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So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

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Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#41

Post by Aperocky »

chrisseaton wrote: post #4

Very difficult to understand what's going here, through the snark, personal abuse, name calling, and political bias. Everyone's trying to communicate through increasingly scathing Tweets and declaring each time that the previous Tweet is yet another new low point. Not a useful way for anyone to get a point across. Everyone should be embarrassed.

As someone who took statistics in college and worked in data science for a period of time, I understood very easily. But I don't blame someone who never fitted a curve to not understand - and that is most of America.

The problem of today is not most of America have never fitted a curve and not understand the difference between training accuracy and prediction accuracy. But that they choose to not believe or even hear out those who did.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#42

Post by chrisseaton »

Aperocky wrote: post #41
chrisseaton wrote: post #4

Very difficult to understand what's going here, through the snark, personal abuse, name calling, and political bias. Everyone's trying to communicate through increasingly scathing Tweets and declaring each time that the previous Tweet is yet another new low point. Not a useful way for anyone to get a point across. Everyone should be embarrassed.

As someone who took statistics in college and worked in data science for a period of time, I understood very easily. But I don't blame someone who never fitted a curve to not understand - and that is most of America. The problem of today is not most of America have never fitted a curve and not understand the difference between training accuracy and prediction accuracy. But that they choose to not believe or even hear…

> But that they choose to not believe or even hear out those who did.

Who are they supposed to believe here?

There's a right-wing academic stroke political appointee, and a left-wing academic stroke political appointee. Both have genuine academic credentials. Both are saying something that supports their political masters. One appears to have been ousted by the other so is probably bitter about that.

If you don't know about statistics, which as you say is most people, this is two equivalent people having an unseemly fight on Twitter.

Did you notice neither presented an actual argument? Just abuse.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#43

Post by roenxi »

viburnum wrote: post #21

Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/St…

The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players.

I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economists to promote workers as primary owners of companies, for example. I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses.

That sort of research no doubt happens, but it gets no airplay compared to people pushing branches of Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#44

Post by aspenmayer »

oneiftwo wrote: post #23
ahelwer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is with this ridiculous fixation people have on participation trophies? I'm serious, where is this idea coming from? Was it an object of moral concern in the media before I was old enough to remember or something? Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life.

>Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life. It's not a single stupid ribbon. It's growing up in a society where literally every competition results in everyone winning. Predicting performance (i.e. evaluating merit) is a skill that requires development, yet when you reward everyone equally regardless of success or failure you train that skill on noise. How do you ex…

Maybe the failure that is being taught to children is the failure of external sources of validation. The sooner a child learns which external sources of validation have merit or value, and which are gamed or captured, the sooner that child learns to trust in their own process over an external authority. I think that is a positive outcome in education.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#45

Post by gdulli »

oneiftwo wrote: post #23
ahelwer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is with this ridiculous fixation people have on participation trophies? I'm serious, where is this idea coming from? Was it an object of moral concern in the media before I was old enough to remember or something? Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life.

>Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life. It's not a single stupid ribbon. It's growing up in a society where literally every competition results in everyone winning. Predicting performance (i.e. evaluating merit) is a skill that requires development, yet when you reward everyone equally regardless of success or failure you train that skill on noise. How do you ex…

Maybe what the other commenter is getting at is that there's no criticism of society you couldn't find some way to project onto some act of parenting or other.

But drawing a line from your pet peeve about the world to one occasional event out of thousands in a kid's life is disproportionate and reductive.

Children fail and children fail to get their way all the time, in hundreds of daily struggles. A few school contests they don't even necessarily find important shouldn't be assumed to move the needle. If a kid grows up rich, that's something that colors their every experience and is more likely to shape a lifelong attitude about what they're entitled to. But that still doesn't mean you have to stereotype them.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#46

Post by arkades »

kthxbye123 wrote: post #39
kevinskii wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came to the same realization, but it was unnecessarily difficult to see through all of the snark. If all parties had simply focused on the salient points of disgreement rather than snarking at each other, it could have been cleared up much more quickly. The GP is right; all sides should be embarrassed.

It would not have "been cleared up", because the CEA didn't make an honest mistake, it was a deliberate attempt to seed disinformation in order to support the President's political agenda.

There's a subset of people that would prefer to think that the halls of power are manned by morons, rather than the criminally selfish.

I don't know what that says about any of us.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#47

Post by Aperocky »

chrisseaton wrote: post #42
Aperocky wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who took statistics in college and worked in data science for a period of time, I understood very easily. But I don't blame someone who never fitted a curve to not understand - and that is most of America. The problem of today is not most of America have never fitted a curve and not understand the difference between training accuracy and prediction accuracy. But that they choose to not believe or even hear…

> But that they choose to not believe or even hear out those who did. Who are they supposed to believe here? There's a right-wing academic stroke political appointee, and a left-wing academic stroke political appointee. Both have genuine academic credentials. Both are saying something that supports their political masters. One appears to have been ousted by the other so is probably bitter about that. If you don't kno…

One of them speak the fact though, and things that are facts tend to draw in scientific consensus sooner or later.

Like climate change, but people chose to not to listen to the scientific consensus anyways.

p.s. The fact being that comparing training accuracy to prediction accuracy is something that is simply unsound. You can have hundreds of ways to spin a statistic that is backed by academic research, and comparing those two are not. It also happen to be the first thing you're taught to avoid.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#48

Post by chrisseaton »

Aperocky wrote: post #47
chrisseaton wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that they choose to not believe or even hear out those who did. Who are they supposed to believe here? There's a right-wing academic stroke political appointee, and a left-wing academic stroke political appointee. Both have genuine academic credentials. Both are saying something that supports their political masters. One appears to have been ousted by the other so is probably bitter about that. If you don't kno…

One of them speak the fact though, and things that are facts tend to draw in scientific consensus sooner or later. Like climate change, but people chose to not to listen to the scientific consensus anyways. p.s. The fact being that comparing training accuracy to prediction accuracy is something that is simply unsound. You can have hundreds of ways to spin a statistic that is backed by academic research, and comparing…

> One of them speak the fact though

But you said people don't know the facts themselves! So how do you want them to know which of these two people has the facts?

I mean they literally say the same thing about each other - 'new low...'. There's no information to action here if you don't know about statistics! Even if you decide to check their authority and motivation there's still nothing to divide them on!

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#49

Post by vivekd »

kbos87 wrote: post #40

So much of everything is about connections and reputation. Tech in particular holds up a guise that people are chosen and ascend because they are “good”, meaning, they are good at what they do. That’s part of it, but it’s an insufficient part, and you can do pretty well in a career being solidly average at what you do. The real currency in my experience is one thing - relationships. Do I think this person likes, resp…

Yes, this was the opinion I came here to post, certainly my own profession of law is like this, at least where I practice in Toronto Canada but I can't imagine other places being much different.

I think one advantage of computers is that what you produce at the end has to work - and if the code doesn't work or you don't know what you're doing, you're quickly exposed as a fraud. This is not the case in other fields like law, academia, politics, and even the corporate world where the results and methods are more abstract and given to opinion.

Unfortunately much of the world is run by people who excel in the abstract fields rather than the technical ones.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#50

Post by adfsdfs »

mcnamaratw wrote: post #2

It's not clear what technical content this post has. A cubic polynomial vs time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time. At that point I run out of guesses about exactly what's being said by anybody.

I think it resembles a cubic spline kernel, FWIW.
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