10 ms·

The secret of academic success, or fun filled failure if you prefer

239 points by herodotus 7y ago

virtuous_signal 7y ago
My takeaway/tldr: Act in a way that makes your colleagues (potentially future colleagues) feel smart.
- scholaronroad 7y ago
  And making people think that you're a wise-ass is better than making them think that you're stupid. P.S: Exile to UK seems lit fam.
- ohbleek 7y ago
  This lines up with my own experience and with advice I've read about "being successful." Essentially that, until you're at the top of the food chain, credit should always be deflected upward. Personally I bump up against the idea that it is good to do that in all situations, however, I have yet to find myself in one.
- unishark 7y ago
  The seminar story is sort of the opposite; dazzle and confuse them with your genius by giving bad talks no one can understand, or else they won't respect you. But both regard dealing with massive egos, a common problem in research.
  - virtuous_signal 7y ago
    I can see that perspective too. I had interpeted it as "don't make it seem that our research (via seminar talks) can be understood by undergrads!"
  - Fomite 7y ago
    I think the lesson is "Read the room". Different types of seminars have different purposes. For some, it is indeed desirable to dazzle and confuse. In others, to be approachable.
  - antognini 7y ago
    A good seminar should have a lengthy introduction at a level somewhat below the general level of knowledge in the room and then transition into showing off how clever your approach is. The first part is critical because it makes everyone feel smart. The second part is critical because it shows everyone that you are smart.
  - screye 7y ago
    This seems counter to almost every CS hiring job talk I have attended. The professors almost always seem to be receptive of people who lay down the basics for everyone in the room, and then systematically place their work using this newly situated academic landscape. I mean, how is a databases professor supposed to understand a SOTA CNN, if they don't understand CNNs to begin with. Maybe OP was simply stuck in the wrong (or right) kind of toxic workplace.
deleted 7y ago
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gaogao 7y ago
The primary fun filled failure, https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/honest-wes-just-funnin-serious-work-viciously-parodied/ https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/honest-wes-just-f..., is a pretty neat excerpt I had never read before, especially as one who toes that Wizard approach towards formal verification.
- dang 7y ago
  It's surprising how well that holds up. I feel like I recognized all those types intimately.
  - sideshowb 7y ago
    The Walrus operator should set things straight! (I lold)
- dgreensp 7y ago
  Thanks for linking to this, it was a good read :) The author seems like a cool (IMO) guy who is a bit insecure about whether he’s supposed to be seeking people’s approval or what. I couldn’t handle the status-seeking and other social dynamics of academia, so I became an entrepreneur.
  - neonate 7y ago
    For those who don't know, he is an esteemed computer scientist who created the Lucid dataflow language with Ed Ashcroft. Much praised by Alan Kay among others.
robocat 7y ago
Nice reference to being seen as a bozo, presumably a la "Don't flip the bozo bit" from Jim McCarthy’s rule No. 4 in Dynamics of Software Development, explained well here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/08/13/the-endemic-bozo-bit/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/08/13/th...
- taneq 7y ago
  "Bozo" as a word for an incompetent person has been around for a long time: "bozo (slang) A stupid, foolish, or ridiculous person, especially a man. [from 1910s]" (Source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bozo https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bozo)
  - raister 7y ago
    I guess the obvious reference is Bozo, the clown...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
psudmant 7y ago
To be sure... the main message here is don't be a jerk, treat people w/ respect, and try to be humble...EVEN if you're right and someone else is wrong! These aren't tough principles and they're not exclusive to academia - they are universal.
- taneq 7y ago
  To take it further, even if you're clearly right in your own frame of reference you still need to recognize that the other person may also be right in theirs. Unless you fully understand someone's frame of reference you don't really know if they're right or not.
- katzgrau 7y ago
  I think that the real message is that a little political finesse (some call "social IQ") goes a long way, and the lack of it can hold you back. If you're thinking to yourself, "but I was never the most socially capable," that's OK, here are some instructions for your logical-and-not-naturally-social brain to execute: Try to be positive with others, give credit where it's due (or will encourage someone else), withold criticism unless the situation truly calls for it. We all want to feel good about ourselves - a simple and easy way to be politically savvy is to be a source of positivity for others.
- Joof 7y ago
  Correct! Unfortunately, this doesn't apply to the second half. Maybe it's a bit more that's necessary.
piotrkaminski 7y ago
Heh, I took a couple classes from Bill back at UVic and, being young and full of myself, I occasionally pointed out mistakes in his teaching in front of all the other students. Luckily, unlike the faculty in his story, he never took personal offense. :)
admiralspoo 7y ago
Stories like these confirm my experience that academia is in a sorry state and ripe for disruption. I'm a firm believer that you are only as good as your last recent work. Enough of these inflated egos that haven't published anything interesting in a decade, or whose one claim to fame was a matter of luck.
- neonate 7y ago
  Wadge is retired and his stories are over 30 years old. So perhaps academia used to be in a sorry state. It still is, and it used to be, too...?
  - stebann 7y ago
    As an undergrad in CS I can say that that politics limit your moves, at least where I live. So the answer is YES.
- sn41 7y ago
  Are you criticising Bill Wadge in particular? His Ph. D thesis led to one of the widely studied notions in descriptive set theory [1]. He switched to computer science and made a lot of contributions to CS and AI [2] If you are talking about disrupting academia in general, I am partly with you. There are academic have-beens, but the "disruption" might be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bath water. I don't know of any decent way of distinguishing an academic who is currently stuck while trying to make progress, from an academic who is truly academically dead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadge_hierarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadge_hierarchy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_(programming_language)
