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Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

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Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#71

Post by throwawayjava »

joefourier wrote: post #69
throwawayjava wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post only reinforces my point: GPA hacking is an intentional choice on the part of students, and GPA hacking is not specific to the humanities. You got nothing out of your humanities courses. The fault was not in your courses but in yourself. You certainly could have chosen to improve your prose, refine your theses, and strengthen the presentation of your arguments. Instead, you chose to GPA hack. One of the gre…

It all depends on your goals, I agree. You can certainly use university as a means to come out a better educated, well-rounded citizen, or simply a method of acquiring the credentials necessary to get hired. If you can afford the former, great, but for many, it may be come across as a luxury.

> It all depends on your goals, I agree... but for many, it may be come across as a luxury.

As I've already stated,

>> The sad irony, by the way, is that your perceived downsides are rare and GPA hacking backfires

Choosing to learn employable skills is important, but there's no upside to viewing education as "simply a method of acquiring the credentials necessary to get hired".

You seem to have missed the fundamental point of my last two posts: your view of how to approach education is self-defeating even if you view education purely as a way of increasing lifetime earnings!

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#72

Post by Nasrudith »

im3w1l wrote: post #70
pasabagi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the humanities departments are particularly successful - but they've been underfunded and horribly hamstrung by political and administrative interference for about half a century now. It's also not that Shakespeare's going to make anybody a better thinker. It's more that stuff like this sets the tone for the culture in general. If you don't really teach hard, interesting culture, then all the people who…

> History shows this kind of thing is just incredibly dangerous. If everybody likes culture that's enjoyable and easy, easy, self-satisfied thinking predominates. Then suddenly everybody is marching waving big flags and wearing funny hats, because it's a lot of fun, and makes you feel great to be part of something. Please provide a reference for this. It sounds too much like a just-so story for me to take that at fac…

I'm not sure if a citation would make it any better. That line of logic makes me think of the opposite pitfall - that it leads to needless hair-shirted puritanism because anything enjoyable can't possibly be a good thing. "We can't use anesthesia in surgery because the lack of suffering is detrimental to character!" By definition it leads to needless suffering.

While knowledge and culture may seem boring or useless in itself (the fine details of long dead Roman politics) it is possible that there are hidden great applications to it in the right situation. Just for two surprising relevance examples Roman gladiatorial archetypes experiencing political correctness after annexing former foes, gladiatorial endorsements, and after the extended war had resulted in consolidation of farms in the hand of slave holding elites past legal limits the idea of land reform or enforcing the existing laws being called 'unRoman'.

Science alone has a history of finding bizarre peripheral finds that nobody would have expected. Take an incident that resulted in cattle bleeding to death after routine mild procedures - the source was eventually traced back to fungus affecting their feed. Useful in itself but good only for agronomy. Said fungus was used to produce the first bloodthinner on the market.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#73

Post by Nasrudith »

PAClearner wrote: post #28
zerr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is getting a tenure position - with all these nepotism, protectionism, elitism of academic world.

meh as a baby academic I am not convinced that the nepotism protectionism elitism of academia are markedly higher than the 'real world'

The big difference is the workplace variety. You can work at start ups, small businesses, mid-sized companies, or mega-corporate, or even government jobs. It isn't that they don't exist there but that it is easier to escape certain types of it.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#74

Post by kensai »

jboggan wrote: post #34
aluren wrote: post #3

Regarding "literally everyone does it" (fishing for results, removing negative ones, and so on): it's very true, and much more prevalent than what people think. Even at top-level universities with big shots. Especially at top-level universities with big shots. I know someone, upon entering a lab to do electronic microscopy, who found out that the image data her lab had written multiple papers on very high-impact jour…

Related story: When I was in grad school I was doing graph theoretic analysis of human metabolic networks. I had some really interesting and promising preliminary results about the structure of various metabolic pathways and had been invited to present my unpublished work in a multi-departmental lecture. I was making some new visualizations for my talk and spotted something odd, which led me to a bug in my source cod…

You might not know it sir. But you are a hero. Definitely my hero! Not all heroes wear capes.

This is how Science should be done.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#75

Post by v_lisivka »

aldoushuxley001 wrote: post #30
v_lisivka wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is not when you publish something. Science is when at least two independent labs can reproduce your published result.

Why two and not three or one?

It's easy to keep secret when you only one who knows truth. It's also easy for two, because you immediately know who to blame if secret is revealed, so you can keep pressure. But situation changes for three, because you cannot know who revealed secret, so it's much easier to crack.

