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Ex professor turned hedge fund dude here -- Can confirm working in a hedge fund is more ethical than being faculty. Vote with your feet people. Stop pretendin

Ex professor turned hedge fund dude here -- Can confirm working in a hedge fund is more ethical than being faculty. Vote with your feet people. Stop pretending to care, and leave a system which really does no one any good besides a handful of faculty in the top 5. -- certainly not science

xiaolingxiao 7y ago
Could you elaborate?
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  Roughly paraphrased, "Just do the research yourself and forward science like they did in the past. Why does everything have to be through the universities of the world?
  - alpineidyll3 7y ago
    https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-mathematical-community https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-ma...
- geezerjay 7y ago
  Not the OP but the straw that broke the back of my PhD's camel was an exchange with my supervisor that went something like this: Supervisor: I need to improve my metrics and you only published a paper last year. You owe me 3 papers in the next 6 months. Me: How am I going to write 3 papers? Supervisor: You figure it out. Me: What topic should I write about? Supervisor: That's your job.
- alpineidyll3 7y ago
  Sure. I worked in non-relativistic Many Body QM which is a mature field (although some outstanding problems remain). I had funding etc. I was looking into two sorts of things, one which was an applicable replacement for some old technology, and a pure theory project focused on some insoluble fundamental mystery. The applicable project was popular, but at best I could put in extra hours to compete with how rapidly people in the top 5 would copy my ideas and successfully receive the credit for it. The passion project remained permanently only interesting to me, and was too difficult for any students I could acquire. I quit when I realized that I wouldn't be able to actually make scientific progress on the second vein of research because of the other demands on my life. To 'Work' as faculty is to write grants, play politics (and necessarily do less science) or ignore the well being of yourself and your students, because the field is worse than indifferent to progress and new ideas. Progress is intrinsically threatening to old faculty, who control the resources the field by sitting on NSF panels. One can choose to ignore what success is, but if so taking students is (in my opinion) unethical. Even hidden away alone behind your desk hoping no one knocks, you will sit on so many committees etc. that you would be lucky to have 2 hours a day for science. I had friends who were doing incredible science with a few students, focusing on intellectual virtue, who then were denied tenure for being unliked by modern university's customers (undergraduates). Because no one in finance exchanges information, I am genuinely free to focus on ideas. The ideas are the same as quantum mechanics, as finance is also a problem of many-dimensional probabilities. Hagen Kleinert wrote a great book about it. It would be trivial to fix American academia, by either eliminating tenure, forcing retirements from grants, or simply testing that faculty could do a single project a year without a student. Of course the national academy would sooner die than allow any one of these things to pass. They prefer to travel on grants and pretend they are wealthy.
orbifold 7y ago
Do you have recommendations for places in Europe to apply to?

xiaolingxiao 7y ago

Could you elaborate?

sieabahlpark 7y ago
Roughly paraphrased, "Just do the research yourself and forward science like they did in the past. Why does everything have to be through the universities of the world?
- alpineidyll3 7y ago
  https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-mathematical-community https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-ma...
geezerjay 7y ago
Not the OP but the straw that broke the back of my PhD's camel was an exchange with my supervisor that went something like this: Supervisor: I need to improve my metrics and you only published a paper last year. You owe me 3 papers in the next 6 months. Me: How am I going to write 3 papers? Supervisor: You figure it out. Me: What topic should I write about? Supervisor: That's your job.
alpineidyll3 7y ago
Sure. I worked in non-relativistic Many Body QM which is a mature field (although some outstanding problems remain). I had funding etc. I was looking into two sorts of things, one which was an applicable replacement for some old technology, and a pure theory project focused on some insoluble fundamental mystery. The applicable project was popular, but at best I could put in extra hours to compete with how rapidly people in the top 5 would copy my ideas and successfully receive the credit for it. The passion project remained permanently only interesting to me, and was too difficult for any students I could acquire. I quit when I realized that I wouldn't be able to actually make scientific progress on the second vein of research because of the other demands on my life. To 'Work' as faculty is to write grants, play politics (and necessarily do less science) or ignore the well being of yourself and your students, because the field is worse than indifferent to progress and new ideas. Progress is intrinsically threatening to old faculty, who control the resources the field by sitting on NSF panels. One can choose to ignore what success is, but if so taking students is (in my opinion) unethical. Even hidden away alone behind your desk hoping no one knocks, you will sit on so many committees etc. that you would be lucky to have 2 hours a day for science. I had friends who were doing incredible science with a few students, focusing on intellectual virtue, who then were denied tenure for being unliked by modern university's customers (undergraduates). Because no one in finance exchanges information, I am genuinely free to focus on ideas. The ideas are the same as quantum mechanics, as finance is also a problem of many-dimensional probabilities. Hagen Kleinert wrote a great book about it. It would be trivial to fix American academia, by either eliminating tenure, forcing retirements from grants, or simply testing that faculty could do a single project a year without a student. Of course the national academy would sooner die than allow any one of these things to pass. They prefer to travel on grants and pretend they are wealthy.

orbifold 7y ago

Do you have recommendations for places in Europe to apply to?