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An incredibly accurate depiction of research in any theoretical field, I'd say. Compound that with the fact that during your education you're mostly presented w
by algorias 14y ago
An incredibly accurate depiction of research in any theoretical field, I'd say. Compound that with the fact that during your education you're mostly presented with texts that summarize decades or more of research into a scant few pages as if the people involved had just flowed naturally from one idea to the next, from a problem statement to the incredibly complex idea that unlocks the proof.
When it's finally your turn to try your hand at actual research, it turns out that your contributions are barely a couple of side notes on a restricted subset of a problem in the hope that someone will use that information to find out something that is actually relevant in practice.
Rather than turning me off from academia, it makes me marvel at the tower of minuscule pebbles upon which our modern civilization rests. One day, I might get to place a few more of them on top.
- wheaties 14y agoAgreed. After doing 2 years I left with a masters and never looked back. What is even scarier than the minuscule contributions you might make is the few that have done anything but minuscule. Those people are amazingly smart. By the way, cats do like vacuums... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCzkm2z4-6g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCzkm2z4-6g
- Widdershin 14y agoThat's the part of the article that stuck out to me. I mean, I used to have a lovely ginger cat who liked nothing more than to be vacuumed. I think that the author should ensure that his cat vacuuming experiments are more rigorous in future.
- iliis 14y agoWell, my cat gets scared to death by a vacuum cleaner. She darts out of the room as soon as it's turned on.
- VLM 14y agoIts the motor noise. Once the cat is 20 years old and totally deaf (depends on breed...), I can verify the cat will love the vacuum cleaner. It feels like being brushed and massaged at the same time. I'm surprised day spas don't do this to humans. Needless to say this is using the hose and brush attachment, not the carpet beater.
- chris_wot 14y agoIf the nozzle is too large, or the cat too skinny, it risks getting sucked into the machine. Fair enough the cat is scared. Cats don't do math either. Well, perhaps Schrödinger taught his cat, but I hear it had a sticky end. Nobody is really sure.
- SilasX 14y agoIf they're so smart, why aren't they any better at bringing newcomers up to speed?
- omaranto 14y agoSome thing are hard no matter how you try to explain them. There's lots of stuff that seems to require working through it yourself to understand.
- SilasX 14y agoOh, I don't disagree; some topics are inherently intractable. It's just that, in all my experiences, the numbers are more like 1 truly intractable topic for every thousand that some expert will mistakenly claim is intractable simply because they haven't put the effort into tracing out the connections to other topics. The woman top row of this xkcd pretty much sums up my life: http://xkcd.com/566/ http://xkcd.com/566/
- thomaslee 14y agoProbably because it's hard to distill years of work connecting the dots (which at first don't appear to be connected in an obvious way) in a way that is easily digestable by somebody new to the field. In any case, I imagine there's more glory in digging further into intellectual stuff than spending time making it palatable for newbies. :)
- devb 14y agoIt's the newcomers' faults, clearly.
- jayshahtx 14y agoAt my university, the administration is really pushing to have business undergrads active in research - I don't think most of them have the patience to contribute. Makes me really wish they would read articles like this
- mhurron 14y agoI admit that I have little knowledge of how many fields work and probably know the least about academia but I still have to ask (or maybe that's why I have to ask) what research does a business undergrad participate in?
- the_bear 14y agoMy dad is an accounting professor, and while I don't think he normally involves undergrads in his research, it seems like he could. This is just one small segment of business research, but he tests how rules and incentives impact decision making. For example, make a game where two people are teamed up. You give person A $10 and tell them they can give as much as they want to person B, and that's it. How much does person A share? Ok, now what if you give instructions explaining to person A that person B leaves empty handed if they don't share? What if you say that they're supposed to share 50%? What if 10% of whatever is given to person B is lost as a "tax"? The idea is to figure out ways to get people to act honestly and fairly in the hopes that it can be applied to business. Undergrads could help find test subjects. They could help design the tests (they generally involve simple software that administers the games). Some could probably analyze the results in the hopes of finding interesting and unexpected takeaways.
- mhurron 14y agoThat sounds more like Sociology. As an aside, I believe my first post and this one could sound like I'm trying to be a dick, I'm honestly not. I am wondering and interested. Business majors and related (like your accounting professor father) always seemed to me to be more practical degrees and not really research fields.
- spne 14y agoYour description of research as "pebbles" reminds me of this representation of PhD research (posted on HN a couple years ago). I like how it captures the idea of pushing out the boundaries of what we know just a tiny bit at a time. http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
- pests 14y agoThanks for posting this. His comment immediately reminded me of this and I was about to try to find this exact page.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]