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Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

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Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#111

Post by houseabsolute »

api wrote: post #87
pragmatic wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See another article currently on the front page: Realtime Linux: academia v. reality http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/397422/27eef125e03b8a2d/ "I actually took the time to spend a day at a university where I could gain access to IEEE papers without wasting my private money. I picked out twenty recent realtime related papers and did a quick survey. Twelve of the papers were a rehash of well-known and well-researched topi…

That's funny. If you took a look at startups, you'd find that 99% of them are me-too crap. Badly designed websites for Yet Another Social Networking Gimmick, bad mobile apps, outlandish bad business ideas, etc. 1% of them ever truly go anywhere. 0.1% of them change the world. My point is that anytime you randomly sample a field of work of any kind, you're going to get an exponential distribution of quality with a few…

The difference is that startups go out of business when they fail, whereas publishing papers like this is considered success in academia.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#112

Post by gwern »

WingForward wrote: post #108
gwern wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Fund lots of science. Why do we need this? By every metric I know of, governments spend orders of magnitude more on science than they did in the 1800s. Are we getting orders more "Profit!"?

Could you clarify your metrics and sources?

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/53/41558958.pdf tells me that non-commercial (government or government-subsidized) R&D represents ~1% of GDP in 2006 for the US. I believe equivalent figures for the 1800s would be closer to 0% R&D inasmuch as there were no Departments of Energy, Health & Human Services, etc., but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Maybe the Gilded Age governments in the US actually spent 2% of GDP on R&D.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#113

Post by derefr »

api wrote: post #87
pragmatic wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See another article currently on the front page: Realtime Linux: academia v. reality http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/397422/27eef125e03b8a2d/ "I actually took the time to spend a day at a university where I could gain access to IEEE papers without wasting my private money. I picked out twenty recent realtime related papers and did a quick survey. Twelve of the papers were a rehash of well-known and well-researched topi…

That's funny. If you took a look at startups, you'd find that 99% of them are me-too crap. Badly designed websites for Yet Another Social Networking Gimmick, bad mobile apps, outlandish bad business ideas, etc. 1% of them ever truly go anywhere. 0.1% of them change the world. My point is that anytime you randomly sample a field of work of any kind, you're going to get an exponential distribution of quality with a few…

A random sample of an entire field or industry should have an exponential distribution, yes. Journals, though, are quality-gated: there are supposed to be review processes in place so that only the interesting/important/hopefully-seminal stuff gets published. That they reflect the same exponential curve is a testament to the fact that the review processes don't work.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#114

Post by derefr »

noonespecial wrote: post #90
jbooth wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/me watches the comment thread change over time as those who are more motivated by tribal allegiances start to outweigh those who appreciate a fair joke

I appreciate the well placed joke now and again. "Punching hippies" was funny because its truthy enough to be relevant, and relevant enough to be in the thread. HN goes through a phase every now and again where I think it takes itself a little too seriously. Its for important discussions unlike that red-place with the silly alien (pretentious snorteling and huffing). All attempts at humor are immediately voted down.…

When I feel like lightening up, I go to that red-place. When I'm serious, I come back here. It's nice to have the separation; if we weren't all so serious all the time on HN—if it was just another Reddit, in other words—would there really be a point to coming here? :)

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#115

Post by derefr »

sprout wrote: post #77
jacquesm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately it's not up to her to decide. That said, it seems that some papers go out of their way to hide what the paper is really about by looking at the title.

Usually you just don't know. I got shamed in front of a prof once by saying that a given paper title was a good way to make people not want to come to your talk, and he responded by explaining why he thought it was an interesting talk. There are plenty of examples of things that might be meaningless to a graph-theory professor that are a core part of the language of a combinatorics specialist. And of course, undergra…

One of the things taught to undergrads in the humanities—specifically, in communications design—is that you should make the metadata of something interesting-seeming to a wider audience than the data it represents, so that it spreads further—that way, more of the people interested in the data will see it.

As an example, one of my friends told me about a very interesting paper called, and I quote, "Three Monkeys something something." He didn't know what it was about, but he said it "sounded like something I'd be interested in." He was quite right—but if it hadn't been for the monkeys, he wouldn't had anything vivid about the paper to recall at all.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#116

Post by [deleted] »

jessriedel wrote: post #54

All of this outrage just stems from a confusion over the point of private research universities. The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/... State universities, yes, those are supposed to educate people. But not Ivy League schools. Their purpose is to produce new knowledge. The authors of the OP article then conflate two discussions: (1) Should priv…

[deleted]

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#117

Post by api »

gwern wrote: post #103
api wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny. If you took a look at startups, you'd find that 99% of them are me-too crap. Badly designed websites for Yet Another Social Networking Gimmick, bad mobile apps, outlandish bad business ideas, etc. 1% of them ever truly go anywhere. 0.1% of them change the world. My point is that anytime you randomly sample a field of work of any kind, you're going to get an exponential distribution of quality with a few…

Looking at journals isn't the only way to do it. You can take encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries, and check for citations and mentions there. Funnily enough, one such attempt ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment ) finds that per capita scientific achievement seems to start declining around the 1920s or 1930s, which is also (with WWII and whatnot) the beginning of the modern university system.

