5 ms·

We, collectively as a community, are forced to play these stupid RL career games because if you refuse, you become illegible and, consequently, invisible to sou

We, collectively as a community, are forced to play these stupid RL career games because if you refuse, you become illegible and, consequently, invisible to sources of physical, emotional, and intellectual sustenance. It’s like we are all trapped in vicious cycles of RL career games while hoovering up others in these cycles. Once a critical threshold of people start playing these RL career games, these terrible metrics get elevated to some weird group fairness metrics for hiring/admissions/compensation decisions, no matter how inequitable these games are and how disparate the outcomes are. The metric has moved beyond convenience to something hard to root out. The terrible metric becomes tyrannical, and complaining about it makes you sound like someone who “blames the game for being a bad player”. Even if it was a game you never wanted to play, to begin with. Be the change you want to see in the world. Hire illegible people. Someone is going to tell you can’t and cite vague legal reasons. Unless that person is an actual lawyer giving formal legal advice (or your boss) just ignore him. As a general matter you should always ignore non-lawyers citing vague legal reasons for why you can’t do something.

gyomu 3y ago
I did that with a few interns/junior people and they turned out to be disappointing rather than predictably satisfying. I still agree with you, because I want to believe it pays off in the long run. But it definitely comes at a real short term cost.
- musicale 3y ago
  Tide may be overrated, over-promoted, and overpriced, but people who buy it know that it is going to get their clothes clean.
- coffeecat 3y ago
  Therein lies the problem. Most people are apathetic and incompetent. Winning rat race points requires some amount of competence and "oomph", so rat race points will always correlate positively with applicant quality. Most rat-race-losers, unfortunately, aren't Socrates.
  - jamilton 3y ago
    I wonder what other tests of being non-apathetic and at least somewhat competent would work as well or better than the typical rat race.
    - hellisothers 3y ago
      Anything that signals grit
- bradleyjg 3y ago
  I expect, and have a few data points to suggest, that the average is lower but the variance is higher. More importantly you are helping to fight an anti-human machine that sacrifices endless years of (young! healthy!) life to pointless grinding.
thrwayaistartup 3y ago
Or just leave academia. In the US at least, the job is like 80% government contracting and 20% teaching. Teaching is great, so there's that. But literally every company will let your ad junct, and Professor of Practice usually pays more than 20% of a faculty salary. You can supervise PhD students as interns or by taking a courtesy affiliation (and often even have more impact on those students than their overworked and under-engaged advisors). And university classroom teaching in the US now looks a lot more like 90s/mid-naughts high school teaching. Government contracting sucks, and the academic variety is not any better. I'd literally whether watch paint dry at a military base than contract for DARPA. NSF isn't actually that much better. Who the fuck wants to be a combination high school teacher and federal government contractor? Saints or sociopaths, and there are a LOT more of the latter than the former in higher ed.
- titanomachy 3y ago
  This article is not necessarily about academia, I think it’s actually more geared towards “industry” AI researchers.
  - godelski 3y ago
    Honestly, is there a big difference anymore? The vast majority of papers I read are either by industry directly or have industry as a partner (as an author, not just acknowledgements). There are of course some, and even plenty of examples, but it does seem industry partners is almost necessary these days. I'm not convinced that level of interaction is healthy, for either parties.
    - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > Honestly, is there a big difference anymore? The vast majority of papers I read are either by industry directly or have industry as a partner (as an author, not just acknowledgements). Read more pure math papers, then you will see the difference. :-)
      - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

gyomu 3y ago

I did that with a few interns/junior people and they turned out to be disappointing rather than predictably satisfying. I still agree with you, because I want to believe it pays off in the long run. But it definitely comes at a real short term cost.

musicale 3y ago
Tide may be overrated, over-promoted, and overpriced, but people who buy it know that it is going to get their clothes clean.
coffeecat 3y ago
Therein lies the problem. Most people are apathetic and incompetent. Winning rat race points requires some amount of competence and "oomph", so rat race points will always correlate positively with applicant quality. Most rat-race-losers, unfortunately, aren't Socrates.
- jamilton 3y ago
  I wonder what other tests of being non-apathetic and at least somewhat competent would work as well or better than the typical rat race.
  - hellisothers 3y ago
    Anything that signals grit
bradleyjg 3y ago
I expect, and have a few data points to suggest, that the average is lower but the variance is higher. More importantly you are helping to fight an anti-human machine that sacrifices endless years of (young! healthy!) life to pointless grinding.

thrwayaistartup 3y ago

Or just leave academia. In the US at least, the job is like 80% government contracting and 20% teaching. Teaching is great, so there's that. But literally every company will let your ad junct, and Professor of Practice usually pays more than 20% of a faculty salary. You can supervise PhD students as interns or by taking a courtesy affiliation (and often even have more impact on those students than their overworked and under-engaged advisors). And university classroom teaching in the US now looks a lot more like 90s/mid-naughts high school teaching. Government contracting sucks, and the academic variety is not any better. I'd literally whether watch paint dry at a military base than contract for DARPA. NSF isn't actually that much better. Who the fuck wants to be a combination high school teacher and federal government contractor? Saints or sociopaths, and there are a LOT more of the latter than the former in higher ed.

titanomachy 3y ago
This article is not necessarily about academia, I think it’s actually more geared towards “industry” AI researchers.
- godelski 3y ago
  Honestly, is there a big difference anymore? The vast majority of papers I read are either by industry directly or have industry as a partner (as an author, not just acknowledgements). There are of course some, and even plenty of examples, but it does seem industry partners is almost necessary these days. I'm not convinced that level of interaction is healthy, for either parties.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > Honestly, is there a big difference anymore? The vast majority of papers I read are either by industry directly or have industry as a partner (as an author, not just acknowledgements). Read more pure math papers, then you will see the difference. :-)
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]