an executive managing the managers, or even a manager. When you are (like myself) then you see that good managers / leadership (including tech team leads, etc.) really do make a massive difference in performance with the same people. Things like metrics, values, and re-orgs might seem like Dilbert-esque corporate speak (a view I used to share), but they're incredib…
From ground level, though, it's really easy to see the dysfunctional cultures growing up around metrics. At the factory where I used to work, we'd zig-zag from metric to metric. Yield one quarter, Cpk the next, scrap rate the quarter after that. Special cross-departmental teams to manage the metric. Regardless of which metric was chosen, people would do really dumb things to try to meet it. If scrap rate was the metr…
This seems like a key insight.
Metrics are key to good management – but metrics are for the managers, not for the teams. Managers that pass metrics directly down to their teams as goals aren't doing their jobs; they're trying to make their team do their job.
Maybe. Thoughts?
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Probably more abstract than you were hoping, but look at the controversy surrounding public education in the US right now. It's always been a politically 'hot' area and each new administration wants to de-regulate or re-regulate the sector in some new and ever more confusing way. If it wasn't for the unions, I'm sure some administration would come up with the idea of firing the bottom 10% of teachers based on standar…
My criticism of that example isn't that it's abstract, it's that it's purely hypothetical. I'm claiming there's no evidence to back up the assertion that there would be bad effects without public sector unions, so yet another assertion of this does not really change anything.
I should also mention that we've already seen some of these effects in public schools with the "teaching to the tests" debate in which students are often subjected to a large number of standardized tests that are used to make funding decisions.
I think the problem is that in the end, any debate over schools at the federal level will always turn into something reminiscent of the gun regulation debate where neither side's argument is founded in reality and as such, the teachers will be the ones to suffer.
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What people misunderstand about these metric-based systems in the US is that their purpose is not to reform systems or improve performance. It's to create a layer of interference that either channels control into a new managerial class or to wrest it back into the hands of higher-level administrator from whom it was somehow ceded. The purpose of business consultants is to make money for business consultants. Pushing…
I'm fairly anti-capitalist, and even I can see this is a bit of a stretch. The way managers are taught is that you can't improve upon a process unless you know exactly what to improve. They look for something definite like metrics because a change in those can actually mean something and it's more definite than "they're doing good work." The drive to use metrics actually kind of revolutionized how we improve work. Th…
The trouble is, if you've started from a fallacy of that scale, you're already doomed.
Introducing any form of measurement can in itself change the behaviour of the system you're trying to measure.
Introducing any form of target will bias a system towards reaching that target, but not necessarily without incurring costs elsewhere.
Introducing measurements and setting targets based on them is not only not an automatic win, it can easily become a significant loss.
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With the exception of performances (sports, acting, music) you can make a decent living despite not being at the next level. It is generally not so with academia. And even with the stuff like acting and music, the advancemnet of society doesn't depend on the efforts of professional athletes and performers. So we tend to be a lot more tolerant of people falling out of that pipeline and winding up in more prosaic posit…
> With research it's not the sort of thing you can do on the side after a day spent waiting tables. Depends on your level of engagement. Can you explore your own hypotheses and put together your own experiments? Probably not. Can you engage in citizen science projects like BOINC or Zooniverse (essentially performing drudge work that would otherwise be thrown at some hapless research assistant at the bottom of the tot…
Can you expand on this? I don't see why you couldn't, outside of the amount of money that may be needed for certain research.
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> Not every PhD should have a guaranteed spot as a professor (that would be insane) but when less than 8% of postdocs become professors, the system is in crisis. There are lots of industries like this, e.g., corporate law, sports, acting, music. Are they all "in crisis"? http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/ [EDIT] Others: military officers, investment banking, organized crime, tech start-up, trade…
With the exception of performances (sports, acting, music) you can make a decent living despite not being at the next level. It is generally not so with academia. And even with the stuff like acting and music, the advancemnet of society doesn't depend on the efforts of professional athletes and performers. So we tend to be a lot more tolerant of people falling out of that pipeline and winding up in more prosaic posit…