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'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

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Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#261

Post by analog31 »

exmadscientist wrote: post #56
thelittlenag wrote: post #32

My 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…

In a lot of departments, employees are unofficially expected to buy computers out of their own pockets. Workers are often quite incensed about this.

In turn the employees have a "fuck you" attitude about it. They often buy the cheapest laptop, and won't let their department's IT person touch it. As a result, most work is done with things like out-of-date OS's and software versions, and ad-hoc security and backups.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#262

Post by staunton »

ModernMech wrote: post #91
mjburgess wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have summarised the incentives. You've yet to defend them. Presumably the point of research is that it's not commercially viable at this stage; were it, the market would already address this need. Why bother with a university research system which 'lives or dies' just as start ups do? We already have those. It is widely recognised that there needs to be a long (perhaps millenia-long) pipeline of 'unprofitable' re…

Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society. Money needs to be made, growth needs to be demonstrated, debts need to be paid, and for that grants need to come in. People recognize that unprofitable research is necessary, but no one wants to fund it. And event when by some miracle it does get funded, people complain loudly and mock it ruthlessly. Sometimes the institut…

> Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society

This is of course true (trivially and of absolutely anything in a capitalist society). However, it's somewhat ironic in that academia as an economic system is basically communist and rests on funding and planning by state bureaucracies. We are in fact discussing the kinds of corruption and misaligned incentives that plague communist systems. That is not to say, of course, that just making it "more capitalist" would immediately improve it.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#263

Post by leereeves »

ubermonkey wrote: post #245
gedy wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly interested in what defines them as "right wing". All I'm seeing is media describe them as "anti-woke" and "anti-cancel culture".

Cancel culture is just a term for "if you say something terrible, there may be consequences." Being opposed to consequences for saying or doing terrible things is, apparently, a key tenet of the American right. When someone uses the term "anti-woke," what they are signaling is an opposition to things like fairness, awareness of systemic racism and sexism, and the ability of LGBTQ folks to live openly without fear. As…

Funny you should mention "systemic sexism" when 60% of college students are women. If there's systemic sexism in the academic environment, it's against boys and young men.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#264

Post by ip26 »

etrautmann wrote: post #163
mlsu wrote: post #135

Reading the comments here, it seems that even very prestigious universities are full of academic pettiness and dysfunction which deny all of us the output of brilliant people like Katalin Karikó. It leaves me wondering: why do we not create any new universities? Why doesn't a Carnegie of our age create a new university? Brin University? Zuck University? This seems like a no brainer. I think it might seem difficult to…

Unless the organization is fundamentally structured with difference incentives, I'm not sure it'll achieve a different outcome. It's a hard but necessary challenge to prioritize research, which requires that every research group advocate the utility of their work and be evaluated in comparison with others.

I agree, the funding model would have to be different.

I think there may actually some schools that already do it, but you don’t hear about them much because the research-funded model ultimately drives prestige. A school that just provides a really great education is simply less likely to be famous.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#265

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

BurningFrog wrote: post #255
quacked wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I'd agree that Reason and Merit are always applied by the market, unless the market is referring to "whatever VCs can be convinced to give money to". However, the crux of what you're saying, which is that in academia Reason and Merit are thrown directly out of the window is completely true. My favorite discrepancy is in hiring. In startups, you can win a $150k/year job in a ten minute conversation wit…

I assume this is in part because the $150k startup hire can get fired just as fast if they don't impress, while the corresponding academia process takes months or years.

There's also inmediate feedback

150k salary ships, sells, or is out of a job or the company goes bankrupt, whichever is 1st

The equvalent researcher, with almost all kinds of research, will always keep the same job for years, and the University is always going to be around regardless of the research being done

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#266

Post by WoodenChair »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #85
thelittlenag wrote: post #32

My 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…

I'm sick of lies and misrepresentations from people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, talking like schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money. First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent. The school/university is very restricted in what they can…

> First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent.

You write as if a 50% administrative overhead is healthy. In non-regulatory captured industries it's almost unheard of. Even most non-profits that are considered the best by Charity Navigator have administrative overheads of <20%.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#267

Post by kurthr »

thelittlenag wrote: post #32

My 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…

I'm sure you'll find lots of people at her school who know the game, but for everyone else who hasn't heard.

