As a counter to this article I found my time as a grad student exceedingly productive and gave me great faith in the scientific institution. I definitely believe academics are underpaid; when most of the people in my department could have easy made 500k doing ML in the valley, they were making less than 100k as post docs or 30k as grad students.
Otherwise my advisors were always incredibly proud of their students, passing on their knowledge, and actively pushing them to succeed like proud parents. A lot of my colleagues went on to join other labs or even open labs of their own as PIs.
I see this coming up on HN from time to time: happy current or recent CS grad student implicitly generalizing their experience to academia at large. The thing to keep in mind is that CS is a rare exception: it's relatively well funded and there is real demand for it from outside academia (the two things are not unrelated, of course). ML in particular is often said to have a "brain drain" problem. So obviously you can't treat people like serfs; if you try to, they'll just leave for a better private sector job.
Most academic fields are nothing like that. As a rule of thumb, cultism ~ 1 / (external demand).
Geologist here! It's not just CS, definitely true for us too. I can't speak for all fields, but I do know that the unemployment rate for science PhDs is virtually nil, and the industry demand is absolutely not restricted to software.
For us in the Earth sciences: mining, oil/gas, environmental remediation/consulting, and the national labs are all big employers for us.
The author appears to be talking about comparative literature exclusively. It’s truly a misleading title.
Comparative literature (or “critical theory” or “dept of rhetoric” or whatever fanciful name they’re using) is indeed the cultiest field of academia. It’s why they’re so easy to punk. (See: Sokal affairs.)
Not really comparable at all. The "Social Text" affair was a major deal because "Social Text" was a major venue of postmodernism at the time, and it was a major cause of the fall of postmodernism in academia.
Nobody was "fooled" by the Bogdanovs -- they were French TV personalities who managed to get a couple of bogus papers published in extremely low impact journals that hardly anyone read. Similarly with "Who's Afraid of Peer Review" -- there are thousands of minor journals out there and some aren't very picky about what they publish. In science, it is important to take note of where something is published as opposed to the mere fact that it is.
Social Text wasn't a major venue (of postmodernism or anything else), and Sokal's hoax didn't cause a fall of postmodernism in academia. Far from it. When I left academia in 2009 it was still the dominant perspective, and that doesn't seem to have changed.
Fish's response to Sokal is also exemplary:
What sociologists of science say is that of course the world is real and independent of our observations but that accounts of the world are produced by observers and are therefore relative to their capacities, education, training, etc. It is not the world or its properties but the vocabularies in whose terms we know them that are socially constructed -- fashioned by human beings -- which is why our understanding of those properties is continually changing.
Distinguishing fact from fiction is surely the business of science, but the means of doing so are not perspicuous in nature -- for if they were, there would be no work to be done. Consequently, the history of science is a record of controversies about what counts as evidence and how facts are to be established.
Those who concern themselves with this history neither dispute the accomplishments of science nor deny the existence or power of scientific procedure. They just maintain and demonstrate that the nature of scientific procedure is a question continually debated in its own precincts. What results is an incredibly complex and rich story, full of honor for scientists, and this is the story sociologists of science are trying to tell and get right.
> The "Social Text" affair was a major deal because "Social Text" was a major venue of postmodernism at the time
Social Text was in fact a pretty niche venue and it was not even peer reviewed. Yes, its contents were risible and easy to lampoon, but Sokal’s feat wasn’t the crushing blow on the modern humanities that it is often presented as.
They aren’t underpaid. Tenured professors have the ultimate job security. They also get paid sabbaticals which is fairly rare in the real world. Adjunct professors on the other hand — those are definitely underpaid, but they’re often doing that work as a side job or they’re trying to fight their way to tenure.
A job from which you can’t be fired? That’s worth something. Stellar benefits? That’s worth something as well.
"Adjunct professors on the other hand — those are definitely underpaid, but they’re often doing that work as a side job or they’re trying to fight their way to tenure."
This is like saying that it's OK that a job is paid poorly because the jobs are part-time. Or that it's OK to pay someone less for a second job because it is a second job. Or one group less than another group because obviously they don't need the money.
Underpaid is underpaid. It doesn't matter what the reasoning is. Especially if you are getting paid less than the "full time" or "permanent" person simply because you aren't "full time". I'll also argue in the case of tenured professors: Job security isn't everything, nor is a sabbatical - and IIRC, fewer places are even offering tenure as often. The adjunct professors have little hope.
Every post-doc position is wildly over-subscribed and there is fierce competition for each one. So simple economics - the law of supply and demand - says they are not underpaid, in fact if anything they are paid over the clearing price for the market.
You're under the mistaken impression that there is a free market for postdoc positions. Postdoc salaries are fixed by government salary level tables and postdoc positions are opened as part of a planned economy. Plans range from 5 to 10 years.
