16 ms·

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

• 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.
• robbmorganf 5y ago
  > overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We probably don't need too many more physics professors but we sure could use more physics research. Or maybe better physics research. Either way, more/better physics discoveries. That said, our scientific communication channels seem filled to the brink. So maybe we need more efficient scientific communication before we can make good use of more researchers.
  • enkid 5y ago
    Is this actually the case? There is a lot of research that is occuring in the private sector or research labs and the such. A lot of it is being done at universities, but us there an actual quantified measure if what percentage of research is not in a teaching institution versus what is?
    • pydry 5y ago
      Instead of trying to quantify research (not really measuable in any meaningful sense) perhaps ask yourself how physics has improved your every day life and then ask yourself which improvements you think society should have given up in exchange for a greater supply of quants. Things like the microchip, wifi, rocketry, satellites, jet engines, etc. If the answer is "none of it" that tends to suggest underproduction.
      • AmericanChopper 5y ago
        This is some rather flawed logic. The productivity of physicists at the time the microchip was invented doesn’t suggest anything at all about the productivity of physicists today, and the utility of productive physics research doesn’t suggest anything at all about the existence of non-productive physics research.
        • pydry 5y ago
          Are you saying that there is a better measure than past performance?
• version_five 5y ago
  I agree with everything you wrote and you said it better than I was going to. I just want to add that I actually see "lapsed physicist" as a good sign: in physics PHD grads, we have a lot of people who as part of their formation undertook a focused study on some area at the forefront of human knowledge. Only by doing a lot of these studies will be make real advances, because science is mostly finding things that dont work. And the byproduct is someone with "useful" skills in the sense that they can use them to easily transition to highly paid work, or what the author calls a lapse. Less often, one goes on to a research career, and less often still, one makes a big breakthrough. But overall, it's win-win. Not saying its perfect, but I think having a meaningful offramp after grad school is the best way to do more exploration and push the frontier of science. If you had to do a PHD and then risk complete unemployability after, the situation would be much worse
  • lumost 5y ago
    Alternately, we may be selecting or training those who would be successful through the wrong mechanisms. Those who choose to chase a numerically improbable outcome may not be the most likely to succeed. Tenure commitees weigh a variety of factors including research acumen, teaching ability, office and field politics etc. Decades of a hypercompetitive market will eventually create entrenched power structures.
• dctoedt 5y ago
  > the professions he lists are "lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum. True, people with zero-sum, "I want more!" attitudes might very well self-select for the listed lines of work, perhaps because of the greater potential payoffs and arguably-weaker checks and balances there. But at the risk of sounding defensive, zero-sumness really does depend greatly on individuals' attitudes: Lawyers can be useful in the same sense that cars' transmissions and oil pumps are useful; MBA types are trained in planning and management, which, I dunno, have their uses; financiers can get people who have money to part with it voluntarily so that others can make use of it. When I took a review course for the patent bar exam many years ago, Professor Irv Kayton told us forcefully that our job as patent attorneys was not to be scientists or engineers ourselves — we all had science- or engineering backgrounds — but instead to be the "noble servants" of those innovators in society.
  • whiddershins 5y ago
    In all fairness the legal <=> political feedback loop seems to act to make law less zero sum, by continually increasing the amount of law and regulation, hence an ever-growing pie of legal work. And all cynicism aside, a growing economy might organically increase the need for lawyers.
    • dctoedt 5y ago
      > a growing economy might organically increase the need for lawyers. I've long thought that; the need for lawyers grows non-linearly with population, because the need is correlated with the number of transactions, which would tend to increase (exponentially? factorially?) with population.
      • thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > the need for lawyers grows non-linearly with population, because the need is correlated with the number of transactions This is a cultural artifact, not a cross-cultural truth. The historical norm is to use zero lawyers even for the largest-scale transactions. It's still the modern norm to use zero lawyers for small-scale transactions.
• didibus 5y ago
  > 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 I disagree with you. From the article, those very professions existing would be explained by Elite Underproduction. It is an example of the system optimizing for all surplus to be competed away. Thus we have created an Elite which include the science and study of competing where only so many resources and only so much status is available. If you read his argument, it is that we create an "elite" whose role is not to advance the frontier of understanding and achievement, but instead to capitalize on the currently available resources and status. I think the part that is a little bit of a stretch, is that he's redefining "elite", he seems to say that "elite" should be a status held by those who innovate our capabilities of understanding and producing for all. And then he says, if you take "elite" to mean that, you'll see that we do not produce a lot of those, therefore we are "underproducing elites". That said, I think generally people think of "elites" more as the "aristocracy", a.k.a, those who have entrenched themselves with social capital and status. With that definition, you can say we produce too many "elites", as in, too many people who are trained in trying to acquire a big slice of the social capital and status, and because there is a limited pool of that, these people fail to acquire a big chunk of it as they all compete for that limited resource. Thus the theory of "Elite overproduction". So you see, it really just depends how you define "Elite". But the main point of OPs' article is valid, our system does not reward or invest enough in trying to push our understanding and capabilities in order to advance all of humanity. And because of that, if you have the qualifications to try and do so, you instead choose to capitalize on maximizing your slice of the existing wealth by going into Quants for example, because the system pays well to do that, but doesn't for true research.
• novok 5y ago
  > standard unit of scientific knowledge: "the peer-reviewed publication" I think part of the problem with shown with the replication crisis, even though it's less in physics, points to an issue with that being the "standard unit" although. Science, like a lot of the world today, "waste enormous potential, mainly in the causes of legibility and standardization" as the author said. A lot of science busywork is subject to goodharts law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. https://sketchplanations.com/goodharts-law https://sketchplanations.com/goodharts-law
• eru 5y ago
  > 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. What makes you think so?