11 ms·

Academia is a cult?

156 points by petethomas 8y ago

yoler 8y ago
Are PhD degrees required to do machine learning research? Or can someone be completely self-taught and contribute to the field as much as those with PhDs?
- bognition 8y ago
  A PhD is not required.
- ummonk 8y ago
  Do you mean to be able to do machine learning research or to be able to get someone to pay you to do machine learning research?
- tnecniv 8y ago
  Conferences / other publication venues don't require you have a PhD to submit to them. However, figuring out what a good novel research problem is and solving it rigorously is much much easier in an academic environment --- both because you are financially supported to work on said problems and because you have a community of people to tutor you and give you feedback.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    I think the financial part is important. Funding in academia is interesting to say the least. Especially when it comes to grant funding, which can often have interesting requirements that are impossible to have privately or as an individual.
- currymj 8y ago
  no, not inherently. it helps, though. note that a PhD in a computer science department is going to be much less bad than the humanities PhDs described in the article. - they are fully funded, stipends are somewhat higher (at least not total starvation level), and there is the opportunity for lucrative industry internships - students in general have leverage, because it's possible to leave and go get a high paying engineering job - there's a bias towards continuing in academia but it's not taboo to go to industry; you don't have to lie about this. - for a combination of these and other reasons, i don't think an abusive culture has set in: professors don't feel like they need to haze their students. i don't mean to imply that everything is beautiful and perfect but it is way less culty.
- perfmode 8y ago
  nope: http://colah.github.io/ http://colah.github.io/
- prions 8y ago
  I'm about to finish my masters in CS, where I focused in machine learning. While I don't research at my school, my current job is a software/ML engineer in a machine learning focused team; I consider my role between a software engineer and data scientist. While I don't do academic research, I spend a non-trivial amount of time reading papers and keeping abreast of new research that is relevant to my job. If the research seems relevant enough, I'll dig deeper and implement the research into a workable model. The software engineering portion really kicks in when I productionize this model and make it a usable product. So in regards to your question, if you want to do fundamental, academic research then go for your PhD. For the kind of work I do currently, then it's more about the group you work with in industry.
- SeanLuke 8y ago
  Is vocational training and an apprenticeship necessary to be a master carpenter? No, it is not: but it makes it far easier to become one. And that's what a PhD is: it's a vocational degree coupled with an apprenticeship. It's not like a BS or MS: it's ultimately not about courses or grades. Rather, you are attaching yourself, like a barnacle, to a researcher -- the professor -- so that you can learn how to be a researcher yourself. Eventually you step out from under her wing and do some research on your own, and that forms your thesis work. You could learn to do research in a specialized field without going through this process -- and I know several who have -- but you'll probably discover along the way that science or engineering research is an apprenticeship field for a very good reason.
yosefzeev 8y ago
A cult with levels that you literally have to pay for is also a pyramid scheme.
- guachesuedehack 8y ago
  To be honest, it's the publishers that are to blame. I believe most scientist dont really care how it's published as long it is. The publishers run a pyramid scheme.
  - LanceH 8y ago
    You can't blame the publishers for schools which are training people to be professors and little else at a rate 10x actually needed.
    - guachesuedehack 8y ago
      As far as i know, the publishers keep the bulk of the fees
      - therealdrag0 8y ago
        You two are not talking about the same thing. You are talking about publishers, OP is talking about university students vs employment. Universities accept paying students knowing that there is only a job for 1/10 of those students.
  - oculusthrift 8y ago
    are you joking? the only reason publishers have any power is academia is full of a areoagance and people chasing “prestige” and getting into good journals
pacifist 8y ago
Washington Post is a cult.
- ixtli 8y ago
  You’re gonna get downvoted because this is HN but really this article is clickbait designed to exploit a growing epistemological crisis in the west. The author is just describing a group with a history and traditions. While cults are also groups with tradition and sometimes history it’s well disingenuous to say THAT is their defining feature. EDIT: I’d just like to be clear that Academia has definitely got serious issues. But a person who establishes PhD level credentials in Marxist social analysis at the top of the article sure does spew a ton of words about material conditions without ever naming capitalism as the issue and instead blames “academia.” Oh, professors and grad students are terribly overworked but also they are administering a cult?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - SeanLuke 8y ago
    > You’re gonna get downvoted because this is HN I think he's getting downvoted because the Washington Post is, almost unquestionably, not a cult. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and he provided none.
    - ixtli 8y ago
      While what you’re saying is clearly factually true, what he’s done was apply a very common style of sarcastic dismissal. I think it’s rather obvious he didn’t mean to imply WaPo was actually an organization similar to Om Shinrikyo. In all honesty I think if he’d have written some long form comment we’d all get the same point but have wasted far more time.
      - SeanLuke 8y ago
        > what he’s done was apply a very common style of sarcastic dismissal Perhaps common on Youtube comments.
village-idiot 8y ago
Something that David Graeber said that opened my eyes. Until the 1970s or so, Universities were actually a guild for academics geared towards the production of knowledge. They had self rules, titles, apprenticeship systems, and to some degree the backing and protection of the state. Plus like a true medieval guild, they were run by the masters of the guild itself. Sure, they did not call themselves guilds, but in form and function they behaved like one. The reason why this arrangement was allowed to stay from ancient days is that the universities performed a useful function for local and federal governments, unlike craft guilds. Governments need a lot of trained clerks, always have. Universities however only need professors to replace the dying batch, as the production of knowledge really wasn't tied to markets or social whims per-se. So a large part of the educated students were turned towards government jobs, a useful arrangement for both parties. This setup appears to have broken down pretty recently, although exactly why is left as an exercise for the reader.
