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Academia's 1%

chroniclevitae.com

131–140 of 144 posts

Re: Academia's 1%

#131

[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…

Fascinating article over at The Edge where Kahne man interviews hariri. TLDR; the answer to your simpering question is "yes"

Re: Academia's 1%

#132
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you always get downvoted to hell? I thoroughly enjoy your posts. HN, what is wrong with being provocative? This place has too much buttoned-down, fear of the downvote (FOD, kinda like FUD but for geeks). Ironically, the HN crowd would make perfect academics. Such reason, much facts! note: i'm an academic deciding on whether to take or bail on a tenure-track academic job.

I don't know about provocative . Everyone knows what O'Church's opinions are at this point. Can the same tune really be provocative?

Just because you're tired of it doesn't mean his niche isn't provocatively positioned.

Re: Academia's 1%

#133
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're right; I got too caught-up in academia-speak.

Re: Academia's 1%

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Well, that's probably deceptive, as those guys are probably exceptional in other ways (publications as an undergrad, other research, etc) which takes away from their grades, or they only cared about certain classes which were important to their field.

As a current graduate school applicant with a couple of admits to top 10 programs I can confirm this. My GPA looks "low" around a 3.3 cumulative (I have lots of C's in things I deemed unimportant) but I have a relatively high CS GPA (3.8-3.9), took many graduate classes during undergrad, worked at startups, consulted, did multiple years of research resulting in two publications with 2-3 more in the pipeline, worked o…

That's what I've heard, and it makes sense. Most specifically, to get into grad school X, you need to have one or more of the facility members in your school who are known by one or more in X recommend you with the message that you can do research.

Re: Academia's 1%

#135
post #130

Here's how to understand academia. When you're 22, almost everything you've done has been measured in relative terms to your peers (in part, because almost no one at that age has real accomplishments by adult standards, except in athletics; so it's a favorable curve). You think that the world is more competitive than it actually is, because you've been rewarded (or punished) based on individual performance. Of course…

>Then there are the tribal effects. Why do bankers and traders earn 3x what programmers do, and why do we as programmers earn 3x what academics do, at each level? Because the worst place you want to be in a market is side-by-side with someone who's similarly competent in the rendered service but has no organizational or social skill, nor sense of self-worth; he'll sell himself very short, and drag you down with him b…

I am.

Bankers back each other and know how to fight for themselves and the group. Programmers generally don't. You'll see a engineer rat another engineer out to management when there's nearly nothing to gain. This has been shown in companies with peer performance reviews: the bankers and traders give each other top ratings, while the programmers tend to beat each other up. It's not that bankers are better people and won't stab each other in the back; it's that they understand that information is power and won't do so for free, or for meaningless stakes like transient managerial favoritism.

A typical, politically-inept programmer will say, "the low performers are Alice, Bob, and Charlie", just because he's asked. You don't have to offer him anything. He ends up losing in the deal for two reasons. First, if people find out that he's a snitch who tried to endear himself to management by selling others out, then everyone will hate him. That's just human nature. Second, low performers can be good for your job security because (a) you don't have to outrun the bear if layoffs or stack-ranking come-- you just have to outrun the other guy; and (b) they can anchor compensation favorably. The fact that a mediocre investment banker gets $500,000 per year means that a good one makes millions. That's how you play a large, rich organization that isn't going to die because of a few passive low-performers. You want to move against the active low performers (i.e. those who create problems for other people) and the politically dangerous, but it's generally good to protect people who are benignly below-average because their making average wages puts a case forward for you (as an average or better performer) to make above-average wages.

A banker won't give that kind of information (who's performing, who's a little weak) up unless there's something to be won from it. If you're acting politically optimally (and not afraid of being a bit of a sociopath) you know that there are times when it's best to protect low performers and times to sell them out. In peace time, it's usually the former.

