Reputation is just a derivative on people. Just likes options price risk on the stocks and commodities, reputation prices risk of the person. academia is kind of like a rating agency on people’s reputations. Rating agencies can misprice risk like anyone else but only in retrospect.
So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
201–210 of 223 posts
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#202Doesn't this apply to almost any large bureaucratic organization or system?
I've worked on multiple teams at large companies. Tech teams lead by hacker types would make sure to respect and reward technical competence, even if relationships did still matter a whole lot. On the other hand, I've recently worked in "machine learning" teams led by academic snake oil salesmen who publish lots of papers in ML journals and have fancy PhDs. They often regard coding and technical delivery as "grunt wo…
Sounds like academia, government, and most of the business world.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
thank you for this great summary; i couldn't understand it myself, but can with your help. my only regret is that now that I understand it, i realize it's not interesting (to me personally)
Honestly who knows if I'm actually interpreting it right, the whole thing was very confusing.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
@akiselev: I haven't only been applying to US locations of US companies (e.g. Google Switzerland). But a SWE from Google gave me a referral link to which I'm grateful. I wonder to what extent it will help though since it went through HN and we just met. I want a phone screen and be told that I am or am not good enough. I can have peace with this if one FAANG company shoots me down on my D&A skills. For my own sanity,…
When I was in a similar position, i had to make loads applications, almost a hundred. The ones that came off are the ones i least expected. I needed this many because in the begining I sucked at interviews, misunderstood questions/what people where after, etc. Also FAANG will not neccesarily give you the most meaningfull work, there are plenty of smaller firms working on important things in life
FAANG gives you money, in Europe there aren't that many better places to be. I started out with a typical salary and joining Google doubled it, and then raises at Google doubled my salary again over a few years, that has saved me many thousands of hours of work that I can spend on other things in life so far.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 memb…
You're misquoting me. The surface level thinking refers to this segment: "He just think, whoever is letting the refugees in is dumb and shouldn't do that".
When people are coming to your border in large trove, not letting them in is easier said then done. You can't just "not let them in". To keep my analogy going, this requires an algorithm of some sort. First you need to find something that works, and then you need to take into account cost consideration, scaling, etc.
Your example would work as well. Someone who were to say, whoever is stopping them from coming in is stupid. This would also be surface level. What do you do with them once they're in? Housing, education, integration? Does our system have the capacity to handle such load or will it collapse? Just letting them in may not be enough, it could cause problems down the line, what are we doing to prevent those.
The right conclusion to take from my comment is that problem solving is hard, there's a lot of variable at play, a lot of considerations to take in, and it is never as easy as you assume at first. Recognizing this is part of being humble, and I think computer science teaches you that.
Thinking you have the answers because you thought about it for 5 minutes and not realizing you skimmed and hand waved over all the direct and indirect complexities and considerations and are skipping multiple steps of the solution. Thinking that there is an easy solution and then advocating for it strongly when you haven't begone to recognize and understand the complexity of the problem itself. This to me is an indication of a lack of some form of critical thinking. I think computer science can to some extent teach people better about this, by having them practice concrete problem solving exercise on a computer which can assess to the solution working or not. And learning formal problem modeling techniques and validation strategies. It's a useful skill.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#206This 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.
>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.
Or rather it could be that the game itself is whats wrong, leading to a reproducibility crisis, fraud, group think, walled gardens and ivory towers.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#207So 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…
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…
> Competence is very far down this equation.
The worst part is when performance review time comes around. It's obvious to anyone looking at the situation objectively that competence doesn't matter much when choosing who to reward and who to fire, but seeing the tribe members pretend otherwise and target hard workers who aren't part of the clique is absolutely devastating to morale.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 serie…
I think you are arguing semantics. You are talking about what makes good science when evaluated by a person skilled in that particular art the parent poster is talking about how groups of people discover increasingly true pictures of the world. Human beings are at the very best arrogant and fallible by nature, incapable of truth. When you want to improve your model of the world by including some heretofore unknown to…
> You are talking about what makes good science when evaluated by a person skilled in that particular art the parent poster is talking about how groups of people discover increasingly true pictures of the world.
