8 ms·

The divide you're describing between careers C++ development and physics can be explained by simple supply and demand. You've responded to the market and are be

The divide you're describing between careers C++ development and physics can be explained by simple supply and demand. You've responded to the market and are better off for it. Also, when you have a bunch of very intelligent and hard-working physics grad students, how on earth can "working hours" not be a discriminatory mechanism between them, when the coveted faculty positions are so few and far between? Does it not stand to reason that a person who devotes more of his day to the work will come out ahead, on average? It isn't good or bad, it simply is.

bumby 6y ago
“It isn’t good or bad, it simply is” implies it followed some amoral natural law. These are human-created systems, though, and would be built upon human ethics and morals. Stating academia as an institution just “is” isn’t much different than asserting the military-industrial-congressional complex just “is”
- luckylion 6y ago
  > implies it followed some amoral natural law Doesn't it? If you have two lions of the same physical ability and one of them hunts for six hours a day and the other one hunts for 12 hours a day, which one would you expect to be more successful? > Stating academia as an institution just “is” isn’t much different than asserting the military-industrial-congressional complex just “is” It's not about academia specifically though, it's about any and all systems where individuals compete. Given similar talent, the one who puts in more time/effort will likely win.
  - bumby 6y ago
    Except I don’t think we can/should reduce our institutions to such a simple model. There’s many more inputs than just work-hours. We build our institutions to guard against this. That’s why we don’t live in an anarcho-capitalist society and have things like anti-trust laws.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > There’s many more inputs than just work-hours. Obviously, but if you consider those to be very similar at the top of some field, wouldn't you expect work-hours to be important in predicting the outcome? I'm sure you can draw clear lines between two individuals, but when you look at many people of similar ability, how much time they put in will most likely predict their results pretty well. > We build our institutions to guard against this. We do? Is there a thing where you can explain that you're as smart as other people and therefore it shouldn't matter that they work 5 days a week in some area and you only work one day, and that it's unfair that they produce more results than you and get the promotion/grant/whatever you compete for? I've never heard of it.
      - bumby 6y ago
        The anti-trust example in the previous statement is one. It doesn't matter if someone is more successful, even if it's due solely to an extraordinary work ethic; societal institutions will artificially limit their market share. Sports is another example. Leagues put salary caps as well as minimum salaries to artificially limit compensation. Both sports and economics put these in place to provide a bulwark against such "natural laws" in favor of human defined ethics like fairness.
        luckylion 6y ago
        Those are extremely different things. There is no monopoly in academics or personal career. Sports is a terrible example imho, because most of the compensation isn't in the salary, it's in the ad contracts. > Both sports and economics put these in place to provide a bulwark against such "natural laws" in favor of human defined ethics like fairness. That's not at all why we have anti-trust laws. They are harmful to the economy, that's why. If they weren't, that is, if monopolists usually were more efficient in lowering prices/increasing quality/innovating than companies that had competitors, we'd have no issue with monopolies at all.
        bumby 6y ago
  - devit 6y ago
    There's no need for anyone to win, both the person working 6 hours and the one working 12 hours can contribute and be compensated proportionally to their efforts.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      No, they can't. There are more grad students than postdoc positions. Modern academia is famous/infamous for this.
  - fock 6y ago
    One of them will be dead by exhaustion a short time after he piled up his bounty only to have it rot because he doesn't know a freezer...
- specialist 6y ago
  IMHO, depersonalizing a problem may help to mitigate it. My IRL analogy: Working in election integrity, I emphatically encouraged my peers to pointedly ignore intention, to frame problems as "errors", not "fraud". From the systems view, all fraud are technically errors. And the conversation is full stop over the moment someone says "fraud", "chicanery", "electioneering". But if you can keep the convo in the "safe space" of "errors", avoid partisanship and blame and whatever, then it's easier to build coalitions, persuade others, neutralize opposition. Just my two cents.
