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Elite Underproduction

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Re: Elite Underproduction

#231

Post by phreeza »

radu_floricica wrote: post #224

I'm finding more and more pieces of information that suggest the Great Stagnation coincides with the institutionalization of science. Science "won", got the respect of society, and got upgraded to Serious Business, with corresponding stiff roles and certifications. And 60 years later we look around and wonder how we got to tolerate parasitic journals. Assume - a very fair assumption - that journals are just the tip o…

I think the great stagnation is widely considered to have taken hold in the mid 70s. Institutionalisation of science has been going on since the 30s at least, if not earlier. It provided inventions massively increasing total factor productivity well into the period of institutionalisation. I think it is much more likely that whatever "disease" is causing the great stagnation is also affecting science.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#232

Post by isubasinghe »

At least here in Australia, I don't believe comp sci grads really get the chance to use their knowledge. I did my masters at the University of Melbourne.

If I stay in Australia I will almost certainly be doing pretty boring CRUD work, so yeah I am doing exchange at ETH Zurich next sem and probably gonna apply for jobs in the USA or continue my studies via a PhD at University of Sydney.

The masters program was kinda intense:

- wrote a compiler

- wrote a distributed mutual exclusion/leader election algorithm

- wrote an incremental, data-parallel louvain modularity optimisation algorithm

- wrote a key/value store on top of Raft (although this was a personal project done after the Distributed Algorithms subject)

- wrote code for simulation of the Andromeda-Milky Way collision and ran it on the Universitiy's HPC cluster

- will be developing an Operating System at ETH

These US based companies should give Australia a chance, we have some good universities and even one that rivals Ivy leagues in computer science imo (looking at UNSW here)

Re: Elite Underproduction

#233

Post by watwut »

fpig wrote: post #131
stazz1 wrote: post #116

This is a good article and I disagree but in subtle and nuanced ways. For example, say that "overproduction of elites" did lead to the Civil War, well we can look to the FDR years and see that a progressive tax -- that successfully taxed the wealthiest at a rate that dissuaded concentration of wealth beyond a certain level -- actually helped: we made libraries and schools and public infrastructure in the US. So while…

> So while having too many "elites" (by which I assume "wealthy people" is meant), we have a storm brewing. It doesn't mean wealthy people. It means people who feel they deserve to be a part of the elite, usually by virtue of their formal education. If we're "overproducing" such people, a large part of them cannot actually achieve this, because there's a lot more such people than available positions in the "true" eli…

In this context, physics PhD are awfully odd choice of example. And people who changed from physics to machine learning doubly so. You don't study physics in order to get ahead in politics. You wont be able to influence it as machine learning engineer either.

Both of these are literally occupation with zero claim to be elite in the sense of "having power".

And second, what this argue is that ideal political system has small group of people who have power and wealth. In ideal state, they are unified as they run things. They don't display plurality of opinions, don't have to compromise either.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#234

Post by oblio »

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…

> 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.

It's the American system, frankly.

In Germany research institutes are frequently separated from universities.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#235

Post by mkl »

kragen wrote: post #154
Invictus0 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone here is missing the point. It's not that physics is running out of questions to ask. It's that the questions are getting increasingly more expensive to answer, and the answers are increasingly less compelling. The low-hanging fruit picked long ago, modern physics produces fewer discoveries that change people's lives in the way that radar, lasers, microwaves, and transistors did, which makes science investmen…

There's always a time gap. Remember that from the first public microwave demonstrations in 01895 by Bose to the first deployments (as radar in the 01940s) took 45 years; the Amana Radarange brought microwaves into people's homes in 01967, another 27 years later; and microwave ovens didn't really go mainstream until about 01990, another 23 years after that , 95 years after Bose's first public demonstrations. The LASER…

> vaccine ... wasn't rolled out for another 9 months, during which tens of millions of people died

The total death toll has just passed 5 million.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#236

Post by native_samples »

enchiridion wrote: post #105
native_samples wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, libertarians generally define a government as having a monopoly on violence. That does not necessarily mean they think the government should have a monopoly of violence.

