8 ms·

I am someone with a Ph.D. in a STEM field who has had both a semi-academic research career (at NASA) and an industrial career. There are two things about this

by lisper 5y ago

I am someone with a Ph.D. in a STEM field who has had both a semi-academic research career (at NASA) and an industrial career. There are two things about this situation that I find really shocking: 1. The extent to which the academic mindset is stuck in pre-internet ways of doing things. The whole process of advancing a career by publishing papers reviewed by a very small number of "peers" was established in the seventeenth century and was an efficient way of filtering out good ideas from bad ones given the technological constraints of the day. Needless to say, many of those constraints no longer apply. There is nothing wrong with peer review. Indeed, it is essential. But, in the age of the internet, there is a lot wrong with peer review conducted by a small handful of people selected by a journal publisher. The whole idea of a journal should be obsolete. 2. The extent to which traditional academia has managed to maintain its privileged role in society despite contributing less and less actual value. A tenured professor is still a highly respected position despite the fact that the actual job of being a professor has a lot more to do with politics than it does with academics. Teaching, which is supposed to be one of the core businesses of the academy, is actively frowned upon. Nothing destroys an academic career faster than putting a lot of effort into being an effective teacher. Some fascinating sociology there. Someone should do a study. But no one will because it won't advance their career.

themitigating 5y ago
Do you have evidence for this trend? "The extent to which traditional academia has managed to maintain its privileged role in society despite contributing less and less actual value"
I_DRINK_KOOLAID 5y ago
> The whole idea of a journal should be obsolete. > A tenured professor is still a highly respected position despite the fact that the actual job of being a professor has a lot more to do with politics than it does with academics It seems to me that given your 2 above statements you essentially want to abolish journals and peer review in order to be able to give researchers the ability to sponsor, parlay and generally use their social skills to push a paper out. You mention the internet so it's granted that as soon as somebody discovers that the more rabid followers one has, the better it is for the papers one is pushing...it becomes an arms race All of the above is in order to essentially enable researchers to do what you accuse professors of doing (using politics to get ahead without or with little contribution).
- lisper 5y ago
  Figuring out what to replace the current system with is a non-trivial problem. Obviously replacing it with a simple popularity contest is not the right answer. But figuring out what the right answer is is exactly the sort of thing that the academy ought to be good at, or at least attempting, but they aren't even trying. I think the Right Answer would look something like Page Rank, except with reviewers being ranked. Anyone can review, but the relative weight of each review is biased according to that reviewer's reputation, which in turn is based on the collective value of the reviews they have received. There would still be a role for some kind of governing body, but its function would be to enforce continuity of identity and the binding of identity to publications. So something like Arxiv, but with a vetting process to insure that a paper or review submitted by an author really was written by that author, and to prevent one person from publishing with multiple identities.
  - thfuran 5y ago
    How would you weight say a highly ranked computational biologist reviewing a paper in cultural anthropology?
    - j-pb 5y ago
      Meta reviews.
    - lisper 5y ago
      That is a really excellent question. That's why I said "something like Page Rank" and not just Page Rank. This is an unsolved problem, but I don't think it's an unsolvable problem.
  - j-pb 5y ago
    I'd argue that such a system would be much better at avoiding the current political swamp, if the reputation/trust was relative to your personal trust into certain individuals and research directions. E.g. we might view different close people as trustworthy or judge their research with different value, which in turn have their subjective judgement. That subjective judgement is inherent in the scientific method and allows different opinions to compete until the truth emerges. I think that the web of trust should reflect that and give you a personalized score for each paper based on a trust network between public keys.
SiempreViernes 5y ago
