22 ms·

Elite Underproduction

• hhaha88 5y ago
  Adam Smith wrote the state must protect equality of condition on similar grounds. The origin of higher education is partly rooted in selling secular credentials the public was too ignorant to falsify, as science began falsifying fairytale. We keep circling around payola for landlords and manual labor for the rest. This isn’t exactly new.
• b9a2cab5 5y ago
  The "academic meatgrinder" ignores the fact that a plurality of top PhD and MS programs' students are international, usually from Europe, India or China. There are deeper issues at play - like the fact that American K-12 schools often have an anti-intellectual culture and American culture as a whole does not place sufficient emphasis on doing well in school.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    Worth noting that many of those cultures have a much more idealistic view of Science. Americans often use business terms when discussing science.
  • yaacov 5y ago
    That’s because of visas. In the US you can study CS at a good school now and make $200k straight out of undergrad. Makes a technical PhD a lot less tempting
    • kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
      Where are you getting that $200k figure? These are for not just out of college: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/computer-science-salary-SRCH_KO0,16.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/computer-science-salary-S... https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Computer-Science-Salary-by-State https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Co... https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Master_of_Science_(MS)%2C_Computer_Science_(CS)/Salary https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Master_of_Scienc...
      • marcinzm 5y ago
        Large tech companies will pay that much and if you've got the skills to get a PhD then you can very likely pass their interview process. https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi... Also most of the generic pay sites in my experience are down weighted by a bunch of underpaid visa workers, boot camp graduates and so on. Also government workers who don't get paid well but get great benefits.
      • ryandrake 5y ago
        OP said you can make $200k straight out of undergrad, which is probably technically true, like it's technically true that I can win the lottery or get struck by lightning. There is probably a new grad somewhere making $200k in far-far right tail of the distribution. Just like it's technically true that you can make $400k (or $600k or $1M, whatever the popular number to cite is now) as a software engineer. Yes, these people probably do exist in that long tail, at certain top levels in certain top companies in certain top locations.
        • marcinzm 5y ago
          If you think it's that far in the right tail then you're really underestimating how much large tech companies pay even new grads. edit: Also, $400k is about standard for a senior SE at a large tech company or late stage startup nowadays.
        • bidirectional 5y ago
          I really don't think it's that far out in the tails, especially given we're discussing top universities. If you're at MIT/Harvard/Stanford you're definitely aiming for 200k TC fresh out of undergrad.
          • diognesofsinope 5y ago
            Exactly my thought: A CS degree from Stanford almost has to start at at least 90k.
        • 5y ago
  • civilized 5y ago
    I can't help but wonder if the current economy, with all its inequality and disproportionate rewards for the highly skilled, is a necessary step on the path towards changing the anti-intellectual US culture. You get more of what you reward and less of what you don't. It's not always a pleasant truth, but it's a powerful one.
    • rayiner 5y ago
      Calling it a “step” implies moving in that direction. But the problem in America is that the counter-movement against “anti-intellectualism” is just as anti-intellectual. More people are going to college, but they’re not majoring in math and science. We have an ever expanding ecosystem of non-rigorous *studies fields. These are arguably even less valuable than the cultural norms of Bible-thumping small towns. At least the latter has demonstrated itself as a framework capable of socially supporting communities of people who build things. The former has no track record whatsoever. You can see this exemplified in the fact that, even as we are mocking people for not going to college, we are lowering academic standards and getting rid of gifted programs: https://www.teachforamerica.org/one-day/opinion/stop-eliminating-gifted-programs-and-calling-it-equity https://www.teachforamerica.org/one-day/opinion/stop-elimina.... It’s magical thinking on all sides.
      • civilized 5y ago
        The *studies folks are complaining loudly and bitterly of their debt and not having cushy jobs handed to them on a silver platter. In principle this should encourage future students not to take those paths. I agree that I don't like the direction we're headed, but hopefully the natural consequences of that direction will encourage people to revisit their ideological assumptions.
        • rayiner 5y ago
          The natural consequences of this will be China overtaking the US. Americans are not going to enjoy a world where they’re not the dominant power. Among other things they’re really going to hate not being able to print money for consumption free of consequences.
  • named-user 5y ago
    Which has what implications? Your comment is kind of meaningless drivel with abstruse language.
    • dang 5y ago
      Name-calling like this will get you banned here. Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully and respectfully? Edit: your account has already been repeatedly posting comments that either break the site guidelines or are on the edge. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  • civilized 5y ago
    I'm not sure your evidence makes the point you intended. The academic meat-grinder is the best way for those international students to get visas.
  • finexplained 5y ago
    I don't really think the connection you're trying to draw follows immediately. There are very strong domestic students, probably enough to fill all the top PhD programs. The calculus for pursuing a PhD is different if you're a domestic vs international student. If you're international and want to move to and eventually live in the US, where some of the highest paying jobs in the world are available, then first getting into a well regarded graduate program, which will attract potential employers, coming in on a student visa and then getting an employer to sponsor an H1B is a pretty good strategy. If you're already a top student in the US at a top university, you already have access to those employers and intend to stay in the same country long term, so the opportunity cost of going to graduate school is so much higher.
    • b9a2cab5 5y ago
      If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population. I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism. If you look at top public school undergrad programs that don't practice affirmative action (UC's, UW) the programs are almost 50% Asian. To be clear, when I say American I mean someone whose ancestors have lived in America for multiple generations, since at least the 1950's. I'm the child of immigrants and I don't consider myself an American. My culture places a distinctly different emphasis on educational achievement compared to what you might consider an American.
      • cm2012 5y ago
        Not quite. American across the sea immigration selects for the smartest and most ambitious people in the world. It's natural that they and their descendants will outperform most Americans.
        • Robotbeat 5y ago
          & it benefits Americans (even those whose families have been here for generations) tremendously. I am a “native born” American, and I’ve benefited a lot from having a whole bunch of extremely smart immigrants in my field. My physics graduate school mentor was from Ukraine, my advisor was an immigrant from China. The person who hired me out of graduate school to an aerospace/materials science job was an immigrant from the Philippines. Several of the coworkers who have best coached and mentored me were immigrants from Zimbabwe and Korea. Generally more helpful and kind to me than native-born coworkers. It is as positive sum as it gets. (although I don’t think it lasts very long past first or second generation immigrants. It’s more individual choice and family culture than anything. So the only way to keep the benefit of cherrypicking & equipping the most ambitious and brightest among the world is to continuously encourage high skilled immigration.)
