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Elite Underproduction

troynikov.io

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Re: Elite Underproduction

#191

Post by ClumsyPilot »

kcb wrote: post #173
xyzelement wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not convinced that the rise of China will be so bad. Boomers and neocons want us to think so You're not convinced that going from "living in the most economically dominant and militarily powerful country in the world" to "not" is going to somehow not be a painful experience? You can use the "I am not convinced" line for anything. "I am not convinced that being homeless is worse than living in a nice house" but.…

Aren't you implying that every country besides the US is currently having a painful experience?

Absolutely!

When UK Parliament wanted Zuk to answer some tough question about his company facilitating electoral fraud, he simply refused to show up. Even first world nations struggle in dealing with American corporation, which often act as if they are above the law.

God forbid you are a developing nation. British American Tabacco has taken poor developing nations to court for trying to ban children from smoking (!!) and got compenation and the law repealed

https://youtu.be/6UsHHOCH4q8

I am not even mentioning illegal stuff: bribes, threats, drone strikes, strong-arming, etc.

Even the EU was strong armed when it comes to GPS:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/dec/08/world.internation...

Those that think that American economic advantage was won in a 'fair game' are super naive

Re: Elite Underproduction

#193

Post by konfin »

PaulHoule wrote: post #103

As a physics PhD turned coder I am not sure more physicists would mean more progress in most fields, particularly in fundamental physics and cosmology. In these places experimental results are just too hard to win. For instance, String Theory lumbers on without evidence to confirm or deny it. There are a few areas where a little boundary crossing might make a difference (e.g. we got 30 years of bogus papers on univer…

https://web.archive.org/web/20011013031756/http://wuphys.wus...

I can't really do any more justice to the topic than what's been said there.

I'll just note that 1999 is now the good old days when you'd only spend 10 years as a post doc. I left in 2011 and postdocs who had been there for 10 years are still post docs. Out of my class of 30 PhD's there's now no one left in Academia. The golden girl of the class who spend time in Antarctica, CERN and all the other places which take one in one thousand applicants is a data scientist at a bank as of last month.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#194

Post by runako »

This is extremely physics-centered. 2021 is an especially poor year to complain about our society producing enough elites to expand our understanding of the physical world, given that this year billions of people are currently being inoculated against a novel disease by vaccines built on a novel platform in record time. And when new therapeutic vectors are becoming readily available for the same disease, also in record time. I'm not a physicist or biologist, but from my perspective, the advancements in biotech in the areas of vaccines, cancer therapeutics, and other areas are at least worthy of mention here. Rapid cures for pandemics are likely to do more to help expand basic science research -- by exciting the populace -- than more precise measurements of the charge of basic particles.

And this week is an especially poor choice to publish a rant like this given the news that a company just got sizable funding to scale fusion reactors to commercial scale. Physics triumphs; physicists lament?

Perhaps we have the frontierspeople we need, and because they don't look like the frontier in the history books, the author simply doesn't recognize this?

Re: Elite Underproduction

#195

Post by kcb »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #191
kcb wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you implying that every country besides the US is currently having a painful experience?

Absolutely! When UK Parliament wanted Zuk to answer some tough question about his company facilitating electoral fraud, he simply refused to show up. Even first world nations struggle in dealing with American corporation, which often act as if they are above the law. God forbid you are a developing nation. British American Tabacco has taken poor developing nations to court for trying to ban children from smoking (!!)…

And yet the US is not #1 in pretty much any quality of life metric. The point is there are plenty of nations with varying degrees of US influence that are far from miserable or painful places to live.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#196

Post by Jensson »

watwut wrote: post #59
dash2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't blame the individuals, instead he argued that there's a social problem which society needs to solve.

And countra argument is that smart capable educated people choosing to do machine learning instead of physics is not social issue. That it is them not lapsing and doing less worthy intellectual pursuit.

> smart capable educated people choosing to do machine learning instead of physics is not social issue

It definitely is a social issue, the main reason people make that switch is money and money is a social issue. Why would you make less money doing physics research than helping advertisers better manipulate people? There is no reason, currently society rewards the later more than the former, but in another society it could be the other way around.

So the problem isn't if you as an individual choose to switch field since you'd like that field better, but all those who switched since that field pays better. That is the social issue.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#197

Post by thaumasiotes »

lmm wrote: post #186
thaumasiotes wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing stopping the new lab from also offering the possibility of tenure. Why would it be outcompeted?

It would be outcompeted because other labs could hire many more grad students for the same cost.

Why?

Re: Elite Underproduction

#198

Post by derbOac »

runako wrote: post #194

This is extremely physics-centered. 2021 is an especially poor year to complain about our society producing enough elites to expand our understanding of the physical world, given that this year billions of people are currently being inoculated against a novel disease by vaccines built on a novel platform in record time. And when new therapeutic vectors are becoming readily available for the same disease, also in reco…

But that vaccine? Partially developed by one woman who was treated like dirt by U Penn because she insisted on pursuing mRNA vaccines, solely because she wasn't bringing in enough federal grant money. Demoted. Supported by another faculty member to do it. U Penn now likes to try to take credit for it even though this research was done despite them, not because of it. This woman leaves university academics to pursue research through the private sector.

She's doing fine, thank you, won a big award etc. But to me it's a perfect example, in that this vaccine you're mentioning, that saved the world in a literal sense, occurred despite the academic structure. That academic structure tried to stomp her out, expunge her from the department.

I think it's totally appropriate, in this kind of climate, to point all this out.

Are there advances? Sure, but it's more in the sense that the initial world conflicts of the early twentieth century slowly evolved in the midst of trench warfare in which humans were treated like fodder for the machine.

I have a problem with the linked article only in that it's grossly misleading: the author seems to disagree with the elite overproduction thesis, but then essentially goes on to argue that there's an overproduction of elites, at least insofar as there's no resources to support them. But every one of those people who exits academics because they aren't given the opportunities, or are psychologically abused, or who don't have the right connections, or whatever, are another opportunity lost. So I agree with it in its substance.

Academics is currently grossly dysfunctional. The fact that progress occurs at all is a strawman -- it's not about progress per se, it's about opportunity costs and lost life in time and suffering.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#199

Post by Jensson »

kcb wrote: post #195
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely! When UK Parliament wanted Zuk to answer some tough question about his company facilitating electoral fraud, he simply refused to show up. Even first world nations struggle in dealing with American corporation, which often act as if they are above the law. God forbid you are a developing nation. British American Tabacco has taken poor developing nations to court for trying to ban children from smoking (!!)…

And yet the US is not #1 in pretty much any quality of life metric. The point is there are plenty of nations with varying degrees of US influence that are far from miserable or painful places to live.

Living in USA will be more painful than it is now when USA no longer gets to import a lot of goods giving nothing in return. USA hasn't had a positive trade balance in half a century, people will want back their stuff at some point and that point wont be fun for the Americans.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#200

Post by thaumasiotes »

dctoedt wrote: post #142
whiddershins wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the need for lawyers grows non-linearly with population, because the need is correlated with the number of transactions

This is a cultural artifact, not a cross-cultural truth. The historical norm is to use zero lawyers even for the largest-scale transactions. It's still the modern norm to use zero lawyers for small-scale transactions.

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