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An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

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Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#121

Post by nilkn »

auctiontheory wrote: post #118
nilkn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may just be an artifact of the expanding population. It wasn't too long ago that many young people also harbored an idealism about working for big companies: go to college, get a nearly guaranteed job at a corporation, work there for 25-30 years, retire with a pension. But we all know that each of these steps is less guaranteed today than it was for the previous generation, sometimes significantly so. It's the sam…

A similar job today would likely only go to a graduate of Harvard Business School, Wharton, or something similar. Actually that's not true at all. High-performing salespeople in tech (and other industries) are extremely well-paid, and tend not to have fancy degrees. Sales is still a career in which hustle and results are valued over book smarts, and there is no branch of a company that is "closer to revenue" than sal…

Do you have any statistics to support this? And what do you mean by "extremely well-paid"? Anything under $400k doesn't count. Do you honestly think that's a typical salary these days for a salesperson in most industries? I assure you it is not. Most will never make that in their life. Also, how many of these extremely well-paid salespeople that you know didn't even attend college?

Finally, the upper ranks of many Silicon Valley companies like Facebook are filled to the brim with graduates of HBS and similar. There are lots of ex-McKinsey consultants in VP positions in the industry.

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#122

Post by yk »

jurassic wrote: post #89
LordHumungous wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is not a business.

Running a research group is a lot like running a small business from the professor's point of view. You have employees (grad students, lab managers) and equipment/supply/rent(overhead) costs that you use to produce a product (research, in the form of papers). You produce these products on a kind of account basis (not a per-paper basis), but if you aren't producing enough when it's time to re-up with your funding agen…

At least in Germany you get the problem that the basic idea of research groups is rather feudal. ( That is the original idea when universities were invented in the late middle ages was, that professors get a personal fiefdom.) And this makes imho a lot more sense, at least for basic research. But recently universities try to organize it more like a business. That means that professors have to write more and more reports for funding agencies, and consequently have to pursue research that can be sold easily. That is, assuming that they have actually time to do research instead of fighting bureaucracy.

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#123

Post by tsotha »

reillyse wrote: post #94
dnautics wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the difficulty with 'basic research with seemingly no value' (a good example is the fourier transform, which at the time was seen as a mathematical curiosity) - is that it lacks accountability. How do you make sure that the academe that is selling their project as 'basic research' isn't just pulling a fast one on you and sucking your funds to tickle their intellectual jollies? This problem is even worse when you take…

I don't agree with the taxpayer funds aspect. Why can we not agree that employing people to perform research is a good thing? There are lots of things that are taken as good investments by governments based on the fact that it will be useful in future years. Take for example teaching people to read and write, preventative healthcare, disaster planning, Sex education (it's a long list when you think about it). My poin…

>Why can we not agree that employing people to perform research is a good thing?

There are lots of good things that aren't worth what they cost.

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#124

Post by XorNot »

coliveira wrote: post #109
betterunix wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"These smaller, more digestible, incremental papers are also more useful to other researchers" Survey papers are useful to other researchers. Minimum publishable units are a waste of research time, and the pressure to pad one's CV and get "results" (which actually means more papers) worsens the situation. It is even worse when a grad student is told that they were "scooped" because their half-finished MPU was publish…

MPU papers are useful for training purposes. They let students and junior researchers participate on the scientific conversation. It is important to have minor roles to be played in the larger scientific community.

Personally I hate the entire format of publishing a paper. It's more spinning a story then actually detailing useful information, and the single longest exercise of my PhD program (which I dropped down to a Masters from) was a result of a group publishing many papers on a subject and never actually detailing their method properly (turns out the whole thing is dependent on partial oxygen pressures, so the detail of "lightly placing the lid of the vial on top of it" - mentioned nowhere - is spectacularly important).

