Academia's 1% • Hacker News Board

Re: Academia's 1%

#91

Post by Dewie » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 7:59 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #42

Dewie wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good work is the key to good fortune Winners take that praise Losers seldom take that blame --- This can be used to point at both victim-of-circumstance "losers" and it-was-all-me "winners", depending on your viewpoint.

The outcomes of human-social-status processes have never been epistemological evidence of anything except how humans allocate social status.

That is a fascinating sentence. So fancy and yet it conveys such a simple point. I have no doubt that you would fit right into an elitist, self-important, overly status-conscious academic environment where prestige is more important than actually achieving something on an intellectual or practical level.

That's still just the social and environmental part, of course. You'd still have to have some chops. But if you're anywhere as close to as smart as you think you are, that won't be a problem at all.

Re: Academia's 1%

#92

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 8:10 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #76

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's possible, but when we know that many people who are MIT Professor Good could not get into MIT for undergrad[1], it still requires us to believe MIT's admissions and graduation criteria for PhD students are very loose compared to all their other observed standards. [1] -- http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2003

That's frankly ridiculous, or at least the CalTech example at the end. For undergraduate study, MIT and CalTech have a strong filtering function in that you must be able to do math and calculus based physics, and, oh yeah, one "humanities" course per term. A student brilliant only at math would likely fail horribly. And so a student who's brilliant at just CS might not make the cut for MIT, since MIT's EECS undergrad…

[deleted]

Re: Academia's 1%

#93

Post by Futurebot » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 8:19 PM UTC

Important subject. Related:

Professors and PHDs on food stamps:

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/21/professors_on_food_stamps_th...

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/15/152751116/why-so-many-ph-d-s-a...

The PHD bust:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-...

http://www.economist.com/node/17723223

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-pus...

The PHD glut:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc-res...

http://www.nature.com/news/how-not-to-deal-with-the-phd-glut...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-us-produc...

The plight of part-time professors:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/the-tall...

Parents, politicians, and teachers have been beating the 'ever more education' and 'more STEM grads' drums for a while. The past 5-7 years have shown that these things were not, and are not, the panacea they were promised to be. We can always pick the individual situations apart and say 'they made the following 50 mistakes, and that is why they are un- or under-employed', but if we look at the trends, we can see it's bigger than that. We have overlapping crises of credentialism; jobs that aren't there - even for many people with STEM degrees; underpaid and overworked adjuncts that require food stamps to live; people who go to school until they are in their mid-30s, sometimes later, and walk out with a pile of degrees and no marketable skills outside of academia, and cannot get jobs IN academia; skyrocketing tuitions; and an enormous bubble of debt (now over 1T.) How many brilliant people will never come anywhere close to fulfilling their potential because of all this? Not a good situation.

Re: Academia's 1%

#94

Post by Pyxl101 » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 8:35 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #84

gaius wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is funny because, it wasn't that long ago in history, that the characteristics that made a person successful were how all about how well they could hunt. How many of the new geek kings of the startup scene, would be kings in that world? You might be successful in your niche, but never forget the sheer good luck that had you born near (spatially and temporally) a local maxima.

A friend of mine once had a conjecture that back in the day, the people who moved to the cities were the ones who couldn't hack it being self-sufficient on a farm.

That might be true to some extent but I think it ignores all of the other much more powerful motivations. Wealth is easier to accumulate in a city because there is far more specialization.

I can't be a first-rate baker and a blacksmith and a shipwright and a miner and a fisher and a farmer and and and ... the specialists in the city do one thing excellently: they bring down the cost while also bringing up quality, raising quality-of-life for people in the city. If I'm an average farmer and average blacksmith, perhaps I'll produce $10 worth of goods in an hour, $5 worth of crops and $5 worth of tools. As an exceptional farmer, I can produce $20 worth of crops, trade $10 of them for tools, and end up with $10 each of crops and tools. It's as simple as that - trading between people with different specialties / needs leaves both people better off, and you can't do that subsistence farming.

Public infrastructure in cities has also always been much better, such as roads, communication systems, police, fire fighting, etc. Trade was much easier because there were more people to trade with, a larger market for your goods. On a small subsistence farm, any excess that you cannot save or reinvest is wasted; in a city, it can be sold or traded to accumulate wealth.

There are certainly people who are attracted to the city because they can't hack it (beggars, etc.), but they are in the minority. In the modern era, something like 3% of the population are farmers, and they are so exceptionally effective (supported by agricultural scientists, robotics engineers who build automated farming machinery, etc.) that the rest of us have plenty of food, freeing us up to specialize in other things (like robotics).

I believe this cycle of technological enrichment fundamentally requires specialization. This is not to say that anyone is wrong for wanting a simpler or more communal form of living, but I doubt the motivations are anything economic. The reason that so many people end up working in cities, in factories (sweatshops) today is simple: they can accumulate more wealth specializing in even a mundane repetitive task (quickly, cheaply, and with quality) than they could by subsistence farming.

