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Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

theguardian.com

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Re: Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

#61

Post by googlemployee1 »

jordanb wrote: post #52
Systemic33 wrote: post #6

I loved the ending: "He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn't impressed." The show is despite what some think, not a celebration of science, but a ridicule of science, and takes the stereotypes to new levels. Edit: I also watch the show, but as the article that GuiA links to mentions, the show wnats you to laugh at the nerds, and not t…

A quote from a friend of mine: "Arrested development is smart jokes at the expense of stupid people; the Big Bang Theory is stupid jokes at the expense of smart people."

so your friend is reddit? pls go

Re: Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

#62

Post by adamnemecek »

purringmeow wrote: post #57
amerika_blog wrote: post #48

School is an obedience/memorization test, the exact opposite of the real-world applied thinking skills that are needed. Private schooling is bad; public schooling is even worse. That's where ideology substitutes for academics as well. Memorizing 20 ways to do something, and then finding a way to cram in each one on a test in an "applied" situation, leads to indiscriminate use of technique and poor debugging skills.

I am interested in what kind of alternative are you offering? How do you give basic knowledge to the majority of people?

Because you can criticize things only if you have a better alternative.

Re: Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

#63

Post by tokenadult »

Thanks for submitting this. This was a good introduction to Higgs. It was reading the comments here after reading the article that reminded me of a paper by Leif D. Nelson, Joseph P. Simmons, and Uri Simonsohn, "Let's Publish Fewer Papers,"

http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/papers/fewer.pdf

suggesting that psychology, and maybe other disciplines, could be improved if scholars published less often than they now do. "We agree that it is impractical, but it is just a thought experiment. Still, we stand behind the notion that the ideal is much closer to 'a paper a year' than to 'publish as many papers as you can.'"

Re: Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

#64

Post by rtpg »

kulkarnic wrote: post #27
paul wrote: post #3

I feel like the inability to focus for long periods of time is holding back progress in many areas. If we can't even stay away from email for a few days, how can we clear our minds of conventional thinking?

A few days? People get upset if you haven't replied in an hour. Seriously though, long periods of solitude is not what we need. I'd not be productive if I became a hermit, but I'd be a lot more productive if I had periods of quiet time, punctuated by moments of discussion. This is how thinkers and artists (and hackers) worked for a long time, before we wrongly convinced ourselves that being interruptible improves pro…

>A few days? People get upset if you haven't replied in an hour.

I've solved this problem by always taking forever to answer e-mails. If it's important, people just call me.

Whether this is good or not is questionable, however.

Re: Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

#65

Post by Jtsummers »

amerika_blog wrote: post #48

School is an obedience/memorization test, the exact opposite of the real-world applied thinking skills that are needed. Private schooling is bad; public schooling is even worse. That's where ideology substitutes for academics as well. Memorizing 20 ways to do something, and then finding a way to cram in each one on a test in an "applied" situation, leads to indiscriminate use of technique and poor debugging skills.

> Private schooling is bad; public schooling is even worse. That's where ideology substitutes for academics as well.

Not picking on you, but this comes up a lot about public education as a tool for brainwashing. Often the implication is it's by those "liberal teachers". I must say, based on the voting record in the US, those teachers are incredibly ineffective brainwashers.

Re: Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

#66

Post by drdeca »

adamnemecek wrote: post #62
purringmeow wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am interested in what kind of alternative are you offering? How do you give basic knowledge to the majority of people?

Because you can criticize things only if you have a better alternative.

No, but I would think that it is often useful to indicate when one does not know of a better option than the one one is criticizing.

Because "this is a bad choice" has a connotation that that is not the one that should be made, but that a different known one should be made instead, I think.

Of course, the indication can be implicit, or from context, etc.

And there might be exceptions, But I think this generally holds?

Re: Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

#67

Post by ChristianMarks »

Higgs isn't alone in remarking that he would not have had the time today to conduct the kind of work he did in the 1960s. Brian Greene has remarked that today’s grant-driven academia would not have allowed Einstein the luxury of a decade in which to develop his General Theory of Relativity.