  • watwut 5y ago
    America produce huge amount of smart educated people. They choose to not do PhD, because financially it is often sucky decision. It has nothing to do with elementary or high schools performance. Those produce capable kids enough. It has to do with decisions and priorities those people have as young adults. And they are not even making bad decisions, for them not doing PhD is rational choice.
  • systemvoltage 5y ago
    As an immigrant to USA in my teens in mid-2000s, one of the striking and underappreciated things about Americans (those that are born in USA) as well as the entire culture of America embodies a sort of a liberating spirit that resonates everywhere. Once you graduate high-school, the world is yours. The transition is quite remarkable and college students have a tremendous amount of ambition. I hated highschool because it was too easy (even AP courses), but loved college. There is also a deep disdain for hierarchical structure in USA and it is one of the most unique aspects that I don't see anywhere else. It gets developed in college years and then continues onwards to the professional world. If we have a spectrum from "Individualism" to "Hierarchical", we can draw USA on one end and may be Japan on the other. Germany would fall in the middle. I don't think international students like myself bring anything new, but we learn a lot from Americans and then obtain citizenship. These observations were at the center of my conscience as I was growing up into adulthood.
• danny_codes 5y ago
  I find this kind of thinking kind of insulting actually. As a guy with a physics degree who's doing machine learning (precisely what the author bemoans), I don't feel like I "lapsed". I have other interests besides physics. There's a lot of things that aren't physics. > What they're not doing is advancing the human understanding of the physical world. I don't owe you anything. If this is your dream than do it yourself.
  • dash2 5y ago
    He didn't blame the individuals, instead he argued that there's a social problem which society needs to solve.
    • watwut 5y ago
      And countra argument is that smart capable educated people choosing to do machine learning instead of physics is not social issue. That it is them not lapsing and doing less worthy intellectual pursuit.
      • Shacklz 5y ago
        > And countra argument is that smart capable educated people choosing to do machine learning instead of physics is not social issue. You want your brightest in society to do things that further society/humanity as a whole; playing the stock-market game or optimizing models to further consumerism (which is what most ML in the industry boils down to, let's be honest) isn't exactly doing that. Everyone's absolutely free to work on whatever they want, that's for sure. But from a society point of view, we should ask ourselves if our system sets the right incentives.
      • Jensson 5y ago
        > smart capable educated people choosing to do machine learning instead of physics is not social issue It definitely is a social issue, the main reason people make that switch is money and money is a social issue. Why would you make less money doing physics research than helping advertisers better manipulate people? There is no reason, currently society rewards the later more than the former, but in another society it could be the other way around. So the problem isn't if you as an individual choose to switch field since you'd like that field better, but all those who switched since that field pays better. That is the social issue.
• fullshark 5y ago
  Most of the frontiers our society explored and expanded in the last 80 years were borne from world war 1 and 2 technological advancements I'd argue, more so than true elites emerging (or those elites emerged due to WW2, e.g. Turing and Von Braun). If you agree with the author that we need these frontiers, then that's a scary thing for the future of civilization.
  • novok 5y ago
    Nuclear bombs and rockets came out of WW2, but the revolutions of general relativity and quantum physics were being researched without any war to create them.
• smnrchrds 5y ago
  You may like this article as well: Why Are Egyptian Youth Burning Their University Diplomas? The Overeducation Crisis in Egypt https://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/middle-east-briefs/pdfs/101-200/meb102.pdf https://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/middle-east-brie...
  • nradov 5y ago
    It's sad how the protesting Egyptian students are asking for exactly the wrong thing. Large numbers of public sector jobs are the problem not the solution. If they can't manage such a basic analysis correctly then it indicates that their elite educations didn't teach them much of value.
• wpasc 5y ago
  I strongly agree with the premise of the article, and I wish more of society was aware of the issues that propagate what the author calls "Elite Underproduction". However, while I agree with the premise, I think the precise factors that create this issue are not sufficiently discussed or agreed upon (Not enough money goes into science research? Regulation imposes too heavy a burden on the outputs of scientific endeavors in the material world? We culturally are not sufficiently accepting of those people who would like to do elite-esque style research?). I'm not sure what the precise ratios of the causes are but I feel each of those question marks I just wrote contribute somewhat. Personally, I have no idea what the ratio is or a great way to go about fixing it. But hey, if some awareness of the issue helps, I'm all for it. Regardless of what you feel about Peter Thiel or Eric Weinstein, their discussion in the first episode of Eric Weinstein's podcast at least discusses the issue around "Elite Underprudction". In that episode, Eric brings a perspective from a more left-leaning viewpoint and Thiel with his signature more libterarian/right-leaning viewpoint.
  • pharmakom 5y ago
    Thiel is right wing but definitely not libertarian.
    • enchiridion 5y ago
      Isn’t Thiel essentially anarcho-capitalist? So pretty far right and extremely (in the literal sense) libertarian. EDIT: anachro->anarcho
      • woodruffw 5y ago
        Thiel's hawkish military (and self-interested, given Palantir's contracts with Defense) positions on China probably put him outside of the pale of "normal" libertarian politics.
        • native_samples 5y ago
          Normally libertarianism has an 'exception' for defense because it's a pure commons. There's no obvious way to have private sector military due to the nature of wars and invasions. Indeed, the government having a monopoly on violence is a core part of libertarian thinking.
• errantspark 5y ago
  It feels like the problem is tied to our understanding of what's important as a society. We agree more or less that money represents value, even if people say it doesn't their actions say they it does. I think the more we double down on this as gospel the further our manufactured/perceived reality can move away from the underlying truth of the world. Money only represents short term value well. I think at some point the tension there will be too much for the fiction to hold and the fault line will have to fall back into equilibrium. It would probably be best if we were to do it gently.
  • lostdog 5y ago
    Money represents immediate value, and basic science is long term value, and it's very difficult to get money to jump that temporal gap.
• 101keyboard 5y ago
  "In my line of work I meet plenty of lapsed physicists. These are people with physics degrees, even physics Ph.D's, who don't do physics. Instead they're usually some sort of programmer, or occasionally some version of a quant." I now PhDs that became High School teachers and they were some of the most gifted. I know PhDs that wait tables to make ends meet. I think if the guy has fundamentally not understood what Peter Turchin was talking about. They are getting priced out of the housing market, won't ever be able to afford to buy a house. Even raising a family might be difficult. At the same time you pay for services for the boomers and a retirement and social security that yourself might never see.
