Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers? • Hacker News Board

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#101

Post by alex43578 » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 7:47 PM UTC

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #27

alex43578 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it’s much better to spend “$400,000 for a Research Project on Whether Ducks Enjoy Classical Music”, just to ensure not a single grant went unfulfilled. We have a $1.78T deficit. The ducks and the mathematicians will need to take a cut at this point.

> We have a $1.78T deficit The fatal assumptions many people thinking about government spending from the outside make are that a) money is limited and b) money is redistributed (~to a cause of their choice) after funding for something else gets cut

Money isn’t limited, as in we can just print more, but it comes at an inflationary cost: see the last 5 years. MMT doesn’t work.

Since money is limited, and we’re spending in a deficit, money shouldn’t be redistributed to another bad cause after something gets cut. Unfortunately, and all too often, it does.

One side cuts taxes to spend on blowing up the world’s energy market, another side raises taxes to buy votes among the people who pay 0 in taxes (or fund a study on if ducks like Mozart). They’re both wrong, and people are too blinded by the sports-team nature of politics to recognize this.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#102

Post by alex43578 » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

werrett wrote: post #41

alex43578 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it’s much better to spend “$400,000 for a Research Project on Whether Ducks Enjoy Classical Music”, just to ensure not a single grant went unfulfilled. We have a $1.78T deficit. The ducks and the mathematicians will need to take a cut at this point.

Yes, let’s pay down the deficit by cutting funding to the sciences. While the latest war is running at ~1 billion a day (we’re in day 48 btw). https://iran-cost-ticker.com/

Cut the duck study and avoid blowing up the world’s energy markets for $1B a day. Nowhere in my comment did I argue for another trip to the sandbox.

The US had a balanced budget as little as 30 years ago. This current state of fiscal profligacy isn’t inevitable, except for the fact that both parties realized they could buy votes with your children’s financial wellbeing.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#103

Post by tpm » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #81

tpm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes someone "exploited"? According to Marx it's basically always you are selling your time/labor for money because you are paid less than the value of the labor. The employer keeps the surplus.

Employer (the capitalist) also takes the risks, blablabla. Probably a better framework would be to look at the power imbalance in the respective labor market. Is the employer incentivized to hire people even at a relatively high wage, because there's competitive pressure from other employers? Do people have enough savings (and unemployment payments or other safety nets) to be able to find a good job? (Even relocate i…

> Is the employer incentivized to hire people even at a relatively high wage

That doesn't matter in that particular theory (I'm not a marxist, just explaining). The employees are always exploited like a natural resource.

> Company towns were bad, and small rural towns with only one big employer also exhibit similar problems.

Well the funny thing is Marx advocated for that in the Communist Manifesto. He might have been a good philosopher but the solutions he proposed weren't very successful.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#104

Post by keeda » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 11:16 PM UTC

glitchc wrote: post #86

lapcat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking. Why? Most science is incremental. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Then a PhD should not be given until a series of increments amount to something ground-breaking.

It still takes 3 - 5 years or more even for that incremental progress. It takes years to just catch up on the field! Do we expect PhD candidates to subsist on barely livable wages until they eventually publish a ground-breaking result? That kind of disincentive to even start a PhD would not be conducive at all to progress.

Yes, most PhD theses are scientific and commercial dead-ends (even more reason not to gate the degree on ground-breaking results!) but they do serve to cull the problem space, and that's exactly why we need more of them. In fact we should even provide some incentives to publish negative results in academia.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#105

Post by array_key_first » Sat, Apr 18, 2026, 12:19 AM UTC

glitchc wrote: post #87

zdw wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed. Complaining that "Why doesn't progress go fast like before?!" when the newest tool-side improvement is a slightly faster…

> This is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed. This trope gets repeated every so often but it's just a trope. In 1900s people felt all physics was solved, then came…

Past performance is never a guarantee of future performance, that's a gambler's fallacy. Just because we found out more groundbreaking stuff before, doesn't mean we will continue to do so.