- celticmusic 7y ago
  > Stories like these confirm my experience that academia is in a sorry state and ripe for disruption. Can we maybe find our way to looking at something from a different perspective than this? "My marriage is in a sorry state and ripe for disruption". wut?
- rofo1 7y ago
riazrizvi 7y ago
Great life lesson shared in just eight paragraphs of blog. Too easy to miss.
yodsanklai 7y ago
This article doesn't reflect my experience in academia (but I was in a different field/country). Success is highly corollated with the quality of your publications (and your ability to gather money and students to write them), not so much local politics. I found local politics to be important for administrative careers. > That’s it. Stay positive, never criticize. That’s the secret. That applies to other fields too. Actually, I was an academic and switched to the software industry. I feel that a somewhat sensitive part of the job is trying not hurt anyone's feeling. Could be when reviewing code, or discussing technical choices, or company orientation.
- lala26in 7y ago
  Students who make good use of the initial momentum in school are best candidates for academia. It's hard to self-start or do alone. Very few succeed in pushing boundaries alone.
- tkgally 7y ago
  > This article doesn't reflect my experience in academia... Nor mine (also in a different field and country). It does, though, reflect how some academics, especially younger ones, seem to view academia: as a politicized, factionalized battle of personalities. More than once I've had a junior colleague who perceived himself or herself to be a victim of such a battle when in fact the reason for their failure to get a contract renewal, promotion, tenure, or lighter teaching load was mere bureaucratic inflexibility or budgetary constraints and had nothing to do with them personally. The way the blogger hedges his account—“to my best guess,” “probably,” “it appears”—suggests to me that he might have been reading too much into his situation as well.
deepaksurti 7y ago
>> When they hire you, they’re convinced at first that they’ve made a great choice. This honeymoon period lasts about six months at which point their attitude flips and they become convinced that they hired a bozo True of almost every job!!! There could be many reasons to why this happens, I can only speculate given all the hiring strategies, the interviewing jujitsu and what not, it might be an NP category problem.
- idclip 7y ago
  Familiarity breeds contempt. One thing to understand, from a meditative pov, society and its industry is unconscious Ego dynamics. Its full of projection, and mostly people playing out unresolved trauma. The unconscious Ego is mostly good at choose(Like, Dislike) and has very little regard for the human underneath, since, especially in form of an Institution/Company, it cant see its own humanity. This is why people sound authentic in person, but start to act out draconian aggression fantasies as a collective, which starts with the creeping disenchantment - Alot like many and most young human relationship.
  - dchyrdvh 7y ago
    This is worth a separate post, as there's a lot to unpack here.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I think the key is just: > Familiarity breeds contempt. This alone explains the "honeymoon period" without introducing unconscious aggregate Egos of companies or societies.
  - mikorym 7y ago
    > Familiarity breeds contempt. This is actually encoded into a common expression in Nothern Sotho. In the infinitive go tlwaela the meaning is to get use to or to grow accustomed to something. But when you say O a ntlwaela, as in: "You are getting used to me," you are actually telling the person that they are being contemptuous. In fact, this principle is so well developed in the Northern Sotho language that you can even use the phrase for someone that is not in fact accustomed to you. For example, I was at the recycling site the other day and this guy came up to me and was pissed that I came in and didn't do what he wanted me to do (which could have been a fair objection) but he also as a side remark called me racist. To which I responded, "O a ntlwaela." In context, what I am really saying would be that he is stereotyping me. His response, realising he made a mistake, was to just deny it without substantiation, as in "Ke go tlwaela bjang?" Essentially he was saying: "How am I being familiar with you?" The answer was of course that he was calling me racist because I reminded him of someone else; i.e., a steriotype he was used to. In any case, I did not point this out any further and just left.
bogdanoff_2 7y ago
The takeaway from the first story is simple: don't be a jerk. It's harder to find a takeaway from the second story. How do you in general avoid making whatever mistakes Bill supposedly made with his seminar?
- sandoooo 7y ago
  Knowing the culture and relative status dynamics would have helped. Undergrads are lower than the worms beneath your feet as faculty, and shouldn't be invited to faculty gatherings lest they drool on the carpet. By not figuring out what the faux pas's are for the local ecosystem, he was setting himself up for failure. If it wasn't this talk it would have been something else.
  - smallcharleston 7y ago
    Are they? As an undergrad I thought my professors were silly folks who got suckered into making a huge effort on obscure facts when they could easily make the same salary with less energy in software/IT. When a prof I did research with behaved rudely to me I just quit his lab and got someone else to write grad school letters for me. Academically all but the best undergrads know basically nothing, but looking down on them seems like you’ll soon have lab a labor shortage to me, especially in CS.
    - Fronzie 7y ago
      undergrads don't bring in grant money, but do cost time (teaching). From a university 'business' point of view, they are a net loss. Grants are a big thing in academia.
      - limbicsystem 7y ago
        In the UK it's exactly the opposite. Here's the best case (UCL - a super research intensive university): https://www.ucl.ac.uk/students/fees-and-funding/how-ucl-uses-tuition-fees https://www.ucl.ac.uk/students/fees-and-funding/how-ucl-uses... Most other universities rely far more on teaching. Tuition fees also have the advantage that they are constant and relatively easy to predict while grants last a few years at best (and of course you do have to >do< something with them so they are not pure profit. Broadly, grants are the delicious froth on top of the tuition fee latte.
mmhsieh 7y ago
creating good will costs little but pays off a lot when you eventually F something up and can draw from it for forgiveness apart from that, not being an asshole is its own reward
AlexCoventry 7y ago
Now I'm curious about the CLM he wouldn't go into.
Rerarom 7y ago