Eric Weinstein wrote that, "We have spent the last decades inhibiting such socially marginal individuals or chasing them to drop out of our research enterprise and into startups and hedge funds. As a result our universities are increasingly populated by the over-vetted specialist to become the dreaded centers of excellence that infantilize and uniformize the promising minds of greatest agency." [1]

Weinstein's "deviants and delinquents" include "von Neumann [skirt chasing], Gamow [hard drinking], Shockley [bigoted], Watson [misogynistic], Einstein [childish], Curie [slutty], Smale [lazy], Oppenheimer [politically treacherous], Crick [incompetent], Ehrenfest [murderous], Lang [meddlesome], Teller [monstrous] and Grothendieck [mentally unstable]."

Higgs's observation suggests that the systematic stamping out of non-conscientious non-conformists is a byproduct of over-scheduling them. (Scheduling has to be considered independently of effort, ability and experience. [2]) Weinstein's deviants benefited from a historical period during which they had sufficient time and freedom to pursue their greatest work (von Neumann, who didn't need any time, is an exception).

But I imagine that time is a luxury even for the deviants and delinquents who find themselves displaced from academia into startups. So what is really needed is a startup culture that provides for years of uninterrupted development and focus. (Not to mention a hiring process that actively selects for displaced deviants, but that's another post.)

[1] http://www.edge.org/responses/q2013 Edge 2013 : WHAT SHOULD WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w16502 Don't Spread Yourself Too Thin: The Impact of Task Juggling on Workers' Speed of Job Completion. Decio Coviello, Andrea Ichino, Nicola Persico. NBER Working Paper No. 16502

Re: Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

#68

Post by TheZenPsycho »

EpicEng wrote: post #8
Systemic33 wrote: post #6

I loved the ending: "He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn't impressed." The show is despite what some think, not a celebration of science, but a ridicule of science, and takes the stereotypes to new levels. Edit: I also watch the show, but as the article that GuiA links to mentions, the show wnats you to laugh at the nerds, and not t…

Meh, still funny, and the jokes are often more clever than your typical network fare. EDIT: I love that I get downvoted for saying that I like a show. You guys must be a blast at parties.

I remember when hacker news had a culture that was embarrassed about making contentless unproductive comments like this.

The article is about Peter Higgs and the current academic environment. The Hacker News thread contains a prolonged debate about the merits of some TV show.

and then this comment.

Re: Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

#69

Post by dl8 »

Systemic33 wrote: post #6

I loved the ending: "He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn't impressed." The show is despite what some think, not a celebration of science, but a ridicule of science, and takes the stereotypes to new levels. Edit: I also watch the show, but as the article that GuiA links to mentions, the show wnats you to laugh at the nerds, and not t…

The main thing I don't like about BBT is that it's generally not funny. Look how the show holds without its laugh track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKS3MGriZcs

Re: Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

#70

Post by fargolime »

mikeash wrote: post #42
fargolime wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not pseudoscience for that reason alone. You're using the definition incorrectly, even if yours is the definition commonly improperly used. For example Einstein's Relativity of Simultaneity thought experiment is targeted at laypeople and is both scientific and a logical proof. Had he put the idea into a blog and nothing more it still would've been an advance of physics, regardless whether anyone else paid it min…

You're right, of course. It's not pseudoscience because it's a blog targeted at a non-scientific audience. It's pseudoscience because it's complete nonsense.

I've seen many people say that, but none who proved it scientifically. After all, it simply uses generally accepted equations to make its point. As the author suggests, I've plugged the equations into Excel to get the same charts.

My favorite part is this:

- The Relativistic Rocket site reports that a rocket accelerating / decelerating at 1 Earth gravity can travel from Earth to the Andromeda galaxy, 2 million light years away and arriving at low speed, in 28 years on the crew’s clock. Then the rocket’s crew would observe a beacon floating at the midpoint between the galaxies recede 1 million light years in the 14 years after they pass it.

That's an unassailable conclusion, and it follows that the beacon would accelerate away from the crew as they observe, since the beacon moved away from them at an average rate greater than that the rate at which they passed it. That's the explanation for dark energy in a nutshell.

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