[HN Gopher] Against the Burden of Knowledge
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Against the Burden of Knowledge
Author : mooreds
Score : 32 points
Date : 2024-07-06 18:52 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theseedsofscience.pub)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theseedsofscience.pub)
| quonn wrote:
| Regarding the number of researchers, of all of my friends who got
| a PhD only a single one did it because he liked research. For
| most it was a stepping stone for a totally unrelated career in
| industry and for some just the easiest option due to lack of an
| alternative.
|
| Given that, is is surprising that progress does not scale
| proportionally? Maybe, maybe not. For sure my comment is not
| backed by anything but anecdotes.
| gumby wrote:
| > Regarding the number of researchers, of all of my friends who
| got a PhD only a single one did it because he liked research.
|
| This is sad; luckily for me the percentage is higher among my
| friends. I suspect your experience is closer to the statistical
| mean (perhaps because there's a good chance your friends are a
| few decades younger than me and many of my friends).
|
| Also: I bailed out _because_ I didn 't like research, or rather
| because I very like the _practice_ of research but only ever
| worked on super obscure things, and I wanted to make a
| difference I could see. Also I didn 't want to have to deal
| with the culture of research funding and related bureaucracy.
| Not that there's anything wrong with those who do like that
| stuff! It just seemed not worth getting a doctorate; it
| definitely would have made some things easier but in retrospect
| I made the right call (for me!).
|
| There is a lot of basic research done that does make a
| difference but where that difference is unknown to the original
| researcher -- perhaps separated too far in time. I have found
| value in decades-old PhD theses in the life sciences, mainly
| physiology.
| advael wrote:
| It's crazy how much institutional decay there is basically
| everywhere in this era. Like I grew up hearing stories about
| institutions being crazy effective compared to the ones I
| actually encountered. Sure, humans have always had folly, but the
| society we currently occupy is obsessed with often nonsensical
| metrics, rewards con artists disproportionately for gaming those
| metrics, and creates significant barriers for anyone trying to
| navigate the world through other means. There is no faculty in
| any academic institution untouched by the Reagan-era push to make
| colleges into degree factories, the administrative bloat caused
| by incursions of the demands of an increasingly muscular and
| obtuse finance sector (that also affects most other
| institutions), or the pervasive instinct to automate decisions
| based on dubious metrics, and most adults understand this at an
| intuitive level
|
| We are in a period of widespread outright institutional collapse.
| Institutional decay should be the null hypothesis when
| considering the causal factors behind any widespread problem
| devwastaken wrote:
| This is a natural outcome when governments create rules that in
| effect solidify a market practice. It becomes irrelevant over
| time and fails to change because the rules will not allow for
| it, and even if they did, committees are not known for being
| industry leaders.
|
| In education the solution is simple and effective - cut all
| federal student aid. The educational institutions that have
| strong industry ties and therefore the best outcomes will
| persist. Those that were warming chairs to hand out fake
| degrees will go under. Let it fail for the admins, because it's
| already failing the students.
| glompers wrote:
| Your posted suggestion, of defining the best outcomes as
| immediate job success, would solidify a market practice of
| lowering fences between town and gown (viable during only the
| past 3 or 4 generations) as the only viable way forward for
| educational bodies that intend to survive.
|
| Because I agree with your general statement that market
| situations lose relevance once legislated, I think the
| principle more naturally extends to mean:
|
| It is better to consider how to keep universities, whether
| research institutes or liberal arts universities, as a
| distinctive part of "the whole spectrum of techniques by
| which one generation transmits its insights and abilities to
| the next," Prof. Edsger Dijkstra's words. Not enshrine a set
| of commercial principles by which every piece of a spectrum
| must play.
|
| Immediate job success is a fickle master; it would be a shame
| to LinkedInify any society. In 1996, Dijkstra said, [0]
|
| > The University with its intellectual life on campus is
| undoubtedly a creation of the restless mind, but it is more
| than its creation: it is also its refuge. The University is
| unique in that on campus, being brilliant is socially
| acceptable. Furthermore the fabric of the academic world is
| so sturdy that it can absorb the most revolutionary ideas.
