6 ms·

I recently read Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides". [1] In vast parts, it's not much more than mildly disguised US-bashing (Dijkstra

by kleiba 6y ago

I recently read Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides". [1] In vast parts, it's not much more than mildly disguised US-bashing (Dijkstra was always a grumpy old man) but that's not what caught my eye. What did was the fact that he describes the US research landscape as a system that orients itself around short-term projects and industry desires. Dijkstra clearly expresses his contempt for this approach over what he claims to be the European way: long-term thinking and research done for research's sake. That paper was written in 1982 Fast forward ~40 years, and the presumed US model is exactly the way research funding works all across Europe today. Jumping from one project to the next, always hoping that one of your next proposals will receive funding, or you're out of a job. Your project proposal has a weak "exploitation" section? Well, goodbye proposal then! Universities are thought of as nothing more than R&D departments and providers of new young hires for the economic sector. It's only consequential then to axe such "useless" disciplines as pure mathematics. This is a scandal. -- Edit: these news from last September fit perfectly into the picture [2]: The European Union’s next research programme is likely to have a greater emphasis on funding for applied research, experts have warned, as universities were told to put pressure on politicians to increase the budget. [...] In July, EU leaders agreed to spend €80.9 billion (£72.9 billion) on Horizon Europe, €13.5 billion less than was hoped for in May. However, regarding the budget cut, keep in mind the costs incurred by the COVID19 pandemic. -- [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD611.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E... [2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/horizon-europe-will-further-weaken-basic-research-funding https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/horizon-europe-wil...