- guachesuedehack 8y ago
  What would be your theory ?
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    Hah, I thought it would be funny to add that "left as an exercise to the reader" bit, a habit from my Math days. Two things. First, reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer college level skills. That combined with computers means that the bar for government clerical work is much, much lower. The result is that in the 1920s a Philosophy grad would be extremely useful to a county government because of their general liberal arts education, nowadays a high school diploma does the trick. Doubly so now that everyone can use a computer to some degree or another. Without the critical function of providing clerks, Universities have lost a large amount of their value proposition to the government. Second, since the 1970s both political parties have shifted away from the government as all of us striving together, to a necessary evil at best. The right has been extremely effective at villifying government action and government spending in particular. With that context in mind, it is not surprising that the right would aim to not only cut government spending on higher education (something that their religious wing also likes) to save on the tax money, but also to "starve the beast" in general. Also, the 1970s were kinda crazy, and academia came out of that looking kinda extreme.
sn41 8y ago
I would really like to respectfully listen to the points of view of the author, but I do not like myself manipulated by this excessive over the top clickbait headings. I hope that we can all return to a more civil discourse without resorting always to the most extreme polarised positions that go by the phrases "influence" and "persuasion" these days.
- milesvp 8y ago
  FYI the story writer almost never comes up with the headline in a traditional newspaper story pipeline (which most likely still includes wapo). Usually it’s one of the editors that has final say on the headline (and control of A/B testing online). Often the reporter will even have to push back when the editor tries to use too strong a word that may be technically incorrect based on the reporter’s more in depth knowledge of the topic. Now I’m not trying to say that the story writer isn’t also writing sensational stories, with their own agendas, only that you would do well not to judge a story by its headline. Otherwise, I agree sensational headlines turn me off as well.
_hardwaregeek 8y ago
Seems like this should be titled "Humanities Academia is a cult". Which is a conclusion with which I don't necessarily disagree. Frankly, the job numbers are out there. If you choose to get a PhD in history even after seeing them, you're probably delusional in some form. I'm not so certain about STEM however. While cults can pop up anywhere there is a leader with a non trivial power dynamic, I'd say that a fair portion of professors in STEM will happily explain to you the harsh reality of academia and discourage you from getting a PhD. Furthermore, there are jobs outside of academia for PhDs, so there's a lot less lock in.
- BadassFractal 8y ago
  Seems aligned with recent experiments with publishing garbage papers in, allegedly reputable, soft sciences journals: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2018/10/10/grievance-studies-academia-fake-feminist-hypatia-mein-kampf-racism-column/1575219002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2018/10/10/gri.... The concept of "idea laundering" is fascinating. It seems that, as of today, the incentives of the academics are simply misaligned with the those of the public.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Science and math are as unemployable as the humanities. When people use "STEM" in this way they really only mean engineering.
  - BadassFractal 8y ago
    I've seen math / physics majors make an easy transition into software development. I bet that is much easier to pull off than switching to programming from say, sociology.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      Okay, but the employable activity there is still software development and not science or mathematics.
malshe 8y ago
In my experience there are multiple cutls within academia and they operate at different levels. In finance, for example, there is a cult of "efficient market hypothesis" and another cult of "behavioral finance". The two groups don't appreciate each other much although publicly they love to say how much they respect their colleagues from the other group.
- cirgue 8y ago
  By that measure, all of human society is a cult.
  - malshe 8y ago
    That's a strange statement. So as a human society who do we all hate collectively in secret but claim to love openly? My point is that the academia as a whole is not a cult but there are cults within academia. Also that's not the only "measure" by which one can claim existence of cults within academia but it's still something you don't want in the research community. Numerous times I have heard statements like "this paper will never get past XYZ because XYZ doesn't like Thaler/Kahneman/[any behavioral researcher here]". That should never be acceptable in research that's claimed to be scientific. Yet, it's common in academia.
paulpauper 8y ago
I don't agree with this. A cult requires two things: your money and your loyalty. Neither gets your that far in academia. Look at all the people trying to get into Harvard. Many applicants would willingly pay way more than the tuition if to be guaranteed a slot (if Harvard slots were put to auction, I imagine bids would be very high), but so so few are accepted despite being able to pay. Scientology will accept anyone that can pay. Rather academia is more like professional sports in that it is very competitive and many try-out and few make it to the pros.
- StanislavPetrov 8y ago
  You are mistaking, admission to Harvard with a "career in academia". Being admitted to a school has some correlation to your achievements (legacy students and affirmative action aside). Being one of the small percentage of graduate students that gets a paying job in the field has far more to do with your loyalty and your willingness to subjugate yourself to the will of your superiors - as the author of this piece (and anyone else who has come up through the ranks of post-grad education in the last 25 years) rightly points out.
  - paulpauper 8y ago
