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'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
61–70 of 361 posts
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#62[deleted]
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Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#63In many professions including the business of startups and academia you need to be at least as good at selling something as you are at developing/discovering it.
While that may be true today, in the research sciences — there should be some kind of middle ground. Thomas Edison may have been a giant of self promotion. But I would argue Nikola Tesla invented as much or more foundationally important technology we use today. I would argue Tesla like Kariko will never be a wiz at self promotion. But a domain expert should have spotted them early on. I mean isn’t that the job of peo…
I think you got this backwards. Tesla made a few important inventions early on and then spent the rest of his life showing off big sparks and scamming investors. Edison's labs were far more influential.
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#64My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" re…
> the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets) Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the…
What amuses, and irritates, me is that academics frequently project this insanity onto Business or The Profit Motive.
Having close connections in academia, that world is the worst of what can be imagined. A highly competitive start-up, or scale-up, environment has a level of Reason and Merit imposed by the market which rationalises most everything (even the insane VC fantasyland headline-driven stuff is intelligible).
Academia is the worst combination of every imaginable macro force.
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#65[deleted]
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Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#66[deleted]
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Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#67Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#68Just a reminder Einstien who was the most revolutionary scientist since Newton was unable to secure a teaching position prior to publishing 3 nobel prize worthy papers in 1 year. Why do we think academia has suddenly magically changed?
To be fair, he wrote those papers after not getting a job as a professor. He graduated in 1900, applied for teaching positions for two years after that, and then had his annus mirabilis in 1905, that's when he wrote the papers you're referring to. After that, he then applied again, and had a teaching position in 1908, then a full professorship in 1911. So, it's not that people looked at three Nobel-prize caliber disc…
> unable to secure a teaching position *prior* to publishing 3 nobel prize worthy papers in 1 year
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
A revolution will likely make things even worse. Once you decide on selecting a certain trait, a thousand imposters will pop up immediately, who superficially match all the criteria that you wanted to select for.
This tells us that too many people chase these jobs. Maybe, time to hire as many as possible using basic income scheme.
The people who seek professorships aren't motivated by money, they're motivated by prestige and tenure. If they wanted money, they'd have gone directly into the private sector.
But: there just aren't enough professorships to support the amount of PhDs we mint every year.
This is causes people to go off and postdoc for years hoping somewhere will accept them. Through a combination of luck and skill, some get a job as a prof and go through the tenure gauntlet.
But for most, eventually they have to give up on their dream and do something else - except post-docs are underpaid, so they start off in a worse financial position than they otherwise would.
This has a domino effect, because those post-docs compete for jobs with fresh PhDs who never wanted to stay in academia anyway.
The effect is compounded by universities increasingly relying on adjuncts as a way to cut costs (adjunct professors are heavily exploited, and they take the abuse because they feel like they need to boost their resume to get a tenured position). So, there are even fewer tenure track positions to go around
The only way to fix it is to either reduce the number of PhDs awarded every year (not going to happen) or incentive an increase in the number of professorships at universities.
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#70Being currently in the middle of belatedly reading The Black Swan, I can't help but see this as a classic case. Penn has a formula that's supposed to predict "success," and it's a linear formula: more papers & funding leads linearly to more success. y = mx + b which is totally how the world works, right? Not if you've read Nassim Taleb or even Paul Graham's essays about mining unfashionable/disreputable/heretical ground for ideas nobody else has thought of or is willing to consider. Just like startups, somebody is going to discover something huge in there. Even if you were willing to say a university isn't a place of ideas for their own sake, and is instead nothing more than a venture capital firm like their bureaucrats seem to be asserting - in short even with the profit/greed motive intact, it still seems like a dumb strategy to model the world as linear and boring.