8 ms·

Higgs isn't alone in remarking that he would not have had the time today to conduct the kind of work he did in the 1960s. Brian Greene has remarked that today’s

Higgs isn't alone in remarking that he would not have had the time today to conduct the kind of work he did in the 1960s. Brian Greene has remarked that today’s grant-driven academia would not have allowed Einstein the luxury of a decade in which to develop his General Theory of Relativity. Eric Weinstein wrote that, "We have spent the last decades inhibiting such socially marginal individuals or chasing them to drop out of our research enterprise and into startups and hedge funds. As a result our universities are increasingly populated by the over-vetted specialist to become the dreaded centers of excellence that infantilize and uniformize the promising minds of greatest agency." [1] Weinstein's "deviants and delinquents" include "von Neumann [skirt chasing], Gamow [hard drinking], Shockley [bigoted], Watson [misogynistic], Einstein [childish], Curie [slutty], Smale [lazy], Oppenheimer [politically treacherous], Crick [incompetent], Ehrenfest [murderous], Lang [meddlesome], Teller [monstrous] and Grothendieck [mentally unstable]." Higgs's observation suggests that the systematic stamping out of non-conscientious non-conformists is a byproduct of over-scheduling them. (Scheduling has to be considered independently of effort, ability and experience. [2]) Weinstein's deviants benefited from a historical period during which they had sufficient time and freedom to pursue their greatest work (von Neumann, who didn't need any time, is an exception). But I imagine that time is a luxury even for the deviants and delinquents who find themselves displaced from academia into startups. So what is really needed is a startup culture that provides for years of uninterrupted development and focus. (Not to mention a hiring process that actively selects for displaced deviants, but that's another post.) [1] http://www.edge.org/responses/q2013 http://www.edge.org/responses/q2013 Edge 2013 : WHAT SHOULD WE BE WORRIED ABOUT? [2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w16502 http://www.nber.org/papers/w16502 Don't Spread Yourself Too Thin: The Impact of Task Juggling on Workers' Speed of Job Completion. Decio Coviello, Andrea Ichino, Nicola Persico. NBER Working Paper No. 16502

