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Elite Underproduction

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Re: Elite Underproduction

#81

Post by version_five »

avsteele wrote: post #30

I disagree with the article's premises and conclusions, my perspective is that of a physicist who also knows many lapsed physicists. The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum. So to me the article really is "I agree with the elite overproductio…

I agree with everything you wrote and you said it better than I was going to. I just want to add that I actually see "lapsed physicist" as a good sign: in physics PHD grads, we have a lot of people who as part of their formation undertook a focused study on some area at the forefront of human knowledge. Only by doing a lot of these studies will be make real advances, because science is mostly finding things that dont work. And the byproduct is someone with "useful" skills in the sense that they can use them to easily transition to highly paid work, or what the author calls a lapse. Less often, one goes on to a research career, and less often still, one makes a big breakthrough. But overall, it's win-win. Not saying its perfect, but I think having a meaningful offramp after grad school is the best way to do more exploration and push the frontier of science. If you had to do a PHD and then risk complete unemployability after, the situation would be much worse

Re: Elite Underproduction

#83

Post by finexplained »

b9a2cab5 wrote: post #43
finexplained wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really think the connection you're trying to draw follows immediately. There are very strong domestic students, probably enough to fill all the top PhD programs. The calculus for pursuing a PhD is different if you're a domestic vs international student. If you're international and want to move to and eventually live in the US, where some of the highest paying jobs in the world are available, then first gettin…

If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population. I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism. If you look at top public school undergrad programs that don't practice affirmative action (UC's, UW) the programs are almost…

> If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population.

I don't think you can draw a cultural difference from this. I get what you're trying to say, particularly by narrowly defining "American"; that cultural influences put pressure/status on academics both by immigrant parents and non-American parents and that pressure causes students to excel academically and achieve these high paying positions. But there is so much selection bias here; both in the types of people who immigrate to a new country and those who leave their home country to attend school abroad. It's not clear to me Asian culture results in FAANG being disproportionally Asian, or simply that there are 2 billion Asian people in the world, and while the same percentage of people are sufficiently qualified as top American students (let's say 2%), 2% of 2 billion people is 40M people! Do you see the problem with jumping to this conclusion? You don't have sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis, that both cultures produce tops students at similar percentages.

A personal anecdote: I spend a lot of my interviewing candidates. Students for all the top schools in the world, international students and domestic students, undergrads and PhDs. Conditioned on having gone to a top university, I've never noticed a difference in performances between domestic students and international ones. (Or undergrad vs PhD to be honest.)

I also take a bit of issue with your definition of "American" on a personal level.

> To be clear, when I say American I mean someone whose ancestors have lived in America for multiple generations, since at least the 1950's.

My parents are immigrants, I'm a first generation American. But I am absolutely culturally American. There is no other country were I would feel at home culturally, and I've been heavily influenced by the country I grew up in. I'm also the product of US public schools, most notably UC Berkeley, which you cite. And I'm not Asian or Russian. And I do work at a FAANG level firm.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#84

Post by thanhhaimai »

DevKoala wrote: post #82

There are way too many examples to validate the elite overproduction theory. Just right now we don’t have enough skilled trade workers to execute on the infrastructure plan. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/us/politics/biden-infrast...

I don't share the same sentiment that we don't have enough talented workers. We just don't have enough workers who are willing to work minimum wage with a $0.5/hour raise year over year.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#85

Post by cblconfederate »

max002 wrote: post #52

Im curious about one thing and im self-taugh so please forgive lack of understanding of uni world. Youre saying that physicist who do machine learning should be instead trying to unserstand physical world. While not having academic background i do read a lot of science news (its my porn:D) and now and then i see stuff like "new strong material discoveded by ml", "ml speeds up discovery of composite materials" or "ml…

Physics itself is about creating models of the world that are simple and understandable, and provide profound insights. ML is the opposite of that, a black box that works but cannot explain itself. A drug discovered by ML is not increasing our understanding of the world.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#86

Post by slt2021 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #70
b9a2cab5 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population. I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism. If you look at top public school undergrad programs that don't practice affirmative action (UC's, UW) the programs are almost…

> If you look at top public school undergrad programs that don't practice affirmative action (UC's, UW) the programs are almost 50% Asian. That's why, when looking at resumes, I've heard "Yeah, you know X is good, he went to Y (a school with affirmative action) and he's Asian/International, so you know he's there on merit". I somehow feel we regressed over time.

>so you know he's there on merit

it is hilarious how historical racism towards blacks leads to reverse racism (affirmative action) and leads to another racisms.

it's like you can't fix racism issues by instituting even more racism, it will only lead to more and more racism.

I hear often that Black employees are often looked down upon, because of the AC in hiring and education (the bar is extremely low for them). I think that Affirmative Action was created to reinforce stereotypes and racism, after the Civil Rights Movement

Re: Elite Underproduction

#87

Post by cblconfederate »

b9a2cab5 wrote: post #5

The "academic meatgrinder" ignores the fact that a plurality of top PhD and MS programs' students are international, usually from Europe, India or China. There are deeper issues at play - like the fact that American K-12 schools often have an anti-intellectual culture and American culture as a whole does not place sufficient emphasis on doing well in school.

Worth noting that many of those cultures have a much more idealistic view of Science. Americans often use business terms when discussing science.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#88

Post by enkid »

robbmorganf wrote: post #79
avsteele wrote: post #30

I disagree with the article's premises and conclusions, my perspective is that of a physicist who also knows many lapsed physicists. The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum. So to me the article really is "I agree with the elite overproductio…

> overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We probably don't need too many more physics professors but we sure could use more physics research. Or maybe better physics research. Either way, more/better physics discoveries. That said, our scientific communication channels seem filled to the brink. So maybe we ne…

Is this actually the case? There is a lot of research that is occuring in the private sector or research labs and the such. A lot of it is being done at universities, but us there an actual quantified measure if what percentage of research is not in a teaching institution versus what is?

Re: Elite Underproduction

#89

Post by native_samples »

robbmorganf wrote: post #79
avsteele wrote: post #30

I disagree with the article's premises and conclusions, my perspective is that of a physicist who also knows many lapsed physicists. The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum. So to me the article really is "I agree with the elite overproductio…

> overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We probably don't need too many more physics professors but we sure could use more physics research. Or maybe better physics research. Either way, more/better physics discoveries. That said, our scientific communication channels seem filled to the brink. So maybe we ne…

Do we need more physics research? I guess it depends a lot on how you define physics, but it seems like outside of possibly better silicon nodes, there isn't a whole lot of low hanging fruit in physics at the moment. When physics does get research funding it gets dropped into building giant machines that, at vast expense, have discovered virtually nothing.

It feels like right now most areas of academia are consuming far more resources than their useful output could really justify, which is perhaps why in so many fields it's so heavily dependent on government funding (vs say computer science where academic/corporate lab collaborations are quite common).

Re: Elite Underproduction

#90

Post by native_samples »

woodruffw wrote: post #11
enchiridion wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t Thiel essentially anarcho-capitalist? So pretty far right and extremely (in the literal sense) libertarian. EDIT: anachro->anarcho

Thiel's hawkish military (and self-interested, given Palantir's contracts with Defense) positions on China probably put him outside of the pale of "normal" libertarian politics.

Normally libertarianism has an 'exception' for defense because it's a pure commons. There's no obvious way to have private sector military due to the nature of wars and invasions. Indeed, the government having a monopoly on violence is a core part of libertarian thinking.
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