  - bumby 6y ago
    I think that’s a good way to phrase it. Another is to focus on the “process” rather than the “person”. An election process can fail to provide validation against errors. A person, however, commits fraud.
    - specialist 6y ago
      Ya, process vs people is a smarter dichotomy. More general purpose. Thank you.
- kspacewalk2 6y ago
  Human-created systems (science funding in the US) are absolutely built upon human ethics and morals and subject to modification. But the concept of productivity = f(time-invested) is indeed an amoral natural law. f(.) is not necessarily something simple like a line, maybe a sigmoid, I don't know. But the idea that time spent on a problem is, away from corner cases like 0 and 24/7, positively correlated with results and productivity - that idea is indeed amoral and not really mutable. You bring up the military, and I can draw another analogy - development of a military technology. Sure, you can decide nukes are amoral, but the more actors there are in the world, the higher the chance that someone else will develop them anyway, and will wipe the floor with you, amoral as though they may be. So do you really have a choice? Generall,y when a technological advance is possible and brings about significant advantages for the entity that develops it, it will eventually happen. It won't be good or bad, it just will be. Agonize about it or don't, develop it or let yourself be overpowered by the one who will - your moral choice entirely.
  - bumby 6y ago
    I’m with you in the first paragraph. My larger issue is when the function is reduced to a single variable like time invested. There are some cases where time invested can even be counterproductive because of competing effects (think of newbies working out who assume more is always better and eventually become overstrained). My point is that it’s naive to think time = productivity in anything but trivially simple systems. To think that about complex systems can get you in trouble Your second paragraph I’m less sure about. It comes across as realpolitik (that may have been your point) which can be used as a rationalization to continue immoral behavior. My bringing up the military is that we can create systems that incentivize certain behavior (lobbying for a military need) and confuse that with natural law when in reality it can be mitigated through a differently oriented system (in this case, one that more clearly separates money and politics)
neutronicus 6y ago
I did not argue that this situation is "bad," I argued that it's "hostile to people who want to start families." Now, you can guess based on my emotional language that I think it is good to pursue policies that make careers more open to people who want families. And, as it happens, the US government agrees, in so far as it designates wanting a family a protected class for the purpose of employment discrimination. My argument, devoid of moral content, is: If it's your aim to avoid excluding people who want families from a career, you need to regulate the amount of hours people in that career are expected to work, the amount they're expected to travel, and the distribution of lifetime expected earnings (don't unnecessarily gate a prosperous 40s behind penurious child-bearing years). Since this particular career is overwhelmingly government-funded, free-market analyses miss the point - the government decides how many Physics Grad Students there are, what they're paid, and largely what their future career trajectories are. Given that it holds the purse strings it also holds substantially more power to regulate working conditions than it otherwise would. It's empirically obvious that people who want families are excluded from science, and I'm positing that the above is why.
- tomp 6y ago
  I also want the society to support more families, especially by the highly educated people (not in the name of some IQ-supremacy, although you could argue that's beneficial to society, but simply to level the playing field - low educated people don't seem to have any problem having tons of kids, while high educated are delaying family creation more and more - and in case of women, often into their less fertile years). However, my proposed solutions are quite different, and much more direct - simply address the main issues directly - the main issue IMO currently being housing (at least in major cities, near major colleges, in major Western countries). So you could make a simple rule, giving (either literally, or in a form of long-term (10+ years) loan that automatically gets written of under some conditions) young people apartments when they e.g. enroll in a difficult STEM PhD program. Once this problem is "sorted" (housing represents a major factor in how "secure" you feel about your future - you and your kids never going homeless) I think that would encourage many young highly-educated high-achiever couples to start families much sooner.
  - 6y ago