Imagine, I will report today that I'm able to determine temperature of the physical vacuum (e.g. using double slit experiment), and then able to drop it, i.e. cool vacuum below absolute zero. Will you trust me? Of course, not. Then when you will trust me?

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#76

Post by v_lisivka »

mehrdadn wrote: post #56
v_lisivka wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is not when you publish something. Science is when at least two independent labs can reproduce your published result.

The issue I see with this is that it implies anyone who isn't doing work high-profile enough to get independent labs to try to reproduce it isn't doing science.

IHMO, it's correct. They are just sitting on shoulders of giants.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#77

Post by v_lisivka »

yurlungur wrote: post #61
v_lisivka wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is not when you publish something. Science is when at least two independent labs can reproduce your published result.

While I have a similar disillusion with the academia, I think sometimes people misinterpret the difficulty with reproducibility, especially on a field they are not familiar with. It seems to me it's imprudent and a bit disrespectful to jump to the gun when a certain research fail to get reproduced, especially when it comes to biology, because the experimental procedure can be incredibly complex and prone to all kinds…

Wrong result or no result is result too. With help of those who tried to reproduce and failed, it's easier to find missing gaps in knowledge and fill them. Otherwise this knowledge will be lost.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#78

Post by v_lisivka »

analog31 wrote: post #65
v_lisivka wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is not when you publish something. Science is when at least two independent labs can reproduce your published result.

So, build two more LHC's. ;-) In my view it should be a judgment call whether a particular result needs to be replicated. I'm aware of the so called replication crisis. But adding more arbitrary rules will simply invite people to figure out how to game those rules, if they were gaming the original rules (deliberately or unwittingly).

LHC is not the first collider in the world, so results from previous experiments are used to calibrate LHC.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#79

Post by pasabagi »

Nasrudith wrote: post #72
im3w1l wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> History shows this kind of thing is just incredibly dangerous. If everybody likes culture that's enjoyable and easy, easy, self-satisfied thinking predominates. Then suddenly everybody is marching waving big flags and wearing funny hats, because it's a lot of fun, and makes you feel great to be part of something. Please provide a reference for this. It sounds too much like a just-so story for me to take that at fac…

I'm not sure if a citation would make it any better. That line of logic makes me think of the opposite pitfall - that it leads to needless hair-shirted puritanism because anything enjoyable can't possibly be a good thing. "We can't use anesthesia in surgery because the lack of suffering is detrimental to character!" By definition it leads to needless suffering. While knowledge and culture may seem boring or useless i…

>anything enjoyable can't possibly be a good thing.

I think you're conflating enjoyment, in the sense you enjoy an apple, and enjoyment in the sense you enjoy a painting. It's a really common conflation, mainly because in our society, the dominant culture is enjoyable in the sense an apple is enjoyable. That, for me, is part of the problem. Nobody ever got inspired by eating an apple. Nobody ever learned new forms of empathy, or developed, through appetitive enjoyment.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#80

Post by pasabagi »

im3w1l wrote: post #70
pasabagi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the humanities departments are particularly successful - but they've been underfunded and horribly hamstrung by political and administrative interference for about half a century now. It's also not that Shakespeare's going to make anybody a better thinker. It's more that stuff like this sets the tone for the culture in general. If you don't really teach hard, interesting culture, then all the people who…

> History shows this kind of thing is just incredibly dangerous. If everybody likes culture that's enjoyable and easy, easy, self-satisfied thinking predominates. Then suddenly everybody is marching waving big flags and wearing funny hats, because it's a lot of fun, and makes you feel great to be part of something. Please provide a reference for this. It sounds too much like a just-so story for me to take that at fac…

Well, the classic reference is Adorno, "The Culture Industry". But you're right, it is a just-so story. I don't think it's possible to do a fair treatment of the relation between culture and politics in a hundred-word post, and my own limitations have made it still less rigorous.

To add some more unrigorous, allusive examples to the mix: the typical Al-Qaeda member is not a imam, but rather an engineer. Technical capability by no means implies ethical capability- so if you imagine a whole society of highly developed technical abilities, and highly under-developed critical capacities, it's a scary thought. And you don't really have to look far into history to find lots of examples.

Consider the V2 rocket, for instance. One of the most amazing technical innovations of the century, but equally, utterly pointless on every other level, even the military one. That's the kind of thing that nations with deeply stupid official cultures tied to deeply brilliant technical cultures make.

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