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Ask HN: Why are academics satisfied with not changing the world?

3 points by amichail 5y ago

coldtea 5y ago
Most of those who "change the world" do it for the worse, so there's that...
PaulHoule 5y ago
Because getting tenure is a hard enough mountain to climb and because they are satisfied with writing papers. My thesis adviser (physics) told me that he wanted to attain "immortality" through leaving a corpus of papers behind and he did exactly that. For him that made his life meaningful. He made decisions that I wouldn't have made, such as leaving the child and the mother of his child 2000 miles away to follow work. His kid showed up as a surly 14 year old after years of not seeing his dad and boy was he pissed... This contradiction particularly turns up in computer science. You get ahead in CS by presenting papers at conferences and not by writing code. If you take teaching seriously you are also putting a lot of effort into teaching CS 101 or whatever the introductory course is required by many of the majors at your school. There's not a lot of time and headspace to program at a professional level. Some people in CS really are great programmers, but that doesn't get you a career in the field, writing papers get you a career. A lot of people in CS are bad coders. There was that time I got a little C program from a super famous CS professor that crashed before it got into main(). You might heard the phrase "publish or perish" and if you are on that track and spend too much time talking to the public, changing the world, or anything that isn't "publish" you will probably "perish".
- amichail 5y ago
  The vast majority of academics fail to achieve immortality through their publications though.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    It could be arguable that he did. He certainly did not become a household name like Stephen Hawking, Charlie Chaplin, etc. On the other hand before he died (unfortunately quite young) a group of his students and collaborators assembled for a festschrift conference and he told us that he felt he'd been successful. It's his motivation so he gets to decide. In my estimation most of the other professors in his department were similarly successful.
    - onecommentman 5y ago
      To be precise, the previous comment was about whether he achieved “immortality”, not a personal sense of satisfaction in his contributions. It is gratifying to know he achieved the deep peace of believing he had been “successful”, and by that I assume you mean he achieved the important personal objectives he had set for himself. In the formal sense, no one’s personal contributions ever confer immortality (heat death of the universe) and, paradoxically (as is true for all great truths), everyone’s contributions always confer immortality (albeit anonymously). Depending on how you looks at it. The way I look at it, it’s a silly metric the monkey mind makes up to distract the actual immortal soul from experiencing a full life.
Blackstrat 5y ago
Why would we want them to change the world? History is replete with the failures of technocracies. Why add another? This is simply another example of authority bias.

3 points by amichail 5y ago

Most of those who "change the world" do it for the worse, so there's that...

Because getting tenure is a hard enough mountain to climb and because they are satisfied with writing papers. My thesis adviser (physics) told me that he wanted to attain "immortality" through leaving a corpus of papers behind and he did exactly that. For him that made his life meaningful. He made decisions that I wouldn't have made, such as leaving the child and the mother of his child 2000 miles away to follow work. His kid showed up as a surly 14 year old after years of not seeing his dad and boy was he pissed... This contradiction particularly turns up in computer science. You get ahead in CS by presenting papers at conferences and not by writing code. If you take teaching seriously you are also putting a lot of effort into teaching CS 101 or whatever the introductory course is required by many of the majors at your school. There's not a lot of time and headspace to program at a professional level. Some people in CS really are great programmers, but that doesn't get you a career in the field, writing papers get you a career. A lot of people in CS are bad coders. There was that time I got a little C program from a super famous CS professor that crashed before it got into main(). You might heard the phrase "publish or perish" and if you are on that track and spend too much time talking to the public, changing the world, or anything that isn't "publish" you will probably "perish".

amichail 5y ago
The vast majority of academics fail to achieve immortality through their publications though.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  It could be arguable that he did. He certainly did not become a household name like Stephen Hawking, Charlie Chaplin, etc. On the other hand before he died (unfortunately quite young) a group of his students and collaborators assembled for a festschrift conference and he told us that he felt he'd been successful. It's his motivation so he gets to decide. In my estimation most of the other professors in his department were similarly successful.
  - onecommentman 5y ago
    To be precise, the previous comment was about whether he achieved “immortality”, not a personal sense of satisfaction in his contributions. It is gratifying to know he achieved the deep peace of believing he had been “successful”, and by that I assume you mean he achieved the important personal objectives he had set for himself. In the formal sense, no one’s personal contributions ever confer immortality (heat death of the universe) and, paradoxically (as is true for all great truths), everyone’s contributions always confer immortality (albeit anonymously). Depending on how you looks at it. The way I look at it, it’s a silly metric the monkey mind makes up to distract the actual immortal soul from experiencing a full life.

Blackstrat 5y ago

Why would we want them to change the world? History is replete with the failures of technocracies. Why add another? This is simply another example of authority bias.