31–40 of 250 posts
Does anyone have a link to the actual study? The linked DOI is a 404, and I'm confused by the phrasing of "more than 40%". Does the study not have a more exact number (with error)?
I'm not sure about the situation elsewhere, but in Lithuania, it feels like professors produce articles or tackle topics solely to check a box. Most of the content generated by universities here seems completely irrelevant and ends up being discarded after completion. The courses are very bland and uninformative too.
System behaves as designed. Situation normal: all fucked up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah yes, the real world of corporations and all their made-up bullshit. Much more real than a university.
ML papers by Western universities barely touch on the problems that practitioners face. The only papers I see that are routinely useful have half the authors having a .in or .cn email at the end with the rest having Indian and Chinese names in US institutions. The only western papers which aren't extended advertisements for their company are from people who are making something for themselves. For example the best pa…
Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning. A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the peculariti…
isn't competition good for innovation?
Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning. A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the peculariti…
In the videogame industry, this mostly led to a bunch of low paying, long hour, lousy jobs with high turnover. Why pay more for a low level employee if you can get a new hire for cheaper? In academia, money is a little less hierarchical, so it led to a madcap fight for grants with all of the related downsides.
Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning. A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the peculariti…
isn't competition good for innovation?
This is probably not the complete story, and probably a bit too pessimistic, but I think this is true...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would have expected a higher percentage. This. A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate.
Ah yes, the real world of corporations and all their made-up bullshit. Much more real than a university.
You're posting that sort of message in a startup-oriented online forum.
There was a point in time where Google was lauded by it's success story as progress originating in investments in academia.
Professors are basically there to manage the process and haggle for funding. They tend to not be very hands-on with research for the simple reason that that's not their main job. They mostly delegate that to people in their team.
And you can only become a professor by doing post docs, landing some tenured position and then maybe they'll make you a professor somewhere. It's a long, uncertain process and the failure modes are basically ending up with a teaching position or being otherwise stuck in some faculty mostly not doing research. Nothing wrong with that. But not what I was after. And a lot of teachers in university are basically people that dropped out of the process somehow.
Anyway, the whole management thing had no appeal to me: I did not want to be a manager managing other people doing all the fun stuff (research) while basically dealing with a lot of bureaucratic shit. Not my idea of fun, at least.
So, I left. It was the only logical thing to do. I worked for Nokia Research for a while after that. But the career paths there weren't a whole lot different there. And the whole thing started imploding a bit after the iphone launch.
These days I do startups and a bit of consulting. Mostly as a CTO, and I'm very hands on which is just how I like it. Inevitably, there's a bit of management involved as well. But I like what I do.
Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning. A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the peculariti…
isn't competition good for innovation?
Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning. A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the peculariti…
isn't competition good for innovation?
From that perspective, the system works. We are making more articles, in more journals, there is also plenty of money thrown around. Unfortunately, there is no incentive for correctness, novelty or usefulness in this system.
Falsification of results, especially in the soft sciences, is relatively easy. Verification of results, doesn't give you any credit. So you can have people producing articles with blatantly misleading or false results for decades, all without any repercussion.
And it's not much better in the hard sciences either. Because verification of results there, is even more difficult and costly. And again, we are not incentivizing verification.