cvet 13y ago
As a student in a Ph.D. program, I can't help but think I'm caught in the grant-driven world and am being steered away from deeper consideration of big ideas. It's an easy track to get stuck on, mostly because grant-proposing is a game, identifying a minor unexplored area is relatively simple, and there are short-term rewards for doing so. What's really getting at me is the arrogance of established "experts." It's kind of baffling (because it should be about curiosity, not certainty), and when you come across someone who has made it through the academic system and still retained curiosity, independent-mindedness, etc., it's a really refreshing sight. That being said, a lot of what I do is unfulfilling and I've discussed several times leaving the academic world for some kind of tech startup life, although I'm not sure if that is a pipe dream or grounded in reality.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
zzleeper 13y ago
Btw are u an economist? Nicola Persico's work is really good but those papers are hard to find casually =)
- ChristianMarks 13y ago
  No. A historical figure in mathematical logic and complexity theory recently suggested that I earn a second Ph.D. in economics. It probably should have been the first, instead of mathematics. I work on agent-based simulations as a hobby. (No jobs in that area.) I make an effort to read whatever I can, but it isn't nearly enough.
RamiK 13y ago
"Brian Greene has remarked that today’s grant-driven academia would not have allowed Einstein the luxury of a decade in which to develop his General Theory of Relativity." Academia has been a force for stagnation well before the 1900s. e.g. Einstein wasn't working in Academia when he released his 1905 General Theory of Relativity paper. He spent 1901-1908 working in the patent office while releasing papers outside of Academia. Only in 1908 he was appointed lecturer in acknowledgment of his existing works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Patent_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Patent_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_Papers#Special_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_Papers#Special... If you want to figure out what's wrong with Academia I suggest asking economists who deal with incentives and market forces as a subject of research as opposed to the anecdotes of a few well-meaning physicists. Yes, the physicists are clearly smarter. But with few exceptions they're just not trained or equipped to asses these problems.
- sampo 13y ago
  > 1905 General Theory of Relativity paper Special relativity. On general relativity he worked from 1907 to 1915.
  - RamiK 13y ago
    Yeah. Sorry. Copy pasted badly. The link was right though... Speaking of which: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity#Creation_of_general_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity#... Seems he had most of the concept nailed down by 1907 but was struggling with the math. So, he worked the module step-by-step only adding gravity in 1915 after learning about Riemannian manifolds.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
rtpg 13y ago
> So what is really needed is a startup culture that provides for years of uninterrupted development and focus. (Not to mention a hiring process that actively selects for displaced deviants, but that's another post.) Years? a lot of great research is done as the culmination of baby steps, and papers can be published at midpoints. Even Einstein, from his patent office published at least 5 papers in 7 years. That's a pretty decent rate considering it wasn't even his fulltime job, and a PhD student working as such would probably be considered proficient(then again, I'm not aware of the paper rate of physicists). I've met a lot more people in research who would just do nothing without deadlines than hidden geniuses that are hindered by their deadlines. Granted, I've met few geniuses too. I'm really curious as to what task really requires years of uninterrupted work that cannot be segmented and presented for feedback.
- ChristianMarks 13y ago
  I take that as an indication that I am correct. There are the examples of General Relativity and Grigory Perelman's solution of the Poincare Conjecture, not to mention recent advances on the twin prime conjecture.
- sampo 13y ago
  Of Adrew Wiles (of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem fame), Wikipedia says: "He dedicated all of his research time to this problem for over 6 years in near-total secrecy, covering up his efforts by releasing prior work in small segments as separate papers."
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Look, you have a point, but we've swung to the other extreme. Nowadays, you're supposed to start building up your publication record while in undergrad if you want to have a really competitive background for an academic job.
vorg 13y ago
