Just a reminder MIT's endowment funds totaled $27.4 billion, excluding pledges
A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
351–360 of 756 posts
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
no, they are saying that by discarding mississippi, you are ignoring like 45%+ of the state that didn't vote for whatever politician you hate. and also you are ignoring the centuries of disenfranchisement that prevents more people from voting against whatever politician you hate. it's not a monolith. mississsippi is the blackest state in the union yet coastal liberals who are supposedly anti-racist are quick to throw…
Having actually lived in Mississippi, I’ve seen the disenfranchisement first hand. But what can we do? We can’t fix Mississippi, they will have to want to fix themselves, so why not let them explore more fully the consequences of their own actions? Mississippi thinks California is keeping them down, then without California they would have to start blaming themselves more.
> then without California they would have to start blaming themselves more
Because blaming a foreign country for your woes just doesn't happen.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then? Well, what should a democratic society do when that democracy votes to overthrow it and do fascism?
No one voted to "overthrow" democracy and do "fascism," cut the hyperbole.
> No one voted to "overthrow" democracy and do "fascism,"
Most Trump voters didn't. A sizeable fraction have openly agitated for, and supported, violently overthrowing our elected government.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#354I work in a large public university system and we are also seeing enrollment drops across campuses. We are also seeing declines in enrollment in the K-12 education too.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#355Besides 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.
Vaswani, A., et al. (2017) Attention Is All You Need. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Long Beach, 4-9 December 2017, 6000-6010.
Generally understood to be an output of Googlers.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#356> Relatedly, some federal agencies are discussing the possibility of factoring in geography when they allocate their funds, rather than basing decisions on scientific merit alone.
Sounds ironically like "DEI".
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stop freaking out at thought experiments. I'm asking what should happen in such a scenario. Should a democratic society be able to vote to nuke their least favorite city? Should they be able to vote for slavery? Should they be able to vote to legalize raping kids? What should a democratic populace not be able to inflict upon the less powerful segments of society?
To clarify, you agree that the Trump admin / MAGA political movement isn't fascism and his election wasn't an overthrow of democracy? Your earlier remarks were just a thought experiment? That isn't really the sense I've gotten from your historical comments.
I don't agree; it's simply irrelevant here.
We either accept "there are some things you shouldn't be able to democratically vote for" like, say, the Holocaust or reinstating slavery, or we do not.
You added Trump to the conversation, not me.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grad students outnumber coalminers 70:1, if they're roughly half international which another comment claims, that's still a big difference.
The way "coal miners" are discussed would also likely be something that puzzles historians. There are approximately 45,000 coal miners in the US, that's roughly equivalent to the combined enrollment of Harvard and MIT. There are more university students in the relatively small city of Cambridge, Massachusetts than there are people mining coal in the US and yet we have to pretend the latter are a constituency worth co…
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Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
That may well be true but it's not the whole story. My department has been hiring continuously for 15 years, and there have been more than a few years we have not been able to hire anyone because the applicant pool was underqualified. So while it's true there aren't enough jobs for everyone , there are still jobs for those who want them enough to get the qualifications for them (your field may vary).
So, question from the peanut gallery: how is this different than saying if folks don't get a job it's just because they "weren't qualified"? And isn't that just a tautology? Isn't the point that we might think that getting a terminal degree would qualify a person for some kind of job in their field? I mean, "I'm not too poor to eat, I just can't find anyone to sell me food at a price I can afford" is -a- take, but ma…
its a different relationship entirely. you're hiring someone to mentor grad students, get grants, and teach. and while you aren't given tenure right away, that's certainly the goal, which can be a multi-decade commitment. everyone is trying to raise the bar with their program, and a couple 'meh' hires can really change that trajectory for quite a while. there are only like 20 faculty in your department, its not like development a giant tech co where there are tens of thousands and they are constantly moving in and out - each of these hires has a dramatic impact on your culture.
so yes, it absolutely makes sense to leave slots empty if you don't find candidates that you're excited about.
Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
#360I’m a PhD student in India, working in a nano fabrication group. In my group, all my seniors and alumni ahead of me have gone into industry. That seems pretty normal for experimental STEM. But I don’t think that means the PhD was wasted, or that the system only matters if people stay in academia.
This is especially true in fields like nanofabrication and semiconductor fab.
So I don’t see "most PhDs leave academia" as the main problem. The damage does not show up immediately, but a few years later you have fewer people who know how to work on hard technical problems from first principles.
Context, since this is HN and anonymous comments are cheap: I’m a current PhD student at one of India’s top technical institutes, not a professor defending the system from above.