I've never encountered a libertarian who thought otherwise, although I guess you can have 'sub-contracted violence' via things like private police forces licensed by the government. What exactly are you thinking of here?

Re: Elite Underproduction

#237

Post by oblio »

kiba wrote: post #102
pydry wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is nothing new left to be discovered in physics now. All that is left is more and more precise measurement." -- Lord Kelvin, 1900

What is the likelihood of discovering a new phenomena or largely unexplored field of science akin to the discovery of electricity and electrochemistry? There may be a finite amount of works on physics that we can do, or technological niches that we can exploit thanks to discoveries in physics or any relevant field of knowledge. The well of discoveries isn't running dry today, but it may in future generations.

Considering the fact that what we don't know is potentially infinite, and what we don't know we don't know is a potentially infinite chunk of that, how could that ever be true? :-)

Well, I guess we could hit a local minima where we need some out-of-this-world resources or research to level up, but let's not be so pessimistic so soon. We've only been doing this modern research thing for a few centuries. You could go back 4-5 generations in an especially long lived family and you'd find someone in the family tree that was still alive before the modern scientific method was created.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#238

Post by native_samples »

pydry wrote: post #98
native_samples wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"There is nothing new left to be discovered in physics now. All that is left is more and more precise measurement." -- Lord Kelvin, 1900

I suspected I'd get an answer like this. Please read again: maybe there's not much low hanging fruit at the moment. Invictus0 has it right: this isn't the same thing as "no new discoveries ever".

Fields do have dry periods where for whatever reason, making progress is hard. Most famously AI had its "AI winter" for decades. We know now that there were new discoveries waiting to be made there but they required technology and datasets that simply didn't exist at the time. The last decade of AI progress has depended utterly on the growth of the public internet and then fast GPUs for processing that data. No matter how much funding the government had given symbolic AI in the 80s and 90s it'd have got nowhere. At least not on the use cases people seem to care about.

I find canned answers to this question increasingly tiresome. Academia and government funded research operates on a massive scale. It's unacceptable to me, as one of the people who actually pays for all this, that researchers entirely opt themselves out of any questions of utility or accountability. Fundamental physics in particular should take a good hard look at itself as it's both very expensive and in recent years, delivered very little. Consider string theory. It's been developed since the 1970s. 50 years now and for what? As far as I know this has delivered nothing concrete.

This isn't unique to physics, that's just an example. Epidemiology went down the statistical modelling rabbit hole 20 years ago and never emerged: I've yet to encounter a non-misleading claim coming from this field. If the entire field had been defunded 20 years ago we'd have a much healthier and saner world.

It's also not true that simply labelling something research means it'll one day be useful. Phrenology was once considered to be research. Critical race theory is labelled research. I think we can safely say these fields will never be useful and in fact have had sharply negative utility.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#239

Post by oblio »

dctoedt wrote: post #112
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…

> 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…

> MBA types are trained in planning and management, which, I dunno, have their uses

I'm assuming you didn't mean it this way (I guess it was an ironic comment), but planning and management are incredibly important.

The most important part to our scaling is how we organize ourselves. A top notch organizer allows a group of people to scale seamlessly. That's worth everything in the modern world.

Imagine thousands of brilliant minds, organized elegantly and efficiently to work together at maximum efficiency. It's rare because it's incredibly hard to achieve. But when it does happen, we get so much output, both creative and physical, that it's almost unbelievable. Think Bell Labs & co.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#240

Post by hoseja »

Jensson wrote: post #229
kragen wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but historically great advances in theoretical physics have usually followed great advances in experimental apparatus.

Like Einstein or Newton? Theoretical physics tends to be way ahead of experimental physics, it took 50 years from higgs boson existing as a theory to finding traces of the higgs boson in the LHC etc. Physics is done using the true scientific method. First you make a theory, then you make experiments to test the theory. Theoretical physicists made a theory and proposed some possible experiments to test it. Then 50 yea…

There's no Einstein without the Ultraviolet Catastrophe.
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