Comment by psi75 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by psi75 | Hacker News Reader

Man, I wish I could use my real name for this reply, but for political reasons I can't (in fact, I change my username regularly) because I have a lot of insight into this problem, why it exists, and why it probably won't get better barring a complete overhaul of our socioeconomic system and the myriad corrupt institutions that support it.

We live in an age of institutional decline and it is severe. You see this in (trade) publishing. Your publisher no longer builds your reputation; the publisher has pushed that responsibility unto the author. The ones who already have the personal resources necessary to market their books get further validation and credibility; the ones who don't will go unheard. Academia's the same way: universities no longer provide funding for people of excellence; rather, they have put the onus of funding on the professors themselves--you'll get more funding (and published in better places) on account of using their name, and for that they take a cut. The relationship has inverted; rather than nurturing emerging talent, these institutions are nurtured by emerging talent, and this vampirism is sustainable because those talented people have no other choice insofar as all the other institutions are failing at approximately the same right.

Consequently, we have widespread duplicated effort, channel-flooding due to metrics-gaming (gotta get that h-index into the three digits before tenure time) and a corporatized, mediocre culture in which agreeability (negatively correlated with excellence and conscientiousness) matters far too much and salesmen run the day.

Historically, there were nations of priests and nations of warriors and nations of farmers. We've become a nation of sellers; but we no longer have much to sell but our own talk.

I don't know, for sure, how to solve this. Anyone who pays attention can see that capitalism (which invariably becomes corporate capitalism) is a dead end at a 21st-century technology level... but of course the eradication of capital is merely a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for scientific excellence. Going socialist is mandatory if we want to fix this, but alone does not guarantee much--there are a lot of cultural changes that probably need to happen before we can build healthy institutions again.

Academia has become big business. Over a period of 30+ years I have observed that part-time admin roles that were filled by academics are now run by full-time corporate types. Their primary mandate is to increase profits and thus inflate their own salaries.

As for successful grants, I have seen that, now, 50% of the amounts immediately goes to "overhead" and the PI needs to pay for stipends and equipment from the remaining 50%, yet there are further "transaction charges" even those activities.

The publishing, grant winning, etc are simply "KPIs" so beloved by the MBA hordes.

What I found incredible is the lack of push-back from academics against the encroaching takeover by the biznoids. Speaking of whom, they don't give a damn about research, academia is merely yet another territory to which they extend their rent seeking (for themselves) activities.

> What I found incredible is the lack of push-back from academics against the encroaching takeover by the biznoids.

Paradox of tolerance. Academics were too peacefully inclined to realize what is happening to them and their jobs until it's too late.

As the left re-emerges, I hope it will evolve into something with some fight in it. De-corporatization is going to take decades and it's not all going to be pretty.

We just need to go p2p, spend five minutes thinking what that means (or read my scattered thoughts) and the culture change becomes obvious.

>Going socialist is mandatory if we want to fix this

Of course, the lede is buried exactly where expected. How novel an idea it is that the the system is separable from its components and that utopia is indeed achievable if only the rest of the world would wake up and learn to serve your idea of a higher purpose. The inevitable counterpoint is that the system is responding predictably and efficaciously to a change to its environment: more undergraduate funding leads to more students pursuing graduate degrees and a greater deal of competition in the academic space. The "problem" is self-correcting. It turns out science doesn't need happy scientists.

The reason why you don't attach your name to comments like this is because your possession of a name worth attaching would preclude this comment from existing.

> The reason why you don't attach your name to comments like this is because your possession of a name worth attaching would preclude this comment from existing.

Socialists are actually oppressed in many countries

This comment is spot-on. We've traded actual productivity for the appearance of productivity as thrift.

Yes that's primarily due to capitalism, specifically neoliberalism, crony capitalism and late-stage capitalism.

Unfortunately socialism isn't enough to save us, because even democratic socialism demands full employment, which is increasingly at odds with automation and UBI.

I don't believe that we have come up with a system yet that incentivizes the kind of one-off revolutionary invention that most of us got into programming for in the first place. The kind of economy where a single invention frees millions of people from forced labor.

Sergey and Larry come up with PageRank and suddenly everyone wants their search engine and they're set for life. Google wins the internet lottery and keeps all of the trillions of dollars. What about the rest of us? We invent something and our business fails due to long-tail effects and we die broke. 90% of businesses fail in their first year. So it's becoming increasingly competitive as tech improves - the ultimate tragic result. Which self-evidently trends toward a crisis of techno-capitalism in the future: The Singularity. Probably the last failure in human history.

We're looking at a situation by the end of the decade where one guy generates an entire movie from notes scribbled on a napkin with some future variation of DALL-E 2 and makes a million dollars. Meanwhile another guy who doesn't have the right connections spends his life working in the service industry as a wage slave.

Meaning that the most likely indicator of someone's success is a coin flip as we enter this era of neo-fuedalism.

Meaning that civil unrest and violence are all but inevitable now (just turn on the TV to see it everywhere).

Now, I think a lot of people on HN and the world at large have not tried working for themselves, so have no idea how hard money is to come by. Sure, we can make a quarter million dollars every year working 40+ hour weeks at a FAANG company. But make that from a personal project? Highly unlikely.

Writing this now, I have given up on a solution to this coming from the top. People close to me, even the majority of people on HN, don't seem to get it. They'll never get it. Something in the idea of UBI irks them deep down inside, just like with student loan forgiveness. So it's over.

On a personal level, I'm looking towards solarpunk and local cooperatives that create resource streams for people outside of the financial incentive. I think it's possible to invent robot kits that provide things like hydroponic produce for very low cost. Once people have their basic needs met, it liberates them from having to beg for grants or even a job. Which is why the entire status quo is geared against this. Rents and basic expenses will squeeze us even harder before the end. Expect crushing regulations against off-grid living, just like how rain barrels have been criminalized in the southwestern US.

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