  • timkam 5y ago
    As somebody who's about to finish a CS dissertation, I sometimes think the best way to do CS research is to get a somewhat interesting software engineering job that allows for a 4-day week and to do research as a side project. Most likely, this gives one more research time than staying in academia (with the exception of the first Post Doc, perhaps). Edit: This works for most of CS, but not for most of Physics, I assume.
    • cinquemb 5y ago
      Could work for alot of computational-x fields. Historically, i tried to get software dev jobs that maximized my free time to do whatever i what on the side (also helped that i've been working remotely for ~6 years).
• rob_c 5y ago
  Cool, very interesting reading. Does anyone know a good resource rich details the change in job demographics over time for different nations? (Possibly just my google fu escapes me today)
• maayank 5y ago
  > In the long run, creating more understanding of the physical world is probably more universally valuable to human flourishing than the far more parochial 'make money number go up' Citation needed. Moreover, dedicating resources to finance can be seen as dedicating resources to better dedicate resources. (I upvoted the article since it's interesting stuff)
  • WhisperingShiba 5y ago
    I think the money number go up thing is not working, and I'm sure study of the physical world is part of the solution, but the biggest gains for our society seem to be in the way we structure our lifes. I think the coming decades, the study of eudaimonia will be key to our advancement as a species. I asserted that using money as a mechanism for gradient ascent is not working. I will walk you through my thinking, since this is an off beat claim. 1) Not all human needs are related to resources. Money cannot buy dignity, or love, and in-fact can generate the opposite of these qualities in one's life. 2) Most 1st World Humans have everything they need, materially, and more 3) Suicide is the ultimate statement of 'I am not having a good time' 4) Wealth is not hugely overwhelmingly correlated with lower suicide rates, with some of the wealthiest countries clocking in the highest rates of suicide. Source: List of countries by suicide rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate#data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r... (Sort by all descending) 5) I believe some other element or spirit is being maximized in happy countries, which also leads to wealth. 6) We should try to maximize a certain social spirit, which then maximizes wealth, instead of trying to directly maximize wealth. 7) GDP is a strange metric, which doesn't directly map to abundance. Yet, socially, we try to maximize it. I think this metric is victim to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law Thoughts?
    • convolvatron 5y ago
      i think you're absolutely right. one issue here is kind of 'streetlight' problem. money gets you a crude, and perhaps a counterproductive way of measuring value. but what other metric are you going to use? not an anti-communist, but so far central planning has shown itself to be equally ripe for corruption.
• golemotron 5y ago
  The author wants to manufacture demand. It's not that easy.
  • lostdog 5y ago
    It is simple, but not easy. Just replicate DARPA+NIH+NSF, and increase the total research budget by 100x, and ensure there are stable career paths to be a researcher until retirement.
    • convolvatron 5y ago
      more importantly, have money in DARPA+NIH+NSF like institutions and find some success metric that lets you reward fundamental basic science rather than things that are of interest to the military or commercial establishments. i worked on DARPA contracts for quite a number of years...they were...ok? but you still had to spend some energy talking about how this was going to benefit the warfighter or lead to something that was going to make someone alot of money NIH and NSF are certainly better, but my impression is that you still get alot of points in NSF land for showing a path towards commericialization
    • native_samples 5y ago
      That would result in extremely large quantities of junk science of use to nobody. Increasing research funding must be entirely off the table until non-replicable research papers are no longer field-destroying problems.
• dzink 5y ago
  Support steers choices for ambitious youth. Those MBAs are deployed to put ears on the ground and markets, to surface consumer needs, generate demand for products at companies, and vet investment worthy projects in the market. They steer capital and engineers where the work is valuable, that makes money, and that fuels the demand for more MBAs. Researchers are building branches in the forest of knowledge, but to do it they have to bend to the will of an academic apparatus that is made to be self serving and zero sum in the hands of few who may or may not be worthy of the trust placed in them. There is also plenty of fraud and cheating globally among academic contributors. It’s almost like we need an HN for each branch or academic work, so anyone can contribute and see what’s novel, and the feedback is from vetted experts only, but that would put an undue burden on the experts and reduce their own productivity. There is room for an open collaborative solution somewhere, but it needs a lot of iteration to get it right.
  • wpietri 5y ago
    Is their much evidence for your view of MBAs? I understand that's their self-myth, of course. But I don't see much of that in practice. And MBAs play a big role in the more predatory reaches of corporate America. E.g.: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/buyout-firms-profited-as-simmons-debt-soared/ https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/buyout-firms-profite...
• avsteele 5y ago
  I disagree with the article's premises and conclusions, my perspective is that of a physicist who also knows many lapsed physicists. The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum. So to me the article really is "I agree with the elite overproduction thesis, I just don't think it applies to physics". OK lets talk about that then. If there is something that's gone wrong with pushing forward the boundaries of our knowledge it isn't a lack of bodies producing the standard unit of scientific knowledge: "the peer-reviewed publication". These have grown exponentially. I don't think I've seen anyone even argue the rate of knowledge increase is growing commensurately. It *might* be the case that new knowledge requires exponentially more people looking for it but that's a pretty different article. Personally, I'm skeptical more NSF funding would help. I do agree with this part: Our apparatus of scientific education, especially mathematics education, is deeply flawed. It takes too long to bring young people to the research front, and it produces a false view of what doing science is really like. But this research is in a academic setting, and there is definitely, unambiguously, an overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available. Letting more new students in the door wouldn't help anyone!
  • erikerikson 5y ago
    I took the author as saying we should have more research positions for those PhDs to inhabit and while we're at it, why don't we let them do that research instead of playing the current academy games that undermine research production.
  • rossdavidh 5y ago
    Thank you for elegantly summarizing the things I was going to take a lot longer to try to state, less coherently.
  • Robotbeat 5y ago
    Part of the problem with Physics PhDs is they take too long. Median of like 7 years in graduate school. And they’re hyper-specialized, not as useful as the general education you get in physics undergrad. Good argument for making more undergrad physics students but stopping the emphasis on graduate degrees. Graduate degrees: 7 years of your young life focusing on a very specific topic that might be better spent applying the really useful physics undergraduate education in industry (or perhaps adding a couple more years in engineering graduate school beforehand). Not to say that graduate school has no function. But The cost benefit is not nearly as clear as the education you get in undergrad.