dandanua 6y ago
It looks like our civilization has passed its peak and now bouncing back to medieval ages.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  If you read historic books you will notice this sentiment has been present almost constantly since antiquity. The fact is you get current state with all its gory details but the past with bad parts filtered out.
  - dandanua 6y ago
    Maybe, but something is constantly changing in the worrying direction. Humans are becoming slaves of the tools they build, not vice versa. Our biological abilities fade away in the presence of technological progress. People may fantasy about some cyberpank future, but I have doubts about it. Simpler organisms can't control what is superior to them. And I'm pretty sure general AI is a real thing, at least in the future. So, the confrontation between humans as biological species and tech progress is quite justifiable.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Konohamaru 6y ago
      > Simpler organisms can't control what is superior to them. Sure they can. Just pull the electrical plug on the 10,000 IQ general AI. Its future is entirely contingent on the continued existence of cheap oil, which we are already well past its peak.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    It also frequently happens, and there are many ulti century-long stretches of time in various places in the world from which we have virtually no literature or historical record, not even enough to verify basic facts like what cities were named or where they were located. Sometimes this is because there was virtually nothing being written at the time that anyone thought worth preserving, or because movements, marauders, armies, or some pogrom burned it all and forced people not to discuss the contents on pain of death. Alarm about the end of civilization is wrong far more often than it is right, but it is eventually right. Societies just recover over time. I'm afraid we've reached the level of technological sophistication that it might be hard to avoid putting a real end to it next time. Our current situation is materially different due to our machines.
- Lio 6y ago
  Which is ironic considering that Medieval Literature, and Chaucer in particular, is one of the other things the University of Leicester were talking about getting rid of.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    Fortunately, a university axing Chaucer is not going to end him, not only because he's already dead, but also because he's been dead for long enough that you can just read his works online for free, no university required: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Geoffrey_Chaucer https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Geoffrey_Chaucer
- martin-t 6y ago
  Most people are reactive, not proactive. Proactive people look at the big picture, search for facts instead of opinions, watch for trends in data and make decisions based on those. Reactive people just go with the flow until some big event happens, then maybe sometimes things change. Remember, civilization needs constant effort to maintain so by default things are getting slightly worse over time. If there's enough proactive people for upkeep, it stays the same or even gets better. If not, things keep getting worse until something sufficiently bad happens, then outrage follows and reactive people spring into action - e.g. protests or outright revolutions depending on how bad things were allowed to become. When things are good (or at least good enough) for a long time, less and less people see the need to be proactive...
cm2187 6y ago
You still have to keep in mind that something like 90% of the technological advances of the XX century were born in US labs. So it’s not that broken.
- kleiba 6y ago
  Well, if technological advances is the only thing you care for, sure, then go ahead and get rid of stuff like pure maths. However, are you sure that these advances would not have been made if the US had a different system? Like I argued before, Europe has pretty much copied the system by now but I don't see much in terms of catching up. Take A.I., for instance: completely dominated by the U.S. and China. Europe? Like in many things in life, copying someone else's successful model is by no means a guarantee that you're going to be successful too. Why? Because your circumstances are usually completely different from whatever you're copying.
  - turbonaut 6y ago
    > Take A.I., for instance: completely dominated by the U.S. and China. Europe? DeepMind?
    - kleiba 6y ago
      Alphabet is not a university.
      - quonn 6y ago
        Alphabet bought it. But it‘s a direct result of university research with the same people. Just check the field of reinforcement learning.
        kleiba 6y ago
        True, but a singular example does not save the continent.
potamic 6y ago
Sadly it's the same in software these days. I've seen places where the business teams outnumber the development teams. It's such a clusterfuck with everyone trying to steer the direction their way, when only so much can be built. Of course, when it comes to hiring more devs, "we don't have the budget for it".
- melomal 6y ago
  Patched up software with increasing technical debt is how a business should be run, haven't you heard? Oh and in the mean time get more sales, create immediate displeasure and load up the outsourced customer support with angry clients. /s
antihero 6y ago
It's almost as if a capitalist system rewards people who seek dollar signs instead of real progress, and is antithetical to what is genuine and good. Progress is merely a side-effect of capitalism. If people can gain capital without it, they will.
anticristi 6y ago
I agree with you analysis, but is this necessarily bad (or rather, is all of this bad)? As a young researcher, my peers and I already noticed the "customer-ification" of academia. Taxpayers are investigating in academia, either via tuition fees or research grants, and expect to see returns: Either more jobs, more competitive national economy or a better life. So far so good. Unfortunately, too much "customer-ification" leads to job insecurity for more junior academic members and kills "moonshots". However, without "customer-ification" the system ends up with dinasors that do research "for fun" on taxpayer's money, with no real return. Now, I'm unsure how much "customer-ification" is healthy. I would argue that both too little and too much hurt. I was fortunate enough to see some of my more junior peers striving with "just the right" amount: They managed to get themselves on R&D boards of companies, yet do research on fundamental theories. Think "to truly make airbags reliable, we need a theory on controlling non-linear systems of type X". I'm not sure what happened in the case debated here, but I genuinely hope that the departments that are under thread have some evidence for their usefulness (e.g. public outreach for medieval literature, joint-articles for pure math).
- woofie11 6y ago
  Well, the underlying problem is high tuition and high faculty salaries. Faculty used to be like a monastery, where scholars could live a simple life to nerd in their topic of nerdhood. Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. Tuition went up multifold too. I'm more than happy to pay a bunch of nerds $60k per year to have lifetime jobs to sit around and nerd, but if my taxpayer dollars are paying for that monstrosity, it better darned well deliver economic value too.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago
    What nerd with intellect would work as a professor if they could earn the significantly more money working for a hedge fund, FAANG, etc? Genuine question. The current academic hopeful spends their 20s in near-poverty level stipends and are more likely than not to never get a professorship as it is. If they did all that for 60k/yr why would they even bother? (Additionally I don’t know if it applies here, but often that money to build buildings is with conditions- ie.”you have to use this money to build a building a name it after me”.)
agumonkey 6y ago
The opposite is also true. I read a book about early electricity discoveries. People in Europe were all about the deep end theories. America.. pragmatism reigned supreme. As long as you can make something out of phenomenon you're good to go. The book said that by the time Edison made a light bulb, European academics were still debating unproven theories.
- morelisp 6y ago
  On the other hand, by the time Europeans made the WWW, American capitalists were still trying to figure out how to micromonetize resource transclusion.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    Then www rose in the US while France was having meetings about what protocol to use for the minitel. It's and odd pattern.
- frobozz 6y ago
  That book was bunk. By the time Edison made a light bulb, incandescent light had been initially demonstrated by Davy 70 years beforehand, and shown to practical by Lindsay 35 years after that. Jobard, de la Rue, and de Moleyns had made experimental light bulbs 40 years beforehand, Lodygin had held a patent for 5 years. Most crucially, Swan's lightbulbs had been lighting Mosley Street for six months. Carbon arc lights (also shown by Davy early in the 1800s) having been in commercial use for some time before that. The main invention that made light bulbs practically viable was the improved vacuum pumps of the 1870s, which none of these people lay claim to. This is what led to the rapid development of incandescent light in the 1880s.
- cambalache 6y ago
  You should read better researched books
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    I think I misremembered because he was an EE from swiss EPFL IIRC.