Correlation != causation.

http://www.seanbonner.com/blog/archives/piratesarecool.jpg

I think per capita scientific achievement has declined, but I think it's because we did all the easy stuff already. We are starting to hit a wall where new discoveries increasingly require one or more of the following:

1) A lot of expensive tools. (accelerators, genomics cores, supercomputers, etc.)

2) A lot of labor. (The "armies of graduate students and postdocs" phenomenon is a product of this.)

3) Intelligence beyond the capacity of a single individual. (Supercomputers, large numbers of people over time, etc. are required to "grasp" something. Anything ending in "omics" is a perfect example of this.)

You can think of it as being loosely analogous to peak oil, though the underlying causes are different. With peak oil, it's because the resource itself is limited. With scientific discoveries, you might have an infinite ultimate supply but you have a finite horizon of vision. It's like if there actually was infinite oil deep in the earth, but we were strictly incapable of building drills longer than one mile.

Personally I think #3 is the limit we're really hitting. I sometimes doubt that we have the IQ power as a species to truly grasp the genome or to unify QM and gravity. We either don't have the IQ or we don't yet have the language or philosophical framework to think about those things.

We're not infinitely smart. Can your dog read Hacker News? Maybe aliens are watching us now and thinking "well, they're sort of clever but they're really just still animals... they only see two sides to every conflict, they can't think in more than three dimensions, and they can't hold more than seven or eight simultaneous ideas at once..."

I'm not saying academia is perfect. It needs to change. If we really are nearing our IQ limits, we need an environment that removes distractions and allows people to really focus to get that last bit of creativity and intelligence. Academia is too bureaucratic, noisy, interrupt driven, and stressful. All those are IQ-killers.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#118

Post by api »

houseabsolute wrote: post #111
api wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny. If you took a look at startups, you'd find that 99% of them are me-too crap. Badly designed websites for Yet Another Social Networking Gimmick, bad mobile apps, outlandish bad business ideas, etc. 1% of them ever truly go anywhere. 0.1% of them change the world. My point is that anytime you randomly sample a field of work of any kind, you're going to get an exponential distribution of quality with a few…

The difference is that startups go out of business when they fail, whereas publishing papers like this is considered success in academia.

You fail in academia too, but the floor is different. With a startup, you cease to exist or drop off into an abandonware project. In academia, failure means you get lackluster appointments, little grant money, etc. You kind of stagnate.

I've noticed that smart self-aware people in academia can right this by recognizing that kind of stagnation for what it is, namely failure, and responding by changing course, increasing effort, etc.

The dangerous thing about academia is that failure just looks like mediocrity... mediocrity is failure. This isn't the case in the real world, where mediocrity is just mediocrity and failure is... well... you see them sleeping on the sidewalk.

Your dopamine system is not calibrated this way. So to succeed in academia I think you have to realize that if you're not a star you're sleeping in a gutter and respond to your situation accordingly. Respond to mediocre results the way you would respond to sleeping in the gutter in the "real world."

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#119

Post by api »

derefr wrote: post #113
api wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny. If you took a look at startups, you'd find that 99% of them are me-too crap. Badly designed websites for Yet Another Social Networking Gimmick, bad mobile apps, outlandish bad business ideas, etc. 1% of them ever truly go anywhere. 0.1% of them change the world. My point is that anytime you randomly sample a field of work of any kind, you're going to get an exponential distribution of quality with a few…

A random sample of an entire field or industry should have an exponential distribution, yes. Journals, though, are quality-gated: there are supposed to be review processes in place so that only the interesting/important/hopefully-seminal stuff gets published. That they reflect the same exponential curve is a testament to the fact that the review processes don't work.

I agree that journals do not have the quality control they claim to have. I was responding to the larger idea that academia is somehow unique in having such a quality distribution.

Re: Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

#120

Post by gwern »

api wrote: post #117
gwern wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at journals isn't the only way to do it. You can take encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries, and check for citations and mentions there. Funnily enough, one such attempt ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment ) finds that per capita scientific achievement seems to start declining around the 1920s or 1930s, which is also (with WWII and whatnot) the beginning of the modern university system.

Correlation != causation. http://www.seanbonner.com/blog/archives/piratesarecool.jpg I think per capita scientific achievement has declined, but I think it's because we did all the easy stuff already. We are starting to hit a wall where new discoveries increasingly require one or more of the following: 1) A lot of expensive tools. (accelerators, genomics cores, supercomputers, etc.) 2) A lot of labor. (The "armies of…

"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouth 'look over there'" http://xkcd.com/552/

I might buy the End of Science argument, but this would be far from the first time that it has been made, and I'm not sure it really works. Look at computer science; how much of that was or could have been worked out in the absence of an actual computer? And as much computer development was aided by government funding, the commercial imperatives were just as compelling. (Look at IBM's pre-digital computer success.)

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