• fsloth 5y ago
  I think Turchin percieves the matter better than the author. For some reason the author presumes everyone who decides to to study physics should not veer from this path or else they have failed. This is an extraordinary queer point of view. As such a "failed" physicist myself now in software, having a degree in physics makes me actually quite malleable for all sorts of fun things, and my studies have indoctrinated me to basically view everything as an unknows system, that can be modelled even though current models don't exist. This is very usefull! It's great to have this sort of dialogue, but the n physicists doing programming have found a niche for themselves and their talents. I would not call that failing. The other side of the coin is that should science be better supported? Instill insight and ambition to students? None of those are bad things from the point of view of the discpline. But attacking the argument from the point of view that "everyone who started studying physics, and are now doing something else signal a failure of the system" smells very much of propagating a view that people at the young age when they decide their university program should have a great understanding of the world, their position in it, and absolute certainty that physics is the best way to spend their working life. Which most 18-20 year olds probably don't have (well, I did not for one). And having thus chosen a profession out of poor understanding of the complete picture, should stick to their decision and pull through, even though it seems to them other professions would be more suitable. The author mixes the bag even more by off-the-cuff random judgment calls on the intrinsic human value of others labour, which never really results in a sane dialogue. The claim itself is incredibly elitist - "Optimizing an algorithm at Google has less human value than repeating an known experiment at a physics lab to dot the i:s on a well understood theory". Physics is very important! But individual career choices are in a different category altogether. If you go and study physics and stick to it you might have ended up wasting your intellectual potential on hyped dead-ends like string theory . Now where is the benefit for mankind in that? (the comment is intended as a naughty swipe and I'm smirking while typing this).
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• powera 5y ago
  This seems to subscribe to the "bulb theory" of technological advancement; that if we have ten times as many physicists we will make physics advances ten times as quickly. That's just not true. And the various "lapsed physicists" he meets are in fact proof of elite overproduction.
• losvedir 5y ago
  Offtopic, but the article uses and defines "MAGMA", meaning Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. That actually makes a lot of sense to me. How did Netflix make it into the usual acronym and not Microsoft?
  • TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    Netflix was there primarily because its compensation was in the same tier.
  • altantiprocrast 5y ago
    Netflix makes a better acronym MANGA
    • jjk166 5y ago
      I miss the days of HP, eBay, Netscape, Texas Instruments, Adobe, and IBM.
  • TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    FAANG was originally a term for high-growth stocks. At the time it was coined, Netflix stock was growing rapidly while Microsoft was not.
• max002 5y ago
  Im curious about one thing and im self-taugh so please forgive lack of understanding of uni world. Youre saying that physicist who do machine learning should be instead trying to unserstand physical world. While not having academic background i do read a lot of science news (its my porn:D) and now and then i see stuff like "new strong material discoveded by ml", "ml speeds up discovery of composite materials" or "ml speeds up new drugs discovery" and so on. How that does not improve our understanding of physical world?
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    Physics itself is about creating models of the world that are simple and understandable, and provide profound insights. ML is the opposite of that, a black box that works but cannot explain itself. A drug discovered by ML is not increasing our understanding of the world.
    • max002 5y ago
      And IF we get to explainable models (i.e. https://aithority.com/machine-learning/neural-networks/deep-learning/abacus-ai-publishes-paper-on-explainable-machine-learning-for-neurips-2021/ https://aithority.com/machine-learning/neural-networks/deep-...) would that change its "usefulness" in physics world in your opinion? Not trying to fight or say that youre wrong. Just curious about perspective, im extremely detail oriented so i pick on them ^_^
      • cblconfederate 5y ago
        it doesnt even need to be explainable. If a model comes up with an equation that reconciles quantum physics with gravity then we could try to reason how it came to it, but we don't need to. As long as the model described in the equation is understandable by humans it should be enough. However most ML models are black boxes that solve problems without generating models of the world (that we know of) Physicists and mathematicians are uncomfortable with computer-generated proofs. I think they 'd be less uncomfortable with computer-generated theories because they can understand those
• Glyptodon 5y ago
  I think this guy has a point, but it's not actually a rebuttal to the elite overproduction thesis, it's more like "for this one angle of one piece of the elite overproduction issue we could actually do something." There are lots more people with PHDs that get pushed out of the academic research career direction they might have aspired to. And if more of them could successfully follow their dreams it'd probably be good. But that doesn't seem like a rebuttal to me.
• andreilys 5y ago
  In our society, Elite Overproduction can be explained as a form of Malthusian social competition where only so many resources and only so much status is available, and the only way to access a satisfactory slice is to compete within the power structures that control them. In turn, our institutions evolve mainly to facilitate this competition rather than performing their ostensible material functions. In turn this causes resentment to grow among those who never had access to those institutions in the first place. This situation is a consequence of Elite Underproduction. Our society is chronically bad at producing and nurturing true elites, the individuals who are capable of creating and sustaining frontiers. That makes malthusian competition inveitable, and the only thing going - the kinds of 'elites' we end up producing are good at that kind of competition and not much else. Yes it’s important to have elites that go out and create new frontiers, but at the same time status in a hierarchical society is inherently zero-sum. We can’t all be high status, because there needs to be some reference point. As an example in the world of law there are only so many spots available at Harvard Law School, even fewer spots for clerking with Supreme Court justices, and of course a very very small amount of actual Supreme Court justices. What happens when someone loses the high-status tournament to become a Supreme Court justice? Ideally they find another tournament/status game to play, somewhere they can succeed. But even so, if we saturate our society with too many lawyers, there are simply not enough tournaments they can play in (that will also pay them enough to pay off their student loans).
  • xyzelement 5y ago
    >What happens when someone loses the high-status tournament to become a Supreme Court justice? Ideally they find another tournament/status game to play, somewhere they can succeed. If someone reasonably bright orients their entire endeavor around the goal of becoming a Supreme Court Justice, they will be totally fine in life even if they fall well short of their goal. "Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you will land among the stars." The problem we have is actually the opposite - too many people believe that no opportunity is available to them, thus they don't pursue anything, and end up stagnant or declining ("Aim for the ground... can't miss!")