    your loyalty and your willingness to subjugate yourself to the will of your superiors no it does not because even among the loyal not all are guaranteed tenure, whereas cults induct anyone who pays and is loyal, with no cap.
    - kernx16 8y ago
      How true is the no cap part? Genuinely curious, because I can't imagine some cults where if you're at the bottom of the ladder, the cult will do everything it takes to retain you if you give the cult little money and unrelenting loyalty because the loyalty itself will take care of retaining oneself to the cult. Hence, willingness to subjugate oneself to the will of the superiors with no end. Hopefully that makes sense.
whatshisface 8y ago
>It’s not unusual for academic job seekers to spend 10 percent of their annual income — the amount of a tithe — attending a single conference for an interview (including airfare, lodging, registration fees and incidentals). You can tell the author legitimately knows humanities academia from the inside because they are experts at pointing out unrelated coincidental facts as if their simultaneous truth meant something.
- infinity0 8y ago
  bro, correlation causes causation
  - marmaduke 8y ago
    That is the taboo undercurrent of most discussion sections of science papers
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      That's not really true about natural sciences, there isn't a lot of confusion about causation in chemistry for example.
daenz 8y ago
>It should come as no surprise that the professor who made that demand is a white male alumnus of the Ivy League, and the student an immigrant from a working-class background. I'm getting really tired of these kinds of racial and ethnic generalizations. If you substitute "asian" or "jew" in and you find it's racist, it's still racist if it says "white."
- BadassFractal 8y ago
  Looks like someone here has a case of white fragility. Please recall that reverse racism does not exist: the oppressed cannot be racist towards the oppressor. I jest. That's another one of those concepts that came out of the humanities academia recently, which is relevant to the article: https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10774 https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10774
- woodruffw 8y ago
  > I'm getting really tired of these kinds of racial and ethnic generalizations. If you substitute "asian" or "jew" in and you find it's racist, it's still racist if it says "white." No. If you attended a civil rights march in 1962 and remarked at how white the counter-protesters were (and how the hoses never seem to get aimed at them), you would be making an accurate observation about race and power dynamics, not smearing white people. Observing that some (many?) of those same dynamics persist in our present enlightened age is not racism.
  - daenz 8y ago
    Even if I accepted the modern re-branding of the word "racist" to mean the new "power + privilege", which I don't accept, but I understand many people use that definition, the author's statement is still loaded with racial prejudice. He literally said that bad behavior X is "no surprise" because the person behaving badly is white and a man. You trying to justify this language as not only tolerable but acceptable is part of the problem society has wrt treating people as individuals. And the fact that you're using historical injustices against people to tell me why I need to accept negative language around two immutable physical characteristics that I possess is really over the line. We're supposed to be moving away from that kind of society.
bonniemuffin 8y ago
I prefer to think of it as more of a MLM or pyramid scheme than a cult.
- woodpanel 8y ago
  MLM you say? Ok, let me see - peddling in private homes (friends and family)? check! - using social connections as marketing channel (classmates, friends and family)? check! - promising benefits, while customers have to pay upfront and wait years for see their investment (never) pay off? check! - turning customers to promoters (work environments turn away applicants without XYZ degree)? check! - kick-back/ROI is distributed in ways that are "opaque" at best for customers? check!
  - marmaduke 8y ago
    Any political party checks all those boxes.
    - woodpanel 8y ago
      Really? Do you pay thousands of dollars each year to, and spend your first non-child-labor years for any political party? If so, then yes that party must be a cult :-)
  - bonniemuffin 8y ago
    Yeah, exactly. Specifically the bit where tenured faculty really need the cheap labor of PhD students, so they're incentivized to paint a rosy picture of the tenure-track prospects to encourage students to enter PhD programs -- "look at me! I achieved the dream!". Yet in reality the chance of these students reaching the tenure track are slim to none, and in fact the only way to be successful is by pulling more people into the pyramid below you to stand on. Much like how successful MLM sellers are incentivized to bring more and more sellers into the program under them ("look at me! I achieved the dream!"), even though the chance of any of those new sellers actually becoming successful are slim to none, and in fact the only way to be successful is by pulling more people into the pyramid below you to stand on.
ilovecaching 8y ago
As a counter to this article I found my time as a grad student exceedingly productive and gave me great faith in the scientific institution. I definitely believe academics are underpaid; when most of the people in my department could have easy made 500k doing ML in the valley, they were making less than 100k as post docs or 30k as grad students. Otherwise my advisors were always incredibly proud of their students, passing on their knowledge, and actively pushing them to succeed like proud parents. A lot of my colleagues went on to join other labs or even open labs of their own as PIs.
- briandear 8y ago
  They aren’t underpaid. Tenured professors have the ultimate job security. They also get paid sabbaticals which is fairly rare in the real world. Adjunct professors on the other hand — those are definitely underpaid, but they’re often doing that work as a side job or they’re trying to fight their way to tenure. A job from which you can’t be fired? That’s worth something. Stellar benefits? That’s worth something as well.
  - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
    "Adjunct professors on the other hand — those are definitely underpaid, but they’re often doing that work as a side job or they’re trying to fight their way to tenure." This is like saying that it's OK that a job is paid poorly because the jobs are part-time. Or that it's OK to pay someone less for a second job because it is a second job. Or one group less than another group because obviously they don't need the money. Underpaid is underpaid. It doesn't matter what the reasoning is. Especially if you are getting paid less than the "full time" or "permanent" person simply because you aren't "full time". I'll also argue in the case of tenured professors: Job security isn't everything, nor is a sabbatical - and IIRC, fewer places are even offering tenure as often. The adjunct professors have little hope.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Every post-doc position is wildly over-subscribed and there is fierce competition for each one. So simple economics - the law of supply and demand - says they are not underpaid, in fact if anything they are paid over the clearing price for the market.