This is very weird (the seminar thing). In my university the professors would be extremely happy to see a talk where undergraduates could and do attend.
- siberianbear 7y ago
  I had the same thought. As an undergraduate, I went to some of the interesting-sounding seminars given by grad students. It was a great way to get to learn something interesting and also get to know your professors. I have to admit, however, that I was usually the only undergrad in attendance.
mr_gibbins 7y ago
It's fine to offend in some contexts, but the author sounds like a douche. He wouldn't like it much if another researcher wrote an article taking a massive dump on his work, would he? It's basic manners. Don't say the authors are wrong. Say they take a 'singular view'. Or 'it is arguable that...'. Or 'their results contradict X'. It's fine to critique, but no need to be an ass about it. As for the seminar - most definitely the fault of the faculty. Anyone should be able to attend a seminar. The clue is in the entymology - 'university' = 'universal'.
- arkh 7y ago
  > no need to be an ass about it I disagree. Sometimes people used to everyone walking eggshells around them need a jolt of assholishness.
  - acollins1331 7y ago
    Sometimes. But not every time. Critiquing someone's science is not one of those times.
  - adamsea 7y ago
    Perhaps, but being the decider about who does and who doesn’t deserve some assholishness is the heart of what an asshole is. Someone who disregards the wishes and feelings of another. Like if you said you like asparagus and I said “you should like broccoli, it’s better”, if we weren’t buddies like you that and I wasn’t your nutritionist :).
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Saying that some people need to be subjected to abuse is a terrible point of view.
    - exergy 7y ago
      Abuse is a heavily loaded word, and as an aside, I hate the cheapening of language in modern times. Assault is another that's getting cheapened. Someone bluntly telling another "you're dead wrong" isn't abuse IMO. But to your main point, I've seen my share of the polite leading the polite. If there is a general level of competence, fine, work can still proceed. But often, workplaces need an asshole who will voice their opinion in blunt language. There are moments when diplomacy causes, at best, avoidable delays, but at worst completely fucked projects.
epamonip 7y ago
I can say firsthand how real & vicious local politics can be in academic institutions. I made the mistake of openly questioning the research funding of a new professor I began working under in undergrad. It turned out he was the only one who taught the last 2 courses I needed for my CS degree. He took it all very personally. Nearly a 4.0 , success in math & programming competitions for the college, research, none of it mattered. I never finished my CS degree because of those 2 coursse. Years later I went to talk to him about it candidly, hoping I could just keep my head down and finish. But it didn't work.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Why not take the course, submit high quality assignments, and when bad marks come back, appeal to a higher faculty member? Comp sci is fairly objective - it would be very hard for him to give you a failing mark for exceptionally high quality work in a way he wouldn't be reprimanded for.
  - raister 7y ago
    I can only imagine the level of hardship on the test the professor would go to achieve his objective of failing you...
    - TheTrotters 7y ago
      Unless you’re the only student in a class others would get the same test or assignment.
  - thrwaway69 7y ago
    Depending on where he lives or studies, that wouldn't even be a choice let alone a realistic option to pursue. For one, if there is a shortage of good professors (which there is and if he is one), I can bet you some schools would trash the student without a thought if professor threatens them. Playing legal battles afterwards isn't something available for most poor students. Though, that's my experience here. Done a biting before and I won't again. I will just secretly record everything and make it look really bad, then viral it after leaving college. I have learnt to pretend to follow popular opinions, thinking etc because otherwise it ends up as a disadvantage position for you. What I would do now is ask a few open ended generic questions which will lead to person expressing a lot of what they care about, make a profile and never step on those. Be contradictory on issues the other person is unsure of, helps stay authentic. I noticed I can sow huge doubts in people when it comes to choosing clothing even if I am the only person in a group of 5, they will start rethinking their choices in the head but for something related to their work or moral dilemmas, it's not easy.
mxcrossb 7y ago
> It took me a long while to figure out what (to my best guess) happened. Certain colleagues were offended that I’d encouraged a bunch of undergraduates to show up at a research seminar. Is it not also possible that the author failed to emphasize which parts were new in the talk? A lot of talks start by describing deficiencies in the state of the art. But maybe he needed to give so much background that he couldn’t make that clear, and the audience was left uncertain.
werber 7y ago
>> That’s it. Stay positive, never criticize. That’s the secret. This seems to work in a lot of fields, optimism being confused competence really fascinates me
alimw 7y ago
Sadly being a jerk can be a vicious cycle. With rising anger and bitterness about how poorly your contributions are received, it may be virtually impossible to present a smiling and upbeat facade to the world—when you're tired, when you're stressed, in a job interview for example or after making a presentation. So for all those here who think "don't be a jerk" is a valid defence for their own unwillingness to brook criticism, just think how many promising careers, then lives, are destroyed by this mechanism.
- rofo1 7y ago
  It's true, but it's also a test of your inner strength. Can you be a good person even after enduring pure evil? I find that particularly puzzling and I hold people that are capable of good (after being betrayed etc. by the world) in high esteem.
watwut 7y ago
Second story tries too much to read into minds of people who probably did not liked the talk - and somehow finds worst possible interpretation despite there not being much signal to lean that way. For example, it is quite possible to not like talk that had too much beginner content in it, without the issue being personal offense on graduate presence. I find it pretty normal to not want to listen to beginner content - matching content to primary audience is a thing. And it is possible for some people to like talk and others dislike it without anyone being massive asshole. The "you can read another book" should probably be taken as feedback (even as it was not the most direct or polite way to phrase it) rather then mortal insult.
