321–330 of 756 posts
Studying at MIT in the AI age is a complete waste of time and money. I'm surprised it's only 20%.
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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 pas…
Sort of, but that was always a pretty obvious tack to take, and I don't think there was ever a shortage of would-be leaders willing to play that role. So we're still left with the question of why the voters chose the most obviously untrustworthy guy to play it.
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> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union Is this really true for the US? There's a grad student union which represents me where I'm at (non-US), was not aware this was so rare.
It is recent and still uncommon that private universities have a grad student union. The US also has many great public universities that have had grad student unions since forever
“Masters only programs” is a bad hack that needs to be gone. It is just a cash grab from overseas students desperate for a Visa to work in the US. Many of these programs are highly exploitative and leave overseas students with crippling debts and have almost no academic merit. I’ve seen this in supposedly good schools like CMU that offer Masters in Software Engineering which is basically a cash grab for overseas stud…
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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 w…
Representative unions' incentive seems to be gathering the biggest bloc of members to represent, with their dues and bargaining power focused into a few union bodies for maximum leverage. This seems to be virtually all unions in the US.
Direct unions - perhaps more accurately works councils? - seem to exist out there, but more in EU - just from what I can read, not firsthand.
The huge unions enjoy more dues but the common denominator definitionally has to be substantially lower than smaller works councils to get the membership counts. Big general unions benefit unions themselves, while smaller unions specific to a company or protecting a professional standard benefit the skilled or specialized workers. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much of a marketplace in the US around that choice.
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 Is this really true for the US? There's a grad student union which represents me where I'm at (non-US), was not aware this was so rare.
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Historians looking back at this era are going to struggle to understand why we made the decisions we did.
Lots of historical precedent for an intellectual elite ignoring the perception and needs of the common folk leading to an uprising. I'd imagine every great(in scale/importance) uprising/political tumult had some aspect of "but they're ruining everything!" Everything for intellectuals and people with ties to the system that was functioning for that minority. Coal miners don't care that international students aren't co…
The median professor makes less than, say, an electrician. I am a professor in a good school, and I could probably triple my pay by going to industry.
This propaganda needs to stop.
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…
I used to work with a brilliant and humble guy. He got accepted to MIT at 14, but his parents made him go to community college for a year to give him a little more time to mature. He then went to MIT and graduated after three years, then went to Berkeley and got a masters in one year, then went to Stanford and it took six years to get his PhD? Why? Because his advisor milked him for his work. She had a pile of papers…
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Yup, it’s called a brain drain and it’s why until recently America held a vice grip on groundbreaking research and its commercialization.
Historians looking back at this era are going to struggle to understand why we made the decisions we did.