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Reminds me of the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. Initially it seems like it's a poem about working hard and taking risks, but it's actually about old

Reminds me of the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. Initially it seems like it's a poem about working hard and taking risks, but it's actually about old people lying to themselves, trying to forget that their success was actually just luck. About half the professors I worked with were responsible adults, and half were narcissistic children who would do exactly what you described, "just do what I did", and when it doesn't work they quickly changed to personal attacks and insults. And of course, the professors who had PhDs from MIT or Stanford just breezing through, getting approved for everything they applied to on the first round, even when their past deliverables and future proposals were garbage, and people who went to second-tier schools having to fight tooth and nail every incremental gain. Just a pile of crap. Couldn't stand it.

godelski 3y ago
There's a saying I really like "the harder I work, the luckier I get." It being about how the time you invest makes you able to take advantage of more opportunities. BUT it also recognizes that the luck element exists. I think Veritasium also had a video along the luck+work lines. Basically if you just are unlucky you just have no opportunities and you'll fail no matter what work you put in. But if you don't put in work, you're also passing up possible lucky opportunities. Either way, it is a combination of a stochastic process plus skill (think about the design of any good {video,board} game. They require both skill and luck, just like life. You definitely need both, and I think this is what people forget. Work is incredibly important, but you can do a lot of good and hard work and just be unlucky. That honestly is probably one of the more distinguishing differences between students/faculty at top institutions vs mid. Especially since success is a compounding event, thus an early success can catapult someone forward. We shouldn't diminish their hard work by saying it is all luck, but neither should they diminish others hard work and frustration as a lack of working hard enough when luck plays a significant role in the system. Neither is failure strictly due to luck. It is messy and we need to accept that this is the reality of the world, especially if we want to make the system more efficient and more "meritocratic" (quotes because previous comments and their relationship to Goodhart, the difficulties in evaluation and necessity to embrace noise). Though your last point about the top tier breezing through, I can completely relate. I see a lot of low quality papers from those institutions get high marks and it is very surprising and definitely not consistent with a blind evaluation system... but I think most of us already know that.

godelski 3y ago

There's a saying I really like "the harder I work, the luckier I get." It being about how the time you invest makes you able to take advantage of more opportunities. BUT it also recognizes that the luck element exists. I think Veritasium also had a video along the luck+work lines. Basically if you just are unlucky you just have no opportunities and you'll fail no matter what work you put in. But if you don't put in work, you're also passing up possible lucky opportunities. Either way, it is a combination of a stochastic process plus skill (think about the design of any good {video,board} game. They require both skill and luck, just like life. You definitely need both, and I think this is what people forget. Work is incredibly important, but you can do a lot of good and hard work and just be unlucky. That honestly is probably one of the more distinguishing differences between students/faculty at top institutions vs mid. Especially since success is a compounding event, thus an early success can catapult someone forward. We shouldn't diminish their hard work by saying it is all luck, but neither should they diminish others hard work and frustration as a lack of working hard enough when luck plays a significant role in the system. Neither is failure strictly due to luck. It is messy and we need to accept that this is the reality of the world, especially if we want to make the system more efficient and more "meritocratic" (quotes because previous comments and their relationship to Goodhart, the difficulties in evaluation and necessity to embrace noise). Though your last point about the top tier breezing through, I can completely relate. I see a lot of low quality papers from those institutions get high marks and it is very surprising and definitely not consistent with a blind evaluation system... but I think most of us already know that.