- andai 7y ago
  I recently read something interesting about how to take insults: > When we encounter insults from other people, we must deal with them with reason rather than anger. Either the insult is true, in which case we should be grateful for the insulter for pointing out this area in which we could improve, or it is false, in which case we should pity the insulter for his lack of accurate perception. - Pete Adeney
  - homonculus1 7y ago
    "If a person gave your body to any stranger he met on his way, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in handing over your own mind to be confused and mystified by anyone who happens to verbally attack you?" -Epictetus
cousin_it 7y ago
I think there are two different issues. On one hand, if you haven't received much blunt criticism in your life, you might not notice when your own criticism comes across as blunt. On the other hand, if you're used to an environment where blunt criticism is no big deal, and then move to an environment where everyone walks on eggshells, it can be hard to adjust. But if people gave and received more criticism in general, both of these issues would go away, so that's what I would prefer.
- watwut 7y ago
  The author found "yeah you can read another book" to be mortal insult, so there is factor of asymetry in how he criticises others vs how he wants to be talked to.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - homonculus1 7y ago
    To the contrary, he didn't even realize what it meant when it was said to him. It was only much later that he realized it was intended derogatorily.
graycat 7y ago
The OP is talking academic secrets and essentially office politics. I've had some experience with such secrets and getting around the politics so will chip in! (1) Some Academic Ground Rules Some high end research universities state that the requirement for a Ph.D. dissertation is "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication", and the usual criteria for publication are "new, correct, and significant". (2) Career Secret In technical careers, say, based on math and computing, there is almost always more money to be make in making valuable applications of such knowledge than in research creating such knowledge. Moreover, for the goals of financial security or even to be financially responsible and to be able to buy a house, have two late model cars, support a wife and family, have a valuable IRA, etc., it can be tough to meet these goals as a prof doing research and much easier making valuable applications. (3) A Career Success I was a ugrad math major but by luck stumbled on to a cute fact: There was and likely still is good money to be made applying math, physics, and computing to problems in US national security around DC. So, at the time, some of the math was numerical integration, root finding, numerical linear algebra, the fast Fourier transform, power spectral estimation, digital filtering, lots of applied statistics, numerical solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations, max-min and game theory for the SSBN fleet, etc. My annual salary was six times the cost of a new, high end Camaro. The success was an example of (2) of more money from applications than academic research. So a lesson: With math and computing, to make more money, concentrate on valuable applications and not academic research. Further, do this where there are powerful customers with deep pockets for solutions to technical problems -- e.g., US national security around DC. (4) An Academic Success I was getting paid so well for what I knew in math and computing that I wanted to learn more so went for a Ph.D. Then right away, as in the OP, politics hit me. Then I stumbled onto a solution: I saw a math problem (a tricky issue in the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions), asked for a "reading course", maybe not to get a solution but just study the problem. Two weeks later I found a solution that was clearly publishable (later did publish in JOTA). Presto, bingo, secret discovered: The original work gave me a shiny halo and a Kevlar suit of armor against any and all obstacles, especially political. Technically from (1), the work was enough for a Ph.D. dissertation. Lesson: As a Ph.D. student, ASAP do some research that meets the criteria in (1). (5) Another Academic Secret Get a Ph.D. in an engineering school and not in a school of arts and sciences. I.e., get a Ph.D. in applied math for some engineering and not pure math without clear applications. So, for a dissertation, start with an important practical problem got likely from outside academics. Then use some old pure and new applied math to get a valuable solution. Then, since the practical problem has likely not already been solved well, the work will be "new". Since the problem is important and the solution valuable, get "significant". Since the core of the work is some math with theorems and proofs, it is relatively easy to be check the work and, then, be "correct". Since the problem is from outside academics, your profs might not know about its practical details and, thus, can't easily criticize. Also generally the university might like the idea that you are trying to make money because otherwise they can't even hope that you will donate a lot of money! (6) Business Secret Currently there is an historic business opportunity: E.g., for less than $2000 in parts, as a Web server I plugged together a mid-tower case computer with an AMD FX-8350 processor with 64 bit addressing, eight cores, and a standard 4.0 GHz clock, an Asus motherboard, 16 GB of error correcting coding (ECC) main memory (both the processor and the motherboard support ECC), several TB of rotating disk, Windows 7 Professional, etc. So, computer hardware and software for operating systems, middle-ware, utilities, etc. are cheap and powerful. In addition the Internet spans nearly all the world, and data rates of 1 Gbps are readily available in the US. Since these cheap, powerful resources have not yet been fully exploited, there should be opportunities to make significant bucks. Next, one of the standard remarks is, for success, good problem selection is important: Well, then, broadly can provide new, valuable information. Using some pure and new applied math can help get more valuable information. Then with all of that, also pick a problem can solve as a sole, solo founder funded from own checkbook. An example is the Canadian romantic matching Web site Plenty of Fish -- one guy, two old Dell servers, Windows with .NET, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET, ads just from Google, and $10 million a year in revenue. Later he added staff and sold out for IIRC $575 million. Points: Here we have an example of (2), valuable practical applications instead of academic research. As a self-funded sole, solo founder, get to avoid office politics, co-founder disputes, and venture capital firms and get to own 100% of the company.