> So what is really needed is a startup culture that provides for years of uninterrupted development and focus. Not just startups, but any worthwhile project really. From an interview with Rich Hickey: "I started [Clojure] while on a sabbatical I had given myself. Not a break from work, but a break to work, as a completely free person. I gave myself leave to do whatever I thought was right, with no regard for what others might think, nor any motivation to profit. In releasing it, I had the normal expectations for a new language—that ten to a hundred people might use it. Maybe I would get some help or code contributions. It has taken off, and subsequently demanded far more time than the sabbatical I planned. So, I’m trying to recoup some of the investment I’ve made. Had it been a financially motivated undertaking, I’m sure Clojure would not exist, but I don’t regret having invested in it." http://codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/ http://codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/
- oeqa 13y ago
  That's an interesting link. I always assumed that Rich Hickey came from academia, given that he made a successful programming language. Are there any biographical articles talking about his background?
  - silverlake 13y ago
    He was a consultant. FYI: It's extremely rare for anyone from academia to make a commercially successful language. Their incentives are different. They want publishable novelty, and they don't care about building a useful suite of libraries and a vibrant community. Jones (Haskell), Syme (F#), and Odersky (Scala) are the only designers w/ academic backgrounds I can think of for marginally popular languages.
    - judk 13y ago
      And note that among the major reasons that Haskell didn't get widely popular is that it is full of publishable novelty and lacked a useful suite of libraries* and vibrant community. Until the past few years when Galois folks and bos did a lot of library work.
    - 13y ago
weland 13y ago
> So what is really needed is a startup culture that provides for years of uninterrupted development and focus. Just a few wild ideas, what do you think about these alternatives: 1. A more socially-responsible business environment, so that startups aren't the only icon to pray to? 2. Different funding schemes for research on high-arcing topics? 3. Reducing the "everyone NEEDS to get a degree" hype? A lot of the instant gratification behind phenomenons like the startup culture is responsible for much today's bullshit in academia (I've seen a ton of it before I left it). IMHO, the issues run a lot deeper than how academia is (disastrously) managed.
- moggie 13y ago
  What are those issues?
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Largely a focus on maximizing short-term and near-term "productivity" - as we understand it here and now - rather than allowing the leisure for both basic sanity and for larger thoughts.
  - weland 13y ago
    I was about to write a longer post, but this is so incredulously complicated, and I am so biased, that I changed my mind halfway through. I'm honestly too biased about some of its points to provide anything marginally better than flamebait if I start going into details, but I can offer some hints. 1. The funding for research is increasingly scarce, and the ones who decide how big they are and to whom they should go are increasingly clueless. This means that ideas are funded less and less based on their scientific merit, and that more and more funds are handed over based on personal relations than on true selection. This is an incredibly important problem. The retards running it are (like most retards) too arrogant to realize that we, as a race, suck at making predictions about what we can do. Both in terms of being too optimistic (remember thirty years ago when people thought we'd write these posts from a base on the Moon?) and in terms of missing obvious things, like electricity, which was intensely studied for several decades before it got any reasonable application. There are many ways to avoid handing money over to crackpots. The focus should be on those, not on trying to judge the merit an idea might have in practice. We're too stupid to do that yet. 2. The bulk of the work is carried out by underpaid people, in bad working conditions. This makes smart people bitter, kills their productivity (in the short term) and their lives (in the long term). I distinctly remember my first workplace after I dropped out: it was a start-up where we were routinely pulling 60-hour weeks before we managed to hire enough people. This felt like a lot of free time to me. 60 hours is a free week for a PhD working on something worth a fuck. 120 hour stints are rare because of the physical strain they put on you, but you end up doing one every two months or so. Don't get me started on what that does to your life. This may work if you have a bunch of Steve Jobs wannabe pretending they're scientists, researching how to sell things. Turns out, it's disastrous when trying to do real work. A lot of the jokes we played in the office revolved around that. They stopped being funny when we pondered how many drowsy PhDs were simply too tired to realize they could do <this thing> and bring us five years closer to treating cancer. 