In order to get good grants you need to run "successful" experiments, which means you need to propose to find something interesting, but that means you want to already know there's something interesting there. That means you really need to bootstrap to have already run enough of the experiment that you know where it's going to go, before you write the grant for the money to run the experiment (and analyze the results, write papers, pay grad students, etc). You also need the money to run enough of the experiments for the new proposals you're going to write next so that they are "successful". Running experiments and not getting interesting results will lead to not getting future grants, because those handing out money have memories.

Second thing. The best way to get tenure is to have such a huge group working for you (e.g. 30 grad students), because the provost will be terrified there isn't room for other grant writers in the department to get the money to support them and the lab you've built. Of course managing this is such a full time job before even teaching, that you'll be totally overwhelmed and delegating almost all of the research, papers, and grant writing to senior students. Once you get tenure you can slim back down to about 5 students.

Also, if you come from a national lab or somewhere that gives you experience writing proposals (and preferably reviewing them) that is a huge advantage since you know exactly what the other reviewers are looking for. Once you write successful proposals and papers, you'll be invited to the committees and review other papers for important journals in your field. Of course a lot of this is again a bootstrap and treadmill problem.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#268

Post by godelski »

jacquesm wrote: post #187
godelski wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well just know you're not alone. I hope you got out without killing your passions. Fwiw, I intend to lead by example. I love researching. I have a long term internship where I even do research (unfortunately not closely tied to my PhD work lol). But since I read math books and research as a hobby, I intend to simply do what I call for (in other comments) and just post to GitHub + Openreview + Arxiv and call it a fuck…

I got lucky: I never went in. My family more or less imploded in the middle of my highschool track and I went to work instead and that put me on a faster road to a lot of interaction with the computers of the day than school would have given me and that led to an interesting career. If that hadn't happened I may well have ended up in academia and I somehow feel I dodged a bullet there because my ideas of what univers…

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot I like about academia. Honestly, there hasn't been any other point of time in my life that I've been able to dedicate so much of my time to learning and researching. Even as I'm in a long term internship, that freedom is slipping away. Academia is supposed to be about protecting that freedom to explore and learn, but simply too much bullshit took over. Bureaucrats love metrics regardless of the value of those metrics. Maybe I wouldn't feel as disenfranchised if I wasn't in the fast moving world of ML with where peer review is like playing a slot machine except bigger schools and big labs get access to slot machines with higher payout rates (I see no quality difference between works from different institutions, rather the arxiv wave primes reviewers or language/proprietary {models,datasets} also prime reviewers).

I actually want people to feel disenfranchised at this point though. Because if there's anything I've learned, it's that we don't fix things before they break or even when they are noticeably broken. Rather we fix things when they're so broken that they're unusable, and typically only fix to minimal usability. Which is such a waste of resources. Maintenance is far cheaper.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#269

Post by lebean »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #243
shrubble wrote: post #37

Reminder that: 1) Ken Iverson who invented the APL programming language and went on to win the Turing Award in 1979, had already published 'that one little book' that was considered insufficient for tenure, but which formed the basis for the award. 2) tubes remained the main focus of MIT faculty for quite some years after the transistor was invented. It was Robert Noyce and the people he worked with at Grinnell Colle…

I also find it's worth reflecting that there was a time when things were not so insane. Being unable to work at Cambridge due to a lack of advanced degress, Wittgenstein was famously pushed, at 40, to just submit his Tractatus as a PhD thesis so that he could get his PhD from Cambridge. One of his examiners, G.E. Moore, stated the following on his examiners report: "I myself consider that this is a work of genius; bu…

You describe a time when things weren't insane, but describe Wittgenstein being seriously considered for a PhD for a work that brought us language games and asserts "All propositions are of equal value" as an example. I tried to scribble truth tables and manipulate symbols on a chalkboard to work out how this makes sense, but I remembered that there is no such thing as truth or falsehood, so I guess I can't really judge.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#270

Post by robwwilliams »

queuebert wrote: post #241
robwwilliams wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow—you and I live in different university universes. The overheads are essential to running research universities. They are definitely not kickbacks. This is obvious when comparing research costs at national laboratories versus research costs for comparable work at most universities.

Overhead rates at pure research non-profits are much lower than at universities. The difference is the amount of bureaucracy.

Not true at all in USA. Check out overheads at Salk Institute or other high profile non-profits.
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