No, I am talking about how groups of people discover increasingly true pictures of the world. They don't do that by consensus; they do it by finding models that make more and more accurate predictions, as shown by the actual track record of accurate predictions.
> When you want to improve your model of the world by including some heretofore unknown to you concept,fact, or set of facts you can opt to learn everything from the ground up in order to develop a deep understanding of the topic or accept or slot in some preexisting truths and models as described by others that you presume to be true.
Or, instead of making any assumptions, you can look at the actual predictive track record to see which "preexisting truths or models" actually work and which don't.
The reason this isn't obvious to most people is that most people don't stop to think about how much of their everyday experience, particularly in this age of computers and GPS and other technological marvels, actually gives them a huge track record of accurate predictions for our fundamental scientific theories. If our predictions based on models using General Relativity were not accurate, GPS wouldn't work. If our predictions based on models using quantum mechanics were not accurate, computers wouldn't work. There are countless other examples. Most people don't stop to think about this so they don't realize how high the bar actually is for having a track record of accurate predictions. They think of GR and QM as esoteric physics, not as everyday realities. They don't realize how huge a volume of evidence from their direct experience they already have for these theories being correct, so they think they have to take physicists' word for it, when they actually don't. Which means they also don't realize how much other people, who seem to be just as sure of themselves and their predictions as physicists (if not more so), actually are just overstating their case, often by many, many orders of magnitude.
So I reject your model of how people should actually assess claims in areas where they don't have expertise.
> When people say that the scientific consensus is that cigarettes cause cancer they mean I haven't fully examined the complexity of the human lung and the effects of carcinogens on same but I accept the fact that many experts have done so and are telling me that If I keep smoking I'm more likely to die of cancer.
When people assess the probability that if they smoke they will increase their risk of dying of cancer, they have no need to rely on any "consensus". They can just look at the data.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#209Headline and article content don't line up very well. Actual (short) body of article makes the point that when people in positions of power don't have significant training in statistics, it isn't surprising that they don't understand statistics. But that they do need to understand how much they don't understand. The article says next to nothing about gaming of professional achievement in academia.
I can offer one small anecdote that maybe reinforces some of the criticisms of academic circles.
A long while ago, I worked in IT in the admissions department of a top-5 ivy league school. While there I became good friends with many of the admissions officers for the undergraduate and MBA programs.
It's an open secret that admissions are highly influenced by who you know, but what I was stunned by was the overwhelming percentage of each incoming class owes its entry to the connections of their parents.
I had always assumed it was some small single digit percentage, but the first time I saw "the list", I was dumbfounded. There is a list of students each year that is sent from the Dean of admissions to admissions department containing the students that must be admitted. The process for rejecting one of those students required the admissions officer to submit a report outlining why - an incredibly rare occurrence.
The admissions officers rationalize this as a necessary evil, and cover themselves by pointing to the special attention they pay to diversity candidates. "If I see one more white, indian or asian kid from the upper-east side with a perfect GPA, I'm just going to throw the app out the window" was a quote that stuck in my mind.
The list was a collection of applicants who were the children of staff, professors, administrators, and financial or political benefactors. Surprisingly, children of alumni (even those who donated regularly) were not in the group unless they really made an effort over the years and had someone at the school who could call the Dean personally.
It sort of bothered me because it made me realize that someone like myself - a good student, non-diversity, with good EC activities was competing for a tiny tiny portion of the admissions slots for any top school.
Is it really so much to ask to have a transparent and level playing field in college admissions?
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. This seems pretty straightforward, no? You re-open cautiously, wait a few weeks, make sure your hospital resources aren't being overwhelmed, then open up a bit more, rinse and repeat. I wasn't aware there was another way.
The trace model: identify each infected person, trace all their contacts, test all of them, expand outwards. Full quarantine the infected. Intensive but it works; see South Korea and New Zealand. The "herd immunity" plan can only work with more than 50% of the population infected, of which about 1% will die and some slightly higher percentage suffer lingering ill health, which in the US means at least a million peopl…
The "herd immunity" plan can only work with more than 50% of the population infected, of which about 1% will die and some slightly higher percentage suffer lingering ill health, which in the US means at least a million people.
That's current US policy. That's what the "Get and Keep America Open" plan does.[1] Current death rate for the US is around 1,400 per day.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/open-america/i...