3. A lot of the undergraduate classes are becoming less and less fundamentals-focused, because academia is increasingly becoming the place where you're trained to work in the industry. Consequently, as people finish their senior years, they are increasingly less adept at research -- though, sadly, increasingly proud about their can-do attitude and so happy they have a Computer Science degree to prove that they can design websites, as if you actually had to fucking go to college for that. Turns out these people are good enough for the wonderful world of startups. They're just as clueless about the real world as the people who pay them, their self-esteem is bad enough, and they are so utterly inept at learning anything mildly complex that they are easily sucked into the industry vortex. This isn't true only about CS and CompEng, it's happening in fields like EE and Mechanical Engineering, but the proportion of mission-critical applications in those fields is slightly higher, so most of the hipsters get cured after their first months on the job. Turns out this system, while being almost satisfactory for the industry, breeds very bad researchers. Turns out it's hard to do research into web communication if 90% of your graduates have mad CSS skillz but still have trouble explaining what O(log n) means. #1 and #3 above may be subjective, and there are a lot more points that I didn't want to bring in so as to maximize the chances of keeping the discussion civil. #2, on the other hand, while also being something I am quite subjective about (actually, it's the one I'm rather heartbroken about) is the one that escapes the scrutiny of people who are otherwise quick to cry out against the likes of Walmart. Part of my dropping out of academia (see below for disclosure) is that I'm really not that smart. I'm good, but not scholarly material; I'm good at bringing together various technologies and finding atypical solutions to practical problems, but I suck at pounding on the same important issue for years and years at a time. I also suck at math. My brain isn't wired correctly for that. So, even if the working conditions hadn't been the way they were, I'd have left academia at some point, simply due to my sheer incompetence. However, I had a lot of colleagues who were incredibly smart. People who could think of a problems in way I could never have possibly thought, and who were genuinely better at what they studied (electromagnetism) than I'd ever have been (I ended up doing research in EE by sheer chance anyway; I got into EE because I thought it would make be a better programmer -- which it did). You wouldn't believe the way they changed in five or six years of working 10-12 hours a day, not only weekdays, but weekends too. I've heard more stories of wrecked relationships than I can think about, and too many of them are struggling with depression. Most of them don't regret it at all. They're happy with what they discovered and genuinely feel they made the world a better place, but having been there, I honestly can't help wondering if it was worth it. I never bring it up with them, for obvious reasons, but it's very sad, especially since I can relate with that. (Almost) full disclosure: I am an academia dropout. I dropped out during my MSc studies, despite being on a fairly good track (several articles, in several important journals (important as in "people who aren't scientists have heard of them") with my name on it, prior to me earning my BSc).
Create 13y ago
http://norvig.com/performance-review.html http://norvig.com/performance-review.html http://www.giagia.co.uk/2010/03/23/ada-lovelace-day-2010/ http://www.giagia.co.uk/2010/03/23/ada-lovelace-day-2010/
xorbyte 13y ago
von Neumann is 'skirt chasing' but Curie is 'slutty'?
- fsck--off 13y ago
  Pierre was killed in an accident in 1906. In 1910-11 she had an affair with one of Pierre's former students, Paul Langevin, who was estranged from his wife but still technically married. The Wikipedia entry links to this page: http://www.aip.org/history/curie/scandal1.htm http://www.aip.org/history/curie/scandal1.htm
- ChristianMarks 13y ago
  I'm paraphrasing Weinstein [insensitive!] from his answer to the Edge 2013 question. The wording of Weinstein's original requires more cognitive load (to associate the individual with the adjective he assigns) than necessary. My paraphrase closely follows Weinstein and attempts to reduce the reader's cognitive load, without endorsing Weinstein's choice of adjectives--which I do not endorse.
- ericrweinstein 13y ago
  "In the past, many scientists lived on or even over the edge of respectability with reputations as .... " is what I wrote on Edge. Actually I don't think von Neumann or Curie had anything wrong with them in chasing the embrace of another. And yes, there is a major double standard in reputations. Curie after all chased love while von Neumann, it appears, chased sexual opportunity. Thanks for pointing it out. But the post was not insensitive. Most of these people are my heroes and I'm proud of all their accomplishments.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
>Weinstein's "deviants and delinquents" include "von Neumann [skirt chasing], Gamow [hard drinking], Shockley [bigoted], Watson [misogynistic], Einstein [childish], Curie [slutty], Smale [lazy], Oppenheimer [politically treacherous], Crick [incompetent], Ehrenfest [murderous], Lang [meddlesome], Teller [monstrous] and Grothendieck [mentally unstable]." You know what? You just made me feel a whole lot better about my life. Thank you. Gottlieb/Sennesh [childish, mentally unstable, anime]
- ChristianMarks 13y ago
  Glad to hear it! Going over the list and reading Higgs's comments made me feel less pressure to produce on infinitesimal time scales.

