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Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?
61–70 of 113 posts
Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?
#62The 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…
This chestnut gets trodded out every so often but it's frankly absolute and total nonsense sold by anti-intellectuals and bought by people from all walks of life.
Science is and always was incremental. The breakthroughs come from truly unforeseeable places. It takes seemingly niche and unprofitable and incremental research like studying bacteria living in volcano vents, for us to have PCR.
VCs expect a sliver of their companies to become Unicorns, we understand it to be a numbers game. That grace is given to entrepreneurs but scientists need to grovel for cash and endlessly show that their research is "translatable" or sufficiently impactful.
Sorry, I've heard this one too many times before. Thanks for your contribution to our world's knowledge, I hope you value it as much as I do.
Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's also all too easy to arbitrarily label something as "bureaucratic" and demand that it gets razed and rebuilt. I'm sure Palantir has some level of bureaucracy internally with all the new contracts it has won - perhaps we should also rip that apart?
Fact is that a university that must simultaneously handle education, research, publishing, estate management, legal stuff, media coverage, health and safety etc etc etc ends up being somewhat bureaucratic.
Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?
#64Honest question, not really related to the story: What makes someone "exploited"?
Most of us trade our time for money, so at what point does the money become too little and be considered exploitative? Are all gig workers exploited? Didn't they make a rational choice that this is the best opportunity for themselves?
It certainly feels wrong, the low wages. I'm just wondering where the threshold is.
Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?
#65Earlier 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.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”
-Stephen Jay Gould
Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?
#66In 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…
Classic pulling up the ladder behind you. Thiel went to Stanford, and Andreessen to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Also, Andreessen’s wife of two decades attended Stanford. Her billionaire father ensured that their surname (Arrillaga) is plastered all over the campus.
Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?
#67I 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…
When you’re out in the infinite empty of space many light years from any livable environment, you damn well better know how your warp drive works to be able to fix it, and that is what Star Trek portrayed.
Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?
#68The 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.
This is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed.
Complaining that "Why doesn't progress go fast like before?!" when the newest tool-side improvement is a slightly faster CPU or a new clanker model.
I think there's this group of folks who are like "Why don't we have flying cars?" and eventually realize the problem is physics, but have to somehow blame people instead.
Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It seems pretty obvious that GP wasn’t saying $10/hr to mean literally $10/hr, but were exaggerating to imply that people were getting chump change for this work. $30/hr is still chump change and not enough to buy oneself any reasonable quality of life for the majority of the population.
Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?
#70Earlier 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.
Nietzsche argued that genius is more frequent than we think, but that something else is missing for its realization ("the five hundred hands"):
> In the realm of genius, might the “Raphael without hands” — the term understood in its broadest sense — be not the exception, but the rule? — Genius is perhaps not so rare after all: but the five hundred hands it needs to tyrannize the καιρὁς, “the right time” — to seize chance by the scruff of the neck! [0]
[0] http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/JGB-274 (translated from German)