1. I don't know that this means, are you opposing the idea of content curation? Or that there is pre-publication peer review? Personally I think curated content streams are very useful, you can try looking at the arxiv/new pages for a month and see how you feel about someone organising it for you after that. 2. Dude, why would you claim nobody is studying the sociology of academia in reply to an article studying the sociology of academia?
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
> academia has managed to maintain its privileged role in society despite contributing less and less actual value What is the basis for these strange claims, how is it priviliged if my University proffesor makes less than some of his graduates with 3 years of experience? Whu do you think they contribute less, did physicists start slacking? What statistics demonstrates this?
- lazide 5y ago
  Why would the professor be willing to stay in such a position without getting more in other ways (aka privilege, prestige, ability to not do certain things, do certain other things, etc.)? If it’s the same for their graduates but they make 3x, then what forces are keeping them there? For some it’s idealism - but few tenured professors are idealists in my experience.
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    First, they don't. There's a HUGE CS faculty shortage. CS faculty positions outside of R1 are insanely hard to fill and the average quality of faculty tends to be quite low. Some lower tier colleges and universities will hire tenure track faculty out of online masters programs with no teaching experience. Even then, faculty searches regularly fail. The bar is rock bottom. (This isn't meant as a bias against online programs; the salient point is that if your masters was online then you almost certainly have zero in-person teaching experience even as a TA.) Second, most people aren't rational economic actors and even those who are have a myriad of objective functions. Some common reasons people stay when they could get much higher paying and lower stress jobs: 1. Immigration. 2. Work life balance. Not unique to academia, btw. I know ex-FAANG SWEs who make $70K/yr because they can get the job done in one or two days a week from a van and want to spend most of their life in the mountains. 3. Immigration. 4. Some people actually enjoy teaching and view it as a life calling. 5. Immigration. 6. Ageism. A 50 year old who spent 20 years in academia is going to have a hard time getting back into industry.
    - lazide 5y ago
      So I think the answer is often ‘well, they often can’t go and get 3x the salary’? At least pragmatically, compared to theoretically?
throwawaygh 5y ago
> A tenured professor is still a highly respected position I don't think this is true outside of the (tiny) academic bubble. Being a tenured professor at a well-ranked R1 has some prestige within a limited community. However, most tenured faculty -- even Full Professors -- are not at R1s. Consider the following 5 facts about non-R1 faculty: 1. Compensation. At most institutions -- even in CS -- salaries max out at $100K. It's not uncommon for a CS professor with 30 years of experience to make less than a high school mathematics teacher, especially if the former is at a private university and the latter is at a public school in a state with a strong pension system. It's extremely common for CS professors to make less than new grads at FAANG. 2. External Opportunities. A non-R1 professor will have a difficult time trying to be a consultant, expert witness, etc. Also, raising grant money is basically impossible. 3. Job Autonomy. At most institutions -- even in CS -- the average faculty member spends most of their time teaching. They are, for the most part, treated as replaceable cogs. 4. Job Security. Tenure doesn't mean what it used to mean, and it never meant "perfect job security". During COVID, many universities laid off tenured faculty. 5. Even WITHIN academia, faculty at R2 or LACs are taken less seriously. Outside of academia, faculty are essentially viewed as "teachers" (and that view, again, isn't exactly inaccurate outside of R1). On the whole, in the vast majority of cases, being a professor is lower status than being a software engineer. You don't get paid well, you spend 40 hours a week teaching, and then folks WITH PHDs who know how the business works claim that you have undue privilege because you don't someone find another 40 hours a week to do world-changing research for which you are not compensated and for which you will not reap any reward.
Helmut10001 5y ago
I agree to all your observations. I don't have a solution though. I don't think simply replacing journals/peer review with "the internet" would help. Somewhere, academic track (or track of excellence) should count, which it doesn't on the internet, where everybody gets attention who yells loudest or is most click-bait.
kragen 5y ago