As for academics, they make the software engineers look politically savvy. They've performed so poorly, as a tribe, at convincing the rest of society that they have any worth, that their whole industry has fallen to shit. If I were to choose a specific mistake, I think the biggest fuckup on the academics' part is making it so goddamn obvious that they consider research to be their "real work" and teaching to be that onerous grunt work that they got stuck with. That works for the research rainmakers who bring in millions in grants, but devaluing teachers has led to the adjunct market.

The older generations of professors expressed distaste for the teaching job, as if it were commodity grunt work, and the universities have responded in kind by treating the teaching as commodity grunt work, i.e. the "You said it" retort-- and, at the same time, realizing that they could then do without all these medieval history researchers who were mediocre teachers.

If academics had any political or social skill whatsoever, they would have never developed that culture that devalues teaching and especially undergraduate teaching, because even if they considered the research to be their real work, the rest of society considered the teaching to be their real work, and by devaluing it they basically challenged the rest of society to unemploy them en masse. See, undergraduate teaching is valuable in its own right (intangibly) but it's also a marketing effort; if you convince the next generation of leaders that literature is important, then maybe they won't unemploy people who study it full-time. But if you decide that teaching the hoi polloi undergraduates is beneath you, then you risk getting fucked (deservingly) 20 years later when those undergraduates become state senators or college donors and decide that what you've been studying is unimportant.

That said, the calamity of the tenure system is that the older generation (who created this obnoxious culture) was unscathed and it was the younger generation who saw their job prospects turn to vapor. I hate academic tenure for that reason: it seems almost designed to make the rising generation pay for the entrenched generation's sins.

Re: Academia's 1%

#136

Here's how to understand academia. When you're 22, almost everything you've done has been measured in relative terms to your peers (in part, because almost no one at that age has real accomplishments by adult standards, except in athletics; so it's a favorable curve). You think that the world is more competitive than it actually is, because you've been rewarded (or punished) based on individual performance. Of course…

Why do you always get downvoted to hell? I thoroughly enjoy your posts. HN, what is wrong with being provocative? This place has too much buttoned-down, fear of the downvote (FOD, kinda like FUD but for geeks). Ironically, the HN crowd would make perfect academics. Such reason, much facts! note: i'm an academic deciding on whether to take or bail on a tenure-track academic job.

In mid-2013, I was put on "rankban" which meant that my comments fell to the bottom (actually, the middle-bottom). I went from seeing 30-50 upvotes on a typical comment to being lucky to get 2 or 3.

I spoke to dang about this, last fall, and he was very reasonable and took me off rankban. I think he's trying to do a good job with Hacker News. I have no problem with him, and I realize that moderating a board like this is a hard and often thankless job.

Then, I pointed out a rather obvious pay-for-play story, taking advantage of the Sony hack, about Evan Spiegel in December 2014. (A journalist was, almost certainly because I know how these things work, paid off to say good things about him based on emails that were lacked in the hack. He was trying to protect his reputation, although it's unclear from what.) Since then, I would repeatedly get exactly 5 downvotes to pretty much every comment, all around the same time. Sometimes it would be obvious; it would be a 36-hour-old comment that went from +3 to -2, even though that story had fallen off the front page a day ago. I don't know if this was one person using multiple accounts or different people (Snapchat employees?) I think it's likely that they have some connection to Evan Spiegel himself but I can't prove it.

That said, the Spiegeloids seem to have laid back, because I'm not seeing every single comment get hit with 4-5 downvotes at the same time anymore. (Either that, or they downvote me at different times, making it less obvious.) Maybe they're gone. I can't be sure.

I have still noticed that Hacker News has much more of a willingness to downvote over disagreement. Back in 2010, it had to be a pretty low-quality comment to get downvoted. These days, I see a lot more good comments (and I'm not talking about my own, because I'm a weird special case) that end up light-gray. It's an irksome cultural change and it may be part of why Hacker News doesn't really seem to be growing any more (although it may be that Hacker News doesn't want to grow).

