Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

president.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 756 posts

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#731

Post by Balgair »

mold_aid wrote: post #654
Balgair wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-... This is a timeless entry. It's aimed at humanities, but every STEMy person I have shown it to agrees with it. TLDR: Only get a PhD under 2 conditions: 1 - You are rich and otherwise very bored. 2 - If by Christmas in your first year in grad school, you are absolutely certain that you and your PI get along so well that nothing could hold you back from car…

2 is key. omg the number of students who are like "I want to be a professor" and can barely name a program they're targeting much less the people in it

undergrad or grad students?

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#732

Post by AndrewKemendo »

greenie_beans wrote: post #728
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right so what’s stopping people from doing it now?

i guess you haven't been seeing the news of all the southerners fighting the redistricting efforts after they gutted the VRA

You mean Southerners like me in Virginia who are actually doing that “fighting” and it’s making absolutely no difference whatsoever

is that who you’re talking about?

I’m literally 10 toes down on the ground trying to do exactly the thing that everybody says should be happening which is democratizing community development and nobody gives a fucking fuck

they will show up when you give them resources but never step up to lead after

I’ve started so many goddamn community things but the second I pull back from them to let others lead nobody picks up the slack

I’m excruciatingly done with over and over and over trying to help people take care of themselves

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#734

Post by nostrademons »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #712
nostrademons wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be good but also can be very problematic. Organizations don't really shrink well. When times are good, they hire a lot of people that are marginally necessary. Over the good times, these roles become well-integrated into how the organization does business; whether or not they were necessary at first, people start depending on that person for a task, their approvals become part of a critical workflow, they deve…

Capitalism handles this problem well because a dysfunctional company can be replaced by a nimble startup. There's not really an equivalent in the education world, because of how the university prestige economy works. Prestige is sort of like a natural monopoly: The more prestigious your university, the more talent you attract in terms of students and professors. The more talent you attract, the more prestige you gene…

Right, capitalism has a natural answer for this, which is one reason it's proved so robust over generations.

The solution for the prestige economy is as Paul Graham wrote:

> Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first.

https://paulgraham.com/love.html

Basically people need to defect, ignore prestige, take the hit, and do what they want to do regardless of what other people think. Note that this will destroy the job market, because so much of it is based on prestigious credentials because people are apparently unable to screen for the qualities that are actually needed to do the job. But the job market is in the process of being destroyed by AI and liars and lying AI anyway. The future looks like a bunch of new startups starting from scratch and inventing new ways of doing things, and largely ignoring the existing "real world".

The part I'm worried most about is government, which is another natural monopoly that serves as a social Schelling-point, and one that has become badly outdated for the conditions we're about to face. Unlike prestige, however, you kinda can't just ignore the existing government and do what you want. It's very, very rare for a government to get replaced peacefully, particularly a replacement that doesn't just change the people but wholesale ways of doing things. While I'm hoping that that's what happens, history has plenty of examples of revolutions that ended up extremely bloody, and didn't actually solve anything.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#735

Post by 1-more »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #476
1-more wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly recommend The Man from the Future biography of John von Neumann. We got The Martians for a steal because Europe was too hostile to minorities and we got the Manhattan Project and computers out of the deal. Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again.

That’s not remotely similar.

Similar to what? Von Neumann was part of Europe's elite scientific brain drain to the US in the 20th century, that's all.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#736

Post by jltsiren »

wallst07 wrote: post #722
jltsiren wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is not fungible when you are a large organization. Many things that should be possible in principle are impossible in practice due to rules, politics, and institutional inertia. MIT's endowment is ~80% earmarked to whatever purposes the donors considered important. The remaining ~20% is unrestricted, but unrestricted does not mean unallocated. Everything has already been allocated to some purpose, at least impl…

>practice due to rules, politics, and institutional inertia. Isn't that the responsibility of the dean to fix? I think a lot of us have no idea how this actually works, but do understand the difference between impossible and hard. This seems more like it's on the hard side than impossible.

A dean is a mid-level manager in an organization, where effective power is widely diffused.

Many things are possible in the same sense as rewriting the US constitution. The mechanism for it exists, but using it in practice would require widespread agreement on the specifics. When there are many people making independent decisions, it's best to see the situation in statistical terms. Outcomes that are too many standard deviations away from the expected are effectively impossible.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#737

Post by andix »

shimman wrote: post #553
andix wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no shortage of money This is a general theme in the last decade. There is a lot of money, but it is more and more ending up in the pockets of the extremely wealthy. I'm really no communist, but we've reached a point where the system starts to crumble because of it. It also can't be in the interest of the billionaires. They also want to live in a safe country and use working public infrastructure (roads, ai…

Why wouldn't it be in the elite's interests? You're acting like we don't have an entire written history of elites throughout time immortal making terrible decisions that ended up killing 100s of millions of people from things like colonialism or slave trade or selling weapons of death. There is no reason for billionaires to play nice with the public because they will never be held accountable under the current system…

I agree with you to some point. I just wouldn't frame it in a Marxist way, working class vs. everyone else. It concerns nearly everyone, not just the working class. Limiting it to the working class, excludes many influential people who are more wealthy, far away from being billionaires, but still suffer from the current developments.

We've seen such cycles before. Elites getting too wealthy and influential, until they are stopped. Long ago it was feudalism. But even early capitalism had such an example with the Gilded Age in the US. After WW2 it probably reached the state of being mostly reversed, only to start redeveloping. Funnily enough the Gilded Age was ended by Republicans.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#738

Post by groundzeros2015 »

1-more wrote: post #735
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not remotely similar.

Similar to what? Von Neumann was part of Europe's elite scientific brain drain to the US in the 20th century, that's all.

Whether to help an existing accomplished researcher change address because their home country is not an option, is not similar to the question of whether to educate chinese students who plan to return home.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#739

Post by EasyMark »

coffeemug wrote: post #467
magicalist wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value absolutely is there. The NSF and NIH were both very cheap and have had huge ROI. The cuts to academic funding have been monumentally stupid.

Brass tacks, if an institution has an overwhelming political leaning toward faction X and works to undermine faction Y, is it really surprising that when Y gets into power it attempts to damage the institution? This is precisely why publicly funded institutions should maintain agnostic political posture.

When and where did this happen before a year and half ago?

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#740

Post by caminante »

mrlongroots wrote: post #637
caminante wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they don't realize it or lie to themselves because ~50% dropout. Given the attrition, I really question if PhD programs are honest with incoming prospects. Law schools and business schools are similarly "guilty" of pimping outcomes. ITT: it's people complaining about being overworked and mislead in their PhD programs.

> Yes, they don't realize it or lie to themselves because ~50% dropout. I think there's some misinterpretation here. Not staying on in academia after PhD (common/modal) is not the same as not getting to complete a PhD (rare). In CS/tech, those who exit academia after PhDs get paid $300K-$500K in the industry. I don't think there's any misleading going on.

>is not the same as not getting to complete a PhD (rare)

BTW, your perspective is bizarre.

Not sure where you're getting the idea that PhD candidate attrition is rare. Maybe at MIT where only 20% don't finish (within 10 years -- which is generous), but these are already pre-screened superstars. Most other places converge around 50%.

As for salaries, the median salary for CS PhDs outside academia is $180k. That means a lot are lower and probably aren't working at big tech with full comp pushing them above $300k. [0]

[0] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf26312

Post reply on HN