Live data from Hacker News

Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

thenation.com

51–60 of 113 posts

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

#51

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.

I'm sorry, we should shame the people who are following the only tattered script left for trying to make a better life for themselves?

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

#52
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

[flagged]

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

#53
post #33

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.

Move fast and break things is, in fact, a bad philosophy to work by and govern by. Especially when the people in charge admit to not wanting to rebuild.

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

#54
post #50
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…

I suspect every generation has multiple Einsteins, but they're probably getting killed in war zones or crushed under oligarchy.

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

#55
Ironic how a libertarian would impose his personal views on "the system". Doesn't work? Let it die. Too many PhDs? Perhaps, let them search for a job. If they're indeed too many, a generation of plumbers etc. will emerge naturally. No one is impeding their businesses, if anything governments worldwide are aiding big technology companies in any way possible.

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

#56

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.

More education is actually a good thing. We need to shame corporations and the rich for hoarding wealth and not making education cheaper.

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

#57
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.

Math, physics, and chemistry RLHF freelancing is typically north of $40/hr. Even competence at simply reading & writing English prose earns at least $20/hr. I've never seen an offer for less than that, and I lived off of that kind of work for a month after a layoff in 2024.

That seems like a fair trade considering the freelancer takes on none of the risk and has very little required capital.

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

#58
post #54
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I suspect every generation has multiple Einsteins, but they're probably getting killed in war zones or crushed under oligarchy.

Or being told on hacker news that PhDs are too easy to get and they shouldn't do science.

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

#59
post #33

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.

> It’s not a bad idea to tear things down and rebuild in order to extirpate that rot and misdirection.

Regardless of whether it’s actually a bad idea or not, there’s been zero effort by this administration to rebuild what’s been destroyed.

Post reply on HN