241–250 of 259 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Plenty of new faculty are more interested in research than teaching too. Partly, because they're evaluated on research.
But are being paid by tuition revenue, from people who expect them to teach. The US needs more national labs for people who want to do research but don't want to teach.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But are being paid by tuition revenue, from people who expect them to teach. The US needs more national labs for people who want to do research but don't want to teach.
and better pay and tenure options for people who don't want to do research but are good at and put significant amounts of work into teaching.
These threads are often fun because of the variety of ways people were taught things. It’s hard to guess how they compare because most people only end up doing one of the ways and there isn’t much randomisation in education. Where I studied, problem sets were purely pedagogical and didn’t contribute towards grades. It meant exams could be stressful but the questions in the homework could cover a wider range of diffic…
> ‘what’s yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice?’ A yellow Tychonoff's theorem, obviously.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Jazz musician? Everyone who does it for a living ranges from amazing to genius and being just very good gets you nowhere professionally. Band leaders and/or singers can be, and quite commonly are, very average, and get regular work. They can be pretty bad and work a lot if they're also very good at marketing themselves. (source: am a jazz musician)
Genuine question: What in your opinion are the differences between a great and an average band leader? I've been making music as hobby for most of my life, and band leading is a topic I think about a lot - but it seems for many musicians I meet is not even on the radar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If so, why have teachers at all? Give those freshmen adults a syllabus in the beginning of the semester and conduct exams at the end. ”Those who are smart and motivated will get it, and heck with the rest.”
They still have a role in explaining the material and answering questions, but it's not their job to motivate students to study their subject.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and you observe other students putting similar amounts of effort, but obtaining much better results, understanding things more quickly and getting better ideas, you should probably just drop out I'm sorry, but even if this is true under some circumstances, this seems like terrible general advice, and only matters if your only goal is to reach the top echelons of your field. That doesn't mean there is no room for "a…
My career advice is usually: 1. draw a circle around the things you enjoy doing 2. draw a circle around the things that pay well 3. draw a circle around the things you're good at The intersection is your best career path. I tried to be a musician. Epic failure. I tried sports. Catastrophic failure. I tried sales. Monumental failure. Persisting in those endeavors as a career is akin to beating my head on a rock. Peopl…
Pretty much most senior level/grad algorithm classes are like this. They introduce a framework for solution and then give you about 2-3 example lecture problems that they walk you through. 2-3 weeks after being introduced to 5/6 frameworks its Exam day. You are given unique word problems that, in the eyes of someone experienced like a prof or PhD student, is trivial. But you are struggling with 1 week of homework exp…
My thinking on this may be evolving. I used to think that you would learn more figuring out things for yourself. There may be something to that, but now I am thinking that having a more relaxed learning curve with many worked examples (not just a few) will help more students succeed with the course material.
Students who have seen the material before will be bored, but the examples and gradual learning curve are intended for those who are seeing and learning the material for the first time.
In my own experience, I find that many problems require a particular, often subtle or non-obvious, trick or insight to solve. This can result in wasting a huge amount of time until you are fortunate enough to discover it, assuming you actually do. These sorts of problems, especially on exams, are beloved by instructors because they produce modal distributions that make it easy to pick winners and losers and/or sort students into grading bins. They're hated by students because they tend to reward prior knowledge or experience - or sheer luck - rather than effort in the current course.
I wonder if the author is making a mistake trying to put research-like questions into a problem set, even one intended for early doctoral students. (Imagine putting students in competition with each other on research problems - that would seem to be isolating, cruel, and bad for a research group!) I would certainly hope that the exams are more reasonable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, I gotta try reading the harder Greg Egan novels again. I'm fine with the biological and even some of the topographical stuff, but when he starts basing character development on actually visualising shifting through orthogonal dimensions like what you're talking about, my brain just exits via my arsehole and I give up.
Greg Egan, Matt Parker, myself, and a slew of others (eg [1]) all attended math and physics classes in what some astronaut called the city of lights and the most isolated city in the world ... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laKp1XeEF74 some of us also appeared in a film with Nicole Kidman
(And, though I adore the poetry, I believe Perth (to Adelaide, 2131km) is beaten in isolation by Wellington (to Sydney, 2225km).)
I'm stunned and baffled as to what the Nicole Kidman movie could be though; unless you're talking about the character Matthew Parker? I hope you're not also a celebrity Mr/Mrs defrost as I confess I've no idea who you could be :S
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Experimental technique development and pushing the cutting edge of current state of the art techniques is a phenomena you can see everywhere in human society. It is there in every field of creative endeavor humans engage in, which I would say research is one of. Not only would I say that research isn't special, but I would also say that, just like every other field of creative endeavor that doesn't intrinsically brin…
> Not only would I say that research isn't special, but I would also say that, just like every other field of creative endeavor that doesn't intrinsically bring a lot of money, those who write the checks (and those who focus on currying their favor) call the shots and sit at the center of influence networks and control the flow and direction of creative production. I definitely agree, but at the same time, those who…
Concretely, why don't we take an example you brought up, which is professional football. Let's look at Tom Brady, regarded as the best quarterback of all time. He was 199th pick in the 2000 draft, and look at where he is now. Shouldn't he have quit when he was 199/254 in the draft? After all, he might have gone pro but he wasn't even in the top half nevermind the top quartile.
Let's take another biological example, which is weight training. You actually have to train yourself to failure to get to the point where you tear your muscles enough that they'll regrow, and then you have to eat a ton to rebuild them properly, and then you have to repeat this over and over again consistently to reach peak fitness. What would you say to someone who said "if you're not cutting it at the gym, better quit early rather than later?" You would tell them the same thing Ronnie Coleman said, which is "Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights." Considering the brain-body connection, do you really think that there isn't a correlate with intellectual activity?
This is in no way controversial when considered in the field of physical fitness, but for some reason, "when the activity is intellectual, rather than physical, however, people tend to react more emotionally, or allow their ideology to overshadow some hard facts about human existence."
And one of the hardest facts about human existence for people to swallow is that many times, you aren't unsuccessful in the field of your choice because you weren't born with the right raw material. You are unsuccessful because you didn't properly learn the game, butter up the right resource providers to support you, and continuously hone your technique to get to the top no matter what it took. If you did, it wouldn't be a matter of if but when.
Now, football is a well defined game with well defined physical inputs and far less degrees of freedom than other fields. But academia is the final frontier of human knowledge. Is it really the case that you have found a cheat code and one true metric to determine whether a human will reach academic significance or not? Or is it just the case that you have found an explanation which is convenient, simple, and wrong, which you are afraid to let go of?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and you observe other students putting similar amounts of effort, but obtaining much better results, understanding things more quickly and getting better ideas, you should probably just drop out I'm sorry, but even if this is true under some circumstances, this seems like terrible general advice, and only matters if your only goal is to reach the top echelons of your field. That doesn't mean there is no room for "a…
My career advice is usually: 1. draw a circle around the things you enjoy doing 2. draw a circle around the things that pay well 3. draw a circle around the things you're good at The intersection is your best career path. I tried to be a musician. Epic failure. I tried sports. Catastrophic failure. I tried sales. Monumental failure. Persisting in those endeavors as a career is akin to beating my head on a rock. Peopl…