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Two lines from the article: Scientists and engineers expand the size of the economic pie; lawyers mostly work to divide it up differently. Whenever possible, w
by bedris 14y ago
Two lines from the article:
Scientists and engineers expand the size of the economic pie; lawyers mostly work to divide it up differently. Whenever possible, work to be a person who creates things, instead of a person who tries to take stuff created by someone else. There is an infinite amount of work in science because the universe is big and we don’t really understand it and we probably never will. New answers to questions in science yields more questions.
Greenspun makes and attend to his discussion of what grad school in the sciences is like, especially this, his main point: “Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.”
In other words, science is good for society but bad for the individual, from a purely economic standpoint.
- wenxun 14y agoMy friends and I build a website for scientists to discover & share journal articles that are worth reading, to discuss scientific ideas that are worth spreading, and to connect with people who share similar interests: http://www.pubup.org/ http://www.pubup.org/ . Please let me know what you think of the idea and the website. Thanks!
- beambot 14y agoThe idea is great, but just so you know... my experience in academia (anecdotal) suggests that Mendeley already has a pretty substantial lead: http://www.mendeley.com/ http://www.mendeley.com/
- wenxun 14y agoTrue, but it seems to me that Mendeley and us are addressing different aspects of the same problem
- beambot 14y agoCan you elaborate? The frontpage of PubUp seems strikingly similar to the "papers" page at Mendeley: http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/ http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/ I'm completely open to an alternative service (or even a complementary one). So... I guess what I'm trying to say: Give me, one of your intended customers, a compelling use scenario or value-add proposition that might compel me to switch.
- wildtype 14y agoMe and my friend use facebook, twitter, and (mostly) have appoinment to share interesting paper to read. Discussing paper offline are the reason why we meet. Haha..
- kingkawn 14y agoWhat does "adjusted for IQ" mean?
- Daniel_Newby 14y agoIt means comparing people in different jobs who have the same IQ.
- kingkawn 14y agoHaven't we reached the point yet where the whole idea of IQ testing is pretty discredited? And adjusting for IQ, meaning that someone is smart therefore they are expected to earn more money? It sounds like "taking into account these variables, and introducing this ridiculous one to allow me to adjust the outcomes as needed."
- roel_v 14y agoWell if you don't agree that somebody with an IQ of 120 can be reasonably expected to be better at making money, and in the aggregate people with that IQ do actually make more, than somebody with an IQ of 80, then you have such a radically different view from the mainstream that any discussion is pointless. FYI, adjusting for certain variables is a fundamental aspect of statistics. All studies in social sciences and economics of real-world data do so, because no real-world effect can be isolated to the point that it can be measured independently. "Haven't we reached the point yet where the whole idea of IQ testing is pretty discredited?" What? No, of course not. Are you saying that there are no people who are smarter than others?
- bgilroy26 14y agoIQ is not synonymous with intelligence, it is married to the 20th century philosophy of psychology and history of testing methods. For IQ to simply mean the intelligence scale normalized so that average intelligence = 100 would take a big marketing effort amongst the education and psychology communities. Even if it were divorced from the twists and turns of its historical development, it seems pretty clear that at it's best IQ can aggregate the values of creativity, lateral thinking, calculation, memory-retrieval, memory-storage, memory-organization, (even, despite tester's best efforts) domain knowledge together and replace them with one number. I think that some of the "everybody learns differently!" stuff has jumped the fence and become an old wives' tale, but there has to be a happy medium between assigning someone a 40 column printout to summarize their intelligence and slapping one number on it. [This is not to mention all of the shift in emphasis away from intelligence towards results and output based partially on Outliers, and partially on the idea that if you praise kids for an inherent trait that they have no control over that they will stop playing to win and start playing not-to-lose.]
- vacri 14y agoalso, pretty much all the low-hanging fruit has been done in science. Even if we allow for science to be infinite, each new brick in the wall of science requires an ever-increasing amount of resources to gain, and usually those bricks are also much smaller. My old company made what was essentially datalog viewing software. Version 1 of the software was basically just squiggly lines going across the screen. People loved it, because previously they only had squiggly lines going across paper, and a 20-minute recording was the size of a phone book. But version 2 of the software required far more developer work, and had much more polish and detailed algorithms underlying the analyses... but people bridled at 'having to pay again' when 'we don't really get that much for it'. More work, smaller bricks, less appreciation of what it takes to get there...
- bedris 14y agoI don't have the requisite knowledge to comment on fields other than the life sciences, and I certainly agree with your point that every new scientific and technological advance necessarily has to be more sophisticated than the one(s) that it's built upon. But the notion that the past was chock-full of low-hanging fruit just waiting to be picked seems exaggerated and doesn't give enough credit to the people who did all that work that, in hindsight, looks easy, trivial, and obvious, but at the time certainly required significant insights, advances, and effort. John LaMattina, former president of R&D at Pfizer, weighs in: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2012/03/02/there-has-never-really-been-low-hanging-fruit-in-pharma-rd/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2012/03/02/there-h...
- shadowsun7 14y agoThere is an infinite amount of work in science because the universe is big and we don’t really understand it and we probably never will. There may be an infinite amount of work in science, but there is a finite (and very unevenly distributed) number of grants. Your conclusion rings true to me.