239 points by herodotus 7y ago

virtuous_signal 7y ago

My takeaway/tldr: Act in a way that makes your colleagues (potentially future colleagues) feel smart.

scholaronroad 7y ago
And making people think that you're a wise-ass is better than making them think that you're stupid. P.S: Exile to UK seems lit fam.
ohbleek 7y ago
This lines up with my own experience and with advice I've read about "being successful." Essentially that, until you're at the top of the food chain, credit should always be deflected upward. Personally I bump up against the idea that it is good to do that in all situations, however, I have yet to find myself in one.
unishark 7y ago
The seminar story is sort of the opposite; dazzle and confuse them with your genius by giving bad talks no one can understand, or else they won't respect you. But both regard dealing with massive egos, a common problem in research.
- virtuous_signal 7y ago
  I can see that perspective too. I had interpeted it as "don't make it seem that our research (via seminar talks) can be understood by undergrads!"
- Fomite 7y ago
  I think the lesson is "Read the room". Different types of seminars have different purposes. For some, it is indeed desirable to dazzle and confuse. In others, to be approachable.
- antognini 7y ago
  A good seminar should have a lengthy introduction at a level somewhat below the general level of knowledge in the room and then transition into showing off how clever your approach is. The first part is critical because it makes everyone feel smart. The second part is critical because it shows everyone that you are smart.
- screye 7y ago
  This seems counter to almost every CS hiring job talk I have attended. The professors almost always seem to be receptive of people who lay down the basics for everyone in the room, and then systematically place their work using this newly situated academic landscape. I mean, how is a databases professor supposed to understand a SOTA CNN, if they don't understand CNNs to begin with. Maybe OP was simply stuck in the wrong (or right) kind of toxic workplace.

deleted 7y ago

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gaogao 7y ago

The primary fun filled failure, https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/honest-wes-just-funnin-serious-work-viciously-parodied/ https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/honest-wes-just-f..., is a pretty neat excerpt I had never read before, especially as one who toes that Wizard approach towards formal verification.

dang 7y ago
It's surprising how well that holds up. I feel like I recognized all those types intimately.
- sideshowb 7y ago
  The Walrus operator should set things straight! (I lold)
dgreensp 7y ago
Thanks for linking to this, it was a good read :) The author seems like a cool (IMO) guy who is a bit insecure about whether he’s supposed to be seeking people’s approval or what. I couldn’t handle the status-seeking and other social dynamics of academia, so I became an entrepreneur.
- neonate 7y ago
  For those who don't know, he is an esteemed computer scientist who created the Lucid dataflow language with Ed Ashcroft. Much praised by Alan Kay among others.

robocat 7y ago

Nice reference to being seen as a bozo, presumably a la "Don't flip the bozo bit" from Jim McCarthy’s rule No. 4 in Dynamics of Software Development, explained well here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/08/13/the-endemic-bozo-bit/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/08/13/th...

taneq 7y ago
"Bozo" as a word for an incompetent person has been around for a long time: "bozo (slang) A stupid, foolish, or ridiculous person, especially a man. [from 1910s]" (Source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bozo https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bozo)
- raister 7y ago
  I guess the obvious reference is Bozo, the clown...
deleted 7y ago
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psudmant 7y ago

To be sure... the main message here is don't be a jerk, treat people w/ respect, and try to be humble...EVEN if you're right and someone else is wrong! These aren't tough principles and they're not exclusive to academia - they are universal.

taneq 7y ago
To take it further, even if you're clearly right in your own frame of reference you still need to recognize that the other person may also be right in theirs. Unless you fully understand someone's frame of reference you don't really know if they're right or not.
katzgrau 7y ago
I think that the real message is that a little political finesse (some call "social IQ") goes a long way, and the lack of it can hold you back. If you're thinking to yourself, "but I was never the most socially capable," that's OK, here are some instructions for your logical-and-not-naturally-social brain to execute: Try to be positive with others, give credit where it's due (or will encourage someone else), withold criticism unless the situation truly calls for it. We all want to feel good about ourselves - a simple and easy way to be politically savvy is to be a source of positivity for others.
Joof 7y ago
Correct! Unfortunately, this doesn't apply to the second half. Maybe it's a bit more that's necessary.

piotrkaminski 7y ago

Heh, I took a couple classes from Bill back at UVic and, being young and full of myself, I occasionally pointed out mistakes in his teaching in front of all the other students. Luckily, unlike the faculty in his story, he never took personal offense. :)

admiralspoo 7y ago

Stories like these confirm my experience that academia is in a sorry state and ripe for disruption. I'm a firm believer that you are only as good as your last recent work. Enough of these inflated egos that haven't published anything interesting in a decade, or whose one claim to fame was a matter of luck.

neonate 7y ago
Wadge is retired and his stories are over 30 years old. So perhaps academia used to be in a sorry state. It still is, and it used to be, too...?
- stebann 7y ago
  As an undergrad in CS I can say that that politics limit your moves, at least where I live. So the answer is YES.
sn41 7y ago
Are you criticising Bill Wadge in particular? His Ph. D thesis led to one of the widely studied notions in descriptive set theory [1]. He switched to computer science and made a lot of contributions to CS and AI [2] If you are talking about disrupting academia in general, I am partly with you. There are academic have-beens, but the "disruption" might be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bath water. I don't know of any decent way of distinguishing an academic who is currently stuck while trying to make progress, from an academic who is truly academically dead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadge_hierarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadge_hierarchy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_(programming_language)
celticmusic 7y ago
> Stories like these confirm my experience that academia is in a sorry state and ripe for disruption. Can we maybe find our way to looking at something from a different perspective than this? "My marriage is in a sorry state and ripe for disruption". wut?
rofo1 7y ago

riazrizvi 7y ago

Great life lesson shared in just eight paragraphs of blog. Too easy to miss.