  • rtpg 5y ago
    Law is an interesting example, cuz it has so many points of the non-static nature of all of this. The number of people on the SC changes. The relative status of being a fancy defense lawyer changes. We could in the future set term limits to court judges. there are appelate courts (which are pretty close to the top)!. We could pack the court! We could also make it so that being a lawyer isn't actually prestigious, as a society. We could also stop just choosing people from Harvard & Yale. There are so many choices as a society about what is done, and how many people are or are not needed in certain roles, that the implicit premise in all of this (that the current state of things involve some static limits, _and_ that we have reached those limits right now, instead of 100 years ago or 100 years from now) doesn't stand. Even if I agree that everybody in US elite political circles going through law school is extremely bizarre and bad, I don't think either argument presented in the article holds up.
• greenail 5y ago
  My view is that the problem isn't "lapsed physicists". They are largely still productive and contributing elites. The problem is the "pseudo elite" masters of sociology graduate who ends up at starbucks with a ton of debt and a chip on their shoulder. The incentives are "college is good" without regard for the demand for the degree. While I agree that "college is good", it clearly isn't a good investment for everyone. Most current policy de-emphasizes other ways of learning like apprenticeships which may actually be well suited for technical things. It may be the better description is "pseudo elite overproduction" will cause social and political instability.
  • xyzelement 5y ago
    I think this is it, and matches my recall of the original theory. The sociology graduate working at Starbucks perceives himself elite ("much smarter than the Trump-voting plumber who didn't go to college") but in reality lives in poverty because there's a demand mismatch for his eliteness. This kind of dynamic adds to instability because such people are downwardly mobile (poorer than their parents) and rather than recognizing the key error that sent their life down the wrong track (choice of major/not going to a trade school) they "plant the seeds" of discord by shouting loudly that the situation is hopeless and "the system" is to blame.
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  Don't tell me what, tell me how. This is related to the modern version of academia, turned to a paper-making factory where mediocre professors toil away grant after grant waiting retirement. Still, young people will do a PhD just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes research-wise, even if they know that somewhere around middle life they'll switch to writing expensive software or overselling their skills to groups of developers. The problems are not well-defined. There is no grand scientific mountain to climb (despite the global narrative about climate crisis, photovoltaics and battery chemistry are not the sexiest of subjects). It does feel like science loses some of the mystery of previous generations and has become a lot more procedural. How do you motivate people to become mystics?
• DevKoala 5y ago
  There are way too many examples to validate the elite overproduction theory. Just right now we don’t have enough skilled trade workers to execute on the infrastructure plan. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/us/politics/biden-infrastructure-plan.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/us/politics/biden-infrast...
  • thanhhaimai 5y ago
    I don't share the same sentiment that we don't have enough talented workers. We just don't have enough workers who are willing to work minimum wage with a $0.5/hour raise year over year.
    • DevKoala 5y ago
      The article claims there is not enough trained skilled workers which might force the government to delay the execution of the plan and dedicate part of the budget to training people. Trade jobs require a certain amount of training/experience and pay far above minimum wage. A plumber did a job for me a couple months ago and the guy made six figures a year easily, I asked him. Right now getting any remodeling done in the Bay Area is impossible because there is not enough contractors; availability times are three months in the future and often you get outbid for their time.
    • s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Doubling the salary wouldn't make more workers with 10 years of experience building bridges materialize out of thin air. It might help recruit entry level workers to the field. Also, infrastructure construction jobs are not minimum wage.
  • jjk166 5y ago
    The lack of skilled trades people is not a consequence of elite overproduction, it is a result of the collapse of the apprentice class. The combination of improvements in technology making low skill work easier and an expansion of bureaucracy that requires more certification for more complicated work have made it such that there is a wide gulf between unskilled and skilled labor in most industries. Where in the past people would gain experience on the job and their employers would get useful work out of entry level employees, now training represents a significant investment which is liable to be poached, and thus there is no training pipeline. To reach the skill level required to make good money at a trade, you need to be willing to invest large amounts of time and money into your own tools and training, and anyone who can afford to do that can afford to work in better conditions in other fields. This is short term thinking by corporations biting them in the butt, not some "millenials are too entitled to do real work" bs.
• rewq4321 5y ago
  Started off interesting (RE institutions evolving into infrastructure for supporting zero-sum games), but then devolved into some hypotheses (stated as facts) about physicists moving to computer science and machine learning being a bad thing.
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  As a physics PhD turned coder I am not sure more physicists would mean more progress in most fields, particularly in fundamental physics and cosmology. In these places experimental results are just too hard to win. For instance, String Theory lumbers on without evidence to confirm or deny it. There are a few areas where a little boundary crossing might make a difference (e.g. we got 30 years of bogus papers on universal power laws because no physicist ever talked to a statistician) but many areas have run into barriers that seem insurmountable (Chaos theory was stillborn, I think, because there was little reward for hard work cataloging phenomenology when Noether’s and KAMs conserved quantities ran out of steam.)
  • konfin 5y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20011013031756/http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html https://web.archive.org/web/20011013031756/http://wuphys.wus... I can't really do any more justice to the topic than what's been said there. I'll just note that 1999 is now the good old days when you'd only spend 10 years as a post doc. I left in 2011 and postdocs who had been there for 10 years are still post docs. Out of my class of 30 PhD's there's now no one left in Academia. The golden girl of the class who spend time in Antarctica, CERN and all the other places which take one in one thousand applicants is a data scientist at a bank as of last month.
• Gollapalli 5y ago
  In a lot of ways. This is due to the professionalization of the natural sciences. We need to let amateurs be amateurs while still contributing meaningfully let. Let teachers teach professionally and let physicists in industrial applications do the same. Obviously most experimental physics costs money, but that doesn't mean that everything needs to be a status competition. When there are a few slots, a lot of status up for grabs, and an entrenched elite, you get exactly what you describe. Far too few true elites, and a great deal too many trained to be "elites". But the very nature of elites is that they rise despite these hurdles, or perhaps because of them.
