Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse • Hacker News Board

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#261

Post by jgmjgm » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:47 PM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #142

wpietri wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The folks at Toyota talk about two different kinds of process: controlling and supportive. Controlling is that sort of BS. And I had seen it so much early in my career that I thought that's all there was. Supportive process is bottom up, done to improve consistency and reliability. E.g., by my door I have checklists for going running and swimming, because I was tired of going out to exercise and realizing I had forgo…

Another thing is that "workers in the decision loop" reeks of socialism. Toyota do not have that kind of response though, as being Japanese in origin the leadership have a bit of Giri left in their thinking. In some European nations after WW2 it was not uncommon to have enough worker representatives in the board room that they could affect a vote. These days its been stripped down to a token union man that has little…

German corporations do quite well with workers represented on the boards by law. There are lots of ways to organize a capitalist system.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#262

Post by jgamman » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:47 PM UTC

pmilot wrote: post #28

My wife works as a teacher at one of the largest schoolboards in Québec, and she can tell you that the solution "hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability" doesn't work in a unionized system. Complacency a systemic problem. When your union protects your job, you don't need to actually put effort into doing the job. Of course, that doesn't mean ALL teachers are…

isn't 'get better run unions' an option? Germany for instance has worker representation at the board level. I find it hard to believe that they tolerate members en masse dialing it in.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#263

Post by ThomPete » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:51 PM UTC

trishume wrote: post #259

ThomPete wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know which is why I said it with some reluctance. But your rubutals aren't good examples. Physics, Computer Science and Chemistry still have many still unanswered questions and provide clear benefits and ways to uncover those. In psychology we have a much better way into the human mind through neuroscience. Asking humans about their own behavior is filled with the very bias that we try to battle through the scienti…

Why do you think neuroscience is a better way to learn about human behaviour (which is what psychology deals with)? Neuroscience is incredibly difficult and the brain is super complex. We have learned far far less about human behaviour through neuroscience than through psychology studies. Learning about behaviour through neuroscience is working at the wrong level of abstraction, we're not capable of comprehending lar…

What I said was that psychology should be used as an extension of interpreting neuroscientific findings.

We haven't learned anything about the brain through psychology we have learned about how humans interpret the brain but we don't have a lot of raw data. That's what neuroscience gives us and so it allow us to focus on interpreting the data rather than making a lot of flawed experiments which are often anecdotal more than anything else.

Again I am pretty sure psychology will be seen as alchemy in 50 years if not before.

And yes I know you didn't downvote :)

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#264

Post by jnicholasp » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:56 PM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #253

jnicholasp wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) was (became; established a whole tradition of being) a hermit/beggar/monk; Socrates was a stone mason (occasionally); Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel and begged for food; Jesus was a carpenter and then a wandering preacher; Spinoza (as you note) was a lens grinder; Kant was a tutor; Einstein was a patent clerk. And, as you note, especially in the 19th and 18th centuries, many prot…

Note that having a job seems necessary though. Maybe it's a case of the golden mean? On one side you have people whose job absorbs all leisure. On the other you have some who draw sufficient income without having a job at all. These are Marx's infamous "coupon clippers", and historically they're not as prominent in intellectual history as people with undemanding jobs (personally I'm not aware of many philosophers / s…

> Note that having a job seems necessary though.

I'm not sure that's true. It would be interesting to see some numbers. My naive impression is that there are at least two things needed to make intellectual history: genius, and opportunity to practice your genius. Both are rare, and given that there are far, far more people who need to earn a living than people who don't, I would expect the absolute numbers of (Genius)(NeedsAJobHasAMenialJob) to be greater than (Genius)*(Doesn'tNeedAJob).

My impression is that gentlemen of leisure have, especially in the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries, been a very disproportionate percentage of intellectual history, and that even the nominal jobs in that group (parson, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge) were wholly orthogonal to whether they produced.

What do you think having an unrelated, undemanding job would contribute to intellectual work?