by kleiba 6y ago

dandanua 6y ago

It looks like our civilization has passed its peak and now bouncing back to medieval ages.

lmilcin 6y ago
If you read historic books you will notice this sentiment has been present almost constantly since antiquity. The fact is you get current state with all its gory details but the past with bad parts filtered out.
- dandanua 6y ago
  Maybe, but something is constantly changing in the worrying direction. Humans are becoming slaves of the tools they build, not vice versa. Our biological abilities fade away in the presence of technological progress. People may fantasy about some cyberpank future, but I have doubts about it. Simpler organisms can't control what is superior to them. And I'm pretty sure general AI is a real thing, at least in the future. So, the confrontation between humans as biological species and tech progress is quite justifiable.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Konohamaru 6y ago
    > Simpler organisms can't control what is superior to them. Sure they can. Just pull the electrical plug on the 10,000 IQ general AI. Its future is entirely contingent on the continued existence of cheap oil, which we are already well past its peak.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  It also frequently happens, and there are many ulti century-long stretches of time in various places in the world from which we have virtually no literature or historical record, not even enough to verify basic facts like what cities were named or where they were located. Sometimes this is because there was virtually nothing being written at the time that anyone thought worth preserving, or because movements, marauders, armies, or some pogrom burned it all and forced people not to discuss the contents on pain of death. Alarm about the end of civilization is wrong far more often than it is right, but it is eventually right. Societies just recover over time. I'm afraid we've reached the level of technological sophistication that it might be hard to avoid putting a real end to it next time. Our current situation is materially different due to our machines.
Lio 6y ago
Which is ironic considering that Medieval Literature, and Chaucer in particular, is one of the other things the University of Leicester were talking about getting rid of.
- yorwba 6y ago
  Fortunately, a university axing Chaucer is not going to end him, not only because he's already dead, but also because he's been dead for long enough that you can just read his works online for free, no university required: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Geoffrey_Chaucer https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Geoffrey_Chaucer
martin-t 6y ago
Most people are reactive, not proactive. Proactive people look at the big picture, search for facts instead of opinions, watch for trends in data and make decisions based on those. Reactive people just go with the flow until some big event happens, then maybe sometimes things change. Remember, civilization needs constant effort to maintain so by default things are getting slightly worse over time. If there's enough proactive people for upkeep, it stays the same or even gets better. If not, things keep getting worse until something sufficiently bad happens, then outrage follows and reactive people spring into action - e.g. protests or outright revolutions depending on how bad things were allowed to become. When things are good (or at least good enough) for a long time, less and less people see the need to be proactive...

cm2187 6y ago

You still have to keep in mind that something like 90% of the technological advances of the XX century were born in US labs. So it’s not that broken.

kleiba 6y ago
Well, if technological advances is the only thing you care for, sure, then go ahead and get rid of stuff like pure maths. However, are you sure that these advances would not have been made if the US had a different system? Like I argued before, Europe has pretty much copied the system by now but I don't see much in terms of catching up. Take A.I., for instance: completely dominated by the U.S. and China. Europe? Like in many things in life, copying someone else's successful model is by no means a guarantee that you're going to be successful too. Why? Because your circumstances are usually completely different from whatever you're copying.
- turbonaut 6y ago
  > Take A.I., for instance: completely dominated by the U.S. and China. Europe? DeepMind?
  - kleiba 6y ago
    Alphabet is not a university.
    - quonn 6y ago
      Alphabet bought it. But it‘s a direct result of university research with the same people. Just check the field of reinforcement learning.
      - kleiba 6y ago
        True, but a singular example does not save the continent.