Myrmornis 8y ago
Yes, humanities academia is severely flawed, not only in the ways that the author describes but also in the prevalence of pseudo-intellectual quackery in literature studies, cultural studies and areas of social sciences, philosophy, etc. The newspaper appears to have forgotten to qualify the title to make clear that they were not talking about all academia.
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago
  A lot of biomedical science is also barely worth of the name science as it's not reproducible. And I'm sure you could find the same in physics and math too. But it's way easier to look at the humanities, not being able to understand the language used due to not having the required background and go "clearly it's worthless because I, someone with a degree in a completely different field, cannot understand it". And then endlessly point at the Sokal affaire. But at least one time a nonsense mathematical paper, written by a computer, was accepted for publication. So clearly mathematics is a flawed, worthless field worthy only of derision, right? And a few nonsense computer science papers have also been accepted, so clearly also a worthless field.
  - Myrmornis 8y ago
    Great comment. Oh, only problem is I do understand the language used, I do have the required background and I don’t point at the Sokal affair.
  - marmaduke 8y ago
    Reproducibility is a desirable quality but ultimately neither necessary nor sufficient for science.
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    A couple of points: specialized language in science is needed because science deals with things like genes, particles, and mathematical constructs that we have no words for in normal language. This often means that papers in, say, biology, are not only not understandable to chemists, but even to other fields of biology studying different things. This really isn't in the case in the humanities, which deal with the human experience we experience in daily life. There often the point is to sound as complicated as possible to hide the fact that nothing much is being said. The "Sokal Text" affair tends to overwhelm Sokal's bigger accomplishment, the book "Fashionable Nonsense" (with Jean Bricmont). There he shows how famous scholars like Lacan and Deleuze threw random scientific terms into their works in contexts where nothing scientific is being said as a way to sound "deep". The reproducibility problem in science is real, but oftentimes people confuse reproducibility (i.e. I give concentration X of compound Y to mice of strain Z, and 50% develop cancer within a month and you do the same and get a similar result) with failure of generalization (You change the concentration or mouse strain and get a different result and write a paper saying I'm wrong).
throwaway487548 8y ago
A church.
jwilk 8y ago
Archived copy with GDPR nag screen: https://web.archive.org/web/20181102171858/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/academia-is-a-cult/2018/10/31/eea787a0-bd08-11e8-b7d2-0773aa1e33da_story.html https://web.archive.org/web/20181102171858/https://www.washi...
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Clean version at Outline.com; https://outline.com/cmMBJX https://outline.com/cmMBJX
scandox 8y ago
I don't know the source but I first read the following useful distinction here in HN: The difference between a cult and a religion: a cult wants it all, a religion just wants its cut.
- dmos62 8y ago
  That's an amusing saying, because it conjures images of a struggle, in which there's somewhere something that is greedy and something that seeks fairness. What is the struggle about, i.e. what is that "all" that the greedy actor wants? I think it doesn't matter, because this saying is just a threatrical way of saying that we define a cult as an organization in the religious world that we find to be uncooperative, asocial, greedy, mean, yada yada, -- something we don't like. Further, religion just wants its cut? There's an implicit entitlement there. Why? I started out saying this saying is amusing, but, man, am I finishing on the opposite note.
  - gtyras2mrs 8y ago
    What I get from that statement is that religion is a more sustainable cult i.e. a cult that recognizes that demanding total control is a poor strategy in the longer term.
- liftbigweights 8y ago
  All religions started out as a cult. Christianity was a cult until it won. The difference between a cult and religion is the same as the difference between a molehill and a hill. It's hard to say exactly when a molehill turns into a hill, but you'll know it when it does.
  - kiriakasis 8y ago
    > All religions started out as a cult. Beware of survivor bias. Even assuming that all religion were once cult it still does not follow that all cults could become viable religions.
liftbigweights 8y ago
The same thing affecting academia ( mostly humanities ) is the same thing affecting journalism. Instead of being institutions for seeking truth and knowledge, they've become institutions of political advocacy and agenda.
- repolfx 8y ago
  Obligatory plug for https://heterodoxacademy.org/ https://heterodoxacademy.org/ However, lately I've come to wonder if the solution isn't simply to defund all non-STEM academic subjects. It seems likely that subjects that aren't strongly tied down to some sort of objective utility function will always drift towards some sort of strange and extreme agendas.
nyc111 8y ago
There is a historical reason for this. Religion is practiced by Doctors of Divinity and science by Doctors of Philosophy. At the time of Newton education or universities were controlled by religious doctors. After Newton Doctors of Philosophy took control of the education. Doctor means someone who is licensed to teach the doctrine. So at the fundamental level religion and academia are organized exactly the same. Only doctrine is different. In this system cult simply means an outside hierarchy organized by an unlicensed teacher. But both are cults.
- repolfx 8y ago
  That explanation sounds good but I couldn't find much on the doctor=doctrine link. This says the word comes from medieval Latin "docere" which simply means to teach. Doctrine shares the same root word as doctor, but that root word is simply the notion of teaching and doesn't have inherently religious overtones. https://www.etymonline.com/word/Doctor https://www.etymonline.com/word/Doctor

