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Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

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Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#41

Post by werrett »

alex43578 wrote: post #17
whatever1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be blunt, those freelancers wouldn't be doing this if they had better options Correct, this is what the article points out. Their options were squashed when SV was praising DOGE and the cuts to national research grants based on keywords like “inequalities”. Nobody had the time to check that mathematicians also use the term. We wrecked our research and the vultures got cheap labor to put lipstick on their slop ma…

Yes, it’s much better to spend “$400,000 for a Research Project on Whether Ducks Enjoy Classical Music”, just to ensure not a single grant went unfulfilled. We have a $1.78T deficit. The ducks and the mathematicians will need to take a cut at this point.

Yes, let’s pay down the deficit by cutting funding to the sciences. While the latest war is running at ~1 billion a day (we’re in day 48 btw).

https://iran-cost-ticker.com/

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#42

Post by lapcat »

glitchc wrote: post #29

The problem is really one of supply and demand. Whatever SV talking heads say is a post-hoc rationalization on top of this basic fact. We have too many PhDs (I say this as one). It's never been easier to get one. Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking. Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate. Soon people will complete two just to qu…

> Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking.

Why? Most science is incremental. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#43

Post by xienze »

whatever1 wrote: post #3
christkv wrote: post #2

[flagged]

This is about the $10/hour that they give to freelancers to solve math/physics/chemistry problems so that they can train the LLMs on them. I get approached by “recruiters” all the time about this.

> This is about the $10/hour that they give to freelancers to solve math/physics/chemistry problems so that they can train the LLMs on them.

If you're talking about DataAnnotation, specialized stuff like that is $30/hour and up.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#44

Post by ornornor »

qakHsj wrote: post #34
WhitneyLand wrote: post #26

In case you wonder where the current trends come from. “Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have parlayed their extensive ties with the president into an unabashed assault on universities and institutional science. In private text messages leaked to The Washington Post last year, Andreessen wrote that “universities are at Ground Zero of the counterattack.” He characterized Stanford and MIT as “mainly political lobbying o…

Yes, Musk as well. DOGE did the firing. Musk uses Twitter to keep up appearances and routinely posts UBI propaganda that will obviously never materialize. Why would the guy who slashes social security (except for his corporations) introduce UBI? The genuine worry is that these people have too much money and do seem unhinged. Thiel promotes the Antichrist and the apocalypse, Musk reposts weird Grok pictures of women a…

> Musk

He’s been nuts for a while. See naming one of his (many many many) children some keyboard smash nonsense (supposedly the name of some guardian angel because he believes in that)

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#45

Post by LtWorf »

Telemakhos wrote: post #30
redwood wrote: post #22

I think it cuts both ways because these types of people are the ones who can wield this technology as a Swiss army knife to do really interesting things and in fact if they can build on top of their own peers' collective toil then they can avoid doing that toil themselves and potentially do greater things.. at least that's the theory. If some of them want to temporarily participate in the toil, nothing wrong with tha…

Star Trek's warp-capable space ship is a fictional analogy for nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which are designed by geniuses to be used and maintained at sea by people who are not geniuses and who do not understand all the ins and outs of how atomic energy works. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people today using computers without understanding how transistors work or which register they're wr…

You've ever seen a star trek episode? (The real ones, not the modern crap).

Even the guy pushing the button for the teleporter is some kind of technical genius.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#46

Post by blueboo »

glitchc wrote: post #29

The problem is really one of supply and demand. Whatever SV talking heads say is a post-hoc rationalization on top of this basic fact. We have too many PhDs (I say this as one). It's never been easier to get one. Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking. Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate. Soon people will complete two just to qu…

In a master’s, you learn a lot about a little

In a PhD, you learn everything about nothing

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#47

Post by amirhirsch »

danaris wrote: post #31
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That shouldn't be viewed in isolation. A major root cause is essentially overproduction of academics downstream from the Cold War, and obviously the private sector is not to blame for that. But you can't ignore how much modern Big Tech has sucked away from academia compared to the tech companies of the Cold War era. Microsoft Research and Google Research have some impressive folks, but even combined they are a scient…