cvet 13y ago

As a student in a Ph.D. program, I can't help but think I'm caught in the grant-driven world and am being steered away from deeper consideration of big ideas. It's an easy track to get stuck on, mostly because grant-proposing is a game, identifying a minor unexplored area is relatively simple, and there are short-term rewards for doing so. What's really getting at me is the arrogance of established "experts." It's kind of baffling (because it should be about curiosity, not certainty), and when you come across someone who has made it through the academic system and still retained curiosity, independent-mindedness, etc., it's a really refreshing sight. That being said, a lot of what I do is unfulfilling and I've discussed several times leaving the academic world for some kind of tech startup life, although I'm not sure if that is a pipe dream or grounded in reality.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

zzleeper 13y ago

Btw are u an economist? Nicola Persico's work is really good but those papers are hard to find casually =)

ChristianMarks 13y ago
No. A historical figure in mathematical logic and complexity theory recently suggested that I earn a second Ph.D. in economics. It probably should have been the first, instead of mathematics. I work on agent-based simulations as a hobby. (No jobs in that area.) I make an effort to read whatever I can, but it isn't nearly enough.

RamiK 13y ago

"Brian Greene has remarked that today’s grant-driven academia would not have allowed Einstein the luxury of a decade in which to develop his General Theory of Relativity." Academia has been a force for stagnation well before the 1900s. e.g. Einstein wasn't working in Academia when he released his 1905 General Theory of Relativity paper. He spent 1901-1908 working in the patent office while releasing papers outside of Academia. Only in 1908 he was appointed lecturer in acknowledgment of his existing works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Patent_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Patent_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_Papers#Special_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_Papers#Special... If you want to figure out what's wrong with Academia I suggest asking economists who deal with incentives and market forces as a subject of research as opposed to the anecdotes of a few well-meaning physicists. Yes, the physicists are clearly smarter. But with few exceptions they're just not trained or equipped to asses these problems.

sampo 13y ago
> 1905 General Theory of Relativity paper Special relativity. On general relativity he worked from 1907 to 1915.
- RamiK 13y ago
  Yeah. Sorry. Copy pasted badly. The link was right though... Speaking of which: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity#Creation_of_general_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity#... Seems he had most of the concept nailed down by 1907 but was struggling with the math. So, he worked the module step-by-step only adding gravity in 1915 after learning about Riemannian manifolds.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

rtpg 13y ago

> So what is really needed is a startup culture that provides for years of uninterrupted development and focus. (Not to mention a hiring process that actively selects for displaced deviants, but that's another post.) Years? a lot of great research is done as the culmination of baby steps, and papers can be published at midpoints. Even Einstein, from his patent office published at least 5 papers in 7 years. That's a pretty decent rate considering it wasn't even his fulltime job, and a PhD student working as such would probably be considered proficient(then again, I'm not aware of the paper rate of physicists). I've met a lot more people in research who would just do nothing without deadlines than hidden geniuses that are hindered by their deadlines. Granted, I've met few geniuses too. I'm really curious as to what task really requires years of uninterrupted work that cannot be segmented and presented for feedback.

ChristianMarks 13y ago
I take that as an indication that I am correct. There are the examples of General Relativity and Grigory Perelman's solution of the Poincare Conjecture, not to mention recent advances on the twin prime conjecture.
sampo 13y ago
Of Adrew Wiles (of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem fame), Wikipedia says: "He dedicated all of his research time to this problem for over 6 years in near-total secrecy, covering up his efforts by releasing prior work in small segments as separate papers."
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Look, you have a point, but we've swung to the other extreme. Nowadays, you're supposed to start building up your publication record while in undergrad if you want to have a really competitive background for an academic job.

vorg 13y ago

> So what is really needed is a startup culture that provides for years of uninterrupted development and focus. Not just startups, but any worthwhile project really. From an interview with Rich Hickey: "I started [Clojure] while on a sabbatical I had given myself. Not a break from work, but a break to work, as a completely free person. I gave myself leave to do whatever I thought was right, with no regard for what others might think, nor any motivation to profit. In releasing it, I had the normal expectations for a new language—that ten to a hundred people might use it. Maybe I would get some help or code contributions. It has taken off, and subsequently demanded far more time than the sabbatical I planned. So, I’m trying to recoup some of the investment I’ve made. Had it been a financially motivated undertaking, I’m sure Clojure would not exist, but I don’t regret having invested in it." http://codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/ http://codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/