• stazz1 5y ago
  This is a good article and I disagree but in subtle and nuanced ways. For example, say that "overproduction of elites" did lead to the Civil War, well we can look to the FDR years and see that a progressive tax -- that successfully taxed the wealthiest at a rate that dissuaded concentration of wealth beyond a certain level -- actually helped: we made libraries and schools and public infrastructure in the US. So while having too many "elites" (by which I assume "wealthy people" is meant), we have a storm brewing. Whether that storm rains daggers or flowers depends. More "elites" does not always result in more "political instability" or "declining living standards of the general population." Of course, this is often the case in almost every nation especially ones with concentrations of power AND concentrations of wealth. A beautiful aspect of America is that power and wealth are not so tightly coupled as in other places. When the populous is educated and informed with quality information and ethics, we end up having power that is often at-odds with the aims of the wealthy who aim to preserve their wealth at the expense of the greater good, be it human education, or environmental protection and preservation, and matters of that ilk. So while I do agree that "overproduction of elites" can be problematic, I do not agree that this is a uniquely American problem or issue. Rather, I contend that America, with our innovative and novel system (in the span of historical political apparati) is in the best position to combat this parasitical relationship the wealthiest of people can have on the majority of citizens. Other systems, such as communist systems or monarchical systems, are not as fortunate. Also "money number go up" is -- as a sole motivator -- problematic. But this flippant verbiage dropped with much aplomb is not representative of the difficulties in merely surviving and having enough resources to do so. We, in this modern age, still indoctrinate our offspring and ourselves with a scarcity mindset, and while much of this brain power that goes from "physics to quants" would be better spent defeating scarcity, I find it peculiar that you did not offer up your own income or savings to fund such research and therefore offer to sustain those who are seeking sustenance through said career shift. Emblematic of the problem, I suppose.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • fpig 5y ago
    > So while having too many "elites" (by which I assume "wealthy people" is meant), we have a storm brewing. It doesn't mean wealthy people. It means people who feel they deserve to be a part of the elite, usually by virtue of their formal education. If we're "overproducing" such people, a large part of them cannot actually achieve this, because there's a lot more such people than available positions in the "true" elite (ie people having real wealth/power), which causes discontent. Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions. This however is also not a uniquely American problem.
• cryptica 5y ago
  This resonates with my own experience. It's an interesting perspective which requires a re-definition of the word 'elite'. I think the root of the problem is that value creation and value capturing are independent from each other. A well-functioning economic system should be designed in such a way that the two are intertwined such that an individual cannot capture value from the system without first creating at least as much value for the system. The problem we have nowadays is that the current monetary system has created opportunities for people to capture value (in the form of fiat currency) from the system whilst not creating any new value in return (in the form of useful products and services). The monetary system has even made it possible to capture value whilst actually destroying net value from the system. As an open source developer, I got to experience the downside of this dynamic; I was able to create a lot of value but not able to capture any value in return. I know that if I had tried to capture any value back from the system, my ability to create value would have been reduced to 0 (adoption of my product would have been 0; because nobody would have paid for it; not because it doesn't add value for them, but because they needed to start using it to understand its value and they wouldn't have started using it unless it was free to begin with; simply because there is too much noise in the market place; too much cheap 'newly printed' fiat capital sloshing around advertising competitors' expensive but inferior products). The system allowed me to create value, but only on the condition that I would forfeit my ability to capture the proceeds of the value I created.
  • jart 5y ago
    Open source isn't about value capture. It's about doing awesome things that make people happy. When you do that good things inevitably happen plus it helps if you're coming from a place of security due to how you're sharing your inner creativity to enrich the world. That's how most of the big leaps managed to happen historically. Imagine an ancient agrarian society that produces a surplus of food. People who were harvesting the fields are now sitting around bored trying to figure out what to do, so they come up with things like logic and philosophy. Some figured out how to use it to conquer the known world. Some were punished. But the thing they all shared in common is that they were wealthy in knowledge, and that's the wealth that matters most. I like to think of open source as the latest modern recreation of that pattern.
• golergka 5y ago
  > In the long run, creating more understanding of the physical world is probably more universally valuable to human flourishing than the far more parochial 'make money number go up' type of work lapsed physicists slinging JavaScript in the MAGMA[1] mines are doing for us now. If nothing else, it creates new and more interesting ways of making number go up. I don't know that much about quants and trading, but I do know something about startups. Ten years ago, most of the startups I encountered were pets.com 2.0 — with crazy ideas that were supposed to change the world but turned out just being batshit crazy. But now, most startups I encounter are about doing the same thing that existed for a long time, but more effectively. And a lot of them succeed. It's not exciting, but this JS code often replaces a lot of manual clerk labour, and allowing the same people to do more. It's certainly not the zero-sum game OP is trying to make it look like. It's exactly the kind of grinding, boring work on everyday things that make humanity better as a whole.
• jollybean 5y ago
  Nice thoughts but let's not assume academia is the powerhouse of advancement, it's just one layer. Making useful things with all the grinding that goes in product development is hard. All the little bity components, managing hugely complicated supply chains, these are not petty jobs. We could literally shift some people in Academia over to things like that, like science of supply chains.
• ummonk 5y ago
  Oh great yet another person who can’t be bothered to understand Turchin’s theory or the data behind it and then attacks a straw man. Regarding physicists being driven out of research, as a physics major, institutional issues in academia have nothing to do with me doing coding instead. It’s simply that money makes life convenient and I’m doing what makes me money. If I got paid equivalent amounts to pursue my passions I’d jump at the chance but absent that possibility I’d rather earn a lot, FIRE, and then focus on passions after.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  looks like they are talking about different type of elites. Turchin is referring to govt. elites, mostly.
• Sevii 5y ago
  He talks about how we have to few people qualified to expand the frontier, laments how people with physics education, like myself, are working on software engineering, but somehow misses that software is the frontier. People are getting pulled into software engineering because it is the biggest frontier opportunity available today.
• bjornsing 5y ago
  > Young people going into physics are fundamentally ideologically driven. So why do they lapse? I’ve got a master’s in engineering physics but now work in data science. Here are some reasons I “lapsed”: - I would have loved to be a physicist in 1921, but being one in 2021 is very different. I’d be surprised if there is a single leap in understanding (comparable to general relativity or quantum theory) in my lifetime. - Machine learning on the other hand is making huge progress. It’s a really exciting time to be working in the field. - Personality-wise I’m not cut out for academia. My friends who are physicists describe it as essentially a feudal system… I don’t like being beholden to some boy’s club. Also, the idea that my friends who are physicists are the “true elite” and that their contributions are so much more valuable than mine… I remember one of them actually saying that his most significant contribution is probably that he educates a lot of engineers (and yes, he’s a successful tenure track researcher).