Moreover, universities are not companies and could not possibly be run like companies, and foundational research usually does not produce any consumable products. The effects of foundational research on economy are soften only noticeable years or decades later, sometimes (like in mathematics) centuries later. Regarding publications in foundational research as "products" is highly misleading, they contribute to a net effect in science that can hardly be quantified.
Something that David Graeber said that opened my eyes.
Until the 1970s or so, Universities were actually a guild for academics geared towards the production of knowledge. They had self rules, titles, apprenticeship systems, and to some degree the backing and protection of the state. Plus like a true medieval guild, they were run by the masters of the guild itself. Sure, they did not call themselves guilds, but in form and function they behaved like one.
The reason why this arrangement was allowed to stay from ancient days is that the universities performed a useful function for local and federal governments, unlike craft guilds. Governments need a lot of trained clerks, always have. Universities however only need professors to replace the dying batch, as the production of knowledge really wasn't tied to markets or social whims per-se. So a large part of the educated students were turned towards government jobs, a useful arrangement for both parties.
This setup appears to have broken down pretty recently, although exactly why is left as an exercise for the reader.
exactly why is left as an exercise for the reader.
Because for a long time politicians in all western countries have been pushing the idea that attending university shouldn't be a rare or elite thing, that instead nearly everyone should go to university and get a degree. Scaling up changes things fundamentally. Numbers of students graduating with degrees has been showing a clear exponential growth curve over the last 100 years, see page 14 here for the UK:
The explosion in size and funding levels of the university system that accompanied this growth has radically changed society in many subtle ways I suspect we're still struggling to understand.
Why did politicians do this? We must speculate. The explanations given at the time were somewhat dubious and tended to revolve around "the knowledge economy" (at least in the UK). Tony Blair was big into this around the turn of the millennium - the idea that the rise of China meant western countries couldn't compete anymore in traditional labour intensive industries and would have to move on to "knowledge work", which they then assumed meant needing a degree. Quite why China would be unable to educate its workforce to the same level, or why labour costs would not eventually rise in China to western levels, was left unexplored.
I personally suspect there was another agenda at work. From the mid 1990s to early 2000s, the USA and Europe were dominated by left wing parties (arguably Europe still is). People who spend more time in the university system tend to get more socialist in general. The correlation between increasing student populations and increasing future left wing voters would be hard for any political strategist to ignore.
That leaves the question of why university tends to make people more left wing. Leftist academics themselves tend to explain it as "smart people agree with left-wing policies" and leave it at that. But there are lots of smart people who don't, so that explanation seems lacking. However that's a topic for another time.
Hah, I thought it would be funny to add that "left as an exercise to the reader" bit, a habit from my Math days.
Two things.
First, reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer college level skills. That combined with computers means that the bar for government clerical work is much, much lower. The result is that in the 1920s a Philosophy grad would be extremely useful to a county government because of their general liberal arts education, nowadays a high school diploma does the trick. Doubly so now that everyone can use a computer to some degree or another. Without the critical function of providing clerks, Universities have lost a large amount of their value proposition to the government.
Second, since the 1970s both political parties have shifted away from the government as all of us striving together, to a necessary evil at best. The right has been extremely effective at villifying government action and government spending in particular. With that context in mind, it is not surprising that the right would aim to not only cut government spending on higher education (something that their religious wing also likes) to save on the tax money, but also to "starve the beast" in general.
Also, the 1970s were kinda crazy, and academia came out of that looking kinda extreme.
Your last and second-to-last paragraphs aren't entirely congruous are they?
Firstly you argue that "the right" is responsible for villifying government action, i.e. the population at large were basically static in their views until "the right" came along.
But then you say that the same era was kinda crazy and academics in particular (absolutely not a bastion of the right) came out looking extreme.
I'm not sure where you're based in the world, but that description seems accurate for the UK, perhaps the USA but my knowledge of 1970s era America is not so hot.
Rather than "the right" winning some sort of struggle, perhaps the population came to be suspicious of government naturally as a result of observing the craziness of those times. After all it would be strange if times could be crazy and government employees (as all academics are) could look kinda extreme, and that not affect people's views on a large scale.
I should’ve specified, I live in America. I also did not live to see the 1970s in person, so my final paragraph should be taken with more salt than the preceding ones.
> Firstly you argue that "the right" is responsible for villifying government action, i.e. the population at large were basically static in their views until "the right" came along.
To be fair, “the right” is a fairly large section of the population. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that in general Americans are much more skeptical of the utility of government than they were 50 years ago.
I think your last paragraph is plausible, but it’s not my favored explanation.
