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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

#351

Post by queuebert »

kelipso wrote: post #339
queuebert wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, overheads for research organisations, non-profit or otherwise, are typically higher than universities. Researchers cost way more than grad students and researchers have similar percentages of overhead too.

Five researchers and one admin is cheaper than two researchers, two postdocs, a grad student, two admins, a compliance officer, an HR office, a grants office, a budget office, a legal office, some Deans, Vice Deans, Vice Chairs, Vice Chancellors, etc. You get my point.

I'm sure there are particular examples of places with high overheads, even higher than the 70% at top universities, especially in the biosciences, but historically pure soft money places have been relatively cheap to operate.

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

#352

Post by Cpoll »

lebean wrote: post #269
PheonixPharts wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

That's a bit reductive. However, you're in good company: Wittgenstein himself disagreed with much of his Tractatus later in life.

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

ModernMech wrote: post #344
staunton wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems consistent with my claim. Teaching experience is a "plus", no attempt is made to evaluate the quality of someone's teaching. A few CVs I've seen don't even mention teaching experience despite people having some. There definitely are deal breakers: no (high enough impact) publications would be an easy one. There is no amount of teaching quality, be it proven and famed, that would offset that in places I've…

> There is no amount of teaching quality, be it proven and famed, that would offset that in places I've seen. Staying in the same country (or even the same university) is a hard deal breaker in a lot of places... We've absolutely hired teaching faculty without a Ph.D. (therefore lacking in publications) due to their excellent teaching ability. See my other reply about how we evaluate their ability.

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by kelipso »

queuebert wrote: post #351
kelipso wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, overheads for research organisations, non-profit or otherwise, are typically higher than universities. Researchers cost way more than grad students and researchers have similar percentages of overhead too.

Five researchers and one admin is cheaper than two researchers, two postdocs, a grad student, two admins, a compliance officer, an HR office, a grants office, a budget office, a legal office, some Deans, Vice Deans, Vice Chairs, Vice Chancellors, etc. You get my point. I'm sure there are particular examples of places with high overheads, even higher than the 70% at top universities, especially in the biosciences, but…

A small independent group might have low overhead but from what I see in the ML research space those types of groups are very limited in what they can do. These small groups also tend to work as subcontractors for large groups anyway, so the overhead advantage becomes somewhat moot. Just submitting research proposals to funding organizations regularly in order to get consistent funding requires a large group, especially these days with lower funding per project. Basically, five researchers and an admin won't survive very long without latching onto bigger groups. Also it's pretty well known that universities are cheaper than contractors by a wide margin.

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

#355

Post by kevinventullo »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #304
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 not in the same field, nor in the USA, but I've found the incentives usually work but there is a misunderstanding of the role of the professor. All the professors I know have their teams pursuing multiple lines of work. Some are "safe" and some are more out there. A typical "safe" area is usually running some very expensive piece of equipment (like a mass spectrometer or something) b/c that automatically generate…

I guess the question I have is whether this is really the optimal setup. Shouldn’t we be encouraging more tenure-aged faculty to be getting their hands dirty with research?

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

#356

Post by ubermonkey »

joenot443 wrote: post #296
ubermonkey wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Q.E.D. really seals the deal for me. I don’t know anyone outside of high school who still writes online like that. To be honest though, it’s a pretty good indicator, along with the immediate onslaught of *isms, that your perspectives are sufficiently crystallized that no amount of discussion here will change your views. This kind of energy does exceptionally well on reddit, are you familiar?

Excellent job completely ignoring the substance of my comment because, apparently, you're triggered by latin abbreviations.

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

#357

Post by ubermonkey »

joenot443 wrote: post #295
ubermonkey wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U of Austin is having difficulty because it's defined from the jump as a right-wing institution.

Do you think a university defined from the jump as a left-wing institution would face similar difficulties? One of the founding tenets of U of Austin is noted as being declared that they would not factor race, gender, or class into admissions because they "stand(s) firmly against that sort of discrimination". I’m amused, but not surprised, that in the minds of some that’s a conservative idea.

I think any institution founded for a political agenda (vs. an educational one) would likely be seen as a boondoggle, yes. And I think that's the correct viewpoint.

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

#358

Post by sfink »

geodel wrote: post #158
cycomanic wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is argument is at the center of much of the administrative bloat. It is the same if we consider the arguments around UBI, free public transport etc. Essentially we have created huge administrative bodies to check that nobody is taking advantage of the system, without any cost benefit analysis. We often now spend similar amounts on checking as we are on running the system itself. Maybe we should just acknowledge…

Well, there are bunch of other "cost of doing business" like bribing politicians or govt officials to get work done, expense on lobbying, paying fine rather than doing right thing by businesses and so on. I don't see people at large take this as just a cost of doing business and not something to be fixed by setting up and enforcing rules.

I would say there really isn't any fundamental difference. Any system requires a balance, and you never want that balance point at an extreme because that's where one type of cost is at a maximum. If you squeeze out all freeloaders, then your enforcement regime will eat >90% of the resources. If you remove all overhead, then the freeloaders will consume >90% of the resources. That's as true of academia as it is of law enforcement and government. Police and the judicial system need some amount of leeway to keep things sane. "Bribery" is a strong word that is used to label a vast range of activities, and no human system has ever been created that does not contain some amount of influence and persuasion. (And mostly, we just choose to call it bribery if someone else is doing it. It's defined by who more than by what.)

Slack is important. Slack is necessary for things to move at all.

(Which is not to say that the systems I'm looking at today have anywhere near the right amount of slack. Almost all lobbying should be explicitly illegal IMO. Campaign funding should be heavily regulated and enforced. Universities should be regulated so as to prevent the profit-driven hellscape they have become, at least as long as they're going to be directly or indirectly receiving tax money. Pharmaceutical companies, congresscritters, law enforcement, the prison industrial complex, ... it's a total mess. And it's not just about using the regulatory hammer, it's about underlying incentives. Everything has been captured and monetized. It's gotten so bad that I feel like it would be only fair if I were to be paid for my vote, since it feels like it's going to be converted vote -> influence -> money ever more efficiently anyway. That's not the system I want.)

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

#359

Post by seanr88 »

BeetleB wrote: post #213
seanr88 wrote: post #36

In 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.

Not a very helpful sentence in the context. Yes, academia (at least STEM) is such that you need to be good at selling something. The difference is that the goal of a startup is to make money, whereas that's not the goal of research. We could apply the mentality everywhere. Do you want to tell teachers they need to be as good at selling their skills as they are at teaching? Researchers are there to research. If a theo…

I'm not sure you are disagreeing with me.

I'm just stating a situation I've observed first hand both in the academic world and in the business world.

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

#360

Post by golem14 »

Fomite wrote: post #320
golem14 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a billionaire, but of course this would be great. Are there good suggestions on how to do that without paying the university overhead AND being tax advantaged ? I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff. Are there existing nonprofits who do this ? Are there Howtos on setting up such nonprofits ? Genuinely interested. Not just for academia, even for open source. I can…

A couple things: 1) You can actively just donate money to a professor's lab. You cannot usual direct what they do with it, because that's a grant (or contract), but if you just think Professor X does amazing work, you can give them money. 2) There are tons of existing non-profits that do this. My department, for example, was founded thanks to the generous donations of two non-profits. 3) A key that HN always forgets…

Thanks, this is very helpful (and hopeful).
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