  • Nitrolo 5y ago
    As someone that just finished a similar master's degree as you I'm very interested in how you made the switch to data science, do you have any advice to share?
    • bjornsing 5y ago
      I probably didn’t go the most direct route, so I doubt I can help you much.
    • qazxcvbnmlp 5y ago
      I’ve switched fields a couple times. Figure out how to provide value in the field you want to be in and start practicing it. Once you figure out what that is start looking for opportunities (job openings, contractors needed, etc). It’s really hard to find people that know what they’re doing; so if you know how to do something and can show it, it won’t matter that you don’t have formal education.
  • itronitron 5y ago
    A feudal system seems like the worst type of environment for generating a leap in understanding.
• _3u10 5y ago
  Pay writers better and the whole problem goes away. The fundamental problem is history is written by the losers and the journalists are upset all their friends are making bank.
• burnafter185 5y ago
  Hot take: There's no such thing as elites..? Sometimes somebody, irrespective of class or formal education (but not practical education) does something that's actually a pretty big deal. The whole fundament on which humanity rests is actually pretty mundane people doing random stuff. If you're going to point fingers at something, it's probably the pathway to be determined by "society" as an "elite" which is frankly hilariously arbitrary. These paths are becoming increasingly narrow, and their ends are increasingly saturated. This means that people, who ultimately I like to imagine are simply working towards liberating themselves from the system. The system which they never ascented to participation in, but which runs such a perfect monopoly there is hardly a probable escape from. Kinda like some asshole putting together a hot toddy for the first time, why would you put eggs and hot ale together? Or how about the wheeled suitcase? Were I to want to start a farm, I'd need to buy the property, and to do so I must work within the system for some years either to pay off debts outstanding or else to work until I could satisfy the upfront payment demanded, at that point I'm still subject to laws and codes, not withstanding taxes. I suspect certain portions of these codes necessitate some form of connection which forbids one from wholly living "off-grid". This discounts entirely any extraneous hopes, things like courting and family. In any case this is being drawn further and further from the realm of reasonable aspiration for the vast majority, and so they become increasingly hopeless. Some people are conditioned for groveling, others are not - and this is the emergence of one of the claws of instability. There is also the consideration that the systems of yore are so thoroughly bred out of the American, and I suspect the Western span, that reliance on your neighbor would be akin to indenture, and soon enough one would find themselves a serf paying tribute to your lord rather than aceding to the satisfaction of a petty debt. It seems to me the only directive of the Western mode is transcending your fellows in the order of social echelon. This whole ideology is obviously flawed. The physicist doesn't exist without the farmer, just as the computer scientist wouldn't exist without the metals miners of the world. If anything we've managed to flip the proper order of the strata on its head, wherein the physicist is prized above those who make it possible for him, and the computer scientist, and the miners all to sustain themselves economically. The reality I think is that we're really all more equal than anyone would like to think, but the Western ideologies so long integrated into our culture have become invisible to its function - and they're wrong, and have been, and most were founded on silly pretense that has been further perverted to the point of total nonsense. From these divisions, a wing of the monstrous chaos is reared. I imagine most don't want to be working around people who are incentivized to connive and lie for the sake of self. This is precisely what it is that the system as a whole tends to incentivize, and it seems that in the earliest days that criticisms by Amerindians towards their European counterparts espoused precisely that view. I imagine most people actually want legitimate messy, human interaction - this is something we're so averse to in the Western mode of life, that it tends to require a pretty sound cajoling with drugs to encourage and only briefly. And more and more it seems that we're being programmatically goaded into hardline categories through the media apparatus, one would hope automatically, driven by market forces, but the status quo has a vested interest in the division of people into ever-shrinking groups since it delaminates previously cohesive groups into molecules, and finally isolated atomics. This I suspect is the head crowning. We're inhumane, we're inhuman, our culture is splintering because it has been perverted to the extent that the social contract under which we operate has so long been losing appeal so quickly nobody could possibly anticipate through their lifetime whether their subjugation will be worthwhile. The plainly erring "elite" aren't fit to subjugate a ballpit, let alone the countless masses of the globe. Let it burn.
• bob229 5y ago
  That as a society so many of our greatest minds are working pointless jobs at banks and hedge funds shows what a truly cancerous and moronic species we truly are
• Ericson2314 5y ago
  This is no antidote to Malthusianism. Better to read https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf. Stasis and zero-sum is not as "natural" a situation as is often assumed, giving society's current capabilities. Better to realize while there is no elite conspiracy, the powers that be don't deep down want the the all-out growth they came too, because it is too destabilizing and equalizing. In particular, tight labor markets level the playing field between employer and employee.
• civilized 5y ago
  Physics probably has no frontier left with the sort of economic value this author is hoping for. I'd go into biology and *omics if I wanted to have that kind of impact.
• runako 5y ago
  This is extremely physics-centered. 2021 is an especially poor year to complain about our society producing enough elites to expand our understanding of the physical world, given that this year billions of people are currently being inoculated against a novel disease by vaccines built on a novel platform in record time. And when new therapeutic vectors are becoming readily available for the same disease, also in record time. I'm not a physicist or biologist, but from my perspective, the advancements in biotech in the areas of vaccines, cancer therapeutics, and other areas are at least worthy of mention here. Rapid cures for pandemics are likely to do more to help expand basic science research -- by exciting the populace -- than more precise measurements of the charge of basic particles. And this week is an especially poor choice to publish a rant like this given the news that a company just got sizable funding to scale fusion reactors to commercial scale. Physics triumphs; physicists lament? Perhaps we have the frontierspeople we need, and because they don't look like the frontier in the history books, the author simply doesn't recognize this?