|
| > But it is not only a refuge for the restless minds, it is
| also a reservation for them. It does not only protect the
| restless minds, it also protects the rest of the world, where
| they would create havoc if they were let loose. To put in
| another way, the fence around campus is essential because it
| separates two worlds that otherwise would harm each other.
| The fence ensures that we have relatively little direct
| influence on the world "out there", but we would be foolish
| to complain, for our freedom to be as radical as we like is
| based on the fact that, for at least the first 25 years,
| industry and the world-at-large ignore our work anyhow.
| Currently, there seems to be a world-wide tendency to try to
| lower the fence; the effort strikes me as ill-directed.
|
| He had also been writing similar things in 1986 [1] and 1994
| [2].
|
| [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/dijkstra.html
|
| [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD
| 988...
|
| [2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD
| 117...
| frogeyedpeas wrote:
| Sometimes low barriers result in better results.
|
| If the rent in a city is too high you are not going to get the
| MOST interesting restaurants, bars, and clubs. You are going to
| get only the businesses that will DEFINITELY convince an investor
| to write a check to dump on such high rents; regardless of
| whether that is a good idea or not.
|
| The PhD cohorts for R1 Universities hasn't really gotten any
| bigger than 50 years ago. The number of academic jobs hasn't
| really gotten any bigger either. The only people having success
| in the system are the types of people that seem low-risk to the
| system.
|
| So of course we should expect a decline in innovative ideas as
| time rolls on. The only way to reverse this is to literally
| create more tenured jobs (or perhaps temporary tenure ex: 10
| years you're guaranteed employment) and increase the size of PhD
| student cohorts so that they are large enough that iconoclasts
| can fit in again.
| advael wrote:
| You make a really good point. Defining risk in terms of
| financial ROI and trying to assess it algorithmically and
| default-gating more and more endeavors behind such risk
| assessment is a surprisingly coherent model for a lot of
| widespread modern rot
| paulpauper wrote:
| _But then, Copernicus came along with the heliocentric model
| which, in its simplest initial form, made worse prediction than
| the tuned-up Ptolemaic model. But the burden of knowledge was
| dissolved in an instant. Improving the Copernican model meant
| shifting orbital paths from perfect circles to ellipses. It had
| nothing to do with the epicycles and perihelions of the Ptolemaic
| model and none of that burdensome knowledge was necessary to
| expand the frontier anew._
|
| disagree here. it does not make it easier. to show why a new
| model is right or superior means having to understand the old
| models well enough to show it's wrong or suboptimal. hence
| knowledge.
| bawolff wrote:
| I think people have recognized that the current research grant
| system tends to reward safe, status quo ideas, and discourage
| potentially revolutionary risky long shot ideas. Its been talked
| about for a long time now. Maybe even decades at this point.
|
| The hard part is what to do about it.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| My observation is that both of those could be linked. We might be
| reaching the limits of technology.
|
| It means that to push boundaries we need more money to
| buy/construct new tests. In other words, you need exponentially
| more money. Which leads to the kind of blockbusterization of
| science. You don't get hundred blockbusters each year, instead
| you get two, by team with track record. Which sounds a lot like
| institutional decay.
| mncharity wrote:
| I've repeatedly encountered research I'd have liked to use, but
| which was inaccessibly buried by the pipeline from academic
| research to patents, to optional failed startup, to bigco
| portfolio entombment. And wished for an industrial policy dialed
| more towards a progression from research, to open source and
| community exploration, to cottage commercial, to small-scale
| industrial. Or consider a slider from non-competes, to California
| I'm-working-at-a-competitor-tomorrow, to China and-I've-brought-
| stuff - I'd like to see more California and China than not. Our
| optimization for pharma and VC, often seems terminally ill fitted
| for progress along many vectors.
| electrodank wrote:
| I read the thing twice and it really reads like a long winded
| anecdote, hem haw with some flimsy things thrown in to give it
| more of a serious look. It's mysticism infused with Science.
|
| If I need medical help I go to a hospital. If my car breaks down
| I'll visit the mechanic. An electrician can wire my house
| practically blindfolded (though it's probably against the code to
| do so). Who is the author, what do they do, and what basis of
| experience are they talking from? Because if I want to read shit
| I... well I am on HN already I guess. But seriously, who writes
| these articles?
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