> The whole process of advancing a career by publishing papers reviewed by a very small number of "peers" was established in the seventeenth century This is not correct. The practice of peer review didn't become established until the early 20th century. Einstein was famously indignant and withdrew his paper the first time a journal tried to subject him to it. Like many other journals, Nature didn't do peer review until the 01960s. There are have of course always been journals whose editors published a proper subset of the letters they received, and we have a documented instance of this happening in the 17th century, though not on an ongoing basis. > traditional academia...contributing less and less actual value I could understand you writing this in 01822 but I cannot imagine what you are thinking writing it in 02022. Traditional academia built the internet while industry was building X.25, Tymnet, CompuServe, and SONET (for the Advanced Intelligent Network, so the phone company could bill you more for more valuable information), and hobbyists were building FidoNet. Later, traditional academia built the WWW at CERN. Google and Yahoo were research projects at Stanford; Fecebutt was born at Harvard, albeit in the undergraduate space. Microsoft developed the product that launched them by "stealing" computer time from Harvard to simulate the hardware it would run on. AWS was built on Xen, which was created in traditional academia in the early 02000s before being spun out as a company. So out of FAANG, FGA (plus Yahoo and Microsoft) are creatures of traditional academia; only AG are not. We could add the GNU project, informally hosted by the MIT AI lab from its inception. So much for the internet; but maybe the internet is Bad Actually and we should not consider it "value contributed". What about larger issues in society, like pandemics, overpopulation, climate change, and energy? Moderna created an mRNA vaccine for covid in March 02020, four months after the pandemic began and a few days after Chinese academics published the virus's genome; mRNA vaccine research was done entirely in traditional academia from 01989 to 02008, after which it was DARPA-funded for several more years. The traditional academic research of Norman Borlaug tripled world food production in the 01970s; without it, civilization would have collapsed in famine. Our knowledge of the looming climate catastrophe is entirely a product of traditional academia; and while many of the advances in photovoltaic cells essential to escape it have happened outside academia, many others have come from traditional academia, most recently PERC. RISC-V was created by traditional academia. (So was Linux, and the Minix it was modeled on.) John Goodenough, who invented lithium-ion batteries, is a professor at UT, though he was an Oxford don at the time, and it was Akira Yoshino in industry who brought it to market. (Yoshino is now a professor at Meijo University.) > Teaching, which is supposed to be one of the core businesses of the academy, There are people who suppose it to be one, but most of them are outside the academy. The core business of the academy is philosophy: the love of wisdom, the quest for truth. (Philosophy does, of course, predate the internet, so perhaps that's what you mean by "stuck in pre-internet ways of doing things".) Teaching is a means to that end; it pays the bills, gives philosophers valuable feedback on their ideas, and occasionally creates new philosophers.
lupire 5y ago
I know it's petty but: the ludicrous endurance of the 2-column journal paper format for publishing ideas, shows how resistant academia is to doing things that are useful outside of the rules its insular game.
the_only_law 5y ago
> The extent to which traditional academia has managed to maintain its privileged role in society despite contributing less and less actual value. I thought the value they brought in was grant money.
tablespoon 5y ago
> Indeed, it is essential. But, in the age of the internet, there is a lot wrong with peer review conducted by a small handful of people selected by a journal publisher. The whole idea of a journal should be obsolete. Or it isn't obsolete, but the reasons for it are different. I feel like a lot of technologies that once primarily had value as means of dissemination, now have more value as a means of filtering to make a firehouse manageable by humans, so to speak.
robotresearcher 5y ago
> the actual job of being a professor has a lot more to do with politics than it does with academics. Teaching, which is supposed to be one of the core businesses of the academy, is actively frowned upon. Any actual or former professors here agree with this? I don't. People with equivalent seniority in industry spend plenty of time on politics, early startups possibly excepted.
GPerson 5y ago
Many of the highest salaried careers are actively harmful towards society. It’s hard to be too upset at the tenured professors making 130k a year late in their career when the grunts at elite law firms or investment banks are starting at 250k. I am dissatisfied with the role currently played by academia however.