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#125

Post by auctiontheory »

nilkn wrote: post #121
auctiontheory wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar job today would likely only go to a graduate of Harvard Business School, Wharton, or something similar. Actually that's not true at all. High-performing salespeople in tech (and other industries) are extremely well-paid, and tend not to have fancy degrees. Sales is still a career in which hustle and results are valued over book smarts, and there is no branch of a company that is "closer to revenue" than sal…

Do you have any statistics to support this? And what do you mean by "extremely well-paid"? Anything under $400k doesn't count. Do you honestly think that's a typical salary these days for a salesperson in most industries? I assure you it is not. Most will never make that in their life. Also, how many of these extremely well-paid salespeople that you know didn't even attend college? Finally, the upper ranks of many Si…

The discussion you introduced was about salespeople - guys (mostly) who have a quota, who "carry a bag." It's a highly-paid profession in which Harvard and Wharton MBAs are underrepresented. Enterprise hardware and software salespeople can make well over $400K.

Whether or not the upper ranks of Facebook used to work for Rajat Gupta is hardly relevant to the question of how much salespeople make!

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#126

Post by yk »

rthomas6 wrote: post #59
beloch wrote: post #47

This student makes some excellent points, and it's a bit scary how some things reinforce each other. Some journals, Nature being the most notable, chase impact factor above all else. The only thing they truly care about is that the papers they publish get cited. This means highly original work, which frequently doesn't get cited much for a long time, is less desirable than a turn-the-crank paper from a respected name…

I'm not claiming you're wrong, but why isn't it possible for the student to simply no longer place any value in getting a PhD? That is what they claim, and intelligent people often make decisions on principle that make little practical sense.

Because there is a story why he does no longer value a PhD. And a PhD is a huge investment, both in time as in money, and you don't walk away lightly. So even assuming that the email is a comprehensive account of his reasons to quit his PhD, he did still go from believing in the university system to deeply disappointed of the university system, a system he did spend a huge amount of time in. ( And this is essentially the best case.)

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#127

Post by nilkn »

auctiontheory wrote: post #125
nilkn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any statistics to support this? And what do you mean by "extremely well-paid"? Anything under $400k doesn't count. Do you honestly think that's a typical salary these days for a salesperson in most industries? I assure you it is not. Most will never make that in their life. Also, how many of these extremely well-paid salespeople that you know didn't even attend college? Finally, the upper ranks of many Si…

The discussion you introduced was about salespeople - guys (mostly) who have a quota, who "carry a bag." It's a highly-paid profession in which Harvard and Wharton MBAs are underrepresented. Enterprise hardware and software salespeople can make well over $400K. Whether or not the upper ranks of Facebook used to work for Rajat Gupta is hardly relevant to the question of how much salespeople make!

Do you have any support for these figures? I've never heard of so many salespeople making so much money, and all salary reports I can find most certainly do not support your claim of this being even remotely typical.

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#128

Post by ssivark »

I would like to point to Dijkstra's excellent article (The strengths of academic enterprise) -- http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EW...

The OP talks about a bunch of problems in academia, may of which stem from an attempt to run universities like corporations. In his article, Edsger Dijkstra explains why that's not a good idea.

PS: If you'd like to discuss this, I just submitted this article at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358342

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#129

Post by ahomescu1 »

gradstudent wrote: post #115
dnautics wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your statement is an existence statement. Yes, public goods exist. In some cases government regulation of public goods against abuse is reasonable e.g. "clean air". But your statement doesn't give moral justification for government subsidy of public goods. Let's put it in really stark terms. I want to build a lighthouse. Because it's a public good; it will keep ships in the ocean safe. Is it morally justified for me…

Quit being such an ultra-capitalist arse. The funding of public goods is not and should not be an opt-in system. You contribute whether you like it or not because that's in the best collective interest.

And if an individual decides to opt out, what then? The current solution is "throw them in jail for a decade", which seems way too excessive for me. I keep hearing people complaining about how others get sent to jail for drug-related crimes, but not many similar complaints about tax evasion. Is this crime so bad that we have to throw a person away for years?
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