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A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

president.mit.edu

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Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#261

Post by dh2022 »

coryrc wrote: post #137
busterarm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then? Maybe opposing points of view should pick better candidates that will actually win elections. That's how it works, right?

Our systems need to be MORE democratic! First Pass The Post is democratic, but the worst way of it. In most districts, 40-49% of voters are disenfranchised by gerrymandering. Mixed Member Proportional is far more representative. If you assume certain minority groups vote as a bloc, then you can't gerrymander them away like our current system does. The proportion of people not getting representation is capped by 1/num…

Actually a much better and easier solution to gerrymandering would be to increase the number of House representatives to be the same proportion of population it was in 1776. There will be roughly 15,000 representatives in the House. Gerrymander that!!!

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#262

Post by browningstreet »

htrp wrote: post #5

MIT Current Graduate Student are 41% international. https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/

I'm amazed at how many of the respondents in this HN thread aren't discussing the super-mega-seismic externalities laid upon universities by the current administration. Universities always have issues, but there's an orange elephant in the room.

Somehow Trump manages to do 1,000 nasty things and people talk around their effects a few weeks/months later. We may be bored of talking about him, or centering conversations about what he wrought, but that's a mistake.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#264

Post by j2kun »

jrflo wrote: post #147

Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia. The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all…

> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union

University of Illinois at Chicago (my alma mater) had a graduate student union in 2011, and I don't think a grad student union was so uncommon at the time...

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#265

Post by bigstrat2003 »

zamfi wrote: post #157
notahacker wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...

On its face this sounds like an indictment of an electorate. But I think it's actually a much deeper indictment of the incumbents who couldn't present a vision more appealing than the "madness on television".

Yeah, people act like everything was peachy until Trump decided to run, and then people went crazy and voted for him for some unknowable reason. No, things were pretty fucked before Trump. We had decades of our "leaders" in Washington treating the people with contempt and making decisions for personal benefit, rather than what benefits the people. We had bribery, I mean lobbying, behind a ton of the laws that got passed. And that's without even getting into the tyrannical stuff, like the Patriot act, the NSA spying, etc.

No, the government was pretty blatantly not serving the people's interests when Trump came along. That doesn't make Trump a good solution to the problem, but nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves". It would be surprising if that promise didn't resonate with people.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#266

Post by onetimeusename »

biophysboy wrote: post #246
jrflo wrote: post #147

Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia. The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all…

It is a real shame too, because industry is completely incapable of doing basic research. Universities make the fuzzy ideas, and companies turn them into widgets. The only exceptions in history to this are the monopolies, which have their own obvious problems. They cannot produce non-rival, non-excludable goods - stuff that's hard to patent.

Sometimes. I've seen researchers who just churn out useless junk for citation mining and I don't see a lot of overlap between their work and what industry does. That's probably one of the most demoralizing things about academia in my opinion. You sometimes have to be obsequious to people whose goal is just citation farming and whose papers are useless junk filled with buzzwords. I see this a lot in systems and security research. But I also know some researchers who do amazing work and whose research directly gets used in industry.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#268

Post by ModernMech »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #123
busterarm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then? Maybe opposing points of view should pick better candidates that will actually win elections. That's how it works, right?

Maybe it’s time to split the country? We are so polarized with very different visions about the future and what is needed to reach and increase prosperity. Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. Democracy is fine, but we are just too divided and either side thinks the other side is dragging all of us down, and refuse to believe it’s because…

It's a tempting thought but play it out. Now you live next to a belligerent fascist theocracy with nukes who likes to invade foreign countries and aspires to control the entire western hemisphere from Canada to Chile. How does that end?

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#269

Post by SecretDreams »

Retric wrote: post #228
SecretDreams wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same ways the average Joe / Jane / Jon Bon Jovi are fighting their exploitation by big tech and the government. Silent weeping and lots of Reddit posts.

Despite all the propaganda, unions work. In this case they got better pay and benefits.

I'm pro the concept of unions. They get a bad rep for 3 reasons:

1) They overly protect legitimately poor employees. This poisons the perception of unions.

2) Certain unions have too much power and probably shouldn't exist. E.g. police unions can grind a city to a halt if they don't consistently get a raise. Some teacher unions span a whole state/province - this gives them outsized power. I support these unions and want to see teachers paid well, but there's gotta be some balance. Likewise for government unions.

3) They are not always cognizant that their demands might genuinely just lead to the company folding or going overseas. I've seen unions shut a facility down that never opened up again.

How to resolve?

1) Unions need to better balance their mandates and how they might extend to objectively not great union members.

2) We need an alternative to unions for government jobs. These workers need protections, but government jobs already afford a lot better protections than private sector in NA and shutting down a whole city or state over negotiating will always be an imbalance of power that then becomes an arms race (e.g. back to work legislation). I don't have an answer to this one, but I think it needs review.

3) I don't think this needs any intervention, but I think it's an insane thing to do.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#270

Post by danaw »

alberto467 wrote: post #23
mrhottakes wrote: post #8

Good. The US is reaping what it sows, and other research institutions will become the new leaders. Stinks for Americans, but the world will be better off overall.

Not at all, the US is still the world leader in research institutions. And I say this as an European, we’re miles behind really. You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.

americans right now: "hold my beer"
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