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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?

#81

Post by pas »

tpm wrote: post #76
impostervt wrote: post #64

Honest 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.

> What makes someone "exploited"? According to Marx it's basically always you are selling your time/labor for money because you are paid less than the value of the labor. The employer keeps the surplus.

Employer (the capitalist) also takes the risks, blablabla.

Probably a better framework would be to look at the power imbalance in the respective labor market. Is the employer incentivized to hire people even at a relatively high wage, because there's competitive pressure from other employers? Do people have enough savings (and unemployment payments or other safety nets) to be able to find a good job? (Even relocate if necessary.)

Company towns were bad, and small rural towns with only one big employer also exhibit similar problems.

Where are scientists in this model? Do they have ample of opportunities? Are they simply settling for a low pay because they really really like their niche work?

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

#82

Post by LeCompteSftware »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #25
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"that's actually pretty useful contribution to science" Why? Serious question. Surely the only people using the LLM for such specific STEM domains are the exact same people who are "chasing grants instead of researching." Certainly I can see how training an LLM on this stuff can help automate the process of grant-chasing, and maybe OpenAI can expand their homework cheating business to graduate schools. But I do not s…

LLMs are actively used in research all the time, they help with finding and processing existing knowledge, forming and testing hypotheses, analyzing data, writing software, brainstorming, and countless other tasks that form actual research work, as distinct from "grant chasing" and "publishing papers", in which they help, too. (I mean, OpenAI released GPT-Rosalind just yesterday, and - surprise - it's not meant for c…

This doesn't even slightly answer my question. The incredibly frustrating thing about the AI discussion is the refusal to consider actual evidence because of shifting targets. In 2026 there is evidence that 2024 LLMs did enormous damage to scientific research in 2025: hallucinated citations, hallucinated experiements, an onslaught of unreadable prose, etc etc. But we can't talk about that, can we? That's old hat, everybody knows 2024 LLMs were stupid and useless. Instead we have to discuss our vibes about 2026 LLMs, and maybe in 2028 we'll be able to tell whether or not our vibes were correct.

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

#83

Post by pstuart »

lapcat wrote: post #37
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…

Classic pulling up the ladder behind you. Thiel went to Stanford, and Andreessen to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Not just that, but Andreessen got rich due to the work that came from CERN and he was working at NCSA developing Mosaic, which turned into Netscape.

That wealth was completely the result of work funded by the government, and the resulting initial wealth was his golden ticket into making even more.

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

#84

Post by pas »

jszymborski wrote: post #62
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…

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 thei…

VCs don't manage public money, and they also have their own filters to pick who gets to play the lottery. (And the VC ecosystem has its own set of impact metrics. the sacred KPIs! CLV, CAC, YoY! and of course just scientists know which grant organization wants which buzzwords, just as founders know which VC loves which overhyped contemporary meme.)

None of these spheres of life are, uhm, perfect, but this PR problem is completely the fault of academia, that they cannot sell this lottery model as well as the biz world. (Though I think maybe we should take a minute to consider how well loved investors and capitalists are nowadays!)

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

#85

Post by glitchc »

Frieren wrote: post #74
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…

> The problem is really one of supply and demand. I would blame the monopolization of the economy. A few corporations purchasing big chunks of the industry control the job market create a bottleneck where supply of jobs is controlled by a few corporations. Once all jobs are controlled by a few decision makers the precarious work conditions, diminished salaries, abuses, etc. come naturally. > Unfortunately, with crede…

> Even if everybody had high education, companies would still compete for the best employees. There is no competition for employees because large corporations have agreed to not do so.

Yes, but the degree itself used to be a signal. Of course the school mattered, but getting the degree was considered something. Now the only thing that matters is the school.

> Apple, Google, Intel... discussed no-poach as a way to keep salaries low. Has anything changed?

They wouldn't be able to do that if supply was low. In the 70s-80s, PhDs could incorporate themselves and consult to a very comfortable middle-class living. Nowadays, that's basically impossible for an average PhD. Supply really does matter.

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

#86

Post by glitchc »

lapcat wrote: post #42
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.

Then a PhD should not be given until a series of increments amount to something ground-breaking.

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

#87

Post by glitchc »

zdw wrote: post #68
lapcat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

This trope gets repeated every so often but it's just a trope. In 1900s people felt all physics was solved, then came relativity and the photoelectric effect. In the 1940s, after the second world war, atomics was the ultimate of physics, then we developed transistors. Until 1950s, sand was basically a worthless resource, and now, good quality silica commands a high price in the global marketplace. Truth is, there are many low-hanging fruit, we cannot even guess what we don't know when we don't know it. I wager that we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

It's still possible to make ground-breaking innovations. In fact, they come with regularity, along with all the pulp that qualifies as research nowadays. Here's an example from my field: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/hits09/gentry-homomorphic-e...

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

#88

Post by [deleted] »

glitchc wrote: post #86
lapcat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Then a PhD should not be given until a series of increments amount to something ground-breaking.

[deleted]

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

#89

Post by [deleted] »

glitchc wrote: post #86
lapcat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Then a PhD should not be given until a series of increments amount to something ground-breaking.

[deleted]

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

#90

Post by nunez »

Well, my wife, a math teacher with an advanced math degree, has been seeing data classification/labeling jobs for people with advanced math degrees. They pay well (USD$60/hr), but are, of course, contract work. There are similar jobs for people with law degrees. So, yeah, STEM/white-collar is definitely getting a bit gig-ified.
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