oeqa 13y ago
That's an interesting link. I always assumed that Rich Hickey came from academia, given that he made a successful programming language. Are there any biographical articles talking about his background?
- silverlake 13y ago
  He was a consultant. FYI: It's extremely rare for anyone from academia to make a commercially successful language. Their incentives are different. They want publishable novelty, and they don't care about building a useful suite of libraries and a vibrant community. Jones (Haskell), Syme (F#), and Odersky (Scala) are the only designers w/ academic backgrounds I can think of for marginally popular languages.
  - judk 13y ago
    And note that among the major reasons that Haskell didn't get widely popular is that it is full of publishable novelty and lacked a useful suite of libraries* and vibrant community. Until the past few years when Galois folks and bos did a lot of library work.
  - 13y ago

weland 13y ago

> So what is really needed is a startup culture that provides for years of uninterrupted development and focus. Just a few wild ideas, what do you think about these alternatives: 1. A more socially-responsible business environment, so that startups aren't the only icon to pray to? 2. Different funding schemes for research on high-arcing topics? 3. Reducing the "everyone NEEDS to get a degree" hype? A lot of the instant gratification behind phenomenons like the startup culture is responsible for much today's bullshit in academia (I've seen a ton of it before I left it). IMHO, the issues run a lot deeper than how academia is (disastrously) managed.

moggie 13y ago
What are those issues?
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Largely a focus on maximizing short-term and near-term "productivity" - as we understand it here and now - rather than allowing the leisure for both basic sanity and for larger thoughts.
- weland 13y ago
  I was about to write a longer post, but this is so incredulously complicated, and I am so biased, that I changed my mind halfway through. I'm honestly too biased about some of its points to provide anything marginally better than flamebait if I start going into details, but I can offer some hints. 1. The funding for research is increasingly scarce, and the ones who decide how big they are and to whom they should go are increasingly clueless. This means that ideas are funded less and less based on their scientific merit, and that more and more funds are handed over based on personal relations than on true selection. This is an incredibly important problem. The retards running it are (like most retards) too arrogant to realize that we, as a race, suck at making predictions about what we can do. Both in terms of being too optimistic (remember thirty years ago when people thought we'd write these posts from a base on the Moon?) and in terms of missing obvious things, like electricity, which was intensely studied for several decades before it got any reasonable application. There are many ways to avoid handing money over to crackpots. The focus should be on those, not on trying to judge the merit an idea might have in practice. We're too stupid to do that yet. 2. The bulk of the work is carried out by underpaid people, in bad working conditions. This makes smart people bitter, kills their productivity (in the short term) and their lives (in the long term). I distinctly remember my first workplace after I dropped out: it was a start-up where we were routinely pulling 60-hour weeks before we managed to hire enough people. This felt like a lot of free time to me. 60 hours is a free week for a PhD working on something worth a fuck. 120 hour stints are rare because of the physical strain they put on you, but you end up doing one every two months or so. Don't get me started on what that does to your life. This may work if you have a bunch of Steve Jobs wannabe pretending they're scientists, researching how to sell things. Turns out, it's disastrous when trying to do real work. A lot of the jokes we played in the office revolved around that. They stopped being funny when we pondered how many drowsy PhDs were simply too tired to realize they could do <this thing> and bring us five years closer to treating cancer. 3. A lot of the undergraduate classes are becoming less and less fundamentals-focused, because academia is increasingly becoming the place where you're trained to work in the industry. Consequently, as people finish their senior years, they are increasingly less adept at research -- though, sadly, increasingly proud about their can-do attitude and so happy they have a Computer Science degree to prove that they can design websites, as if you actually had to fucking go to college for that. Turns out these people are good enough for the wonderful world of startups. They're just as clueless about the real world as the people who pay them, their self-esteem is bad enough, and they are so utterly inept at learning anything mildly complex that they are easily sucked into the industry vortex. This isn't true only about CS and CompEng, it's happening in fields like EE and Mechanical Engineering, but the proportion of mission-critical applications in those fields is slightly higher, so most of the hipsters get cured after their first months on the job. Turns out this system, while being almost satisfactory for the industry, breeds very bad researchers. Turns out it's hard to do research into web communication if 90% of your graduates have mad CSS skillz but still have trouble explaining what O(log n) means. #1 and #3 above may be subjective, and there are a lot more points that I didn't want to bring in so as to maximize the chances of keeping the discussion civil. #2, on the other hand, while also being something I am quite subjective about (actually, it's the one I'm rather heartbroken about) is the one that escapes the scrutiny of people who are otherwise quick to cry out against the likes of Walmart. Part of my dropping out of academia (see below for disclosure) is that I'm really not that smart. I'm good, but not scholarly material; I'm good at bringing together various technologies and finding atypical solutions to practical problems, but I suck at pounding on the same important issue for years and years at a time. I also suck at math. My brain isn't wired correctly for that. So, even if the working conditions hadn't been the way they were, I'd have left academia at some point, simply due to my sheer incompetence. However, I had a lot of colleagues who were incredibly smart. People who could think of a problems in way I could never have possibly thought, and who were genuinely better at what they studied (electromagnetism) than I'd ever have been (I ended up doing research in EE by sheer chance anyway; I got into EE because I thought it would make be a better programmer -- which it did). You wouldn't believe the way they changed in five or six years of working 10-12 hours a day, not only weekdays, but weekends too. I've heard more stories of wrecked relationships than I can think about, and too many of them are struggling with depression. Most of them don't regret it at all. They're happy with what they discovered and genuinely feel they made the world a better place, but having been there, I honestly can't help wondering if it was worth it. I never bring it up with them, for obvious reasons, but it's very sad, especially since I can relate with that. (Almost) full disclosure: I am an academia dropout. I dropped out during my MSc studies, despite being on a fairly good track (several articles, in several important journals (important as in "people who aren't scientists have heard of them") with my name on it, prior to me earning my BSc).