156 points by petethomas 8y ago

Are PhD degrees required to do machine learning research? Or can someone be completely self-taught and contribute to the field as much as those with PhDs?

bognition 8y ago
A PhD is not required.
ummonk 8y ago
Do you mean to be able to do machine learning research or to be able to get someone to pay you to do machine learning research?
tnecniv 8y ago
Conferences / other publication venues don't require you have a PhD to submit to them. However, figuring out what a good novel research problem is and solving it rigorously is much much easier in an academic environment --- both because you are financially supported to work on said problems and because you have a community of people to tutor you and give you feedback.
- tracker1 8y ago
  I think the financial part is important. Funding in academia is interesting to say the least. Especially when it comes to grant funding, which can often have interesting requirements that are impossible to have privately or as an individual.
currymj 8y ago
no, not inherently. it helps, though. note that a PhD in a computer science department is going to be much less bad than the humanities PhDs described in the article. - they are fully funded, stipends are somewhat higher (at least not total starvation level), and there is the opportunity for lucrative industry internships - students in general have leverage, because it's possible to leave and go get a high paying engineering job - there's a bias towards continuing in academia but it's not taboo to go to industry; you don't have to lie about this. - for a combination of these and other reasons, i don't think an abusive culture has set in: professors don't feel like they need to haze their students. i don't mean to imply that everything is beautiful and perfect but it is way less culty.
perfmode 8y ago
nope: http://colah.github.io/ http://colah.github.io/
prions 8y ago
I'm about to finish my masters in CS, where I focused in machine learning. While I don't research at my school, my current job is a software/ML engineer in a machine learning focused team; I consider my role between a software engineer and data scientist. While I don't do academic research, I spend a non-trivial amount of time reading papers and keeping abreast of new research that is relevant to my job. If the research seems relevant enough, I'll dig deeper and implement the research into a workable model. The software engineering portion really kicks in when I productionize this model and make it a usable product. So in regards to your question, if you want to do fundamental, academic research then go for your PhD. For the kind of work I do currently, then it's more about the group you work with in industry.
SeanLuke 8y ago
Is vocational training and an apprenticeship necessary to be a master carpenter? No, it is not: but it makes it far easier to become one. And that's what a PhD is: it's a vocational degree coupled with an apprenticeship. It's not like a BS or MS: it's ultimately not about courses or grades. Rather, you are attaching yourself, like a barnacle, to a researcher -- the professor -- so that you can learn how to be a researcher yourself. Eventually you step out from under her wing and do some research on your own, and that forms your thesis work. You could learn to do research in a specialized field without going through this process -- and I know several who have -- but you'll probably discover along the way that science or engineering research is an apprenticeship field for a very good reason.

yosefzeev 8y ago

A cult with levels that you literally have to pay for is also a pyramid scheme.

guachesuedehack 8y ago
To be honest, it's the publishers that are to blame. I believe most scientist dont really care how it's published as long it is. The publishers run a pyramid scheme.
- LanceH 8y ago
  You can't blame the publishers for schools which are training people to be professors and little else at a rate 10x actually needed.
  - guachesuedehack 8y ago
    As far as i know, the publishers keep the bulk of the fees
    - therealdrag0 8y ago
      You two are not talking about the same thing. You are talking about publishers, OP is talking about university students vs employment. Universities accept paying students knowing that there is only a job for 1/10 of those students.
- oculusthrift 8y ago
  are you joking? the only reason publishers have any power is academia is full of a areoagance and people chasing “prestige” and getting into good journals

pacifist 8y ago

Washington Post is a cult.

ixtli 8y ago
You’re gonna get downvoted because this is HN but really this article is clickbait designed to exploit a growing epistemological crisis in the west. The author is just describing a group with a history and traditions. While cults are also groups with tradition and sometimes history it’s well disingenuous to say THAT is their defining feature. EDIT: I’d just like to be clear that Academia has definitely got serious issues. But a person who establishes PhD level credentials in Marxist social analysis at the top of the article sure does spew a ton of words about material conditions without ever naming capitalism as the issue and instead blames “academia.” Oh, professors and grad students are terribly overworked but also they are administering a cult?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- SeanLuke 8y ago
  > You’re gonna get downvoted because this is HN I think he's getting downvoted because the Washington Post is, almost unquestionably, not a cult. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and he provided none.
  - ixtli 8y ago
    While what you’re saying is clearly factually true, what he’s done was apply a very common style of sarcastic dismissal. I think it’s rather obvious he didn’t mean to imply WaPo was actually an organization similar to Om Shinrikyo. In all honesty I think if he’d have written some long form comment we’d all get the same point but have wasted far more time.
    - SeanLuke 8y ago
      > what he’s done was apply a very common style of sarcastic dismissal Perhaps common on Youtube comments.

village-idiot 8y ago

Something that David Graeber said that opened my eyes. Until the 1970s or so, Universities were actually a guild for academics geared towards the production of knowledge. They had self rules, titles, apprenticeship systems, and to some degree the backing and protection of the state. Plus like a true medieval guild, they were run by the masters of the guild itself. Sure, they did not call themselves guilds, but in form and function they behaved like one. The reason why this arrangement was allowed to stay from ancient days is that the universities performed a useful function for local and federal governments, unlike craft guilds. Governments need a lot of trained clerks, always have. Universities however only need professors to replace the dying batch, as the production of knowledge really wasn't tied to markets or social whims per-se. So a large part of the educated students were turned towards government jobs, a useful arrangement for both parties. This setup appears to have broken down pretty recently, although exactly why is left as an exercise for the reader.