Re: Academia's 1%

#95

Post by lkrubner » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 8:46 PM UTC

Does anyone else find it ironic that academia is, in some sense, more anti-intellectual than general manager Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics baseball team? I'm sure on Hacker News most of your know about MoneyBall:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball

Consider this paragraph, and ask yourself why the nation's major universities can not raise themselves to the same level of statistical rigor:

"The central premise of Moneyball is that the collected wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office) over the past century is subjective and often flawed. Statistics such as stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting average, typically used to gauge players, are relics of a 19th-century view of the game and the statistics available at that time. The book argues that the Oakland A's' front office took advantage of more analytical gauges of player performance to field a team that could better compete against richer competitors in Major League Baseball (MLB)."

It is in some sense ironic, and in some other sense sickening, that our nation's universities continue to hang on 19th-century views of status and credentials, when other professions, even sports, have moved onto more objective, measurable metrics.

Re: Academia's 1%

#96

Post by rdtsc » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

beambot wrote: post #38

rdtsc wrote: post #22

I applied for a PhD at an average school, passed the qualifying exam. But after a couple years found a full time programming job and didn't finish. Looking back family and friends were upset at me for not finishing, but I think it was a bullet I dodged. Having to look for research position at a company or getting stuck fighting for tenure position at some even less than average school in the middle of nowhere would n…

> Having to look for research position at a company or getting stuck fighting for tenure position That's something of a false dichotomy. I know lots of PhDs that aren't doing research or faculty jobs.

Maybe, I am in a position to interview a lot of candidates and all the ones with PhDs applying for general software engineer positions are pretty bad at software. Some fail the fizzbuzz test even. They have been working on their research project for 4 years and in that time forgot all most of the things they learned in undergraduate. Some of the ones that passed the interview were asking for much higher salaries, which we could not justify.

Re: Academia's 1%

#97

Post by egocodedinsol » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 8:53 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #59

There is a signalling/game mechanic that explains this sort of thing: 1) You have some rare ability that is distributed unevenly (Research skill, football skill) 2) There's certain brands that are imperfectly connected to the distribution of ability (Harvard, Man Utd) 3) You can hire a guy who looks to have the ability minus the brand, and he'll be cheap (Easier to lure, lower weekly salary). Once in a while, someone…

I'm not sure, but I'd bet that the best institutions actually don't care where their applicants come from. They can afford to just choose the best. It's the so-so places that have to signal their quality by 'hiring the best'. I've seen this in graduate school applications - students with poor marks often stand a better chance of admittance in a top program than a so-so one.

Re: Academia's 1%

#98

Post by Pyxl101 » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 8:55 PM UTC

Pyxl101 wrote: post #94

rhizome wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine once had a conjecture that back in the day, the people who moved to the cities were the ones who couldn't hack it being self-sufficient on a farm.

That might be true to some extent but I think it ignores all of the other much more powerful motivations. Wealth is easier to accumulate in a city because there is far more specialization. I can't be a first-rate baker and a blacksmith and a shipwright and a miner and a fisher and a farmer and and and ... the specialists in the city do one thing excellently: they bring down the cost while also bringing up quality, ra…

Two other points that might be worth further exploration:

* There was an article on Hacker News recently about the historical cost of clothing, how it used to cost thousands of modern-equivalent dollars for a shirt. Thus why people wore clothing until it was rags. The cost of clothing and all such goods came down dramatically due to peoples' specialization as spinners, weavers, sewers, tailors, etc. Now clothing is cheap and plentiful.

[Update: found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950 ]

* There was another HN thread discussing the fall of the Roman empire and the "dark ages". A commentator who seemed to be a historian reinforced the idea that yes, there really was a dark ages. The fall of the empire shut down trade, which led to a marked decline in the pottery available in Britain. Previously they had been able to import plentiful, high quality pottery from elsewhere. With the fall of the empire and the collapse of trade, they began to make it themselves, and were terrible at it. Even the kings of the era had worse pottery than the common person centuries earlier. (This is more about trade than about cities, but the effectiveness of trade increases with density.)

[Update: not the HN comment I was looking for, but similar information about pottery: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/1391 ]

The power of specialization and trade

Re: Academia's 1%

#99

Post by Frondo » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 8:58 PM UTC

projectileboy wrote: post #43

williamstein wrote: post #5

[Disclaimer: I'm part of that 1% she is talking about, since I'm tenured faculty in Mathematics at University of Washington, with "Harvard" on my resume due to my first job being there. http://wstein.org ] The author says: "The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country. Even w…

I don't necessarily disagree with anything you've said, but there's a tone here and in Hacker News in general that bothers me - a fierce meritocracy that doesn't seem to have a scrap of empathy for anyone who doesn't fit into the top 1%. So if the rest of us lazy slobs in the 99% are unworthy to get into the best grad schools or Y Combinator, I'm to assume we should just find ourselves a quiet spot in the midwest in…

Agreed.

Empathy is free; it don't cost a thing for people to show compassion for those who struggle, but it sure seems like a rare and precious jewel among the tech nerd crowd.

Re: Academia's 1%

#100

Post by themoonbus » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 9:00 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #61

themoonbus wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, to put it another way, there are far more paths to success in the private sector than in academia. People change careers, move upwards, downwards, sideways, etc. Academia is much less forgiving.

In STEM, I have the very strong impression that there are many paths that will take you off the academic track, and essentially none that will get you back on it. E.g. you have to keep up with the current literature to some degree.

Exactly, and I can't imagine how it's possible to keep up with current literature when you are out of the academic conference circuit, and no longer have access to a university library that pays for access to journals.