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It is basically true but also devastating to admit that “pro-education” is an ideology. “We should fulfill some basic requirements for a functional society,” an

It is basically true but also devastating to admit that “pro-education” is an ideology. “We should fulfill some basic requirements for a functional society,” and other hardcore extremist positions…

bilbo0s 1y ago
But pro-education is an ideology. It always was.
- snapplebobapple 1y ago
  Its an ideology beyond a base level that is justified by reasonable cost benefit analysis. For example i am very much against the buzz sawing currently going on but i also see the mass overproduction of phds and replication crisis quality research going on in sections of academia and am very much for drastically cutting thise fields. I would want a bunch of analysis done and then very careful scaling back over several years not what is happening
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    I’m pretty sure everybody in academia is already aware of those problems (they are personally annoyed by them on a day-to-day basis). But the serious path to fixing them is not the buzz saw. Like nobody enjoys giving up more than half of their grants to the school admin. But cutting it down 15% max all of a sudden is not a change that is going to stick around.
    - dogleash 1y ago
      > everybody in academia is already aware of those problems (they are personally annoyed by them on a day-to-day basis). But the serious path to fixing them is not the buzz saw What is the serious path to fixing them? I don't think academics are moving the needle with their current strat of a bit of handwringing followed by conceding to the system anyway.
      - bee_rider 1y ago
        Big picture—I think it is unreasonable to expect us to solve this problem that has plagued a giant community of pretty smart people, in a couple Hackernews comments. But, in the interest of conversation… Replication problems—I guess this is sort of a social problem really, it isn’t seen as prestigious to just try and replicate research. Maybe we should start to hand out more grants for that (we get what we pay for, right?). Perhaps this could also help with “publish or perish,” we could stop using paper published as a figure of merit and start using number of papers reproduced. I would put this in the bucket of insufficient diligence applied by the grant issuers. Overproduction of PhDs, I dunno, if lots of people want to go into research I don’t see that as a huge problem. Rather than overproduction of PhDs, perhaps we have a problem of seeing grad students as cheap labor. I think it is widely understood that the hours that grad students bill are almost entirely bullshit (you spend way more time doing anything than your contract says), so maybe we need to police that better (it seems like the grad students’ and the NSF could easily have aligned interests here, in terms of making sure grad students get paid more). Pay them more, the university will have to employ fewer. However, we’ll probably need to hire more dedicated instructors at that point.
        mike_hearn 1y ago
        It's somewhat irrelevant to this thread because academic CS doesn't have a quality problem on the scale that other fields do, and the NSF cuts aren't directly motivated by paper quality anyway (you could argue the stated motivation traces to the same root causes). But, "replication crisis" is a misnomer. The problem isn't replication, not really. A better name would be the scientific validity crisis. This comes up in every HN discussion of science and academia so I wrote a full explanation of why here: https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science-0e195234a280 https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science... ... but tl;dr many papers that are scientifically invalid will replicate just fine. Even if academics suddenly started directing funding to replication studies on a huge scale, nothing would change and there would be no surge in trust in science.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mike_hearn 1y ago
The NSF grants the article is talking about don't fund education, they're supposed to fund research.
- analog31 1y ago
  Research and education have always been intertwined because graduate education involves working on funded research projects. My physics PhD was funded by the NSF.
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    In most walks of life they're separate. The bulk of all education takes place outside of PhD programmes, and private sector research isn't done for its educational value. It's only universities that conflate the two and only at the upper levels. You can be pro-defunding-the-NSF and pro-education, they're not contradictory positions, especially for people who believe universities aren't providing good educations to begin with.
    - analog31 1y ago
      Indeed, it seems like virtually everybody supports education reform. Of course we differ on the details. ;-) Private sector does play a role to some extent because they decide who they want to hire. They could stop requiring degrees, or define some other measure of educational attainment. If it would improve profit, they'd be rushing to try it. Meanwhile, a familiar refrain on HN is "hiring is broken." I'm not a software developer, but companies have made an effort to hire self taught programmers who don't have college degrees. That seems like a good thing. But of course demand has its ups and downs, and we might be in a "down" period right now. I'm thinking out loud here because I don't have an easy answer. For myself, I don't regret my education.
      - mike_hearn 1y ago
        Yes, the software industry shows the way. It's possible because you can rapidly test programming skills in an interview room. Many other office jobs allow this in theory, but in practice hiring managers are inexperienced and don't know how to design rigorous interview processes. There's also a lot of ideology in the mix, some people think skills based hiring is immoral. Still, private sector hiring is often more flexible than it looks. The stated requirements are just a way to filter out applications, but the hiring for important roles is done using networks. In the past I designed the hiring process at a fintech startup selling into banking and insurance; a common refrain from our customers was "we just can't build a team of your quality". I hadn't done anything special there, just applied normal tech industry hiring processes, but those were hardly known amongst our customer base. I actually had one guy asked me in wild-eyed amazement, "is it really true you ask candidates to do the work in the interview itself?!?". A lot of the hiring-is-broken crowd are upset because they got rejected, possibly as a false negative. That really sucks, I'd hate it too if I had experienced that. But it's a view based on personal experience, not on a cold-eyed evaluation of results vs other industries that use different hiring processes. There's a reason that we have a notion of a 'tech company' even though all companies use technology, and there's a reason other industries are scared of them. A lot boils down to different cultural approaches of hiring.