For me, I think the decline in public opinion towards government programs started with racial integration. Around that time a surprisingly large chunk of white people appear to have willingly degraded their public institutions to avoid having to share with black people, sometimes going as far as literally filling recently integrated pools with concrete rather than share. You also see private Christian schools pop up with the explicit goal of being segregated.
Fun fact, organized evangelical involvement in right wing politics began with segregation. It’s only after the association with segregation became toxic did they pivot to abortion and homosexuality as their bête noire. They’ve tried their best to downplay this though, because it’s kind of an ugly truth.
Within this framework, the anti-government anti-public institution movement got rolling in the 1960s, and started to get a large political head by the 1970s and 1980s. The political turmoil within that period on the left in universities was a response and symptom of that anti-government swing, not a cause of it.
It is for certain possible that certain antics by academia during that time period came across as unpalatable to moderates, undermining their position. I just don’t think it was the cause.
>> First, reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer college level skills. That combined with computers means that the bar for government clerical work is much, much lower.
Which probably explains why most public services are FUBAR and stuffed full of incompetent idiots.
Education has been under constant evolution since its earlierst forms, though the change over the 20th century (in North America and Western Europe especially) has been profound, particularly in the first half of the 20th century. I'm going to wind back a bit further.
With the founding of the first European universities (1088, University of Bologna), education focused on the seven liberal arts, with degrees generally in administration, law, medicine, and divinity. Early on there was a divide between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts -- what we'd now call "technology" or "engineering", as well as various applied fields -- also known as the vulgar arts. The term doesn't carry the full derogatory sense of today, though these were considered far less honorable and privileged than the liberal arts. Most practical arts were taught within guilds, not at universities.
The liberal arts were divided amongst the trivium (from which: trivial): grammer, logic, and rhetoric, or roughly, input, processing, and output; and the quadrivium: maths, geometry, music, and astronomy, or numbers, numbers in space, numbers in time, and numbers in time and space.
Roll forward to about 1800 and Alexander von Humboldt was reforming the German university system with changes that largely reflect the modern system. The field of "philosophy" had long since been divided into its "natural" and "moral" fields, those were now starting to break out into the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, etc.) and social sciences (over the course of the 19th century): sociology, political science, political economy, psychology, and anthropology. The modern sense of majors was established by the 1880s or so, though it expanded much since then. In the last decades of the 19th century, areas such as English and Literature started becoming formalised as scholarly research rather than technical practice.
Technology was creating demands for specialised technical skills, while the university as a basis for cultural indoctrination was also recognised (John Stuart Mill writes on this at length, Jens Hanson has a good treatment of this).
By 1900, the high school graduation rate in the United States was about 5%. It helped greatly to be white, male, and not working-class. The high-school curriculum itself was comparable to at least the first year or two of a liberal arts college, with math, Latin, Greek, philosophy, literature, and other coursework. The PhD attainment level today is over twice that of high-school graduates in 1900.
Technical schools, of which M.I.T. was not the first but among the most significant, date to roughly 1860. Its course catalogue, to this day, is numbered in the order in which programmes were added to the curriculum, up through the first 12-15 entries, making for an interesting bit of anthropological evidence itself. By the 1920s, the term "publish or perish" was appearing in the context of academic publishing.
World wars 1 & 2 both proved the significance of science and technology, and Vannevar Bush in particular pushed for a vast expansion of higher education and research following his war work, with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 spurred this on. The GI bill accelerated this, and initiatives such as the California Master Plan for Higher Education and others elsewhere (the UK has a similar programme) in the late 1950s and early 1960s lead to a tremendous expansion of universities, along with the Baby Boom and (in the US) draft deferments for the Vietnam War. College enrollments and degree awards boomed. Disciplines within the letters and sciences (modern-day liberal arts) developed increasing degrees of specialisation and in the eyes of many, were increasingly divorced from practical realities. Government funding drove much research, especially in engineering and the sciences, but also in nontechnical fields.
The tide started to roll back in the 1970s with the oil shocks, economic malaise (far more severe in Britain than the US), and other factors, though tuition hikes were fairly modest until the late 1980s / early 1990s. Industry funding replaced some government monies. The glut of 1970s and later PhDs were hitting first slowed growth, then stasis, and finally decline in available academic positions. At the same time, advanced degrees in many areas proved of limited interest in themselves outside academia.
TL;DR: there were significant changes through the 1970s and 1980s, but they are better seen as part of a very large arc of development of higher education.
In my experience there are multiple cutls within academia and they operate at different levels. In finance, for example, there is a cult of "efficient market hypothesis" and another cult of "behavioral finance". The two groups don't appreciate each other much although publicly they love to say how much they respect their colleagues from the other group.
That's a strange statement. So as a human society who do we all hate collectively in secret but claim to love openly? My point is that the academia as a whole is not a cult but there are cults within academia.
