Academia? Shoot... senior hiring in the tech world is the same thing. If you don't have buddies, gooooood luuuuck.
So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
81–90 of 223 posts
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 economi…
> a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry I think you have this the wrong way around. Mainstream economic theory (the neo-liberal kind) actually leads to the control of government by private capital. What you will see coming out of the top schools (especially Chicago) but many others too is theory that pushes for de-regulation, privatization, free flow of capital, laissez-fa…
> The exact opposite of government control over industry.
Only in the sense of "industry control over government". Which doesn't strike me as any improvement.
The true opposite would be "industry has to fend for itself without being able to co-opt government to tilt the playing field in its favor".
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#83s/academia/every career/g
Does the s/ here mean substitute ? What is the /g in this context? Is this the regular expression flag for global search ? Sorry, not a programmer just a dumb tradie.
You're either joshing with us or you have a bright undiscovered future ahead of you in regexp's- given your apparent intuition for them.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#84Earlier 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…
> things that are facts tend to draw in scientific consensus sooner or later.
Science doesn't work by consensus. Science works by having a track record of accurate predictions. So when you see people talking about "scientific consensus", that should immediately be a red flag. Valid science doesn't talk about "consensus" at all; it just points at the predictive track record--which requires not just "facts" but a series of accurate predictions, made before you knew the facts, that match with the facts--and lets you draw your own conclusions.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#85s/academia/every career/g
Does the s/ here mean substitute ? What is the /g in this context? Is this the regular expression flag for global search ? Sorry, not a programmer just a dumb tradie.
Yes. Not easy to google! From the sed manual ('man sed'):
s/regular expression/replacement/flags – Substitute the replacement string for the first instance of the regular expression in the pattern space. ...
g – Make the substitution for all non-overlapping matches of the regular expression, not just the first one.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#86So 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…
In my experience, coworkers gravitate towards each other socially because they respect each other's skills. Competence, humility, integrity etc. in your work are a major source of those warm fuzzies.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Malice and stupidity are not mutually exclusive.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#88Economics 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…
Isn't M.I.T. traditionally the powerhouse school in Economics?
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry I think you have this the wrong way around. Mainstream economic theory (the neo-liberal kind) actually leads to the control of government by private capital. What you will see coming out of the top schools (especially Chicago) but many others too is theory that pushes for de-regulation, privatization, free flow of capital, laissez-fa…
> The exact opposite of government control over industry. Only in the sense of "industry control over government". Which doesn't strike me as any improvement. The true opposite would be "industry has to fend for itself without being able to co-opt government to tilt the playing field in its favor".
> The true opposite would be "industry has to fend for itself without being able to co-opt government to tilt the playing field in its favor".
Sure, good point. However I don't think it's possible or desirable to let industry be completely independent of the state. It seems to me that would lead us right back to our current predicament - power would concentrate and it would start putting pressure on the state.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#90So 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…
In my experience, coworkers gravitate towards each other socially because they respect each other's skills. Competence, humility, integrity etc. in your work are a major source of those warm fuzzies.
But humility and integrity are "soft" qualities, outside raw technical prowess.
A talented jerk is a scourge of a project (especially in open-source): the engineering might attract others in the short term, but being a jerk makes long-term interactions painful and not very fruitful.