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So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

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Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#211

Post by N1H1L »

_8j50 wrote: post #169
kbos87 wrote: post #40

So much of everything is about connections and reputation. Tech in particular holds up a guise that people are chosen and ascend because they are “good”, meaning, they are good at what they do. That’s part of it, but it’s an insufficient part, and you can do pretty well in a career being solidly average at what you do. The real currency in my experience is one thing - relationships. Do I think this person likes, resp…

Mixed experience here. Technical breadth has helped me a lot,but relationships helped me more. They're not mutually exclusive. If I had barely enough technical skills though,no relationship can save me.

Yes. Too much networking without any technical accomplishments can often backfire.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#212

Post by devdas »

reedwolf wrote: post #179
tasogare wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's an example, my friend always tells me he thinks we shouldn't take anymore refugees. [...] That's surface level thinking to me. How do you do that? [...] What do you do? It’s funny you take this example because your point of view is precisely surface thinking too. I bet you don’t have any concrete plan to fund housing, education, healthcare for those people, nor you have one for them to become productive memb…

>and a lot of countries (Australia, Japan for instance) have in fact a successful policy of allowing only a bunch of them I don't know about Japan, but Australia allows in large numbers of immigrants.

Immigrants are not refugees.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#213

Post by CrazyStat »

em500 wrote: post #162
gowld wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And since cubics can't be nearly flat over two disjoint intervals separated by an extrenum, they added an unlabelled nonsensical bell curve continuation to the to the end where a cubic would predict the case rate plummeting to negative infinity

Not really, they just fitted the cubic to log-deaths and exponentiated them again.

Cubic has to go to +infinity on either the right or left. Exponentiating doesn't help with that.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#214

Post by cco »

pjc50 wrote: post #198
cco wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now and that point? I dunno. This seems pretty straightforward, no? You re-open cautiously, wait a few weeks, make sure your hospital resources aren't being overwhelmed, then open up a bit more, rinse and repeat. I wasn't aware there was another way.

The trace model: identify each infected person, trace all their contacts, test all of them, expand outwards. Full quarantine the infected. Intensive but it works; see South Korea and New Zealand. The "herd immunity" plan can only work with more than 50% of the population infected, of which about 1% will die and some slightly higher percentage suffer lingering ill health, which in the US means at least a million peopl…

This could be a naive question, but everything I've heard is that coronaviruses don't disappear, they just sorta integrate and mutate into our normal "known set" that we deal with year-to-year.

If that is true, doesn't the strategy taken by SK and NZ put them at continued risk for a another outbreak if the virus sneaks back in? Without a vaccine, and then significant uptake by the population yearly, doesn't the risk of covid-19, and its mutations, come back every year?

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#215

Post by jagannathtech »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #137
ip26 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're either joshing with us or you have a bright undiscovered future ahead of you in regexp's- given your apparent intuition for them.

I was kinda hoping I’d read HN for a decade or so then get a job as senior software engineer or systems architect, without all the intervening effort ;)

So I'm not alone with my genius idea.... dang

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#216

Post by mettamage »

username90 wrote: post #204
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in a similar position, i had to make loads applications, almost a hundred. The ones that came off are the ones i least expected. I needed this many because in the begining I sucked at interviews, misunderstood questions/what people where after, etc. Also FAANG will not neccesarily give you the most meaningfull work, there are plenty of smaller firms working on important things in life

FAANG gives you money, in Europe there aren't that many better places to be. I started out with a typical salary and joining Google doubled it, and then raises at Google doubled my salary again over a few years, that has saved me many thousands of hours of work that I can spend on other things in life so far.

I suppose I'm not the only one then. If you have any career advice, it would be appreciated (my email is in my profile).

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#217

Post by CrazyStat »

dnautics wrote: post #147
CrazyStat wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cubic is going to go to either +infinity or -infinity, so it will eventually be of by infinity%. Or infinity orders of magnitude. I feel like I can dismiss it now.

There's such thing as a convergence interval and your flippant comment betrays your ignorance.

Convergence interval doesn't help at all when you're working with a fixed finite polynomial (cubic, in this case).

You don't need any flippancy to betray your ignorance, it's already clearly on display.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#218

Post by pjc50 »

cco wrote: post #214
pjc50 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trace model: identify each infected person, trace all their contacts, test all of them, expand outwards. Full quarantine the infected. Intensive but it works; see South Korea and New Zealand. The "herd immunity" plan can only work with more than 50% of the population infected, of which about 1% will die and some slightly higher percentage suffer lingering ill health, which in the US means at least a million peopl…

This could be a naive question, but everything I've heard is that coronaviruses don't disappear, they just sorta integrate and mutate into our normal "known set" that we deal with year-to-year. If that is true, doesn't the strategy taken by SK and NZ put them at continued risk for a another outbreak if the virus sneaks back in? Without a vaccine, and then significant uptake by the population yearly, doesn't the risk…

We do eventually require a vaccine or similar.

SK and NZ can "end" the outbreak. The "herd immunity" strategy will simply continue it straight through the whole year, with a lot more deaths.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#219

Post by hkai »

vivekd wrote: post #49
kbos87 wrote: post #40

So much of everything is about connections and reputation. Tech in particular holds up a guise that people are chosen and ascend because they are “good”, meaning, they are good at what they do. That’s part of it, but it’s an insufficient part, and you can do pretty well in a career being solidly average at what you do. The real currency in my experience is one thing - relationships. Do I think this person likes, resp…

Yes, this was the opinion I came here to post, certainly my own profession of law is like this, at least where I practice in Toronto Canada but I can't imagine other places being much different. I think one advantage of computers is that what you produce at the end has to work - and if the code doesn't work or you don't know what you're doing, you're quickly exposed as a fraud. This is not the case in other fields li…

You are correct, although I personally know two programmers who are not able to write basic JavaScript code and have survived for almost a year in their jobs by asking around, copying other people's code and asking for help ("I did this, but somehow it doesn't work!").

I don't know how to raise this issue at work without being insensitive.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#220

Post by em500 »

CrazyStat wrote: post #213
em500 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, they just fitted the cubic to log-deaths and exponentiated them again.

Cubic has to go to +infinity on either the right or left. Exponentiating doesn't help with that.

exp(-infinity) = 0
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