  • derbOac 5y ago
    But that vaccine? Partially developed by one woman who was treated like dirt by U Penn because she insisted on pursuing mRNA vaccines, solely because she wasn't bringing in enough federal grant money. Demoted. Supported by another faculty member to do it. U Penn now likes to try to take credit for it even though this research was done despite them, not because of it. This woman leaves university academics to pursue research through the private sector. She's doing fine, thank you, won a big award etc. But to me it's a perfect example, in that this vaccine you're mentioning, that saved the world in a literal sense, occurred despite the academic structure. That academic structure tried to stomp her out, expunge her from the department. I think it's totally appropriate, in this kind of climate, to point all this out. Are there advances? Sure, but it's more in the sense that the initial world conflicts of the early twentieth century slowly evolved in the midst of trench warfare in which humans were treated like fodder for the machine. I have a problem with the linked article only in that it's grossly misleading: the author seems to disagree with the elite overproduction thesis, but then essentially goes on to argue that there's an overproduction of elites, at least insofar as there's no resources to support them. But every one of those people who exits academics because they aren't given the opportunities, or are psychologically abused, or who don't have the right connections, or whatever, are another opportunity lost. So I agree with it in its substance. Academics is currently grossly dysfunctional. The fact that progress occurs at all is a strawman -- it's not about progress per se, it's about opportunity costs and lost life in time and suffering.
• throwawaysea 5y ago
  Speaking anecdotally, but also observing crowd sentiments on social media, I agree with this article on the point that overproduction can lead to instability. It is very easy for people to blame anything but themselves for their circumstances. My friends who pursued degrees in overproduced fields (PhDs but also bachelors, masters) tend to automatically blame the system. They expect to be able to live in major city centers (which are highly desirable and expensive), doing the job their degree maps to, with a high quality of life, and access to luxuries. But the reality is that most of them are “lapsed” and doing other kinds of jobs, and aren’t earning the amounts they once dreamed of. That has left them bitter and they blame political parties, American values, the Constitution, … it doesn’t matter - emotionally, they are very willing to throw it all away. I’m no historical expert, but I get the sense that if even just 5% of the population harbors such sentiments, it would result in unmanageable unrest and societal collapse.
• chrisbrandow 5y ago
  Phd chemist turned iOS programmer here. I am definitely sad that a career in chemistry didn’t work out. I have lots of “Thoughts”, but I do think we fundamentally underspend on science, but I likewise believe the academic PhD system got out of whack with the supply & demand due to some faulty incentives. No grand conclusion, but it’s a real dynamic.
• anarticle 5y ago
  "Lapsed biochemist" here, the incentives for maximally pursuing a career in science are not there. 10y in the lab, I did cutting edge science for <50k/y, got some papers out of it. 5y in software industry, I'm out earning my old boss who has been in the game for 20+y and is top of his field. The saying in academia is "there's no money to argue over, that's why PhDs are egomaniacs". I'm sure it's for someone, but it isn't for me who: is the only person in their family in history to have a degree, and is non-generationally wealthy. I paid my parents mortgage for years when they got laid off in 2008 on my academic salary. Maybe American gentleman scienists? Nearly all the US grad students I worked with (NE USA) were from bonkers wealthy families. I was a lab rat who loved the work, and got to see some things humanity had never seen before. The money just isn't there under the system we have. Over 70k in student debt racked up, paid off by software industry, not academia. All I could think in my last two years in the lab was: "This is it. I'm never going to be able to pay off this debt like this." pulling 10-12h days on experiment days, coming in weekends to feed the mice/cells/other lab bullshit. No thanks.
• daxfohl 5y ago
  But Einstein was a "lapsed physicist", in the Swiss patent office.
• radu_floricica 5y ago
  I'm finding more and more pieces of information that suggest the Great Stagnation coincides with the institutionalization of science. Science "won", got the respect of society, and got upgraded to Serious Business, with corresponding stiff roles and certifications. And 60 years later we look around and wonder how we got to tolerate parasitic journals. Assume - a very fair assumption - that journals are just the tip of the iceberg. Just what us laymen see most clearly from the outside. This makes things look pretty bad. Now, this is pure personal opinion: I think there is about as much chance of reforming academia as it is of making NASA competitive with SpaceX. I doubt a solution will arrive soon, but if it is it will be from somewhere outside the established field.
  • phreeza 5y ago
    I think the great stagnation is widely considered to have taken hold in the mid 70s. Institutionalisation of science has been going on since the 30s at least, if not earlier. It provided inventions massively increasing total factor productivity well into the period of institutionalisation. I think it is much more likely that whatever "disease" is causing the great stagnation is also affecting science.
• nathias 5y ago
  We need better ways of decoupling research from academia, not stoping people from getting an education.
• isubasinghe 5y ago
  At least here in Australia, I don't believe comp sci grads really get the chance to use their knowledge. I did my masters at the University of Melbourne. If I stay in Australia I will almost certainly be doing pretty boring CRUD work, so yeah I am doing exchange at ETH Zurich next sem and probably gonna apply for jobs in the USA or continue my studies via a PhD at University of Sydney. The masters program was kinda intense: - wrote a compiler - wrote a distributed mutual exclusion/leader election algorithm - wrote an incremental, data-parallel louvain modularity optimisation algorithm - wrote a key/value store on top of Raft (although this was a personal project done after the Distributed Algorithms subject) - wrote code for simulation of the Andromeda-Milky Way collision and ran it on the Universitiy's HPC cluster - will be developing an Operating System at ETH These US based companies should give Australia a chance, we have some good universities and even one that rivals Ivy leagues in computer science imo (looking at UNSW here)
• kovac 5y ago
  I'm a software engineer with a pure mathematics degree. I can't speak for the "elite underproduction" bit but the rest of it pretty well covers my case.
• mleonhard 5y ago
  s/underproduction/underutilization/g
• inglor_cz 5y ago
  Interesting. I am one of the people the author talks about. I studied mathematics, then became a programmer (though I never chased 0,01 per cent advantages in stock markets), now I am a writer who also programs something from time to time. One of the reasons why I didn't stay in science and started doing other things was that most of the fruit seemed to be hanging really high. With the entire humanity doing more and more research for decades, it is much harder to find interesting unsolved problems that aren't devilishly complicated than, say, 70 or 100 years ago. This is something that the author seems to ignore. Writing a new book or developing a new application or feature is a satisfying feeling, because you gave birth to something complete and beautiful. Discovering a minor property of some algebraic group does not feel anywhere as good, unless you by some chance stumble upon something really unexpected and big. Which most researchers never do. The second problem is the academia. The academia is beset by weird personal vendettas and vicious fights for relatively small grants. I didn't like that environment.
• nonplus 5y ago
  There is something ironic about looking down on the stack ml practitioners use while trying to bootstrap your public speaking career using ghost/a javascript based service. If you are going to name drop tech stacks you don't think are worth using that cuts both ways.