guachesuedehack 8y ago
What would be your theory ?
- village-idiot 8y ago
  Hah, I thought it would be funny to add that "left as an exercise to the reader" bit, a habit from my Math days. Two things. First, reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer college level skills. That combined with computers means that the bar for government clerical work is much, much lower. The result is that in the 1920s a Philosophy grad would be extremely useful to a county government because of their general liberal arts education, nowadays a high school diploma does the trick. Doubly so now that everyone can use a computer to some degree or another. Without the critical function of providing clerks, Universities have lost a large amount of their value proposition to the government. Second, since the 1970s both political parties have shifted away from the government as all of us striving together, to a necessary evil at best. The right has been extremely effective at villifying government action and government spending in particular. With that context in mind, it is not surprising that the right would aim to not only cut government spending on higher education (something that their religious wing also likes) to save on the tax money, but also to "starve the beast" in general. Also, the 1970s were kinda crazy, and academia came out of that looking kinda extreme.

sn41 8y ago

I would really like to respectfully listen to the points of view of the author, but I do not like myself manipulated by this excessive over the top clickbait headings. I hope that we can all return to a more civil discourse without resorting always to the most extreme polarised positions that go by the phrases "influence" and "persuasion" these days.

milesvp 8y ago
FYI the story writer almost never comes up with the headline in a traditional newspaper story pipeline (which most likely still includes wapo). Usually it’s one of the editors that has final say on the headline (and control of A/B testing online). Often the reporter will even have to push back when the editor tries to use too strong a word that may be technically incorrect based on the reporter’s more in depth knowledge of the topic. Now I’m not trying to say that the story writer isn’t also writing sensational stories, with their own agendas, only that you would do well not to judge a story by its headline. Otherwise, I agree sensational headlines turn me off as well.

_hardwaregeek 8y ago

Seems like this should be titled "Humanities Academia is a cult". Which is a conclusion with which I don't necessarily disagree. Frankly, the job numbers are out there. If you choose to get a PhD in history even after seeing them, you're probably delusional in some form. I'm not so certain about STEM however. While cults can pop up anywhere there is a leader with a non trivial power dynamic, I'd say that a fair portion of professors in STEM will happily explain to you the harsh reality of academia and discourage you from getting a PhD. Furthermore, there are jobs outside of academia for PhDs, so there's a lot less lock in.

BadassFractal 8y ago
Seems aligned with recent experiments with publishing garbage papers in, allegedly reputable, soft sciences journals: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2018/10/10/grievance-studies-academia-fake-feminist-hypatia-mein-kampf-racism-column/1575219002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2018/10/10/gri.... The concept of "idea laundering" is fascinating. It seems that, as of today, the incentives of the academics are simply misaligned with the those of the public.
closeparen 8y ago
Science and math are as unemployable as the humanities. When people use "STEM" in this way they really only mean engineering.
- BadassFractal 8y ago
  I've seen math / physics majors make an easy transition into software development. I bet that is much easier to pull off than switching to programming from say, sociology.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Okay, but the employable activity there is still software development and not science or mathematics.

malshe 8y ago

In my experience there are multiple cutls within academia and they operate at different levels. In finance, for example, there is a cult of "efficient market hypothesis" and another cult of "behavioral finance". The two groups don't appreciate each other much although publicly they love to say how much they respect their colleagues from the other group.

cirgue 8y ago
By that measure, all of human society is a cult.
- malshe 8y ago
  That's a strange statement. So as a human society who do we all hate collectively in secret but claim to love openly? My point is that the academia as a whole is not a cult but there are cults within academia. Also that's not the only "measure" by which one can claim existence of cults within academia but it's still something you don't want in the research community. Numerous times I have heard statements like "this paper will never get past XYZ because XYZ doesn't like Thaler/Kahneman/[any behavioral researcher here]". That should never be acceptable in research that's claimed to be scientific. Yet, it's common in academia.

paulpauper 8y ago

I don't agree with this. A cult requires two things: your money and your loyalty. Neither gets your that far in academia. Look at all the people trying to get into Harvard. Many applicants would willingly pay way more than the tuition if to be guaranteed a slot (if Harvard slots were put to auction, I imagine bids would be very high), but so so few are accepted despite being able to pay. Scientology will accept anyone that can pay. Rather academia is more like professional sports in that it is very competitive and many try-out and few make it to the pros.

