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The difference is that a startup has a much bigger potential upside.

GavinB 18y ago
If you measure success exclusively in money, then that's true. Grad school isn't for me, but it's the right choice for the right people.
- banned_man 18y ago
  Academia is the right job environment for a certain set of people, but they deserve decent living conditions. They shouldn't be exploited just because society views them (correctly or otherwise; mostly otherwise, I believe) as naive pansies. Few are arguing that academics ought to be millionaires (although they're certainly more deserving of that than most of the assholes running Wall Street, the Fortune 500, and Hollywood) but they should be paid well enough to support a lifestyle comfortable enough to enable a "life of the mind" (which most professors, for what it's worth, don't get to have). The phrase, "we don't pay you to work here, we pay you so you can work here" seems to have been lost on academia.
  - gaius 18y ago
    because society views them (correctly or otherwise; mostly otherwise, I believe) as naive pansies. It doesn't matter what society views them as. If supply exceeds demand, prices will bottom out. And that's not even grad school, it's Econ 101.
banned_man 18y ago
Also, academia (in the humanities) has much more of a downside. If your startup fails, you spend a year or two of your life learning a lot of useful skills, but end up out of a job when the money runs out. It sucks, but you end the travail much better off than when you started, and probably better off than if you had toiled in a mediocre corporate job. In the humanities, if your academic career fails, you've spent a decade of your live to get a relatively useless degree, have weak job skills for someone your age, and probably damaged self-esteem. You're not better off than you were when you began; you're in your mid-30s with nothing to show but a publication no one cares about.
- whacked_new 18y ago
  A counter argument: if they are getting the PhD as evidence of mastery in a topic they love, it doesn't matter what comes after it, unless circumstances will force them to give up what they love until they die. If one can see just this far, they will be able to plan accordingly. Suppose they do, then there is no reason to change course. The point is to know what you want and why you want it; having figured this out, screw what other people think, unless your plans require that as a parameter.
  - banned_man 18y ago
    A counter argument: if they are getting the PhD as evidence of mastery in a topic they love, it doesn't matter what comes after it, unless circumstances will force them to give up what they love until they die. The intrusion of bad "circumstances" is the norm in academia. Actually, it's the norm in life, but academia is set up in a way that makes it nearly impossible to recover. Also, the "love" people have for a subject or field is highly conditional (not that it should be any other way; that wouldn't make sense). This is mere attachment. Unconditional love for something so abstract probably cannot exist, and if it can, is not desirable in any case. It's legitimate to be intellectually fascinated by finite fields or 19th-century literature, but to say that one loves these things is a stretch. A person who's capable of developing a fascination with X is equally capable of finding a "love" for Y; that's a core trait irrespective of niche-bound particulars. So when someone is forced into an unappealing niche by academic politics, lives a crappy lifestyle on account of the university's stinginess, and has a fractured family life due to overwork and constant geographic uncertainty, all while having to cope with distracting administrative and bureaucratic chores, it makes sense that this "love" of subject matter would disappear entirely. Most people realize, upon growing up, that they love their families and decent lifestyles more than intellectual abstractions.
    - whacked_new 18y ago
      I don't disagree with you, although that doesn't contradict what I said: I use "love" in a very strict sense, in the same way you use it in the unconditional sense. So another issue I didn't make clear was that many people who declare their love for a subject don't really know to what extent this love stretches. In my book it means being alive implies doing X, until life ends. Difficult for most, but not impossible :-)

If you measure success exclusively in money, then that's true. Grad school isn't for me, but it's the right choice for the right people.

banned_man 18y ago
Academia is the right job environment for a certain set of people, but they deserve decent living conditions. They shouldn't be exploited just because society views them (correctly or otherwise; mostly otherwise, I believe) as naive pansies. Few are arguing that academics ought to be millionaires (although they're certainly more deserving of that than most of the assholes running Wall Street, the Fortune 500, and Hollywood) but they should be paid well enough to support a lifestyle comfortable enough to enable a "life of the mind" (which most professors, for what it's worth, don't get to have). The phrase, "we don't pay you to work here, we pay you so you can work here" seems to have been lost on academia.
- gaius 18y ago
  because society views them (correctly or otherwise; mostly otherwise, I believe) as naive pansies. It doesn't matter what society views them as. If supply exceeds demand, prices will bottom out. And that's not even grad school, it's Econ 101.

banned_man 18y ago

Also, academia (in the humanities) has much more of a downside. If your startup fails, you spend a year or two of your life learning a lot of useful skills, but end up out of a job when the money runs out. It sucks, but you end the travail much better off than when you started, and probably better off than if you had toiled in a mediocre corporate job. In the humanities, if your academic career fails, you've spent a decade of your live to get a relatively useless degree, have weak job skills for someone your age, and probably damaged self-esteem. You're not better off than you were when you began; you're in your mid-30s with nothing to show but a publication no one cares about.

whacked_new 18y ago
A counter argument: if they are getting the PhD as evidence of mastery in a topic they love, it doesn't matter what comes after it, unless circumstances will force them to give up what they love until they die. If one can see just this far, they will be able to plan accordingly. Suppose they do, then there is no reason to change course. The point is to know what you want and why you want it; having figured this out, screw what other people think, unless your plans require that as a parameter.
- banned_man 18y ago
  A counter argument: if they are getting the PhD as evidence of mastery in a topic they love, it doesn't matter what comes after it, unless circumstances will force them to give up what they love until they die. The intrusion of bad "circumstances" is the norm in academia. Actually, it's the norm in life, but academia is set up in a way that makes it nearly impossible to recover. Also, the "love" people have for a subject or field is highly conditional (not that it should be any other way; that wouldn't make sense). This is mere attachment. Unconditional love for something so abstract probably cannot exist, and if it can, is not desirable in any case. It's legitimate to be intellectually fascinated by finite fields or 19th-century literature, but to say that one loves these things is a stretch. A person who's capable of developing a fascination with X is equally capable of finding a "love" for Y; that's a core trait irrespective of niche-bound particulars. So when someone is forced into an unappealing niche by academic politics, lives a crappy lifestyle on account of the university's stinginess, and has a fractured family life due to overwork and constant geographic uncertainty, all while having to cope with distracting administrative and bureaucratic chores, it makes sense that this "love" of subject matter would disappear entirely. Most people realize, upon growing up, that they love their families and decent lifestyles more than intellectual abstractions.
  - whacked_new 18y ago
    I don't disagree with you, although that doesn't contradict what I said: I use "love" in a very strict sense, in the same way you use it in the unconditional sense. So another issue I didn't make clear was that many people who declare their love for a subject don't really know to what extent this love stretches. In my book it means being alive implies doing X, until life ends. Difficult for most, but not impossible :-)