bumby 6y ago

“It isn’t good or bad, it simply is” implies it followed some amoral natural law. These are human-created systems, though, and would be built upon human ethics and morals. Stating academia as an institution just “is” isn’t much different than asserting the military-industrial-congressional complex just “is”

luckylion 6y ago
> implies it followed some amoral natural law Doesn't it? If you have two lions of the same physical ability and one of them hunts for six hours a day and the other one hunts for 12 hours a day, which one would you expect to be more successful? > Stating academia as an institution just “is” isn’t much different than asserting the military-industrial-congressional complex just “is” It's not about academia specifically though, it's about any and all systems where individuals compete. Given similar talent, the one who puts in more time/effort will likely win.
- bumby 6y ago
  Except I don’t think we can/should reduce our institutions to such a simple model. There’s many more inputs than just work-hours. We build our institutions to guard against this. That’s why we don’t live in an anarcho-capitalist society and have things like anti-trust laws.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > There’s many more inputs than just work-hours. Obviously, but if you consider those to be very similar at the top of some field, wouldn't you expect work-hours to be important in predicting the outcome? I'm sure you can draw clear lines between two individuals, but when you look at many people of similar ability, how much time they put in will most likely predict their results pretty well. > We build our institutions to guard against this. We do? Is there a thing where you can explain that you're as smart as other people and therefore it shouldn't matter that they work 5 days a week in some area and you only work one day, and that it's unfair that they produce more results than you and get the promotion/grant/whatever you compete for? I've never heard of it.
    - bumby 6y ago
      The anti-trust example in the previous statement is one. It doesn't matter if someone is more successful, even if it's due solely to an extraordinary work ethic; societal institutions will artificially limit their market share. Sports is another example. Leagues put salary caps as well as minimum salaries to artificially limit compensation. Both sports and economics put these in place to provide a bulwark against such "natural laws" in favor of human defined ethics like fairness.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        Those are extremely different things. There is no monopoly in academics or personal career. Sports is a terrible example imho, because most of the compensation isn't in the salary, it's in the ad contracts. > Both sports and economics put these in place to provide a bulwark against such "natural laws" in favor of human defined ethics like fairness. That's not at all why we have anti-trust laws. They are harmful to the economy, that's why. If they weren't, that is, if monopolists usually were more efficient in lowering prices/increasing quality/innovating than companies that had competitors, we'd have no issue with monopolies at all.
        bumby 6y ago
- devit 6y ago
  There's no need for anyone to win, both the person working 6 hours and the one working 12 hours can contribute and be compensated proportionally to their efforts.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    No, they can't. There are more grad students than postdoc positions. Modern academia is famous/infamous for this.
- fock 6y ago
  One of them will be dead by exhaustion a short time after he piled up his bounty only to have it rot because he doesn't know a freezer...
specialist 6y ago
IMHO, depersonalizing a problem may help to mitigate it. My IRL analogy: Working in election integrity, I emphatically encouraged my peers to pointedly ignore intention, to frame problems as "errors", not "fraud". From the systems view, all fraud are technically errors. And the conversation is full stop over the moment someone says "fraud", "chicanery", "electioneering". But if you can keep the convo in the "safe space" of "errors", avoid partisanship and blame and whatever, then it's easier to build coalitions, persuade others, neutralize opposition. Just my two cents.
- bumby 6y ago
  I think that’s a good way to phrase it. Another is to focus on the “process” rather than the “person”. An election process can fail to provide validation against errors. A person, however, commits fraud.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Ya, process vs people is a smarter dichotomy. More general purpose. Thank you.
kspacewalk2 6y ago
Human-created systems (science funding in the US) are absolutely built upon human ethics and morals and subject to modification. But the concept of productivity = f(time-invested) is indeed an amoral natural law. f(.) is not necessarily something simple like a line, maybe a sigmoid, I don't know. But the idea that time spent on a problem is, away from corner cases like 0 and 24/7, positively correlated with results and productivity - that idea is indeed amoral and not really mutable. You bring up the military, and I can draw another analogy - development of a military technology. Sure, you can decide nukes are amoral, but the more actors there are in the world, the higher the chance that someone else will develop them anyway, and will wipe the floor with you, amoral as though they may be. So do you really have a choice? Generall,y when a technological advance is possible and brings about significant advantages for the entity that develops it, it will eventually happen. It won't be good or bad, it just will be. Agonize about it or don't, develop it or let yourself be overpowered by the one who will - your moral choice entirely.
- bumby 6y ago
  I’m with you in the first paragraph. My larger issue is when the function is reduced to a single variable like time invested. There are some cases where time invested can even be counterproductive because of competing effects (think of newbies working out who assume more is always better and eventually become overstrained). My point is that it’s naive to think time = productivity in anything but trivially simple systems. To think that about complex systems can get you in trouble Your second paragraph I’m less sure about. It comes across as realpolitik (that may have been your point) which can be used as a rationalization to continue immoral behavior. My bringing up the military is that we can create systems that incentivize certain behavior (lobbying for a military need) and confuse that with natural law when in reality it can be mitigated through a differently oriented system (in this case, one that more clearly separates money and politics)

neutronicus 6y ago

I did not argue that this situation is "bad," I argued that it's "hostile to people who want to start families." Now, you can guess based on my emotional language that I think it is good to pursue policies that make careers more open to people who want families. And, as it happens, the US government agrees, in so far as it designates wanting a family a protected class for the purpose of employment discrimination. My argument, devoid of moral content, is: If it's your aim to avoid excluding people who want families from a career, you need to regulate the amount of hours people in that career are expected to work, the amount they're expected to travel, and the distribution of lifetime expected earnings (don't unnecessarily gate a prosperous 40s behind penurious child-bearing years). Since this particular career is overwhelmingly government-funded, free-market analyses miss the point - the government decides how many Physics Grad Students there are, what they're paid, and largely what their future career trajectories are. Given that it holds the purse strings it also holds substantially more power to regulate working conditions than it otherwise would. It's empirically obvious that people who want families are excluded from science, and I'm positing that the above is why.

tomp 6y ago
I also want the society to support more families, especially by the highly educated people (not in the name of some IQ-supremacy, although you could argue that's beneficial to society, but simply to level the playing field - low educated people don't seem to have any problem having tons of kids, while high educated are delaying family creation more and more - and in case of women, often into their less fertile years). However, my proposed solutions are quite different, and much more direct - simply address the main issues directly - the main issue IMO currently being housing (at least in major cities, near major colleges, in major Western countries). So you could make a simple rule, giving (either literally, or in a form of long-term (10+ years) loan that automatically gets written of under some conditions) young people apartments when they e.g. enroll in a difficult STEM PhD program. Once this problem is "sorted" (housing represents a major factor in how "secure" you feel about your future - you and your kids never going homeless) I think that would encourage many young highly-educated high-achiever couples to start families much sooner.
- 6y ago