131–140 of 148 posts
Fair warning: you _never_ get the full picture if you only hear one side of it. It is possible that the advisor is a manipulative asshole (though it's unlikely that they are to such an extent), or it is possible that the author grew up always getting participation trophies and now isn't getting any (far more likely, IMO). So before you render your judgment, wait for at least some semblance of corroboration.
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> you don't get to stick around if you abuse people to the extent described in the article What do you make of the Me Too movement?
That's a good question, so I'll answer it with a question. Do you think Joe Biden should withdraw from the race due to the "credible" rape accusation? If the answer is "no", because there's no hard evidence, then we concur.
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That's a good question, so I'll answer it with a question. Do you think Joe Biden should withdraw from the race due to the "credible" rape accusation? If the answer is "no", because there's no hard evidence, then we concur.
We're not talking party politics here. The point is that the downfall of Harvey Weinstein disproves the idea that you don't get to stick around if you abuse people .
And no, you don't get to pick where you apply #metoo and where you don't. You either "believe all women" or "require evidence". There's no pick-and-choose.
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Because you don't get to stick around if you abuse people to the extent described in the article. At least I haven't seen it, in a quarter century of my adult life. I quite frequently see folks who treat any demands that they do what they've signed up to do as "abuse" though. Think about it: say you are a judge and you wanted to _really_ understand why someone is divorcing their spouse. Would you listen to just one s…
Would you listen to just one spouse or both? Here's the dirty secret: competent wifebeaters look like really splendid people to all the world. The incompetent ones without social skills are weeded out early, that leaves the good ones.
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I'm a bit surprised to hear it put this way. Aren't physics students usually welcome in finance as quants?
(1) Most don't want to be quants. It's a soul-sucking no work-life-balance career path. You're getting paid better, but it's a hyper-abusive work environment. (2) Quant hiring is super-competitive. most physics students wouldn't get jobs. A lot of quants are physicists, but the converse isn't true. (3) And students? Not so much. Quants like to hire Ph.Ds or possibly ABDs. Ones who are ALSO good programmers can go the…
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Former students too. Talk to them, and look up what they're doing. If a lot of former students ended up where you see yourself in 10 years, that's a great sign. If a lot of former students are in dead-end careers, that's a bad sign. Of course, that discriminates against tenure-track faculty, but avoiding tenure-track faculty is good advice too. Tenured professors have the luxury of being able to care about you. Tenur…
Speaking as a tenured professor, I disagree with this -- the trade-offs are more varied than you present them, and the individual differences are probably larger than the categorical differences. It's probably true in general that the younger professors are more likely to both stay up until 3:00 in the morning writing a paper with you and expect you to stay up until 3:00 in the morning writing that paper, but I don't…
From my time in grad school, I don't mind working at 3 am (and most other grad students I knew, at least without families, didn't mind that either). The problem was the abusive nastiness. You're presuming student and faculty interests are otherwise aligned. They're not. The most successful paths to academic success I've seen include:
* Spending time raising money, hiring a ton of students, and getting a few good publications by law of large numbers
* Attaching students to many projects, and when one shows promise, sprinting to do most of the work to claim first authorship on a breakthrough result (at the expense of collaborators), and neglecting the rest of the projects / students (at the expense of the rest of the lab).
* ... and so on.
There is also a question of who becomes associated with the breakthrough: the student or the advisor? Yes, the first/last author split in publication helps, but at the end of the day, someone goes out and gives talks, media interviews, etc. I've seen plenty of student s-ed because the faculty member (who often did minimal work) takes credit for their work.
And there are megaprojects, where there's one nice result at the end, and a half-dozen graduate students who work on it doing menial engineering/lab work. Labs like that end up with zero students going for faculty (or other highly-competitive) jobs.
In other words, aside from baking data, most tactics to academic success involve carefully optimizing the odds, and burning a number of students and/or collaborators to have tenure-granting results associated with the faculty member.
As a footnote, back in the day, I was blessed with a terrific advisor, but the MAJORITY of faculty at MIT are abusive douche bags, and the system is set up entirely to protect them. And most students I know who left MIT into faculty slots did that by cheating at least a little bit, whether through credit theft, baking research results, or otherwise. Most MIT grad students don't cheat, mind you, but most highly successful ones do (and yes, I am in a position where I've seen many of these case play out at MIT, and a few at other institutions). Those go into tenure-track positions, and abuse their students the same way they were abused.
Former students also have a better viewpoint. Many people don't realize they were abused until years later, when they can look back on an experience objectively. Among my cohort, the number of people who would say they were abused today are much greater than the number of people who would have said it at the time.
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(1) Most don't want to be quants. It's a soul-sucking no work-life-balance career path. You're getting paid better, but it's a hyper-abusive work environment. (2) Quant hiring is super-competitive. most physics students wouldn't get jobs. A lot of quants are physicists, but the converse isn't true. (3) And students? Not so much. Quants like to hire Ph.Ds or possibly ABDs. Ones who are ALSO good programmers can go the…
Most employed programmers can't do "industry grade engineering". Physics grad students are plenty capable, with a boot camp if needed.
Most don't want to do the work (not implying laziness -- it's about interest / fit / etc.).
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We're not talking party politics here. The point is that the downfall of Harvey Weinstein disproves the idea that you don't get to stick around if you abuse people .
Well he didn't get to stick around, did he? As powerful as he was, he was immediately disowned by everyone once his victims came forward, and there was corroboration and evidence. Whereas here it is suggested that we make judgments based on a _sole anonymous account_. And no, you don't get to pick where you apply #metoo and where you don't. You either "believe all women" or "require evidence". There's no pick-and-cho…
His case shows it's possible to make it to the top, and to stay there for decades, as an abuser.
You're emphasising whether it's possible to get to the top as an abuser, stay there as an abuser, and die before getting caught. This has little bearing on my point, although we know from the Jimmy Savile case that it is indeed possible.
> There's no pick-and-choose.
As I just stated, I'm not interested in discussing this. My point here is specific.
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I only every heard of one murder of an advisor, that took place in 1978 at Stanford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Streleski Edit: Here is a NYT article about 2 other incidents https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/science/27murd.html According to this article, Streleski bludgeoned his professor, not his advisor
Thanks for finding that. 19 years into a doctorate program...
I was an undergraduate work-study student working in my university lab. I got to talking with a Ph.D student helping set up his equipment, "how long you been working on this?" "Almost 10 years." "Seems really long." "Yes, normally it's 5 years but I can't enough time to finish it. I'm always working on Prof. Engineer's research projects." "I mean can't you just leave?" "No, not at all. You are completely beholden to…
What's a "shop bunny suit"?
And since I was working between classes it made it easier to change.