bilbo0s 1y ago

But pro-education is an ideology. It always was.

snapplebobapple 1y ago
Its an ideology beyond a base level that is justified by reasonable cost benefit analysis. For example i am very much against the buzz sawing currently going on but i also see the mass overproduction of phds and replication crisis quality research going on in sections of academia and am very much for drastically cutting thise fields. I would want a bunch of analysis done and then very careful scaling back over several years not what is happening
- bee_rider 1y ago
  I’m pretty sure everybody in academia is already aware of those problems (they are personally annoyed by them on a day-to-day basis). But the serious path to fixing them is not the buzz saw. Like nobody enjoys giving up more than half of their grants to the school admin. But cutting it down 15% max all of a sudden is not a change that is going to stick around.
  - dogleash 1y ago
    > everybody in academia is already aware of those problems (they are personally annoyed by them on a day-to-day basis). But the serious path to fixing them is not the buzz saw What is the serious path to fixing them? I don't think academics are moving the needle with their current strat of a bit of handwringing followed by conceding to the system anyway.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      Big picture—I think it is unreasonable to expect us to solve this problem that has plagued a giant community of pretty smart people, in a couple Hackernews comments. But, in the interest of conversation… Replication problems—I guess this is sort of a social problem really, it isn’t seen as prestigious to just try and replicate research. Maybe we should start to hand out more grants for that (we get what we pay for, right?). Perhaps this could also help with “publish or perish,” we could stop using paper published as a figure of merit and start using number of papers reproduced. I would put this in the bucket of insufficient diligence applied by the grant issuers. Overproduction of PhDs, I dunno, if lots of people want to go into research I don’t see that as a huge problem. Rather than overproduction of PhDs, perhaps we have a problem of seeing grad students as cheap labor. I think it is widely understood that the hours that grad students bill are almost entirely bullshit (you spend way more time doing anything than your contract says), so maybe we need to police that better (it seems like the grad students’ and the NSF could easily have aligned interests here, in terms of making sure grad students get paid more). Pay them more, the university will have to employ fewer. However, we’ll probably need to hire more dedicated instructors at that point.
      - mike_hearn 1y ago
        It's somewhat irrelevant to this thread because academic CS doesn't have a quality problem on the scale that other fields do, and the NSF cuts aren't directly motivated by paper quality anyway (you could argue the stated motivation traces to the same root causes). But, "replication crisis" is a misnomer. The problem isn't replication, not really. A better name would be the scientific validity crisis. This comes up in every HN discussion of science and academia so I wrote a full explanation of why here: https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science-0e195234a280 https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science... ... but tl;dr many papers that are scientifically invalid will replicate just fine. Even if academics suddenly started directing funding to replication studies on a huge scale, nothing would change and there would be no surge in trust in science.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mike_hearn 1y ago

The NSF grants the article is talking about don't fund education, they're supposed to fund research.

analog31 1y ago
Research and education have always been intertwined because graduate education involves working on funded research projects. My physics PhD was funded by the NSF.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  In most walks of life they're separate. The bulk of all education takes place outside of PhD programmes, and private sector research isn't done for its educational value. It's only universities that conflate the two and only at the upper levels. You can be pro-defunding-the-NSF and pro-education, they're not contradictory positions, especially for people who believe universities aren't providing good educations to begin with.
  - analog31 1y ago
    Indeed, it seems like virtually everybody supports education reform. Of course we differ on the details. ;-) Private sector does play a role to some extent because they decide who they want to hire. They could stop requiring degrees, or define some other measure of educational attainment. If it would improve profit, they'd be rushing to try it. Meanwhile, a familiar refrain on HN is "hiring is broken." I'm not a software developer, but companies have made an effort to hire self taught programmers who don't have college degrees. That seems like a good thing. But of course demand has its ups and downs, and we might be in a "down" period right now. I'm thinking out loud here because I don't have an easy answer. For myself, I don't regret my education.
    - mike_hearn 1y ago
      Yes, the software industry shows the way. It's possible because you can rapidly test programming skills in an interview room. Many other office jobs allow this in theory, but in practice hiring managers are inexperienced and don't know how to design rigorous interview processes. There's also a lot of ideology in the mix, some people think skills based hiring is immoral. Still, private sector hiring is often more flexible than it looks. The stated requirements are just a way to filter out applications, but the hiring for important roles is done using networks. In the past I designed the hiring process at a fintech startup selling into banking and insurance; a common refrain from our customers was "we just can't build a team of your quality". I hadn't done anything special there, just applied normal tech industry hiring processes, but those were hardly known amongst our customer base. I actually had one guy asked me in wild-eyed amazement, "is it really true you ask candidates to do the work in the interview itself?!?". A lot of the hiring-is-broken crowd are upset because they got rejected, possibly as a false negative. That really sucks, I'd hate it too if I had experienced that. But it's a view based on personal experience, not on a cold-eyed evaluation of results vs other industries that use different hiring processes. There's a reason that we have a notion of a 'tech company' even though all companies use technology, and there's a reason other industries are scared of them. A lot boils down to different cultural approaches of hiring.