Describing it as "overproduction of academics" is kind of begging the question, though: is it not at least as much "deprioritization of basic research and education"? It's not like the current demand for scientists is somehow a completely natural value, arrived at objectively and with no human biases involved. And the private sector is heavily to blame for that. In ways that you even describe, as well as others (as a…

Peter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction” suggests this is a cause for social instability and revolutions

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#48

Post by linuxftw »

Every time someone goes to a college or university and pays out of their own pocket to learn the skills necessary to work for a corporation, that's society subsidizing the costs of the corporation.

We're being robbed. We need to actively shame people that spend massive amounts of money on college.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#49

Post by raxxorraxor »

mc32 wrote: post #33
WhitneyLand wrote: post #26

In case you wonder where the current trends come from. “Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have parlayed their extensive ties with the president into an unabashed assault on universities and institutional science. In private text messages leaked to The Washington Post last year, Andreessen wrote that “universities are at Ground Zero of the counterattack.” He characterized Stanford and MIT as “mainly political lobbying o…

Bureaucracy and momentum can lead to rot. It’s not a bad idea to tear things down and rebuild in order to extirpate that rot and misdirection. Companies tend to have restructurings and stack ranking. Obviously these have their downsides too. But they also serve to shake things up and reassess direction and needs. If you’re swimming in money often you can skip this till you hit the skids.

There certainly is a problem in universities and some of it might be a recent cultural development. It also isn't restricted to US universities either and some of it mirrors the a church that wanted to keep some knowledge under wraps. Publishing is also a perverted circus if you indeed are employed as a scientist and want to publish your work/findings.

That said, just razing everything down is probably not the solution, especially if there are indeed no ideas how to improve the current state.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#50

Post by malfist »

glitchc wrote: post #29

The problem is really one of supply and demand. Whatever SV talking heads say is a post-hoc rationalization on top of this basic fact. We have too many PhDs (I say this as one). It's never been easier to get one. Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking. Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate. Soon people will complete two just to qu…

Do you think the boundary of science isn't pushed forward incrementally? Not every person can be an Einstein, hell, not every generation has an Einstein. And Einstein couldn't have done what he did for science without the foundation of those "incremental and derivative" advancements.

This nonsense falls apart at the barest inspection. Science IS BORING. And it should be.

Take for example a muscle building study that found that the biceps grew significantly more when tension was maximized in the stretched position. Science based lifting people hawked for years that the "stretch mediated growth" was king. All based on that one "seminal and groundbreaking" research. Years later when a "incremental and derivative" study was done on the hamstrings found no stretch mediated growth effect. Without the boring work, we wouldn't know that some muscles grow faster when tensioned under stress and some don't. And we still don't know exactly why. The current leading theory is it's something to do with the balance of fast vs slow switch fibers that make up the muscle, but we don't know without more derivative and incremental research.

Hell even under your criteria, if the stretch mediated effect wasn't found in the original study you'd probably classified it as incremental and derivative too.

Want another example? How about this one, a scientist was studying which tricep movement produced the most growth. It's obvious right? It's the one that lets you load the most weight onto the triceps, or at least the one that lets you load the most weight onto the most heads of the triceps. Boring. Derivative. Incremental. Except this study found that despite "common sense" it was actually the overhead tricep extension. You can't load it the heaviest, it's mainly targeting just one head of the tricep, it makes absolutely no sense. But science has proven it to be the case. Later "incremental and derivative" research has proposed a theory that since it's overhead, the muscles go slightly hypoxic during the lift and that triggers a stronger growth reaction, and in fact, applying a band for vasoconstriction around the arm and doing bicep curls was found to lead to more bicep growth than doing it without the vasoconstriction. All of this is incremental science. All of this advances our knowledge of how the body grows.

Science is slow. Science is advanced unpredictability. Science is boring.

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