yodsanklai 7y ago

This article doesn't reflect my experience in academia (but I was in a different field/country). Success is highly corollated with the quality of your publications (and your ability to gather money and students to write them), not so much local politics. I found local politics to be important for administrative careers. > That’s it. Stay positive, never criticize. That’s the secret. That applies to other fields too. Actually, I was an academic and switched to the software industry. I feel that a somewhat sensitive part of the job is trying not hurt anyone's feeling. Could be when reviewing code, or discussing technical choices, or company orientation.

lala26in 7y ago
Students who make good use of the initial momentum in school are best candidates for academia. It's hard to self-start or do alone. Very few succeed in pushing boundaries alone.
tkgally 7y ago
> This article doesn't reflect my experience in academia... Nor mine (also in a different field and country). It does, though, reflect how some academics, especially younger ones, seem to view academia: as a politicized, factionalized battle of personalities. More than once I've had a junior colleague who perceived himself or herself to be a victim of such a battle when in fact the reason for their failure to get a contract renewal, promotion, tenure, or lighter teaching load was mere bureaucratic inflexibility or budgetary constraints and had nothing to do with them personally. The way the blogger hedges his account—“to my best guess,” “probably,” “it appears”—suggests to me that he might have been reading too much into his situation as well.

deepaksurti 7y ago

>> When they hire you, they’re convinced at first that they’ve made a great choice. This honeymoon period lasts about six months at which point their attitude flips and they become convinced that they hired a bozo True of almost every job!!! There could be many reasons to why this happens, I can only speculate given all the hiring strategies, the interviewing jujitsu and what not, it might be an NP category problem.

idclip 7y ago
Familiarity breeds contempt. One thing to understand, from a meditative pov, society and its industry is unconscious Ego dynamics. Its full of projection, and mostly people playing out unresolved trauma. The unconscious Ego is mostly good at choose(Like, Dislike) and has very little regard for the human underneath, since, especially in form of an Institution/Company, it cant see its own humanity. This is why people sound authentic in person, but start to act out draconian aggression fantasies as a collective, which starts with the creeping disenchantment - Alot like many and most young human relationship.
- dchyrdvh 7y ago
  This is worth a separate post, as there's a lot to unpack here.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I think the key is just: > Familiarity breeds contempt. This alone explains the "honeymoon period" without introducing unconscious aggregate Egos of companies or societies.
- mikorym 7y ago
  > Familiarity breeds contempt. This is actually encoded into a common expression in Nothern Sotho. In the infinitive go tlwaela the meaning is to get use to or to grow accustomed to something. But when you say O a ntlwaela, as in: "You are getting used to me," you are actually telling the person that they are being contemptuous. In fact, this principle is so well developed in the Northern Sotho language that you can even use the phrase for someone that is not in fact accustomed to you. For example, I was at the recycling site the other day and this guy came up to me and was pissed that I came in and didn't do what he wanted me to do (which could have been a fair objection) but he also as a side remark called me racist. To which I responded, "O a ntlwaela." In context, what I am really saying would be that he is stereotyping me. His response, realising he made a mistake, was to just deny it without substantiation, as in "Ke go tlwaela bjang?" Essentially he was saying: "How am I being familiar with you?" The answer was of course that he was calling me racist because I reminded him of someone else; i.e., a steriotype he was used to. In any case, I did not point this out any further and just left.

bogdanoff_2 7y ago

The takeaway from the first story is simple: don't be a jerk. It's harder to find a takeaway from the second story. How do you in general avoid making whatever mistakes Bill supposedly made with his seminar?

sandoooo 7y ago
Knowing the culture and relative status dynamics would have helped. Undergrads are lower than the worms beneath your feet as faculty, and shouldn't be invited to faculty gatherings lest they drool on the carpet. By not figuring out what the faux pas's are for the local ecosystem, he was setting himself up for failure. If it wasn't this talk it would have been something else.
- smallcharleston 7y ago
  Are they? As an undergrad I thought my professors were silly folks who got suckered into making a huge effort on obscure facts when they could easily make the same salary with less energy in software/IT. When a prof I did research with behaved rudely to me I just quit his lab and got someone else to write grad school letters for me. Academically all but the best undergrads know basically nothing, but looking down on them seems like you’ll soon have lab a labor shortage to me, especially in CS.
  - Fronzie 7y ago
    undergrads don't bring in grant money, but do cost time (teaching). From a university 'business' point of view, they are a net loss. Grants are a big thing in academia.
    - limbicsystem 7y ago
      In the UK it's exactly the opposite. Here's the best case (UCL - a super research intensive university): https://www.ucl.ac.uk/students/fees-and-funding/how-ucl-uses-tuition-fees https://www.ucl.ac.uk/students/fees-and-funding/how-ucl-uses... Most other universities rely far more on teaching. Tuition fees also have the advantage that they are constant and relatively easy to predict while grants last a few years at best (and of course you do have to >do< something with them so they are not pure profit. Broadly, grants are the delicious froth on top of the tuition fee latte.

mmhsieh 7y ago

creating good will costs little but pays off a lot when you eventually F something up and can draw from it for forgiveness apart from that, not being an asshole is its own reward

AlexCoventry 7y ago

Now I'm curious about the CLM he wouldn't go into.

