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This is the consequence of giving up privacy and agency very easily. At some point universities stopped encouraging independent exploration and started minting
by KuriousCat 3y ago
This is the consequence of giving up privacy and agency very easily. At some point universities stopped encouraging independent exploration and started minting out industry ready vocational humans eager to join the rat race. That needs to be fixed but at this point there are not many direct beneficiaries who would want to address that problem so this is going to get worse for a while.
- vkou 3y ago> At some point universities stopped encouraging independent exploration and started minting out industry ready vocational humans eager to join the rat race. Universities absolutely encourage independent exploration. Every year, they mint ~10x more grad students than there are research professor positions for them. You want universities to produce even more of them?
- HarryHirsch 3y agoBack then we had industry research labs. There was Bell Labs, the Frythe, DuPont Experimental Station, BASF's Zentralforschung, and nowadays we have the 737-MAX.
- daveguy 3y agoThere are still a bunch of industry research labs. Here's a currated list of just those doing computer science research: https://cra.org/cra-wp/research-labs/ https://cra.org/cra-wp/research-labs/ Just because Boeing sucks these days doesn't mean there isn't good research happening in industry.
- leetrout 3y agoI wonder how accurate that list is now. I see Twitter listed and I assume they have stopped doing CS research.
- danaris 3y agoAnd to what extent are those labs doing the same kind of fundamental research that Bell Labs was doing back in the day? Sure, they wanted to produce things that Ma Bell could monetize—but it was abundantly clear that they were not being micromanaged to that effect. Today, at least from the outside, it seems like any industry-funded research is cut off the moment it looks like it's not going to produce a clearly-profitable product or service within the next few years.
- KuriousCat 3y ago"10x more grad students" != Independent exploration. Limited opportunities means limited bandwidth to fail, this means a lot more incremental and conservative research. There is definitely a lot less research freedom and a lot more conformity and race to publications. I can not disagree more with you on this.
- danaris 3y agoYou appear to be conflating a few different things here. The primary thesis of your original post appears to be universities' shift toward getting people ready for careers that require advanced knowledge (and away from pure learning/research). That has very little to do with research freedom and the race to publications. Those are both real phenomena, but a) it is arguable whether the former is actually a problem, and b) they are only very loosely connected. The number of grad students being trained, by contrast, is much more likely to be related to the degree to which universities still value and practice learning for learning's sake—although I think it is somewhat less so than vkou wished to imply, since there are, in fact, plenty of non-academic jobs that do require or prefer a Masters or even a PhD.
- KuriousCat 3y agoYour premise is that if universities are training more grad students they are valuing independent exploration and encouraging learning for the sake of learning. I don't think it is true. If I am training 100 people to think alike, it is not valuing independent research and exploration. It is herding. Current grad students are "trained" to align with interests of few research labs/few personalities with lot less eccentricity and originality.
- danaris 3y agoI think you may be mixing me up with vkou...? My premise is, purely and simply, that you are conflating multiple things that are not the same.
- 3y ago