5 ms·
I mean, one of the leading mathematicians at the moment, is expected to spent his time collating conference statistics? Does he not have an assistant for this k
by jacknews 4y ago
I mean, one of the leading mathematicians at the moment, is expected to spent his time collating conference statistics? Does he not have an assistant for this kind of thing?
- jostmey 4y agoIt’s academia. Only admins get secretaries. I’m only joking a little bit, as I once was a professor
- robertlagrant 4y agoI was going to make the same joke! If he were an Assistant Vice Under-Dean he'd have 10 assistants, but sadly he's just an academic.
- kevmo314 4y agoSeems like his assistant is GPT-4 :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- NhanH 4y agoTerence Tao makes about only half a million or so every year (his salary at UCLA is public). Not sure about other income, but it is pretty much just the same ballpark as good doctors, lawyers, accountants at big 4 etc. At that range of income, it’s job-dependent on whether they would have an assistant or not, so no surprise here either way.
- jacknews 4y agoSo you think 'good accountant' and 'world class mathematician' are equivalent, based on their salary?
- NhanH 4y agoNo I don’t, but they have to pay for assistant all the same. I was describing how things are, not how they should be. University could have paid for Terence Tao’s assistant, but then they could have paid him more too.
- jacknews 4y agoI think their company or institution should be paying for the assistant, just as they pay for the office, security, executive, HR, etc.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y agoOnly?
- NhanH 4y agoI thought about that word, and whether to put air quote around it. But Terence Tao is one of the few that could claim to be one in hundred of millions, if not billion. So yeah, “only”.
- jonahx 4y agoIt's a surprise even if you restrict your point of view to the narrow economic interests of his employer, UCLA, who benefits from Tao's discoveries. Shelling out another 50k or so for an assistant, even if it boosts his productivity by only 10%, is a no-brainer. If you expand your point of view to the interests of all mathematicians, or society at large, the waste here is even more extravagant.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoAn assistant who could do what Tao did is not going to be $50k.
- valarauko 4y agoThe assistant's job would be to take low-hanging fruit non-research administrative tasks off his hands - pretty much like the tasks here.
- joshspankit 4y agoThe assistant would have gone through the documents manually and that’s very much a $50k/yr task
- Uehreka 4y agoDawg. If $500k isn’t in the ballpark to have an assistant, then nobody outside of actual CEOs or Fortune 500 executives has an assistant. I know people who make less than $200k and have an assistant. I feel certain there are people who make less than $100k who have an assistant.
- jackmott42 4y agoHow does someone making less than 200k afford an assistant?
- joelthelion 4y agoTheir company could realize that giving them one would be a wise use of resources.
- kgwgk 4y agoJust like that someone can afford to make $200k in the first place: someone else is paying those people and their assistants to get things done.
- explaininjs 4y agoThe assistant's salary comes from the same corporation that pays the figures salary, not the figure themselves. To the GP's point, a friend of mine makes 80k but is still provided an assistant. That's in the entertainment industry, where PA's are dirt cheap and union laws prohibit multitasking.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago> Not sure about other income, but it is pretty much just the same ballpark as good doctors, lawyers, accountants at big 4 etc Either salaries in the US are extremely higher than what I thought, you have a very idiosyncratic definition of "good" or you are significantly overestimating how much people make.
- NhanH 4y agoThat’s a different topic, I think. So you can consider my definition of “good” idiosyncratic, or to substitute it with “highly paid” or something. The point is that amongst people that I know who are making 500k, the majority of them aren’t having assistants. And I do think it extrapolate to the population of people with 500k income too (no proof here, just a hunch).
- nequo 4y agoDon't doctors have a lot of the administrative duties, preparation of equipment, etc., done by other staff in the practice? For practical purposes, wouldn't that count as having an assistant? In the case of this post, one could argue that collating statistics should be done by ICM staff rather than the committee chair.
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoHaving a personal assistant has become a rarity but I know a lot of people who are paid far less than 500k and can indeed delegate this kind of work. I work in consulting and I would most likely ask a junior member of the team to do data crunching. Similarly we share an assistant in my department whose job is to take care of scheduling complicated meetings, organising business travels, making sure than the documents required for billing have been collected.
- returningfory2 4y agoMaybe a bit of everything, though in my experience people outside the US significantly underestimate how much successful professionals in the US earn. For example, this article [1] says that to be in the top 1% of earners in the US a family needs to make $600k or more. There are 330 million people in the US, meaning that 3.3 million people are in a household earning $600k or more. I think that's a lot! [1] https://smartasset.com/data-studies/what-it-takes-to-be-in-the-1-by-state-2022 https://smartasset.com/data-studies/what-it-takes-to-be-in-t...
- layer8 4y agoSo, you’re saying that collating conference statistics in a spreadsheet is worth a $500K yearly salary? I would have thought that you can get that cheaper.