Also that's not the only "measure" by which one can claim existence of cults within academia but it's still something you don't want in the research community. Numerous times I have heard statements like "this paper will never get past XYZ because XYZ doesn't like Thaler/Kahneman/[any behavioral researcher here]". That should never be acceptable in research that's claimed to be scientific. Yet, it's common in academia.
The same thing affecting academia ( mostly humanities ) is the same thing affecting journalism. Instead of being institutions for seeking truth and knowledge, they've become institutions of political advocacy and agenda.
However, lately I've come to wonder if the solution isn't simply to defund all non-STEM academic subjects. It seems likely that subjects that aren't strongly tied down to some sort of objective utility function will always drift towards some sort of strange and extreme agendas.
There is a historical reason for this. Religion is practiced by Doctors of Divinity and science by Doctors of Philosophy. At the time of Newton education or universities were controlled by religious doctors. After Newton Doctors of Philosophy took control of the education. Doctor means someone who is licensed to teach the doctrine. So at the fundamental level religion and academia are organized exactly the same. Only doctrine is different. In this system cult simply means an outside hierarchy organized by an unlicensed teacher. But both are cults.
That explanation sounds good but I couldn't find much on the doctor=doctrine link. This says the word comes from medieval Latin "docere" which simply means to teach. Doctrine shares the same root word as doctor, but that root word is simply the notion of teaching and doesn't have inherently religious overtones.
To be honest, it's the publishers that are to blame. I believe most scientist dont really care how it's published as long it is. The publishers run a pyramid scheme.
You two are not talking about the same thing. You are talking about publishers, OP is talking about university students vs employment. Universities accept paying students knowing that there is only a job for 1/10 of those students.
are you joking? the only reason publishers have any power is academia is full of a areoagance and people chasing “prestige” and getting
into good journals
Yes, humanities academia is severely flawed, not only in the ways that the author describes but also in the prevalence of pseudo-intellectual quackery in literature studies, cultural studies and areas of social sciences, philosophy, etc.
The newspaper appears to have forgotten to qualify the title to make clear that they were not talking about all academia.
A lot of biomedical science is also barely worth of the name science as it's not reproducible. And I'm sure you could find the same in physics and math too. But it's way easier to look at the humanities, not being able to understand the language used due to not having the required background and go "clearly it's worthless because I, someone with a degree in a completely different field, cannot understand it". And then endlessly point at the Sokal affaire.
But at least one time a nonsense mathematical paper, written by a computer, was accepted for publication. So clearly mathematics is a flawed, worthless field worthy only of derision, right? And a few nonsense computer science papers have also been accepted, so clearly also a worthless field.
A couple of points: specialized language in science is needed because science deals with things like genes, particles, and mathematical constructs that we have no words for in normal language. This often means that papers in, say, biology, are not only not understandable to chemists, but even to other fields of biology studying different things. This really isn't in the case in the humanities, which deal with the human experience we experience in daily life. There often the point is to sound as complicated as possible to hide the fact that nothing much is being said.
The "Sokal Text" affair tends to overwhelm Sokal's bigger accomplishment, the book "Fashionable Nonsense" (with Jean Bricmont). There he shows how famous scholars like Lacan and Deleuze threw random scientific terms into their works in contexts where nothing scientific is being said as a way to sound "deep".
The reproducibility problem in science is real, but oftentimes people confuse reproducibility (i.e. I give concentration X of compound Y to mice of strain Z, and 50% develop cancer within a month and you do the same and get a similar result) with failure of generalization (You change the concentration or mouse strain and get a different result and write a paper saying I'm wrong).
Yeah, exactly. Specifically the bit where tenured faculty really need the cheap labor of PhD students, so they're incentivized to paint a rosy picture of the tenure-track prospects to encourage students to enter PhD programs -- "look at me! I achieved the dream!". Yet in reality the chance of these students reaching the tenure track are slim to none, and in fact the only way to be successful is by pulling more people into the pyramid below you to stand on.
Much like how successful MLM sellers are incentivized to bring more and more sellers into the program under them ("look at me! I achieved the dream!"), even though the chance of any of those new sellers actually becoming successful are slim to none, and in fact the only way to be successful is by pulling more people into the pyramid below you to stand on.
Really? Do you pay thousands of dollars each year to, and spend your first non-child-labor years for any political party? If so, then yes that party must be a cult :-)
All religions started out as a cult. Christianity was a cult until it won.
The difference between a cult and religion is the same as the difference between a molehill and a hill. It's hard to say exactly when a molehill turns into a hill, but you'll know it when it does.
> All religions started out as a cult.
Beware of survivor bias. Even assuming that all religion were once cult it still does not follow that all cults could become viable religions.