by lisper 5y ago

themitigating 5y ago

Do you have evidence for this trend? "The extent to which traditional academia has managed to maintain its privileged role in society despite contributing less and less actual value"

I_DRINK_KOOLAID 5y ago

> The whole idea of a journal should be obsolete. > A tenured professor is still a highly respected position despite the fact that the actual job of being a professor has a lot more to do with politics than it does with academics It seems to me that given your 2 above statements you essentially want to abolish journals and peer review in order to be able to give researchers the ability to sponsor, parlay and generally use their social skills to push a paper out. You mention the internet so it's granted that as soon as somebody discovers that the more rabid followers one has, the better it is for the papers one is pushing...it becomes an arms race All of the above is in order to essentially enable researchers to do what you accuse professors of doing (using politics to get ahead without or with little contribution).

lisper 5y ago
Figuring out what to replace the current system with is a non-trivial problem. Obviously replacing it with a simple popularity contest is not the right answer. But figuring out what the right answer is is exactly the sort of thing that the academy ought to be good at, or at least attempting, but they aren't even trying. I think the Right Answer would look something like Page Rank, except with reviewers being ranked. Anyone can review, but the relative weight of each review is biased according to that reviewer's reputation, which in turn is based on the collective value of the reviews they have received. There would still be a role for some kind of governing body, but its function would be to enforce continuity of identity and the binding of identity to publications. So something like Arxiv, but with a vetting process to insure that a paper or review submitted by an author really was written by that author, and to prevent one person from publishing with multiple identities.
- thfuran 5y ago
  How would you weight say a highly ranked computational biologist reviewing a paper in cultural anthropology?
  - j-pb 5y ago
    Meta reviews.
  - lisper 5y ago
    That is a really excellent question. That's why I said "something like Page Rank" and not just Page Rank. This is an unsolved problem, but I don't think it's an unsolvable problem.
- j-pb 5y ago
  I'd argue that such a system would be much better at avoiding the current political swamp, if the reputation/trust was relative to your personal trust into certain individuals and research directions. E.g. we might view different close people as trustworthy or judge their research with different value, which in turn have their subjective judgement. That subjective judgement is inherent in the scientific method and allows different opinions to compete until the truth emerges. I think that the web of trust should reflect that and give you a personalized score for each paper based on a trust network between public keys.

SiempreViernes 5y ago

1. I don't know that this means, are you opposing the idea of content curation? Or that there is pre-publication peer review? Personally I think curated content streams are very useful, you can try looking at the arxiv/new pages for a month and see how you feel about someone organising it for you after that. 2. Dude, why would you claim nobody is studying the sociology of academia in reply to an article studying the sociology of academia?

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

> academia has managed to maintain its privileged role in society despite contributing less and less actual value What is the basis for these strange claims, how is it priviliged if my University proffesor makes less than some of his graduates with 3 years of experience? Whu do you think they contribute less, did physicists start slacking? What statistics demonstrates this?

lazide 5y ago
Why would the professor be willing to stay in such a position without getting more in other ways (aka privilege, prestige, ability to not do certain things, do certain other things, etc.)? If it’s the same for their graduates but they make 3x, then what forces are keeping them there? For some it’s idealism - but few tenured professors are idealists in my experience.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  First, they don't. There's a HUGE CS faculty shortage. CS faculty positions outside of R1 are insanely hard to fill and the average quality of faculty tends to be quite low. Some lower tier colleges and universities will hire tenure track faculty out of online masters programs with no teaching experience. Even then, faculty searches regularly fail. The bar is rock bottom. (This isn't meant as a bias against online programs; the salient point is that if your masters was online then you almost certainly have zero in-person teaching experience even as a TA.) Second, most people aren't rational economic actors and even those who are have a myriad of objective functions. Some common reasons people stay when they could get much higher paying and lower stress jobs: 1. Immigration. 2. Work life balance. Not unique to academia, btw. I know ex-FAANG SWEs who make $70K/yr because they can get the job done in one or two days a week from a van and want to spend most of their life in the mountains. 3. Immigration. 4. Some people actually enjoy teaching and view it as a life calling. 5. Immigration. 6. Ageism. A 50 year old who spent 20 years in academia is going to have a hard time getting back into industry.
  - lazide 5y ago
    So I think the answer is often ‘well, they often can’t go and get 3x the salary’? At least pragmatically, compared to theoretically?

throwawaygh 5y ago

> A tenured professor is still a highly respected position I don't think this is true outside of the (tiny) academic bubble. Being a tenured professor at a well-ranked R1 has some prestige within a limited community. However, most tenured faculty -- even Full Professors -- are not at R1s. Consider the following 5 facts about non-R1 faculty: 1. Compensation. At most institutions -- even in CS -- salaries max out at $100K. It's not uncommon for a CS professor with 30 years of experience to make less than a high school mathematics teacher, especially if the former is at a private university and the latter is at a public school in a state with a strong pension system. It's extremely common for CS professors to make less than new grads at FAANG. 2. External Opportunities. A non-R1 professor will have a difficult time trying to be a consultant, expert witness, etc. Also, raising grant money is basically impossible. 3. Job Autonomy. At most institutions -- even in CS -- the average faculty member spends most of their time teaching. They are, for the most part, treated as replaceable cogs. 4. Job Security. Tenure doesn't mean what it used to mean, and it never meant "perfect job security". During COVID, many universities laid off tenured faculty. 5. Even WITHIN academia, faculty at R2 or LACs are taken less seriously. Outside of academia, faculty are essentially viewed as "teachers" (and that view, again, isn't exactly inaccurate outside of R1). On the whole, in the vast majority of cases, being a professor is lower status than being a software engineer. You don't get paid well, you spend 40 hours a week teaching, and then folks WITH PHDs who know how the business works claim that you have undue privilege because you don't someone find another 40 hours a week to do world-changing research for which you are not compensated and for which you will not reap any reward.