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#265

Post by zeteo » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:57 PM UTC

jgamman wrote: post #260

zeteo wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that having a job seems necessary though. Maybe it's a case of the golden mean? On one side you have people whose job absorbs all leisure. On the other you have some who draw sufficient income without having a job at all. These are Marx's infamous "coupon clippers", and historically they're not as prominent in intellectual history as people with undemanding jobs (personally I'm not aware of many philosophers / s…

i think you have to go back to the 18th century for that. i'm thinking britain where science was something acceptable that gentlemen could do in their spare time (with smart+poor doing a lot of heavy lifting) and in particular Antoine Lavoisier in France who literally bought the rights to be a tax farmer so he could do his research. he lost his head in the revolution so there's that. YMMV.

Well, Lavoisier's tax farming was not passive income: "Lavoisier's researches on combustion were carried out in the midst of a very busy schedule of public and private duties, especially in connection with the Ferme Générale." [1] The gentleman scientists were also usually involved in some sort of business, even if it was just administering their estates. The people who truly had a passive income - relying on annuities or government bonds, mostly inherited - are hard to spot in the history of science. They were a pretty numerous class though [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Lavoisier#Gunpowder_Co...

[2] https://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/piketty-and-the...

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#266

Post by solidsnack9000 » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:59 PM UTC

CountSessine wrote: post #254

Lxr wrote: post #49

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…

We have to calm down with the metrics, accreditations and regulations, and accept that some people are better than others at certain things, hire the right people and trust them to do a good job. Honest question - how do we know who is better at what if not by some measure/metric? How do we know who the right people are? Is it just a matter of 'expert opinion'? And if so, how do we prevent cliques and nepotism?

We know who is better the same way we know how to set the metric. There is no escaping "values" :)

Metrics do complicate cliques and nepotism; but they can also be used to reinforce them. Rarely is performance as clear cut as speed in a race. Metrics that boil down to approval from coworkers -- how helpful was this person? how professional (1-5) was their communication? -- often do more to conceal bias than prevent it.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#267

Post by solidsnack9000 » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:01 PM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #229

technotony wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There doesn't need to be a metric for that, it's the manager's job to use their judgement to assess that by building a relationship with the person, seeing how well they communicate their ideas (a sign someone understands things), that they finish what they said they would do etc etc.

That just makes the problem circular. How do you find these managers that are good at judging people? Also, you're clearly laying out metrics: communication ability and timeliness. They're just somewhat generic metrics.

As described here, "communication ability" and "timeliness" are not metrics -- they are just things that someone wants. They are no more a metric than "tastiness". In the absence of a well-defined measurement procedure and the intent to carry it out, one can not really be said to have a metric.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#268

Post by zeteo » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:07 PM UTC

jnicholasp wrote: post #264

zeteo wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that having a job seems necessary though. Maybe it's a case of the golden mean? On one side you have people whose job absorbs all leisure. On the other you have some who draw sufficient income without having a job at all. These are Marx's infamous "coupon clippers", and historically they're not as prominent in intellectual history as people with undemanding jobs (personally I'm not aware of many philosophers / s…

> Note that having a job seems necessary though. I'm not sure that's true. It would be interesting to see some numbers. My naive impression is that there are at least two things needed to make intellectual history: genius, and opportunity to practice your genius. Both are rare, and given that there are far, far more people who need to earn a living than people who don't, I would expect the absolute numbers of (Genius…

I don't have a good theory - it's just based on reading biographies. Almost no famous thinkers lived on passive income (although, as I've said, annuities and bonds have been widely available for over 500 years). And probably not any kind of job will do. The most plausible explanation I've read belongs to Richard Feynman:

> I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I am making some contribution" -- it's just psychological. 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 for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge

http://www.pitt.edu/~druzdzel/feynman.html

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#269

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:11 PM UTC

mathperson wrote: post #230

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think this theory makes much sense when you examine it. But it's excellent at justifying a caste system, one where all workers are controlled by wise managers, and where there's a stable hierarchy of executives above that. I note that the hierarchy established is basically equivalent to those of feudalism. It also has the handy property of justifying high compensation for managers and executives; since work…

What is an IC? I think it should mean something like senior engineer but I've only seen this acronym in the context of intelligent community

[deleted]

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#270

Post by WalterBright » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:39 PM UTC

Lxr wrote: post #49

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…

The same thing goes on with government. Every time something goes wrong, there's a call for more regulation and more oversight by the government, often far out of proportion to what actually went wrong. People believe that sufficient regulation of minutia leads to utopia.