That's an amusing saying, because it conjures images of a struggle, in which there's somewhere something that is greedy and something that seeks fairness. What is the struggle about, i.e. what is that "all" that the greedy actor wants?
I think it doesn't matter, because this saying is just a threatrical way of saying that we define a cult as an organization in the religious world that we find to be uncooperative, asocial, greedy, mean, yada yada, -- something we don't like.
Further, religion just wants its cut? There's an implicit entitlement there. Why?
I started out saying this saying is amusing, but, man, am I finishing on the opposite note.
What I get from that statement is that religion is a more sustainable cult i.e. a cult that recognizes that demanding total control is a poor strategy in the longer term.
>It’s not unusual for academic job seekers to spend 10 percent of their annual income — the amount of a tithe — attending a single conference for an interview (including airfare, lodging, registration fees and incidentals).
You can tell the author legitimately knows humanities academia from the inside because they are experts at pointing out unrelated coincidental facts as if their simultaneous truth meant something.
Seems like this should be titled "Humanities Academia is a cult". Which is a conclusion with which I don't necessarily disagree. Frankly, the job numbers are out there. If you choose to get a PhD in history even after seeing them, you're probably delusional in some form.
I'm not so certain about STEM however. While cults can pop up anywhere there is a leader with a non trivial power dynamic, I'd say that a fair portion of professors in STEM will happily explain to you the harsh reality of academia and discourage you from getting a PhD. Furthermore, there are jobs outside of academia for PhDs, so there's a lot less lock in.
Music academia is terrible and riddled with politics and infighting from my experience also. The number of actual livable jobs for classical musicians are very low. It makes me pissed off how public schools will still spend hundred of thousands of dollars and push kids into classical music when it is such a dead end, and competition is so high. It is a ponzi scheme where the students pay the teachers, then the students become teachers and the cycle starts over again. Barely anybody who does not play an instrument ever listens to classical music it is a joke. The least selling genre of music in the United States behind jazz.
> It is a ponzi scheme where the students pay the teachers, then the students become teachers and the cycle starts over again. Barely anybody who does not play an instrument ever listens to classical music it is a joke
Or, this is the normal way traditional arts and crafts of all sorts are transmitted through the generations? It's not a Ponzi scheme unless it promises supranormal exponential growth.
I learned a classical instrument and it taught me many lessons that I don't I would've learned elsewhere (or at least not until much, much later in life):
- rote repetition and practice isn't sexy, but it works and will lead to steady improvement, no matter how bad you are initially
- there is an effective technique to rote practice, and you can put it to use for any skill that you wish to acquire
- failing many times is part of the road to success
These are all skills that are very applicable to software developers as well.
I'm sure there are people who tried very hard to become classical musicians and now regret that choice, and perhaps some resent those who encouraged them along that path, but I never expected to become a professional and continue to happily play in my free time. Same goes for many of my music acquaintances.
I don't get this. Why aren't kids taught music just for the sake of it instead of for a career? You most likely have mastery by not doing it "full-time" but at least you will enjoy it and get to a point where yo would be able to play it socially and enjoyably!
Well, if you want to teach kids music that they actually enjoy and that will be more applicable to this generation, focus on pop music, rap music, hip hop, any popular music genre. Hip hop and R&B are the most popular genres of music in the US [1], classical music and jazz are the least popular genres of music [2]. Why are we still teaching classical and jazz over genres more popular, enjoyable, and accessible? It is not a good career path, it is not popular with kids or with the masses, and it is a lot more expensive than any other genre of music.
I try to imagine a high school band playing rap music... this is not easy. I think you'd have to assign the rap itself to the percussion section, and there wouldn't be much left for the rest of the band to play.
Copyright makes that idea rough anyway. Classical music is far easier to get. Sousa marches and the national anthem are also easy to get.
I mostly don't see how any of this relates to a career path. We teach kids music because they enjoy the teamwork and accomplishment.
Why are we still teaching assemby and C over development languages more popular, enjoyable, and accessible? It is not a good career path, it is not popular with kids or with the masses, and it is a lot more expensive than any other genre of software development.
That is comparing apples to oranges. C and assembly are what most applications and operating systems are built on in one way or another. Classical music is not the root of popular music nor does it carry over to other music genres that much at all.
Also, the way that music is taught in band rooms, is based almost entirely on sheet music and nothing on actually creating music. In fact most of the people I know who were very good classical band players had very underdeveloped ears and sucked at music creation. If you program in C, you will become a better python/js/etc. programmer, the same can not be said for classical music.
Plus, most computer science programs have switched from starting with C to starting kids off on Java or Python, so that argument does not make any sense. Most public schools do not even teach anything other than jazz or classical music.
