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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

#111

Post by mcnamaratw »

starpilot wrote: post #34
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.

> 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. What? The chart's creator said it was a cubic polynomial. Mr. Hassett said he had employed ‘just a canned function in Excel, a cubic polynomial.’” https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-mo...

Sorry to shock you, but not every piece of text on the internet holds water mathematically.

Plot a cubic polynomial in time, at^3 + bt^2 + c*t + d. Use Excel. The curve either diverges to + or - infinity at each end, or it's a constant. That's not the behavior of the dashed red curve in the OP.

What it could be is some kind of cubic spline. But it is not a cubic polynomial in time.

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

#112

Post by tqi »

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.

Definitely agree, this whole affair has a real rashamon vibe to it. it feels like everyone involved (the article, philipson, and furman) are talking past each other. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees forecasting and curve fitting are different things, and that a cubic fit (red line, allegedly) would be a bad representation of what the future will hold. The disagreement seems to be:

- furman believes (or claims to believe) the original tweet was being deceitful by presenting a curve fit as a curve fit but leaving enough ambiguity that casual viewers might interpret it as a prediction of future deaths dropping to 0 by mid may

- philipson believes (or claims to believe) furman thinks that curve fitting and forecasting are the same thing, does not address whether the original tweet was attempting to be coy or deceitful

- article believes (or claims to believe) that philipson believes that a curve fit actually is a good prediction of the future, then goes super wide with it to make some vaguely related point about academia

I believe no one is lying or stupid, but everyone is finding the worst possible interpretation of events so they can dunk on each other.

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

#113

Post by threatofrain »

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…

When you're focusing on your own skills you're polishing an aging vehicle for value delivery, which is mostly only good when someone else glues you with other people. When you're polishing a social network you're engaging in a more amorphous activity with respect to value, but you're also investing in something beyond you, a kind of social coherency which will likely outlast your death.

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

#114

Post by CrazyStat »

dnautics wrote: post #65
starpilot wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What? The chart's creator said it was a cubic polynomial. Mr. Hassett said he had employed ‘just a canned function in Excel, a cubic polynomial.’” https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-mo...

on the other hand, for reals calculus (namely taylor polynomial estimation) also says, "why not a cubic polynomial?"

Because Taylor approximations can lose accuracy very quickly as you move away from the point they are centered around.

There are available epidemiological models that are actually grounded in a scientific understanding of the problem. "Why not a cubic polynomial?" is a stupid question.

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

#115

Post by CrazyStat »

scythe wrote: post #36

I'm just going to comment on the graph, not the tweets. The graph shows three predictions from IHME. One, the blue line, is a model from 3/27. It matches the data okay . The second, the yellow line, is a model from 4/5. The agreement of this line is much worse , and the fact that the model did worse with more data is not promising. The third, the teal line, is a model from 5/4. The data (black) ends at 5/4. So the ag…

> By "cubic fit" I infer that they mean some kind of low-pass signal filter.

It's literally just ax^3 + bx^2 + cx + d, optimize a, b, c, and d to minimize some loss function (probably L2).

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

#116

Post by anjc »

sytelus wrote: post #92

This article doesn't do good job describing the gory details. In AI/ML research, this is so unpleasantly prominent that its nauseating. How does workshop speakers at top conferences gets selected? How does keynote speakers get selected? Whoes workshop proposals goes through? Who gets to be area chair? Why are there 18 people listed as authors when almost 100% of work was done by one student? I call it favor economy .…

> your citation count, number of papers, awards etc quickly becomes insignificant compared to those who are

There are few metrics with which academia can judge how effective a researcher is. If you're not interested in getting as many papers/citations/awards in whatever way you can then you may be in the wrong game.

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

#117

Post by babesh »

tomrod wrote: post #109
babesh wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way a former boss explained it to me is that bosses need to form pyramids to support their own ascension. It is just subtribes within the big tribe fighting for power and dominance. Those networks that you form to support your own rise are used by your boss to support their rise. You get promoted because you will make your own boss look better in the future. The second this ceases to be the case, you get discarde…

In corporations, yes. Corporations are like communist governments without authorization for coercion -- relationships and networks determine your impact. If you sell a product, there is a different calculus for ascension.

Yes.

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

#118

Post by mcnamaratw »

CrazyStat wrote: post #114
dnautics wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on the other hand, for reals calculus (namely taylor polynomial estimation) also says, "why not a cubic polynomial?"

Because Taylor approximations can lose accuracy very quickly as you move away from the point they are centered around. There are available epidemiological models that are actually grounded in a scientific understanding of the problem. "Why not a cubic polynomial?" is a stupid question.

"Why not a cubic polynomial?" taken literally is not a stupid question at all. No, it's not a contribution to understanding the problem at the professional level, but it is a fundamental and important question.

Somebody persists after hearing the answer (which you gave), that might be stupid.

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

#119

Post by Myrmornis »

Most of the top comments in this thread are badly missing the point. This is probably partly due to the title -- the point here is not whether connections and reputation are important.

The point is that at the very highest levels of US government, when they have brought in an academic advisors from elite universities, they have ended up presenting absurdly wrong child-like nonsense as their best attempt at analyzing Covid-19 data.

Rather few people in this thread have managed to get beyond the title and the slightly opaque columbia.edu blog post to see this. An exception is ahdeanz.

It is an extremely depressing and valid point. Yes, human connections will always be important, but we MUST as sensible democracies, ensure that when science needs to be done, it is not left to the those who have been so involved in the world of human politics and dinner-party-approved conversational topics that they can't even vaguely think about something technical.

I expect he has many flaws, but Dominic Cummings in the UK Conservative party is on the right side of history here, in wishing for a new era in which politics is not dominated by those with law and humanities degrees.

https://dominiccummings.com/the-odyssean-project-2/

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

#120

Post by porknubbins »

threatofrain wrote: post #113
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…

When you're focusing on your own skills you're polishing an aging vehicle for value delivery, which is mostly only good when someone else glues you with other people. When you're polishing a social network you're engaging in a more amorphous activity with respect to value, but you're also investing in something beyond you, a kind of social coherency which will likely outlast your death.

I think thats really true from the perspective of a fairly experienced person but I also think it takes a level of skill to build social currency. Building a network is 10x easier when you have done something noteworthy compared to just pure networking off your personality or whatever.
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