Rerarom 7y ago

This is very weird (the seminar thing). In my university the professors would be extremely happy to see a talk where undergraduates could and do attend.

siberianbear 7y ago
I had the same thought. As an undergraduate, I went to some of the interesting-sounding seminars given by grad students. It was a great way to get to learn something interesting and also get to know your professors. I have to admit, however, that I was usually the only undergrad in attendance.

mr_gibbins 7y ago

It's fine to offend in some contexts, but the author sounds like a douche. He wouldn't like it much if another researcher wrote an article taking a massive dump on his work, would he? It's basic manners. Don't say the authors are wrong. Say they take a 'singular view'. Or 'it is arguable that...'. Or 'their results contradict X'. It's fine to critique, but no need to be an ass about it. As for the seminar - most definitely the fault of the faculty. Anyone should be able to attend a seminar. The clue is in the entymology - 'university' = 'universal'.

arkh 7y ago
> no need to be an ass about it I disagree. Sometimes people used to everyone walking eggshells around them need a jolt of assholishness.
- acollins1331 7y ago
  Sometimes. But not every time. Critiquing someone's science is not one of those times.
- adamsea 7y ago
  Perhaps, but being the decider about who does and who doesn’t deserve some assholishness is the heart of what an asshole is. Someone who disregards the wishes and feelings of another. Like if you said you like asparagus and I said “you should like broccoli, it’s better”, if we weren’t buddies like you that and I wasn’t your nutritionist :).
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Saying that some people need to be subjected to abuse is a terrible point of view.
  - exergy 7y ago
    Abuse is a heavily loaded word, and as an aside, I hate the cheapening of language in modern times. Assault is another that's getting cheapened. Someone bluntly telling another "you're dead wrong" isn't abuse IMO. But to your main point, I've seen my share of the polite leading the polite. If there is a general level of competence, fine, work can still proceed. But often, workplaces need an asshole who will voice their opinion in blunt language. There are moments when diplomacy causes, at best, avoidable delays, but at worst completely fucked projects.

epamonip 7y ago

I can say firsthand how real & vicious local politics can be in academic institutions. I made the mistake of openly questioning the research funding of a new professor I began working under in undergrad. It turned out he was the only one who taught the last 2 courses I needed for my CS degree. He took it all very personally. Nearly a 4.0 , success in math & programming competitions for the college, research, none of it mattered. I never finished my CS degree because of those 2 coursse. Years later I went to talk to him about it candidly, hoping I could just keep my head down and finish. But it didn't work.

londons_explore 7y ago
Why not take the course, submit high quality assignments, and when bad marks come back, appeal to a higher faculty member? Comp sci is fairly objective - it would be very hard for him to give you a failing mark for exceptionally high quality work in a way he wouldn't be reprimanded for.
- raister 7y ago
  I can only imagine the level of hardship on the test the professor would go to achieve his objective of failing you...
  - TheTrotters 7y ago
    Unless you’re the only student in a class others would get the same test or assignment.
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  Depending on where he lives or studies, that wouldn't even be a choice let alone a realistic option to pursue. For one, if there is a shortage of good professors (which there is and if he is one), I can bet you some schools would trash the student without a thought if professor threatens them. Playing legal battles afterwards isn't something available for most poor students. Though, that's my experience here. Done a biting before and I won't again. I will just secretly record everything and make it look really bad, then viral it after leaving college. I have learnt to pretend to follow popular opinions, thinking etc because otherwise it ends up as a disadvantage position for you. What I would do now is ask a few open ended generic questions which will lead to person expressing a lot of what they care about, make a profile and never step on those. Be contradictory on issues the other person is unsure of, helps stay authentic. I noticed I can sow huge doubts in people when it comes to choosing clothing even if I am the only person in a group of 5, they will start rethinking their choices in the head but for something related to their work or moral dilemmas, it's not easy.

mxcrossb 7y ago

> It took me a long while to figure out what (to my best guess) happened. Certain colleagues were offended that I’d encouraged a bunch of undergraduates to show up at a research seminar. Is it not also possible that the author failed to emphasize which parts were new in the talk? A lot of talks start by describing deficiencies in the state of the art. But maybe he needed to give so much background that he couldn’t make that clear, and the audience was left uncertain.

werber 7y ago

>> That’s it. Stay positive, never criticize. That’s the secret. This seems to work in a lot of fields, optimism being confused competence really fascinates me

alimw 7y ago

Sadly being a jerk can be a vicious cycle. With rising anger and bitterness about how poorly your contributions are received, it may be virtually impossible to present a smiling and upbeat facade to the world—when you're tired, when you're stressed, in a job interview for example or after making a presentation. So for all those here who think "don't be a jerk" is a valid defence for their own unwillingness to brook criticism, just think how many promising careers, then lives, are destroyed by this mechanism.

rofo1 7y ago
It's true, but it's also a test of your inner strength. Can you be a good person even after enduring pure evil? I find that particularly puzzling and I hold people that are capable of good (after being betrayed etc. by the world) in high esteem.