Music is frequently taught at schools but not pushed as a career choice, so I'm not sure that the original complaint holds (at least not everywhere). Almost all children where I grew up studied music in some form at school and virtually none took it as a career, those who did were amply warned about the risks. This was considered unremarkable.
Music schools aren't just about performance - as long as you are clever about what your research field is, any degree is applicable to any kind of career. Want to go into politics? Write a dissertation on the political influences of the Habsburg monarchy on European music, or perhaps unearth new data on the fly-over republican states through an ethnomusicological lens. Want to get into technology? There is probably no more fun way than to do a PhD in sonic arts, creating complex technical-marvel music machines and writing music software that lands you a job with one of the many music software companies (or start your own). Maybe you want a teaching career? Sure - it's hard work to get tenure but what could be more rewarding than talking and thinking about music all day. Sports or therapy? Music therapy in combination with Feldenkrais or Alexander techniques gets you into a more interesting, unique field than just standard therapy. I could think of a lot more examples how a music school could really supplement the career of anyone - it's the fault of the music school that focuses on looking backwards and only celebrating chamber/choir music. Many schools are realising that's not helpful anymore and while believe me, I love a great rendering of an 18th century opera, you can get a lot more out of music school than that.
Participating in music is personally fulfilling, but unlikely to give financial flexibility. Schools should emphasize the role that it will realistically play in students' lives.
This is definitely the emphasis in music education at the K-12 level, and to a growing extent at the college level as well. I came across this page recently:
I have a PhD in theoretical physics. The only reason I found transitioning to software easy was because I had been writing software my entire life anyway. Am I better or even as good as the engineers who have 6 years experience on me? I don't think I am. Time will tell if I outpace them.
I no longer hold delusions and overly romantic notions of what academic science is. If I have one advantage, it is that I have no doubts as to my career path. I am a very indecisive person, and leaving academia is one thing in my life I am sure was a good choice.
If you mean within academia, I agree. If you mean in the private sector, absolutely not. Mathematics and physics majors have a ton of opportunity in CS-related fields. I hired a lot of them when I ran a data science team. Their understanding of software development from first principles usually seriously outranks CS graduates at the cost of not knowing how to program in advanced languages.
I find it a lot easier to develop a Math/Physics graduate's coding skills than a CS graduate's underlying understanding of the physical world and formulaic thinking.
This all depends on what you consider science, I suppose. If you define science as work with beakers and things, sure, yeah, those positions are dying out.
But genetic research is more of a CS-dominated field than it is a purely "scientific" field these days. nVidia pays technical geneticists mid-six figures to work on their projects.
Science is becoming more democratized and breaking out of the academic, federally-funded, very slow process model, and plenty of people are working in private science that have nothing to do with making drugs, but rather in brand new fields and exploding existing niche ones.
Some of this isn't great, I'll be the first to admit with a lot of experience on both sides of the aisle. But overall it's a massive net positive. For everyone.
If you would like to be pedantic, only a small percentage of individuals use the skills taught to them in their major (or any traditional classroom setting really) in their daily job.
The value of a classical education is that the student learns critical thinking and problem solving in a diverse set of frameworks, which allows them to adapt to the requirements of the job.
Engineering is more immediately applicable. For science and math you need to go much further in your education if you want to pursue a career in the their fields.
Other people mention software engineering in comments, but last time I heard, investment bankers would hire mathematicians, then physicists, and only then software people.
I've seen math / physics majors make an easy transition into software development. I bet that is much easier to pull off than switching to programming from say, sociology.
> I bet that is much easier to pull off than switching to programming from say, sociology.
Sociology curricula are getting quite quantitative these days — the jump from sociology student to data scientist isn’t that far. I used to live with a bunch of sociologists back in grad school, and they lived and breathed R, Python, and SAS.
Most math and science students are aware that we aren't headed for academic research careers in those fields. But that's true for computer science students as well.
I have a physics degree, and while I'm not employed as a programmer per se, programming is my main problem solving tool. It wouldn't be a quantum leap for me to move into a programming job if I wanted to do it.
On the other hand, I also have two friends whose college degrees were in philosophy and music performance, and both became programmers.
Is this a regional thing? I've had interviewers inquire perplexedly from across the table as to why in the world someone with a mathematics degree was seeking a software development job.
Do employers in some parts really salivate over green math/phys grads with not so much as a github profile? Or do these anecdata leave off some key arc to the story where the grad does something substantial to bridge the gap between said major and software dev?
The concept of "idea laundering" is fascinating. It seems that, as of today, the incentives of the academics are simply misaligned with the those of the public.
I don't agree with this. A cult requires two things: your money and your loyalty. Neither gets your that far in academia. Look at all the people trying to get into Harvard. Many applicants would willingly pay way more than the tuition if to be guaranteed a slot (if Harvard slots were put to auction, I imagine bids would be very high), but so so few are accepted despite being able to pay. Scientology will accept anyone that can pay. Rather academia is more like professional sports in that it is very competitive and many try-out and few make it to the pros.
