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"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a
by alexandros 16y ago
"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild's need to credentialize its members."
A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocational training programs, but I've never seen such dismissal of the work produced by academia in such a high profile outlet, with no evidence to back it up whatsoever.
EDIT: Reading further, I see that they did look more closely.. at sociology journals. Why the strange choice? Biology, computing, medicine, physics not interesting enough?
- scott_s 16y agoI noticed that too, and I wondered if they were even capable of making that judgement. I looked up their backgrounds: the review writer is an English professor at Emory; one of the book authors is a Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Queens College in NY. This continues the tendency I've seen elsewhere, which is to lump science and engineering education and research in with humanities when criticizing higher education.
- gaius 16y agoYes, but only humanities types do that, quite deliberately in the hope that the hard subjects will reciprocate when defending them.
- zeynel1 16y agojust a glance is enough at this table of contents of academic journal - classical and quantum gravity- http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/27/17 http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/27/17 to wonder how much of this -research- is advancing knowledge and how much is --about advancing the career of the authors--
- yummyfajitas 16y agoIt's a very good question, and hardly a trivial one. Quite a lot of science is nearly worthless, and only published to pad the author's cv. A couple of blog posts on the topic: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/24/all_those_worthless_papers.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/24/all_those_wo... http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/25/what_to_do_with_the_notquiteworthless.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/25/what_to_do_w...
- api 16y agoLasers were thought to be a laboratory curiosity when they were invented. On the other hand, you have a ton of academics who are convinced that the "semantic web" is the next big thing. Part of the problem with science is that it's an activity where it's very hard to have any useful metric. Even experts in the field have a tough time deciding whether a given research direction is going to be fruitful. They're often wrong. So far the best thing we've figured out for science resembles the Underpants Gnomes' business plan: 1) Fund lots of science. 2) ???? 3) Profit! The ???? part is "pray that some of it is useful and that some of that gets into the hands of people who will use it."
- gwern 16y ago1) Fund lots of science. Why do we need this? By every metric I know of, governments spend orders of magnitude more on science than they did in the 1800s. Are we getting orders more "Profit!"?
- WingForward 16y agoCould you clarify your metrics and sources?
- gwern 16y agohttp://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/53/41558958.pdf http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/53/41558958.pdf tells me that non-commercial (government or government-subsidized) R&D represents ~1% of GDP in 2006 for the US. I believe equivalent figures for the 1800s would be closer to 0% R&D inasmuch as there were no Departments of Energy, Health & Human Services, etc., but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Maybe the Gilded Age governments in the US actually spent 2% of GDP on R&D.
- philk 16y agoIt's a fair point, but he's probably focusing on the arts and soft sciences because those degrees are the most overpriced for the value they deliver. To put it another way, an MIT grad with an engineering degree is going to be much better off career-wise than a Harvard grad who majored in gender studies.
- harry 16y agoThe long term studies of technical degrees vs 'soft science' hasn't been looked at in depth on a national scale with relation to earnings and salary. These studies are just beginning. From AACRO: after 10 years the earning potential for an engineering degree drops below someone with an English degree. Technical degrees are way more valuable out of the gate while soft science take time to develop. To put it into other words: where an engineer can make 65k right after graduation an english major will start at 35k. The engineer's salary increases on par with inflation while the english major increases substantially over time and overtakes it on average at the 10 year point. The paraphrased quote from AACROs lobbyist: 'we're seeing through earnings study that technical degrees go stale over the career of an individual, this is shown when comparing the average english major vs the average electrical engineer' There's alot of background nuance (politics) there behind the study but the idea hasn't really been broached before in higher ed. It's really quite interesting to look at on a US scale, but that data hasn't been collected yet. Oh: I'm not contesting that some soft science degrees aren't total wastes of money. Just that there will always be a place for a gender studies Harvard grad. We just don't need 10,000 of them.
- baddspellar 16y agoDo you have a link to back this claim up? I don't believe it. If you look at PayScale.com, for example, you'll see a ranking of undergrad majors, with starting and mid-career salaries, where mid-career is defined as "full-time employees with at least 10 years of experience in their career or field who hold a bachelor's degree and no higher degrees." ref: http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp English Majors start at $37,800 and get to $67,500 after 10 years. Electrical Engineering Majors start at $60,800 and get to $104,000 after 10 years. AACRO has an incentive to overstate the benefits of non-technical college degrees, as these are the most common types of degrees, and these are the degrees that are leading more people to question the value of a college education.