watwut 7y ago

Second story tries too much to read into minds of people who probably did not liked the talk - and somehow finds worst possible interpretation despite there not being much signal to lean that way. For example, it is quite possible to not like talk that had too much beginner content in it, without the issue being personal offense on graduate presence. I find it pretty normal to not want to listen to beginner content - matching content to primary audience is a thing. And it is possible for some people to like talk and others dislike it without anyone being massive asshole. The "you can read another book" should probably be taken as feedback (even as it was not the most direct or polite way to phrase it) rather then mortal insult.

andai 7y ago
I recently read something interesting about how to take insults: > When we encounter insults from other people, we must deal with them with reason rather than anger. Either the insult is true, in which case we should be grateful for the insulter for pointing out this area in which we could improve, or it is false, in which case we should pity the insulter for his lack of accurate perception. - Pete Adeney
- homonculus1 7y ago
  "If a person gave your body to any stranger he met on his way, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in handing over your own mind to be confused and mystified by anyone who happens to verbally attack you?" -Epictetus

cousin_it 7y ago

I think there are two different issues. On one hand, if you haven't received much blunt criticism in your life, you might not notice when your own criticism comes across as blunt. On the other hand, if you're used to an environment where blunt criticism is no big deal, and then move to an environment where everyone walks on eggshells, it can be hard to adjust. But if people gave and received more criticism in general, both of these issues would go away, so that's what I would prefer.

watwut 7y ago
The author found "yeah you can read another book" to be mortal insult, so there is factor of asymetry in how he criticises others vs how he wants to be talked to.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- homonculus1 7y ago
  To the contrary, he didn't even realize what it meant when it was said to him. It was only much later that he realized it was intended derogatorily.

graycat 7y ago

The OP is talking academic secrets and essentially office politics. I've had some experience with such secrets and getting around the politics so will chip in! (1) Some Academic Ground Rules Some high end research universities state that the requirement for a Ph.D. dissertation is "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication", and the usual criteria for publication are "new, correct, and significant". (2) Career Secret In technical careers, say, based on math and computing, there is almost always more money to be make in making valuable applications of such knowledge than in research creating such knowledge. Moreover, for the goals of financial security or even to be financially responsible and to be able to buy a house, have two late model cars, support a wife and family, have a valuable IRA, etc., it can be tough to meet these goals as a prof doing research and much easier making valuable applications. (3) A Career Success I was a ugrad math major but by luck stumbled on to a cute fact: There was and likely still is good money to be made applying math, physics, and computing to problems in US national security around DC. So, at the time, some of the math was numerical integration, root finding, numerical linear algebra, the fast Fourier transform, power spectral estimation, digital filtering, lots of applied statistics, numerical solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations, max-min and game theory for the SSBN fleet, etc. My annual salary was six times the cost of a new, high end Camaro. The success was an example of (2) of more money from applications than academic research. So a lesson: With math and computing, to make more money, concentrate on valuable applications and not academic research. Further, do this where there are powerful customers with deep pockets for solutions to technical problems -- e.g., US national security around DC. (4) An Academic Success I was getting paid so well for what I knew in math and computing that I wanted to learn more so went for a Ph.D. Then right away, as in the OP, politics hit me. Then I stumbled onto a solution: I saw a math problem (a tricky issue in the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions), asked for a "reading course", maybe not to get a solution but just study the problem. Two weeks later I found a solution that was clearly publishable (later did publish in JOTA). Presto, bingo, secret discovered: The original work gave me a shiny halo and a Kevlar suit of armor against any and all obstacles, especially political. Technically from (1), the work was enough for a Ph.D. dissertation. Lesson: As a Ph.D. student, ASAP do some research that meets the criteria in (1). (5) Another Academic Secret Get a Ph.D. in an engineering school and not in a school of arts and sciences. I.e., get a Ph.D. in applied math for some engineering and not pure math without clear applications. So, for a dissertation, start with an important practical problem got likely from outside academics. Then use some old pure and new applied math to get a valuable solution. Then, since the practical problem has likely not already been solved well, the work will be "new". Since the problem is important and the solution valuable, get "significant". Since the core of the work is some math with theorems and proofs, it is relatively easy to be check the work and, then, be "correct". Since the problem is from outside academics, your profs might not know about its practical details and, thus, can't easily criticize. Also generally the university might like the idea that you are trying to make money because otherwise they can't even hope that you will donate a lot of money! (6) Business Secret Currently there is an historic business opportunity: E.g., for less than $2000 in parts, as a Web server I plugged together a mid-tower case computer with an AMD FX-8350 processor with 64 bit addressing, eight cores, and a standard 4.0 GHz clock, an Asus motherboard, 16 GB of error correcting coding (ECC) main memory (both the processor and the motherboard support ECC), several TB of rotating disk, Windows 7 Professional, etc. So, computer hardware and software for operating systems, middle-ware, utilities, etc. are cheap and powerful. In addition the Internet spans nearly all the world, and data rates of 1 Gbps are readily available in the US. Since these cheap, powerful resources have not yet been fully exploited, there should be opportunities to make significant bucks. Next, one of the standard remarks is, for success, good problem selection is important: Well, then, broadly can provide new, valuable information. Using some pure and new applied math can help get more valuable information. Then with all of that, also pick a problem can solve as a sole, solo founder funded from own checkbook. An example is the Canadian romantic matching Web site Plenty of Fish -- one guy, two old Dell servers, Windows with .NET, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET, ads just from Google, and $10 million a year in revenue. Later he added staff and sold out for IIRC $575 million. Points: Here we have an example of (2), valuable practical applications instead of academic research. As a self-funded sole, solo founder, get to avoid office politics, co-founder disputes, and venture capital firms and get to own 100% of the company.