Create 13y ago

http://norvig.com/performance-review.html http://norvig.com/performance-review.html http://www.giagia.co.uk/2010/03/23/ada-lovelace-day-2010/ http://www.giagia.co.uk/2010/03/23/ada-lovelace-day-2010/

xorbyte 13y ago

von Neumann is 'skirt chasing' but Curie is 'slutty'?

fsck--off 13y ago
Pierre was killed in an accident in 1906. In 1910-11 she had an affair with one of Pierre's former students, Paul Langevin, who was estranged from his wife but still technically married. The Wikipedia entry links to this page: http://www.aip.org/history/curie/scandal1.htm http://www.aip.org/history/curie/scandal1.htm
ChristianMarks 13y ago
I'm paraphrasing Weinstein [insensitive!] from his answer to the Edge 2013 question. The wording of Weinstein's original requires more cognitive load (to associate the individual with the adjective he assigns) than necessary. My paraphrase closely follows Weinstein and attempts to reduce the reader's cognitive load, without endorsing Weinstein's choice of adjectives--which I do not endorse.
ericrweinstein 13y ago
"In the past, many scientists lived on or even over the edge of respectability with reputations as .... " is what I wrote on Edge. Actually I don't think von Neumann or Curie had anything wrong with them in chasing the embrace of another. And yes, there is a major double standard in reputations. Curie after all chased love while von Neumann, it appears, chased sexual opportunity. Thanks for pointing it out. But the post was not insensitive. Most of these people are my heroes and I'm proud of all their accomplishments.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago

>Weinstein's "deviants and delinquents" include "von Neumann [skirt chasing], Gamow [hard drinking], Shockley [bigoted], Watson [misogynistic], Einstein [childish], Curie [slutty], Smale [lazy], Oppenheimer [politically treacherous], Crick [incompetent], Ehrenfest [murderous], Lang [meddlesome], Teller [monstrous] and Grothendieck [mentally unstable]." You know what? You just made me feel a whole lot better about my life. Thank you. Gottlieb/Sennesh [childish, mentally unstable, anime]

ChristianMarks 13y ago
Glad to hear it! Going over the list and reading Higgs's comments made me feel less pressure to produce on infinitesimal time scales.