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Elite Underproduction

troynikov.io

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Re: Elite Underproduction

#141

Post by barry-cotter »

WhisperingShiba wrote: post #138
DanBC wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Source: List of countries by suicide rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r ... (Sort by all descending) > Thoughts? My thought is please don't do this. You get no useful information. Wikipedia strips out all the necessary context. The source that Wikipedia uses explicitly tells you that comparing rates across countries is difficult and fraught with problems. Heck, comparing rates across…

Ok, so besides my use of data which is very difficult to collect and verify, do you disagree with my statements of money failing to map to love and dignity?

GDP per capita maps excellently to dignity. The richer we get the less grinding, soul sucking poverty there is. The fewer children die of easily preventable diseases. The longer people live. The less people work jobs they hate just because they need sustenance. The more people work jobs they like. The more of their life people spend retired or just not working "in education".

Insofar as wealth makes life less nasty and brutish it probably makes life more loving but money buys a lot of dignity.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#142

Post by dctoedt »

whiddershins wrote: post #117
dctoedt wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the professions he lists are "lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum. True, people with zero-sum, "I want more!" attitudes might very well self-select for the listed lines of work, perhaps because of the greater potential payoffs and arguably-weaker checks and balances there. But at the risk of sounding defensive, zero-sumness really does depend greatly o…

In all fairness the legal political feedback loop seems to act to make law less zero sum, by continually increasing the amount of law and regulation, hence an ever-growing pie of legal work. And all cynicism aside, a growing economy might organically increase the need for lawyers.

> a growing economy might organically increase the need for lawyers.

I've long thought that; the need for lawyers grows non-linearly with population, because the need is correlated with the number of transactions, which would tend to increase (exponentially? factorially?) with population.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#143

Post by jollybean »

Nice thoughts but let's not assume academia is the powerhouse of advancement, it's just one layer.

Making useful things with all the grinding that goes in product development is hard. All the little bity components, managing hugely complicated supply chains, these are not petty jobs.

We could literally shift some people in Academia over to things like that, like science of supply chains.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#144

Post by amusedcyclist »

RNCTX wrote: post #64
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 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. In a land where money buys everything, you think culture is the reason why a thing exists or doesn't exist? I think you're…

H1B's in Big tech are about as far from indentured servants as you can imagine, they're in high demand and switch jobs for better pay constantly. American kids with access to generational wealth aren't as interested in difficult technical subjects.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#145

Post by max002 »

cblconfederate wrote: post #120
max002 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And IF we get to explainable models (i.e. https://aithority.com/machine-learning/neural-networks/deep-... ) would that change its "usefulness" in physics world in your opinion? Not trying to fight or say that youre wrong. Just curious about perspective, im extremely detail oriented so i pick on them ^_^

it doesnt even need to be explainable. If a model comes up with an equation that reconciles quantum physics with gravity then we could try to reason how it came to it, but we don't need to. As long as the model described in the equation is understandable by humans it should be enough. However most ML models are black boxes that solve problems without generating models of the world (that we know of) Physicists and mat…

Points taken, thank you for explanation.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#147

Post by jollybean »

avsteele wrote: post #134
robbmorganf wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There are quite a few places like this: * GTRI * Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab * MIT Lincoln Labs * ~All the national labs (NIST, Argonne, etc...) They are still mostly full as I understand. If I was to write an article on what might be improved: We need more translational research (product focused, using existing knowledge) and less academic research. One problem I see is that there just isn't the springboard fr…

" there just isn't the springboard from academic research to commercialization"

I worked in tech transfer for a bit.

There isn't such a thing as 'translation of science' because knowledge itself is pretty useless, even applied research is.

Products - which hopefully embody some of those things - are what people buy and the things that go into making good products are a bit orthogonal to classical R&D approach. Thinking about things from a 'user centric' instead of things having 'intrinsic' value is a big leap that I think takes a few years for some to get.

In Academia we think of knowledge as having inherent meaning and value unto it's own - which is totally fine I'm not hear to argue otherwise.

But in the real world, it's almost as if you have to view Science as just 'fancy pants tooling' and give it about as much love as your ruler or hammer, i.e. think of it as just a tool to meet some 'ends' wherein the 'ends' is not 'publishing a paper'.

In biotech, the 'ends' maybe more mappable, i.e. 'this drug regrows hair in men and women' but as you indicate, it mostly doesn't work this way.

Even then, even if we got our surplus PhD's into industry, we still may have this over-capacity.

So all of that aside, maybe we are entering the phase where the standard/normative level of education is just really, really high. Like in one of those corny Star Trek places where everyone has a PhD.

Just like many of the wealthy, effete folks in the past who got degrees because they were rich and not even interested in pursuing something applied or interesting, 'we're all getting rich now' and perhaps should turn our focus to the 5B people on planet earth who still have material needs.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#148

Post by ummonk »

Oh great yet another person who can’t be bothered to understand Turchin’s theory or the data behind it and then attacks a straw man.

Regarding physicists being driven out of research, as a physics major, institutional issues in academia have nothing to do with me doing coding instead. It’s simply that money makes life convenient and I’m doing what makes me money. If I got paid equivalent amounts to pursue my passions I’d jump at the chance but absent that possibility I’d rather earn a lot, FIRE, and then focus on passions after.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#150

Post by Sevii »

He talks about how we have to few people qualified to expand the frontier, laments how people with physics education, like myself, are working on software engineering, but somehow misses that software is the frontier.

People are getting pulled into software engineering because it is the biggest frontier opportunity available today.

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