- jbooth 16y agoIt's the WSJ editorial page. Punching hippies is one of their 3 reasons for existence.
- mapleoin 16y agoOk, I'll bite. What are the other 2?
- jbooth 16y agoWell, the number 3 was arbitrary, but let's say.. 2) Spending 8 years advocating "deficits don't matter", then changing their opinion 180 degrees within 24 hours of a new President being inaugurated. 3) Writing screeds castigating liberals for being coastal elitists and out of touch on an iPad from the back seat of the author's car service, while drinking a latte on the way to yoga class.
- Aaronontheweb 16y agoWhy are people voting up this idiot? Is it time for yet-another "this isn't reddit" admonishment?
- crystalis 16y agoYes. This isn't reddit. Please provide some rationale for your namecalling, but preferably please just stay at home.
- joelmichael 16y agoA lot can be discerned in a glance.
- baddspellar 16y agoSome years ago, I saw a 60 minutes episode on issues in higher education. The reporter picked a biology journal off a shelf, read its arcane title, and exclaimed "who actually reads this stuff?" to back up her claim about how useless journals are... as if she were somehow qualified to judge the importance of a paper by its title. I couldn't help but imagining what she would have said if she picked up a paper titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" or "On formally undecidable propositions of. Principia Mathematica and related systems".
- jacquesm 16y agoFortunately it's not up to her to decide. That said, it seems that some papers go out of their way to hide what the paper is really about by looking at the title.
- sprout 16y agoUsually you just don't know. I got shamed in front of a prof once by saying that a given paper title was a good way to make people not want to come to your talk, and he responded by explaining why he thought it was an interesting talk. There are plenty of examples of things that might be meaningless to a graph-theory professor that are a core part of the language of a combinatorics specialist. And of course, undergrads and humanities majors best keep their mouths shut.
- derefr 16y agoOne of the things taught to undergrads in the humanities—specifically, in communications design—is that you should make the metadata of something interesting-seeming to a wider audience than the data it represents, so that it spreads further—that way, more of the people interested in the data will see it. As an example, one of my friends told me about a very interesting paper called, and I quote, "Three Monkeys something something." He didn't know what it was about, but he said it "sounded like something I'd be interested in." He was quite right—but if it hadn't been for the monkeys, he wouldn't had anything vivid about the paper to recall at all.
- 16y ago
- pragmatic 16y agoSee another article currently on the front page: Realtime Linux: academia v. reality http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/397422/27eef125e03b8a2d/ http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/397422/27eef125e03b8a2d/ "I actually took the time to spend a day at a university where I could gain access to IEEE papers without wasting my private money. I picked out twenty recent realtime related papers and did a quick survey. Twelve of the papers were a rehash of well-known and well-researched topics, and at least half of them were badly written as well. From the remaining eight papers, six were micro improvements based on previous papers where I had a hard time figuring out why the papers had been written at all. One of those was merely describing the effects of converting a constant which influences resource partitioning into a runtime configurable variable. So that left two papers which seemed actually worthwhile to read in detail. Funny enough, I had already read one of those papers as it was publicly accessible in a slightly modified form. That survey really convinced me to stay away from IEEE forever and to consider the university ranking system even more suspicious."
- api 16y agoThat's funny. If you took a look at startups, you'd find that 99% of them are me-too crap. Badly designed websites for Yet Another Social Networking Gimmick, bad mobile apps, outlandish bad business ideas, etc. 1% of them ever truly go anywhere. 0.1% of them change the world. My point is that anytime you randomly sample a field of work of any kind, you're going to get an exponential distribution of quality with a few hits and a long tail. All papers are not the Church-Turing thesis, and all startups are not Google or Apple. A lot of academia-bashing amounts to criticism of academia for having the same sorts of failings that are present in equal measure in all other societal institutions public or private. Things like: elitism, know-nothing overpaid leadership, poor quality control, loss of focus, abusive labor practices, perverse incentives, poor success ratios for new ventures, etc.
- stcredzero 16y agoSturgeon's Law: Applicable Again! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law
- 16y ago