Re: Academia's 1%

#137
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then there are the tribal effects. Why do bankers and traders earn 3x what programmers do, and why do we as programmers earn 3x what academics do, at each level? Because the worst place you want to be in a market is side-by-side with someone who's similarly competent in the rendered service but has no organizational or social skill, nor sense of self-worth; he'll sell himself very short, and drag you down with him b…

I am. Bankers back each other and know how to fight for themselves and the group. Programmers generally don't. You'll see a engineer rat another engineer out to management when there's nearly nothing to gain. This has been shown in companies with peer performance reviews: the bankers and traders give each other top ratings, while the programmers tend to beat each other up. It's not that bankers are better people and…

That's a very good point, the multitude of students who were screwed by this attitude indeed won't be viewing that part of their college experience favorably.

What would you say "society" views as the job of "MIT professors?"

If you said both, you'd be right as to what actually happens. With rare exceptions that prove the rule like SF author Joe Haldeman, all classes are taught by tenured or tenure track professors, and while you pretty much have to be #1 or #2 in your research subfield to get tenure, you also have to be an adequate teacher.

Re: Academia's 1%

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not realize this but because you worked hard for your position you believe you are entitled to it and the system that promoted you is near perfect. The reality is not so. I have been to UC Berkeley, where the average faculty is far more interested in gaming the system than making real contribution to science. They orbit around "famous" people, co-author papers with "big wigs," be co-PI with well connected peo…

>Scientific breakthroughts historically do not favor top rate institutions. What proof of this do you have? Quick looks over Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals, or even lists of top scientific breakthroughs demonstrate that top rate universities do produce far more scientific breakthroughs than other universities.

How frequently do those people move to those universities after they've made the scientific breakthrough for which they receive the award?

Re: Academia's 1%

#139
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then there are the tribal effects. Why do bankers and traders earn 3x what programmers do, and why do we as programmers earn 3x what academics do, at each level? Because the worst place you want to be in a market is side-by-side with someone who's similarly competent in the rendered service but has no organizational or social skill, nor sense of self-worth; he'll sell himself very short, and drag you down with him b…

I am. Bankers back each other and know how to fight for themselves and the group. Programmers generally don't. You'll see a engineer rat another engineer out to management when there's nearly nothing to gain. This has been shown in companies with peer performance reviews: the bankers and traders give each other top ratings, while the programmers tend to beat each other up. It's not that bankers are better people and…

>A typical, politically-inept programmer will say, "the low performers are Alice, Bob, and Charlie", just because he's asked. You don't have to offer him anything. He ends up losing in the deal for two reasons. First, if people find out that he's a snitch who tried to endear himself to management by selling others out, then everyone will hate him. That's just human nature. Second, low performers can be good for your job security because (a) you don't have to outrun the bear if layoffs or stack-ranking come-- you just have to outrun the other guy; and (b) they can anchor compensation favorably. The fact that a mediocre investment banker gets $500,000 per year means that a good one makes millions. That's how you play a large, rich organization that isn't going to die because of a few passive low-performers. You want to move against the active low performers (i.e. those who create problems for other people) and the politically dangerous, but it's generally good to protect people who are benignly below-average because their making average wages puts a case forward for you (as an average or better performer) to make above-average wages.

I don't think that most people will argue with this. but... I don't think it makes as much of a difference as you think it does to industry wages as a whole.

The average person at McDonalds is better at playing politics than your average person in my industry, but we're still on the good side of a 10x wage differential.

Clearly, there are factors that don't have to do with political skill at work here, and those factors have effects that can completely swamp the effects of political skill.

Re: Academia's 1%

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The fact that your first alternative to succeeding is giving up entirely, I don't see how you could make it to the midwest with enough money to buy the gun you'll kill yourself with. Resources; time, energy, attention; are limited. If you allocate resources to less-than-best people, you get less-than-best results, most of the time. If these people are the kind of weak, selfish pricks who think that the world owes the…

It's funny because I'm pretty sure this is exactly the kind of thing projectileboy was talking about.
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