You are mistaking, admission to Harvard with a "career in academia". Being admitted to a school has some correlation to your achievements (legacy students and affirmative action aside). Being one of the small percentage of graduate students that gets a paying job in the field has far more to do with your loyalty and your willingness to subjugate yourself to the will of your superiors - as the author of this piece (and anyone else who has come up through the ranks of post-grad education in the last 25 years) rightly points out.
How true is the no cap part? Genuinely curious, because I can't imagine some cults where if you're at the bottom of the ladder, the cult will do everything it takes to retain you if you give the cult little money and unrelenting loyalty because the loyalty itself will take care of retaining oneself to the cult. Hence, willingness to subjugate oneself to the will of the superiors with no end. Hopefully that makes sense.
>It should come as no surprise that the professor who made that demand is a white male alumnus of the Ivy League, and the student an immigrant from a working-class background.
I'm getting really tired of these kinds of racial and ethnic generalizations. If you substitute "asian" or "jew" in and you find it's racist, it's still racist if it says "white."
This comment breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to take threads on extraneous flamewar tangents. Especially a doozy like this one, which has burned and been picked over incessantly.
Indeed, the irony here is... kind of amazing. While the author is spot on about the cultish practices thriving in certain corridors of the ivory tower, he's apparently blind to his own susceptibility to some of the more poisonous strains of dogma issued from the very same sources.
> I'm getting really tired of these kinds of racial and ethnic generalizations. If you substitute "asian" or "jew" in and you find it's racist, it's still racist if it says "white."
No. If you attended a civil rights march in 1962 and remarked at how white the counter-protesters were (and how the hoses never seem to get aimed at them), you would be making an accurate observation about race and power dynamics, not smearing white people. Observing that some (many?) of those same dynamics persist in our present enlightened age is not racism.
Even if I accepted the modern re-branding of the word "racist" to mean the new "power + privilege", which I don't accept, but I understand many people use that definition, the author's statement is still loaded with racial prejudice. He literally said that bad behavior X is "no surprise" because the person behaving badly is white and a man.
You trying to justify this language as not only tolerable but acceptable is part of the problem society has wrt treating people as individuals. And the fact that you're using historical injustices against people to tell me why I need to accept negative language around two immutable physical characteristics that I possess is really over the line. We're supposed to be moving away from that kind of society.
> You trying to justify this language as not only tolerable but acceptable is part of the problem society has wrt treating people as individuals. And the fact that you're using historical injustices against people to tell me why I need to accept negative language around two immutable physical characteristics that I possess is really over the line. We're supposed to be moving away from that kind of society.
I'm confused here. You want society to treat you as an individual (a reasonable ask), but you also feel like some other white person's bad behavior somehow reflects upon you?
Let's be clear: the negative language in this article is about the negative actions, not racial characteristics, of the person in question. The racial characteristics are only a reminder that these things don't happen in a vacuum, a truism that most people don't have an issue with (including you, insofar as you recognize that historical injustices really do exist). Talking frankly about how bad behavior connects directly to privilege does not a racist attack make.
>I'm confused here. You want society to treat you as an individual (a reasonable ask), but you also feel like some other white person's bad behavior somehow reflects upon you?
I don't feel like some other white person's bad behavior somehow reflects upon me. I feel like it has become acceptable to judge me based on my non-individual characteristics, based on the language in the article, and your defense of that language. There is no contradiction here.
>Let's be clear: the negative language in this article is about the negative actions, not racial characteristics, of the person in question.
Yes, let's be clear: the negative language is "no surprise," which is being directly applied to those immutable physical characteristics of being white and a man (and one mutable characteristic of being an Ivy League alumnus). Please don't tell me what the author really meant, when their language is quite clear.
> you would be making an accurate observation about race and power dynamics
Accurate observations don't get a pass, unless you're generally smearing the white race. Today, you cannot have a conversation about racial differences in crime rates, IQ, etc. You also cannot make any negative generalized statements towards non-white or non-cisgender groups. However, you can hysterically smear white men as much as you want, without significant repercussions, if any at all [1][2][3][4]
I think the parent post acknowledges this. When I said "if X is racist with race Y, then it's also racist with race Z," they replied with "No." They sound like the explicitly support a double standard, depending on what identity is being smeared.
I don’t find it to be racist (unless your definition is ‘someone who talks about race’).
But it is exceptionally lazy. Rather than making the case they wish to directly, they’re offloading that work onto their audience, many of whom will obviously defer to popular generalizations. The majority of the time I see “privileged white male” shorthand, what the author is talking about is character and behavior, both of which can be warped by one’s environment or social status. But hiding that entire analysis in three words does wrong by the reader and makes it easy to view poor behavior as some kind of essential trait rather than a failure of socialization.