potamic 6y ago

Sadly it's the same in software these days. I've seen places where the business teams outnumber the development teams. It's such a clusterfuck with everyone trying to steer the direction their way, when only so much can be built. Of course, when it comes to hiring more devs, "we don't have the budget for it".

melomal 6y ago
Patched up software with increasing technical debt is how a business should be run, haven't you heard? Oh and in the mean time get more sales, create immediate displeasure and load up the outsourced customer support with angry clients. /s

antihero 6y ago

It's almost as if a capitalist system rewards people who seek dollar signs instead of real progress, and is antithetical to what is genuine and good. Progress is merely a side-effect of capitalism. If people can gain capital without it, they will.

anticristi 6y ago

I agree with you analysis, but is this necessarily bad (or rather, is all of this bad)? As a young researcher, my peers and I already noticed the "customer-ification" of academia. Taxpayers are investigating in academia, either via tuition fees or research grants, and expect to see returns: Either more jobs, more competitive national economy or a better life. So far so good. Unfortunately, too much "customer-ification" leads to job insecurity for more junior academic members and kills "moonshots". However, without "customer-ification" the system ends up with dinasors that do research "for fun" on taxpayer's money, with no real return. Now, I'm unsure how much "customer-ification" is healthy. I would argue that both too little and too much hurt. I was fortunate enough to see some of my more junior peers striving with "just the right" amount: They managed to get themselves on R&D boards of companies, yet do research on fundamental theories. Think "to truly make airbags reliable, we need a theory on controlling non-linear systems of type X". I'm not sure what happened in the case debated here, but I genuinely hope that the departments that are under thread have some evidence for their usefulness (e.g. public outreach for medieval literature, joint-articles for pure math).

woofie11 6y ago
Well, the underlying problem is high tuition and high faculty salaries. Faculty used to be like a monastery, where scholars could live a simple life to nerd in their topic of nerdhood. Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. Tuition went up multifold too. I'm more than happy to pay a bunch of nerds $60k per year to have lifetime jobs to sit around and nerd, but if my taxpayer dollars are paying for that monstrosity, it better darned well deliver economic value too.
- SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago
  What nerd with intellect would work as a professor if they could earn the significantly more money working for a hedge fund, FAANG, etc? Genuine question. The current academic hopeful spends their 20s in near-poverty level stipends and are more likely than not to never get a professorship as it is. If they did all that for 60k/yr why would they even bother? (Additionally I don’t know if it applies here, but often that money to build buildings is with conditions- ie.”you have to use this money to build a building a name it after me”.)

agumonkey 6y ago

The opposite is also true. I read a book about early electricity discoveries. People in Europe were all about the deep end theories. America.. pragmatism reigned supreme. As long as you can make something out of phenomenon you're good to go. The book said that by the time Edison made a light bulb, European academics were still debating unproven theories.

morelisp 6y ago
On the other hand, by the time Europeans made the WWW, American capitalists were still trying to figure out how to micromonetize resource transclusion.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Then www rose in the US while France was having meetings about what protocol to use for the minitel. It's and odd pattern.
frobozz 6y ago
That book was bunk. By the time Edison made a light bulb, incandescent light had been initially demonstrated by Davy 70 years beforehand, and shown to practical by Lindsay 35 years after that. Jobard, de la Rue, and de Moleyns had made experimental light bulbs 40 years beforehand, Lodygin had held a patent for 5 years. Most crucially, Swan's lightbulbs had been lighting Mosley Street for six months. Carbon arc lights (also shown by Davy early in the 1800s) having been in commercial use for some time before that. The main invention that made light bulbs practically viable was the improved vacuum pumps of the 1870s, which none of these people lay claim to. This is what led to the rapid development of incandescent light in the 1880s.
cambalache 6y ago
You should read better researched books
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I think I misremembered because he was an EE from swiss EPFL IIRC.