StanislavPetrov 8y ago
You are mistaking, admission to Harvard with a "career in academia". Being admitted to a school has some correlation to your achievements (legacy students and affirmative action aside). Being one of the small percentage of graduate students that gets a paying job in the field has far more to do with your loyalty and your willingness to subjugate yourself to the will of your superiors - as the author of this piece (and anyone else who has come up through the ranks of post-grad education in the last 25 years) rightly points out.
- paulpauper 8y ago
  your loyalty and your willingness to subjugate yourself to the will of your superiors no it does not because even among the loyal not all are guaranteed tenure, whereas cults induct anyone who pays and is loyal, with no cap.
  - kernx16 8y ago
    How true is the no cap part? Genuinely curious, because I can't imagine some cults where if you're at the bottom of the ladder, the cult will do everything it takes to retain you if you give the cult little money and unrelenting loyalty because the loyalty itself will take care of retaining oneself to the cult. Hence, willingness to subjugate oneself to the will of the superiors with no end. Hopefully that makes sense.

whatshisface 8y ago

>It’s not unusual for academic job seekers to spend 10 percent of their annual income — the amount of a tithe — attending a single conference for an interview (including airfare, lodging, registration fees and incidentals). You can tell the author legitimately knows humanities academia from the inside because they are experts at pointing out unrelated coincidental facts as if their simultaneous truth meant something.

infinity0 8y ago
bro, correlation causes causation
- marmaduke 8y ago
  That is the taboo undercurrent of most discussion sections of science papers
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    That's not really true about natural sciences, there isn't a lot of confusion about causation in chemistry for example.

daenz 8y ago

>It should come as no surprise that the professor who made that demand is a white male alumnus of the Ivy League, and the student an immigrant from a working-class background. I'm getting really tired of these kinds of racial and ethnic generalizations. If you substitute "asian" or "jew" in and you find it's racist, it's still racist if it says "white."

BadassFractal 8y ago
Looks like someone here has a case of white fragility. Please recall that reverse racism does not exist: the oppressed cannot be racist towards the oppressor. I jest. That's another one of those concepts that came out of the humanities academia recently, which is relevant to the article: https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10774 https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10774
woodruffw 8y ago
> I'm getting really tired of these kinds of racial and ethnic generalizations. If you substitute "asian" or "jew" in and you find it's racist, it's still racist if it says "white." No. If you attended a civil rights march in 1962 and remarked at how white the counter-protesters were (and how the hoses never seem to get aimed at them), you would be making an accurate observation about race and power dynamics, not smearing white people. Observing that some (many?) of those same dynamics persist in our present enlightened age is not racism.
- daenz 8y ago
  Even if I accepted the modern re-branding of the word "racist" to mean the new "power + privilege", which I don't accept, but I understand many people use that definition, the author's statement is still loaded with racial prejudice. He literally said that bad behavior X is "no surprise" because the person behaving badly is white and a man. You trying to justify this language as not only tolerable but acceptable is part of the problem society has wrt treating people as individuals. And the fact that you're using historical injustices against people to tell me why I need to accept negative language around two immutable physical characteristics that I possess is really over the line. We're supposed to be moving away from that kind of society.

bonniemuffin 8y ago

I prefer to think of it as more of a MLM or pyramid scheme than a cult.

woodpanel 8y ago
MLM you say? Ok, let me see - peddling in private homes (friends and family)? check! - using social connections as marketing channel (classmates, friends and family)? check! - promising benefits, while customers have to pay upfront and wait years for see their investment (never) pay off? check! - turning customers to promoters (work environments turn away applicants without XYZ degree)? check! - kick-back/ROI is distributed in ways that are "opaque" at best for customers? check!
- marmaduke 8y ago
  Any political party checks all those boxes.
  - woodpanel 8y ago
    Really? Do you pay thousands of dollars each year to, and spend your first non-child-labor years for any political party? If so, then yes that party must be a cult :-)
- bonniemuffin 8y ago
  Yeah, exactly. Specifically the bit where tenured faculty really need the cheap labor of PhD students, so they're incentivized to paint a rosy picture of the tenure-track prospects to encourage students to enter PhD programs -- "look at me! I achieved the dream!". Yet in reality the chance of these students reaching the tenure track are slim to none, and in fact the only way to be successful is by pulling more people into the pyramid below you to stand on. Much like how successful MLM sellers are incentivized to bring more and more sellers into the program under them ("look at me! I achieved the dream!"), even though the chance of any of those new sellers actually becoming successful are slim to none, and in fact the only way to be successful is by pulling more people into the pyramid below you to stand on.

ilovecaching 8y ago

As a counter to this article I found my time as a grad student exceedingly productive and gave me great faith in the scientific institution. I definitely believe academics are underpaid; when most of the people in my department could have easy made 500k doing ML in the valley, they were making less than 100k as post docs or 30k as grad students. Otherwise my advisors were always incredibly proud of their students, passing on their knowledge, and actively pushing them to succeed like proud parents. A lot of my colleagues went on to join other labs or even open labs of their own as PIs.

briandear 8y ago
They aren’t underpaid. Tenured professors have the ultimate job security. They also get paid sabbaticals which is fairly rare in the real world. Adjunct professors on the other hand — those are definitely underpaid, but they’re often doing that work as a side job or they’re trying to fight their way to tenure. A job from which you can’t be fired? That’s worth something. Stellar benefits? That’s worth something as well.
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  "Adjunct professors on the other hand — those are definitely underpaid, but they’re often doing that work as a side job or they’re trying to fight their way to tenure." This is like saying that it's OK that a job is paid poorly because the jobs are part-time. Or that it's OK to pay someone less for a second job because it is a second job. Or one group less than another group because obviously they don't need the money. Underpaid is underpaid. It doesn't matter what the reasoning is. Especially if you are getting paid less than the "full time" or "permanent" person simply because you aren't "full time". I'll also argue in the case of tenured professors: Job security isn't everything, nor is a sabbatical - and IIRC, fewer places are even offering tenure as often. The adjunct professors have little hope.
- gaius 8y ago
  Every post-doc position is wildly over-subscribed and there is fierce competition for each one. So simple economics - the law of supply and demand - says they are not underpaid, in fact if anything they are paid over the clearing price for the market.