There are actually hard limits to things, too. For example, we basically can't make transistors any smaller. Like, physically it's not possible.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#106

Post by array_key_first » Sat, Apr 18, 2026, 12:24 AM UTC

linuxftw wrote: post #48

Every time someone goes to a college or university and pays out of their own pocket to learn the skills necessary to work for a corporation, that's society subsidizing the costs of the corporation. We're being robbed. We need to actively shame people that spend massive amounts of money on college.

I don't understand how we went from "corporations are stealing from us" to "we need to shame random people (who are just trying to improve their lives)"

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#107

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Apr 18, 2026, 12:33 AM UTC

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #95

TeMPOraL wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs couldn't do any damage with hallucinated citations - on the contrary, this is only ever a problem for people so clueless and uncaring that they didn't even bother reading what LLMs wrote for them. Hallucinated citations are evidence of fraud or level of uncaring unbecoming a scientist, or any professional on that matter.

"LLMs couldn't do any damage with hallucinated citations" If you're saying stuff like this with a straight face then you are clearly not a scientist and you don't know what you're talking about. In 2021 there were maybe 10 papers with fictional citations. Even the publication mills at least linked to other junk papers. Now there are hundreds of thousands of papers with dishonest and useless bibliographies. This is be…

Unlike the industry, science has actual standards of conduct, which puts it in a unique position to fix it quickly - if only the journals were doing the one job they have.

Hallucinated citations == strong evidence of scientific fraud. Name and shame and don't publish.

Alas, what's happening only shows the emperor has no clothes. If anyone slept through the replication crisis, they surely can't ignore it now. Can't really blame LLMs for lighting up the structural corruption of scientific process for everyone to see.

If anything, it's doing us a favor - if the journal gatekeeping and peer review can't handle people putting literal, obvious bullshit in their papers today, think what else they aren't handling either, and for how long this has been the case.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#108

Post by glitchc » Sat, Apr 18, 2026, 3:15 AM UTC

jltsiren wrote: post #98

glitchc wrote: post #29

The problem is really one of supply and demand. Whatever SV talking heads say is a post-hoc rationalization on top of this basic fact. We have too many PhDs (I say this as one). It's never been easier to get one. Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking. Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate. Soon people will complete two just to qu…

Most PhD topics are incremental, because you are supposed to do a PhD very early in your career. Because the American system won and the PhD become the terminal degree. Which you often do as a student rather than even a junior professional. In my experience, academic researchers are more likely to do significant independent work in their 30s than in their 20s. Some academic cultures have higher doctorates, habilitati…

This is a good point. Regrettably, most get pushed out of the current system before they have a chance to hone their skills. Society doesn't get to benefit from their best work.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#109

Post by philwelch » Sat, Apr 18, 2026, 4:46 AM UTC

AngryData wrote: post #99

gruez wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably worth mentioning that Marx's labor theory of value is not taken seriously by mainstream economists.

To be fair economists don't agree on many things and even the most mainstream theories are regularly challenged as inadequate and ineffective at explaining past and current economic trends and bad at guiding policy changes and decisions.

There is a very broad consensus that labor theory of value is nonsense however.

And when it comes to a theory being “bad at guiding policy changes and decisions”, attempts to implement Marxism killed more people than the world wars, many through famine.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#110

Post by Vaslo » Sat, Apr 18, 2026, 8:56 AM UTC

glitchc wrote: post #29

The problem is really one of supply and demand. Whatever SV talking heads say is a post-hoc rationalization on top of this basic fact. We have too many PhDs (I say this as one). It's never been easier to get one. Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking. Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate. Soon people will complete two just to qu…

Your comment about PhD topics incremental reminds me of what someone once told me about getting a PhD - you learn absolute everything about almost nothing.

That’s not a knock on PhDs, rather it’s a waste of great talent to be so hyperfocused on one deep incremental topic, then to hope someone has a job for you in that specialized topic upon graduation so you can add the most value.