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So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

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

#131

Post by ryoshu »

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…

We remember the really good people and the really bad people. The mediocre ones... we'll see if they are a good fit.

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

#132

Post by bachmeier »

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…

You must be thinking of the top 5 journals. At the places with money, top 5 publications are the only thing anyone cares about. That's not the entire profession by any means - only those in the highest-ranked departments. The vast majority of papers I read and cite were not published in the top 5 journals.

As someone else pointed out, MIT is one of the top 5 departments, while Yale is generally not considered to be in that group. The list of departments with Nobel Prize winners shows that there are plenty of good departments: Harvard, MIT, NYU, Yale, Chicago, Princeton, UCLA, Stanford, Northwestern, Berkeley, Minnesota, Columbia, Arizona State, Carnegie Mellon, San Diego, Arizona...that's just in recent years.

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

#133

Post by nixpulvis »

Rather than popping off on academia, why not attack the real issue, which is lack of proper testing.

No models, forecasts, fittings, or prophecies mean anything with heavily biased data. I'm unaware of a solid method to counteract this problem.

If my understanding is correct, we need population-wide testing to get a good basis for predictions of the future. Something which, unless I crawled under a rock again, we simply haven't come close to achieving (at least in my neck of the woods).

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

#134

Post by bjonnh »

robust wrote: post #104
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…

Can you point to evidence that the top 5 (to which I would add MIT and Berkeley) get a larger share of citations in economics than in other disciplines?

I could find one source here with such a ranking (didn't dig in their method though): https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.inst.nbcites.html

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

#135

Post by gregcoombe »

nine_k wrote: post #90
closeparen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Talented jerks can absolutely destroy a team. In my experience, the actual degree of coding prowess turns out to be significantly less important than the ability to collaborate.

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

#136

Post by tasogare »

didibus wrote: post #99
vivekd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

This is one reason I believe computer science should be thought in school just like mathematics. The experience is very humbling, you've got all this logic, all the rationale, to you, it must work, but the computer knows it doesn't make any sense. I've learned that most problems are easily dismissed by people as being "easy", "simple", just do this, just do that. I've found software forces you to really think through…

> Here's an example, my friend always tells me he thinks we shouldn't take anymore refugees. [...] That's surface level thinking to me. How do you do that? [...] What do you do?

It’s funny you take this example because your point of view is precisely surface thinking too. I bet you don’t have any concrete plan to fund housing, education, healthcare for those people, nor you have one for them to become productive members of the host society. They are dozens of factors that makes irrational to allow any of them, and a lot of countries (Australia, Japan for instance) have in fact a successful policy of allowing only a bunch of them.

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

#137

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

ip26 wrote: post #83
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was kinda hoping I’d read HN for a decade or so then get a job as senior software engineer or systems architect, without all the intervening effort ;)

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

#138

Post by xfs »

anjc wrote: post #116
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.

It's all in the game, yo.

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

#139

Post by rsfern »

mcnamaratw wrote: post #111
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...

Sorry to shock you, but not every piece of text on the internet holds water mathematically. Plot a cubic polynomial in time, a t^3 + b t^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.

It’s apparently a cubic polynomial fit to the logged data — see http://bactra.org/weblog/1176.html

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

#140

Post by cozzyd »

Animats wrote: post #18
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.

Um, yes. The statistical community has not been doing well with the coronavirus epidemic. Nobody's models seem to be predicting well. Nor is the source data for anything but deaths very good. This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now and that point? I dunno.

The models are mostly easy to understand (from simple differential equations for the simplest models to agent-based monte carlos modeling everyone ina region), but the parameters in the models depend on people's behavior, which is not something that can easily be predicted.

Argonne National Lab has simulations where they simulate every person Chicago and where they might go and who they might run into, which, given the correct set of behaviors would probably work very well. But... how do you predict how people will act in a week? That will depend on the weather, court decisions, number of deaths in random countries, how rousing a speech a politician might give, etc. If we could control how people acted, I bet the models would work very well.

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