Helmut10001 5y ago

I agree to all your observations. I don't have a solution though. I don't think simply replacing journals/peer review with "the internet" would help. Somewhere, academic track (or track of excellence) should count, which it doesn't on the internet, where everybody gets attention who yells loudest or is most click-bait.

kragen 5y ago

> The whole process of advancing a career by publishing papers reviewed by a very small number of "peers" was established in the seventeenth century This is not correct. The practice of peer review didn't become established until the early 20th century. Einstein was famously indignant and withdrew his paper the first time a journal tried to subject him to it. Like many other journals, Nature didn't do peer review until the 01960s. There are have of course always been journals whose editors published a proper subset of the letters they received, and we have a documented instance of this happening in the 17th century, though not on an ongoing basis. > traditional academia...contributing less and less actual value I could understand you writing this in 01822 but I cannot imagine what you are thinking writing it in 02022. Traditional academia built the internet while industry was building X.25, Tymnet, CompuServe, and SONET (for the Advanced Intelligent Network, so the phone company could bill you more for more valuable information), and hobbyists were building FidoNet. Later, traditional academia built the WWW at CERN. Google and Yahoo were research projects at Stanford; Fecebutt was born at Harvard, albeit in the undergraduate space. Microsoft developed the product that launched them by "stealing" computer time from Harvard to simulate the hardware it would run on. AWS was built on Xen, which was created in traditional academia in the early 02000s before being spun out as a company. So out of FAANG, FGA (plus Yahoo and Microsoft) are creatures of traditional academia; only AG are not. We could add the GNU project, informally hosted by the MIT AI lab from its inception. So much for the internet; but maybe the internet is Bad Actually and we should not consider it "value contributed". What about larger issues in society, like pandemics, overpopulation, climate change, and energy? Moderna created an mRNA vaccine for covid in March 02020, four months after the pandemic began and a few days after Chinese academics published the virus's genome; mRNA vaccine research was done entirely in traditional academia from 01989 to 02008, after which it was DARPA-funded for several more years. The traditional academic research of Norman Borlaug tripled world food production in the 01970s; without it, civilization would have collapsed in famine. Our knowledge of the looming climate catastrophe is entirely a product of traditional academia; and while many of the advances in photovoltaic cells essential to escape it have happened outside academia, many others have come from traditional academia, most recently PERC. RISC-V was created by traditional academia. (So was Linux, and the Minix it was modeled on.) John Goodenough, who invented lithium-ion batteries, is a professor at UT, though he was an Oxford don at the time, and it was Akira Yoshino in industry who brought it to market. (Yoshino is now a professor at Meijo University.) > Teaching, which is supposed to be one of the core businesses of the academy, There are people who suppose it to be one, but most of them are outside the academy. The core business of the academy is philosophy: the love of wisdom, the quest for truth. (Philosophy does, of course, predate the internet, so perhaps that's what you mean by "stuck in pre-internet ways of doing things".) Teaching is a means to that end; it pays the bills, gives philosophers valuable feedback on their ideas, and occasionally creates new philosophers.

lupire 5y ago

I know it's petty but: the ludicrous endurance of the 2-column journal paper format for publishing ideas, shows how resistant academia is to doing things that are useful outside of the rules its insular game.

the_only_law 5y ago

> The extent to which traditional academia has managed to maintain its privileged role in society despite contributing less and less actual value. I thought the value they brought in was grant money.

tablespoon 5y ago

> Indeed, it is essential. But, in the age of the internet, there is a lot wrong with peer review conducted by a small handful of people selected by a journal publisher. The whole idea of a journal should be obsolete. Or it isn't obsolete, but the reasons for it are different. I feel like a lot of technologies that once primarily had value as means of dissemination, now have more value as a means of filtering to make a firehouse manageable by humans, so to speak.

robotresearcher 5y ago

> the actual job of being a professor has a lot more to do with politics than it does with academics. Teaching, which is supposed to be one of the core businesses of the academy, is actively frowned upon. Any actual or former professors here agree with this? I don't. People with equivalent seniority in industry spend plenty of time on politics, early startups possibly excepted.

GPerson 5y ago

Many of the highest salaried careers are actively harmful towards society. It’s hard to be too upset at the tenured professors making 130k a year late in their career when the grunts at elite law firms or investment banks are starting at 250k. I am dissatisfied with the role currently played by academia however.