If we’re looking to shift patterns of misbehavior or help people understand them better, that’s a bad way to start.
Looks like someone here has a case of white fragility. Please recall that reverse racism does not exist: the oppressed cannot be racist towards the oppressor.
I jest. That's another one of those concepts that came out of the humanities academia recently, which is relevant to the article: https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10774
Are PhD degrees required to do machine learning research? Or can someone be completely self-taught and contribute to the field as much as those with PhDs?
Is vocational training and an apprenticeship necessary to be a master carpenter? No, it is not: but it makes it far easier to become one.
And that's what a PhD is: it's a vocational degree coupled with an apprenticeship. It's not like a BS or MS: it's ultimately not about courses or grades. Rather, you are attaching yourself, like a barnacle, to a researcher -- the professor -- so that you can learn how to be a researcher yourself. Eventually you step out from under her wing and do some research on your own, and that forms your thesis work.
You could learn to do research in a specialized field without going through this process -- and I know several who have -- but you'll probably discover along the way that science or engineering research is an apprenticeship field for a very good reason.
Conferences / other publication venues don't require you have a PhD to submit to them. However, figuring out what a good novel research problem is and solving it rigorously is much much easier in an academic environment --- both because you are financially supported to work on said problems and because you have a community of people to tutor you and give you feedback.
I think the financial part is important. Funding in academia is interesting to say the least. Especially when it comes to grant funding, which can often have interesting requirements that are impossible to have privately or as an individual.
note that a PhD in a computer science department is going to be much less bad than the humanities PhDs described in the article.
- they are fully funded, stipends are somewhat higher (at least not total starvation level), and there is the opportunity for lucrative industry internships
- students in general have leverage, because it's possible to leave and go get a high paying engineering job
- there's a bias towards continuing in academia but it's not taboo to go to industry; you don't have to lie about this.
- for a combination of these and other reasons, i don't think an abusive culture has set in: professors don't feel like they need to haze their students.
i don't mean to imply that everything is beautiful and perfect but it is way less culty.
I'm about to finish my masters in CS, where I focused in machine learning. While I don't research at my school, my current job is a software/ML engineer in a machine learning focused team; I consider my role between a software engineer and data scientist.
While I don't do academic research, I spend a non-trivial amount of time reading papers and keeping abreast of new research that is relevant to my job. If the research seems relevant enough, I'll dig deeper and implement the research into a workable model. The software engineering portion really kicks in when I productionize this model and make it a usable product.
So in regards to your question, if you want to do fundamental, academic research then go for your PhD. For the kind of work I do currently, then it's more about the group you work with in industry.
I would really like to respectfully listen to the points of view of the author, but I do not like myself manipulated by this excessive over the top clickbait headings. I hope that we can all return to a more civil discourse without resorting always to the most extreme polarised positions that go by the phrases "influence" and "persuasion" these days.
FYI the story writer almost never comes up with the headline in a traditional newspaper story pipeline (which most likely still includes wapo). Usually it’s one of the editors that has final say on the headline (and control of A/B testing online). Often the reporter will even have to push back when the editor tries to use too strong a word that may be technically incorrect based on the reporter’s more in depth knowledge of the topic.
Now I’m not trying to say that the story writer isn’t also writing sensational stories, with their own agendas, only that you would do well not to judge a story by its headline. Otherwise, I agree sensational headlines turn me off as well.
You’re gonna get downvoted because this is HN but really this article is clickbait designed to exploit a growing epistemological crisis in the west. The author is just describing a group with a history and traditions. While cults are also groups with tradition and sometimes history it’s well disingenuous to say THAT is their defining feature.
EDIT: I’d just like to be clear that Academia has definitely got serious issues. But a person who establishes PhD level credentials in Marxist social analysis at the top of the article sure does spew a ton of words about material conditions without ever naming capitalism as the issue and instead blames “academia.” Oh, professors and grad students are terribly overworked but also they are administering a cult?
Thank you for putting it so clearly. I'm afraid there are too many lost souls who think the 4th Estate still exists. Except for a few truth tellers here and there on the internet, it no longer does.
While what you’re saying is clearly factually true, what he’s done was apply a very common style of sarcastic dismissal. I think it’s rather obvious he didn’t mean to imply WaPo was actually an organization similar to Om Shinrikyo. In all honesty I think if he’d have written some long form comment we’d all get the same point but have wasted far more time.
Otherwise my advisors were always incredibly proud of their students, passing on their knowledge, and actively pushing them to succeed like proud parents. A lot of my colleagues went on to join other labs or even open labs of their own as PIs.