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Recently I have been beginning to question university education. It seems that today's education system has mismatched priorities which may have an impact on th
by quantumwoke 8y ago
Recently I have been beginning to question university education. It seems that today's education system has mismatched priorities which may have an impact on the reproducibility crisis. You see, to come up with a fantastic new alloy, you don't have to be a genius. Or even very good. You have to be persistent, and clever enough to realize when you've found something interesting. You will need to understand your field very well, but there are many, many fields. And each one is quite narrow, so while it is hard to understand your field well, many, many people can do this.
So my less dystopian future goes like this. Train lots and lots of physicists, chemists, engineers, programmers, materials scientists, biologists, mathematicians. And (shock horror) through higher taxes employ them. Employ them on promising ideas, and on impossible ideas. Employ them on the problems of the day, and on arcane research that will almost certainly never bear fruit. And sure, right at the top in the Apples and Googles of the world, you'll have the best and brightest pulling together all of the discoveries made without all these reproducibility issues.
Or we could continue down the dystopian path. The low tax path where there really are only meaningful jobs for the best and the brightest. Where we rely on Apple and Google to decide what ideas are worth pursuing. Where the skills and abilities of a great many are not used. And most of us fight for the crumbs from the oligarch's tables. And the oligarchs? For every Elon Musk, there will be 10 who just want the biggest yacht and the prettiest mistress.
Let me say that again. In a low tax environment, the skills and abilities of a great many will not be used. And we will all be poorer for that. Genuinely poorer, because great discoveries will not be made. And it is happening now.
And I'll go one step further. We are also wasting the talents of our best writers and artists. The BBC and other national broadcasters are squeezed. Squeezed so that the idea of something as original and amazing as Monty Python appearing now is laughable. And again, we are all the poorer for that. Not just the lucky ones who get to make amazing shows or works of art, but all of us who never get to revel in them.
The low tax, small government world is a step backwards. If you wish to sum it up succinctly, you may say it is a world where, in order to placate the very rich, we take away opportunities from many, and impoverish the world as a whole.
- emodendroket 8y ago> Recently I have been beginning to question university education. Why are we bothering to educate anyone except the very, very best students in physics, maths and engineering? In fact, why aren't we identifying these students and sending them straight to Caltech? It seems intuitive that this would solve one half of the reproducibility crisis. That doesn't seem intuitive at all.
- quantumwoke 8y agoPlease read the comment again. I address this in the very next sentence.
- emodendroket 8y agoWell, not really.
- quantumwoke 8y agoFrom the HN guidelines: >Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
- emodendroket 8y agoI just don't see what relationship the second thought has with the first.
- quantumwoke 8y agoTo the downvoters: please explain your reasoning. I think I raised some good points here.
- wwweston 8y agoHaven't downvoted, but I'd guess it probably starts with "Why are we bothering to educate anyone except the very, very best students in physics, maths and engineering?" Sure, we will undoubtedly get better society-wide results if we identify a subset of elite students (notably defined primarily in terms of STEM fields) and only "bother" educating them, leaving everyone else to Just Trust Them™ and underutilizing the long tail of talent. And then there's the premise that society somehow isn't looking to utilize the existing population of elite students, which of course it is, no shortage of organizations looking for outliers. About the only good point there is that our system for allocating the best/brightest to certain problems could use improvement.
- quantumwoke 8y agoThe rest of the comment explicitly disagrees with that thought. I have edited it to make it clearer.
- nradov 8y agoThat would never work. We have no accurate way to identify the "best" students so early in the educational pipeline. High school grades and standardized test scores are poor predictors of who will make major contributions to science. More public funding for basic research (including reproduction studies) would probably deliver major long term benefits.
- thedonkeycometh 8y agoIntelligence is such a spectrum that if you select individuals on traits you rot through lack of diversity. A breakthrough will generally come from someone with feet in utterly different fields. Concentrating on grades in STEM poisons the well of raw thinking that science needs to look at everything in unique ways. The only way that we can move forward is that everyone moves forward.
- wwweston 8y agoI'm not sure I see how low taxes inherently cause the misallocation of talent or more broadly, the underspending on R&D. I do suspect that profit motive isn't enough to drive effective R&D, though, I just don't know exactly how to articulate a model for why except at the basic level that that truly searching R&D has a higher risk profile than other opportunities for profit. I support the idea of more tax-supported public funding for a variety of things. I'd also support reshaping the tax code to incentivize R&D. But I'm also not sure that's a going to give everybody their opportunity -- I'd imagine there'd still be lucky ones there too. And we'd still have a lot of work to do to address incentives that drive reproducibility issues.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pluto9 8y ago> Train lots and lots of physicists, chemists, engineers, programmers, materials scientists, biologists, mathematicians. [...] Employ them on promising ideas, and on impossible ideas. The scientifically minded are not the ones who will be deciding what's worthy of research. Politicians and bureaucrats will, and there are plenty of them who believe in all kinds of pseudo-scientific nonsense. How does your system prevent them from shoveling tax dollars into research on homeopathy and young-Earth creationism? And how does it prevent them from using funding to incentivize scientists to find the "correct" results? To phrase my question more generally: I would like to know how your system would avoid making science merely a tool of political interests instead of a tool of moneyed interests.