- microtherion 4y agoHe made ~650K gross in 2021: https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ That is a bit more than 1/9th of what the head football coach at UCLA makes, who has two assistants (offensive and defensive coordinators) who each earned a bit more than Tao. Additionally, UCLA still paid more than $3M in 2021 to another head football coach whom they had fired in 2017. The university seems to have fairly clearly defined priorities.
- explaininjs 4y agoUCLA football is a profit center. It costs 32MM to operate but brings in 37MM in revenue. I suppose Tao might bring in some government grants (maybe?) but I doubt its anywhere near the same ballpark. https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/university-of-california-los-angeles/student-life/sports/#:~:text=The%20head%20coach%20and%2010%20assistant%20coaches%20train,in%20expenses%20and%20made%20%2437%2C548%2C589%20in%20total%20revenue https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/university-of-califo....
- microtherion 4y agoIt's not entirely clear what year those numbers refer to. Overall, the 2019-2022 period seems to have been extremely unprofitable: https://www.latimes.com/sports/ucla/story/2023-01-26/ucla-athletics-budget-lower-deficit-big-ten-conference https://www.latimes.com/sports/ucla/story/2023-01-26/ucla-at... But even IF this were a profitable activity, should a university really be in the business of running an enterprise that literally causes irreversible brain damage (Story about USC, but undoubtedly applies to all football programs: https://www.si.com/college/2020/10/07/usc-and-its-dying-linebackers https://www.si.com/college/2020/10/07/usc-and-its-dying-line...)?
- explaininjs 4y agoYou’re confusing the football program for the athletic program as a whole. If you scroll down in the link I posted you’ll see every other athletic program at UCLA is indeed running at a significant loss. Football is the only profitable one. With respect to the brain damage, he spent much longer in the professional setting than college, it’s more likely the damage came from there. I don’t think colleges should be in the business of restricting what students should be allowed to explore based on the possibility they might choose a career where brain damage may occur. And if they did, Engineering should be the first to go. Just think of all the brain damage resulting from professionals engineers of the military industrial complex!
- FrustratedMonky 4y agoGPT is the assistant. Saves on employees, that would be the pro-corporate take.
- layer8 4y agoYeah, I was thinking that 50 years ago he’d probably have had a secretary or admin person to take care of that.
- camdenreslink 4y agoIsn’t this what graduate students are for?
- dpcan 4y agoThe entire world now has a brilliant assistant for these kinds of things - it's ChatGPT. Every numbskull to every professor now has the ability to generate information on a scholarly level and solve problems that could take a human years of training and experience to produce. I'm really trying hard not to get all doom and gloom about this stuff, but I'm honestly worried. It keeps me up at night.
- 3rd3 4y agoI try to maintain an optimistic outlook because the AI race is now unstoppable anyhow. Mass unemployment is a likely outcome, but modern states already have amazing safety nets in place and they're not far away from a universal basic income. As technology has improved, so has life on almost all relevant metrics (education, longevity, poverty, crime etc.) and even though technology amplifies greed, criminals do not prevail because they are heavily selected against seemingly regardless of the level of technological sophistication. As for paperclippers, there is actually no indication that larger neural nets misinterpret human intention. Rather, larger NNs mostly become better at understanding. Current AIs when prompted to make paperclips do not interpret this as us wanting to turn the entire world into paper clips, but in terms of (the more sensible interpretation) of meeting the economic demand for paperclips, hence giving advice on how to optimize the machinery for producing paperclips etc. Small models do tend to find weird, unintended shotcuts, but my hunch is we are seeing this less with very large NNs. Lastly, we can always employ AIs to control other AIs. AI scammers will be counteracted by scam detection AIs. Same for fake news, mind control, drone warfare, propaganda, etc. AI will allow us to make better political arguments against mass surveillance and for freedom, and it will make journalism more efficient at exposing crime and injustice. Demonopolizing AI is hence extremely important, so that every misuse of AI or misaligned AI can be counteracted by other AIs.
- neel8986 4y ago>> Mass unemployment is a likely outcome, but modern states already have amazing safety nets in place and they're not far away from a universal basic income. very few western and east asian nation have that. 80% of population dont have safety net
- dauertewigkeit 4y agoHis assistants are probably better employed doing research than messing round with spreadsheets. And the secretary might then not have the necessary competence for such a task. And if they employed a person for just such tasks, they would have loads of downtime.
- jltsiren 4y agoAs a mathematician, he probably doesn't bring that much grant money in. The money to hire an assistant doesn't exist, especially in a public university like UCLA. Assistants tend to be more common in fields funded by the NIH, because the grants and the overheads are much bigger.
- chriskanan 4y agoAs a professor, my understanding is that professors used to have assistants for these sorts of things in the distant past, but this is much less so nowadays besides deans or higher ups. People only in leadership positions seem to be able to get them when in a university setting. This isn't true everywhere, e.g., my academic medical collaborators typically have assistants and so do the lab heads associated with non-profit research organizations (e.g., Salk). Department heads may have them, but even that seems to be happening less and less. Unfortunately, professors currently have to spend a lot of time doing tedious administrative/organizational work unrelated to research/teaching.