What a weird comment at the end about ending his relationship with his wife, even if it is in a hypothetical context. He could have stated that differently and not ended on such a dreadful tone.
Goodbye Academia
111–120 of 217 posts
Re: Goodbye Academia
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fastest. Downvote. Ever. \o/
Why? What would be the problem with taxing large acquisitions? It seems relatively painless and with little dead-weight loss compared to other taxes.
>relatively painless and with little dead-weight loss
On what basis are you making this claim? Since you are familiar with the term deadweight loss, you must be familiar with the economic theory associated with taxation, and therefore the standard claim that the least distortionary tax is income tax. Taxes other than income tax are usually justified in terms of negative externalities.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#113Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
Funding science with taxes raised by income tax is socialist for me. Economic theory shows that income tax is the least distortionary kind of tax,
What you are advocating is populism. You see a large transaction, and say "we could use some of that!", without thinking about the relative efficiency of different kinds of taxation.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#114My girlfriend right now is trying to figure out her postdoc in neuroscience. While I fully support her passion, the industry of academia seems completely irrational from almost every sense and full of traps. While the end goal of a tenured professor is exceedingly stable, getting there requires heroic acts of risk, going with the flow and instability that even when compared with the world of startups seems insane. Af…
Sorry, just wondering, does your last sentence have a typo?
>>Whereas if you leave your CS PhD, you can get a job at a startup... there are few places that are dying to hire PhD dropouts.
thanks.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fastest. Downvote. Ever. \o/
Why? What would be the problem with taxing large acquisitions? It seems relatively painless and with little dead-weight loss compared to other taxes.
I'm the OP. I meant I'd never had something downvoted 30 seconds after I posted it.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
And research in the humanities is even cheaper and you see how well their doing.
I'm not sure I follow. I was just making an offhand remark about how R&D gigs in industry for math/cs might be 'easier' to come by because their salary doesn't necessarily compete with lab costs.
The point is that all of this funding scarcity is artificial. its all agame to make you run like a hamster on a wheel. there is no capex needs for liberal arts, only modest opex. but no matter, none of those guys are "funded" either. they all are pitching projects for grants just like the STEM counterparts. Its basically a sociology experiment at this stage.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got a PhD in computer science, and I landed a research job in industry where I get to do both research and development. So, half production, half academia. I consider myself extraordinarily lucky. I can point to many different instances of luck that enabled me to be where I am now. Hard work and talent are a given, but among those that work hard and are talented, there's a lot of blind luck that determines who gets…
This is not about the philosophical debate of luck vs. effort. In my opinion, show-biz vs. academia analogy is not valid (Though there are no Jaden Smith's in academia, I won't use that as a counter-example. Doing so would perpetuate this analogy.). The metrics on which actors are judge are fuzzy and subjective at best, and spurious at worst. Academics, OTOH, (excluding China and a few other offenders) are mostly jud…
There are indeed Jaden Smiths in academia. I personally know people who did their first degree in (humanities subject) and got a PhD position in (top 5 world school) doing (in-demand science subject) and followed by a postdoc in a great institution based entirely on their father being very important in the subject.
These people got funded graduate spots in the best departments in the world, beating out others who obtained first-class degrees (4.0 for the North Americans) and worked their entire lives towards this dream.
How does this happen? Do you want to be the guy who refused to supervise the daughter of the nth most important person in your field? A man who has given you important references in the past and may do so again? When this relationship could get you even closer to the Will Smith of your field? This is good old fashioned corrupt nepotism for all the good old fashioned reasons.
Now, these people are both genetically and environmentally predisposed to be much better than average at this work. Sometimes it works out well. It is possible that this is a good outcome for science. But is it fair? It is not.
(Written as a working prof who had no academic connection advantages. I acknowledge that being white, male and having English as a first language was not a a bad place to start from).
Re: Goodbye Academia
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got a PhD in computer science, and I landed a research job in industry where I get to do both research and development. So, half production, half academia. I consider myself extraordinarily lucky. I can point to many different instances of luck that enabled me to be where I am now. Hard work and talent are a given, but among those that work hard and are talented, there's a lot of blind luck that determines who gets…
This is not about the philosophical debate of luck vs. effort. In my opinion, show-biz vs. academia analogy is not valid (Though there are no Jaden Smith's in academia, I won't use that as a counter-example. Doing so would perpetuate this analogy.). The metrics on which actors are judge are fuzzy and subjective at best, and spurious at worst. Academics, OTOH, (excluding China and a few other offenders) are mostly jud…
[deleted]
Re: Goodbye Academia
#119However, one aspect of being a professor has been terrifying me for over five years now – the uncertainty of getting funding from NIH. No let me rephrase that. What is terrifying is the near-certainty that any grant I submit would be rejected. I have been waiting for the funding situation to improve, but it seems to only be getting worse. I personally know about ten scientists who have become professors in the last 3…
Why does MIT require funding from the NIH? Because research nowadays is very expensive. Seventy years ago you could win the Nobel Prize with a cyclotron half a meter in diameter, nowadays you need the LHC at CERN to do that. And it isn't just high-energy physics, it's biology, chemistry, even computer science. Big data requires big storage. Research grants go to research and upkeep of facilities (the dreaded indirect…
At many universities grants for the sciences subsidize other university functions. In computer science, at least, you may have to pay your own salary out of your grants after the university has taken their (substantial) cut for keeping the lights on. Also, all of your graduate students and postdocs must be paid out of your grants (if they don't have their own money); the universities won't pay them to do research in your lab, though they will happily claim the IP they generate.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#120This is almost exactly my story as well. One point he doesn't mention is that there are many interesting problems in the "real world". Lots of academics just point to industry in general and say, "no freedom, no thanks." I've held a few jobs and all of them presented with unique, interesting, and challenging problems. I've had the freedom to choose my own approach to solving problems and met up with other academic-mi…
I spent the better part of a decade doing academic research, and now have spent the better part of a decade doing startups and software. If I could choose to do anything while also being assured of a stable living, I'd do the research again.
The thing about the software industry is that "interesting" tends to be defined down -- for example, you'll be working on a CRUD app, but the "interesting" part is that you're doing it "at scale". Or you'll be doing some "interesting" refactor of a hard piece of software, that isn't interesting in any other way. Or most insidious of all...there's nothing really "interesting" in your job, and you just get inured to the day-to-day nature of the work, which always tends to look the same. The difference is in the big picture, and for most software jobs, the big picture just drains your soul.
I'm pretty lucky in that the project I'm working on now has a truly "interesting" technical component, but it still doesn't compare with the idea that I could be working on an interesting technical problem that also might lead to a new antibiotic or vaccine...or just discovering something new. I miss that part.