Myrmornis 8y ago

Yes, humanities academia is severely flawed, not only in the ways that the author describes but also in the prevalence of pseudo-intellectual quackery in literature studies, cultural studies and areas of social sciences, philosophy, etc. The newspaper appears to have forgotten to qualify the title to make clear that they were not talking about all academia.

FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago
A lot of biomedical science is also barely worth of the name science as it's not reproducible. And I'm sure you could find the same in physics and math too. But it's way easier to look at the humanities, not being able to understand the language used due to not having the required background and go "clearly it's worthless because I, someone with a degree in a completely different field, cannot understand it". And then endlessly point at the Sokal affaire. But at least one time a nonsense mathematical paper, written by a computer, was accepted for publication. So clearly mathematics is a flawed, worthless field worthy only of derision, right? And a few nonsense computer science papers have also been accepted, so clearly also a worthless field.
- Myrmornis 8y ago
  Great comment. Oh, only problem is I do understand the language used, I do have the required background and I don’t point at the Sokal affair.
- marmaduke 8y ago
  Reproducibility is a desirable quality but ultimately neither necessary nor sufficient for science.
- jhbadger 8y ago
  A couple of points: specialized language in science is needed because science deals with things like genes, particles, and mathematical constructs that we have no words for in normal language. This often means that papers in, say, biology, are not only not understandable to chemists, but even to other fields of biology studying different things. This really isn't in the case in the humanities, which deal with the human experience we experience in daily life. There often the point is to sound as complicated as possible to hide the fact that nothing much is being said. The "Sokal Text" affair tends to overwhelm Sokal's bigger accomplishment, the book "Fashionable Nonsense" (with Jean Bricmont). There he shows how famous scholars like Lacan and Deleuze threw random scientific terms into their works in contexts where nothing scientific is being said as a way to sound "deep". The reproducibility problem in science is real, but oftentimes people confuse reproducibility (i.e. I give concentration X of compound Y to mice of strain Z, and 50% develop cancer within a month and you do the same and get a similar result) with failure of generalization (You change the concentration or mouse strain and get a different result and write a paper saying I'm wrong).

throwaway487548 8y ago

A church.

jwilk 8y ago

Archived copy with GDPR nag screen: https://web.archive.org/web/20181102171858/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/academia-is-a-cult/2018/10/31/eea787a0-bd08-11e8-b7d2-0773aa1e33da_story.html https://web.archive.org/web/20181102171858/https://www.washi...

dredmorbius 8y ago
Clean version at Outline.com; https://outline.com/cmMBJX https://outline.com/cmMBJX

scandox 8y ago

I don't know the source but I first read the following useful distinction here in HN: The difference between a cult and a religion: a cult wants it all, a religion just wants its cut.

dmos62 8y ago
That's an amusing saying, because it conjures images of a struggle, in which there's somewhere something that is greedy and something that seeks fairness. What is the struggle about, i.e. what is that "all" that the greedy actor wants? I think it doesn't matter, because this saying is just a threatrical way of saying that we define a cult as an organization in the religious world that we find to be uncooperative, asocial, greedy, mean, yada yada, -- something we don't like. Further, religion just wants its cut? There's an implicit entitlement there. Why? I started out saying this saying is amusing, but, man, am I finishing on the opposite note.
- gtyras2mrs 8y ago
  What I get from that statement is that religion is a more sustainable cult i.e. a cult that recognizes that demanding total control is a poor strategy in the longer term.
liftbigweights 8y ago
All religions started out as a cult. Christianity was a cult until it won. The difference between a cult and religion is the same as the difference between a molehill and a hill. It's hard to say exactly when a molehill turns into a hill, but you'll know it when it does.
- kiriakasis 8y ago
  > All religions started out as a cult. Beware of survivor bias. Even assuming that all religion were once cult it still does not follow that all cults could become viable religions.

liftbigweights 8y ago

The same thing affecting academia ( mostly humanities ) is the same thing affecting journalism. Instead of being institutions for seeking truth and knowledge, they've become institutions of political advocacy and agenda.

repolfx 8y ago
Obligatory plug for https://heterodoxacademy.org/ https://heterodoxacademy.org/ However, lately I've come to wonder if the solution isn't simply to defund all non-STEM academic subjects. It seems likely that subjects that aren't strongly tied down to some sort of objective utility function will always drift towards some sort of strange and extreme agendas.

nyc111 8y ago

There is a historical reason for this. Religion is practiced by Doctors of Divinity and science by Doctors of Philosophy. At the time of Newton education or universities were controlled by religious doctors. After Newton Doctors of Philosophy took control of the education. Doctor means someone who is licensed to teach the doctrine. So at the fundamental level religion and academia are organized exactly the same. Only doctrine is different. In this system cult simply means an outside hierarchy organized by an unlicensed teacher. But both are cults.

repolfx 8y ago
That explanation sounds good but I couldn't find much on the doctor=doctrine link. This says the word comes from medieval Latin "docere" which simply means to teach. Doctrine shares the same root word as doctor, but that root word is simply the notion of teaching and doesn't have inherently religious overtones. https://www.etymonline.com/word/Doctor https://www.etymonline.com/word/Doctor