Lies Academics Believe | Hacker News Reader

Lies Academics Believe

rachitnigam.com

37 pointsrachitnigam20 comments

The biggest most unfortunate lie is "I'll get a job at the end which will make this all worthwhile and not the most expensive waste of time and mental health imaginable." This lie is told from all sides. Universities say it. Advisors say it. Postdocs say it. Parents say it. Students say it to themselves and to each other.

In English-speaking countries, being in 'academia' usually means being employed in a research and/or teaching capacity at a uni and not working towards a degree anymore. Some may say being faculty, post-docs are a bit in between.

Sorry, no. The single largest population employed in research and teaching capacity is graduate students by several multiples over the next categories.

Find a few people in PhD programs in the US and tell them you don't think they're in academia and see how they react.

> The single largest population employed in research and teaching capacity is graduate students

Which is why I clarified "and not working towards a degree anymore".

> Find a few people in PhD programs in the US and tell them you don't think they're in academia

I have a lot more experience interacting with PhD students than you seem to assume, and I can assure you that one of the most worn out conversation topics is whether they should go into academia after graduation. We can nitpick what that says about whether they are currently in there, but that's pointless. The parent was implying that the prototypical image of someone who is 'in academia' is a PhD student, which is definitely not the case. The way the term is usually used, the prototypical instance of someone who is 'in academia' is a faculty member (tenured or not).

Edit: check out the description here if you don't believe me: https://www.findaphd.com/guides/working-in-academia they take a somewhat broader stance than me above, but they make it clear too that academia starts after the PhD.

This seems very tied to the specific phrase "working in academia" which you appear to have introduced. Would you argue that grad students aren't academics?

They are training to be academics

Of course not - being an academic means working in academia. In the English-speaking world at least, in other parts it may mean other things (eg people who have an academic degree, regardless of what they do now).

I mean stereotype of the head-in-the-clouds ivory tower academic comes from somewhere I guess, but most of the folks I've met in academics have been a bit more pragmatic than this list would seem to indicate.

Especially in STEM, where every grad student thinks they are the unique person who has their head on straight and is just waiting to bail for industry.

I think the problem is everyone who makes up a hivemind can be rational and pragmatic and yet the hivemind itself isn't.

> Pedantry and insight are the same thing

Heh, this lie also believed by many on this forum ;)

Lie #1. Concentrating all the time doesn't warp your sanity.

Oh, but it does.

Flashback to the time that I bumped into my friend coming out of the research library in the afternoon. He was ABD at the time. He made an attempt to say hi but was incoherent. I played it off like a regular conversation, because I knew he'd been writing all day.

Consider that the bricks of our culture are these "concentration fruits". Every philosophy, invention, quest and story. Deranged.

The ones who are too sane to obsess never leave a mark.

> Everything was invented in the 80s

Classic Mac OS was invented in the 1980s, but modern macOS (and Linux) are based on the fine 1960s design of Unix.

ARM may have been invented in the 1980s, but x86 dates to the 1970s.

C++ and Python may have been invented in the 1980s, but Lisp dates back to the 1950s. ;-)

I'm outside Academia so I'm asking, but you don't think that the idea of "Engineering doesn't matter" has started to change with the introduction of AI and ML into business and the popularization of CS in modern culture?

While I find your reasoning reasonable, I will provide an example from the other side: a mentor who later got the Nobel Prize told me "the first time you study something you should get right the order of magnitude, the second time you should get right the decimals, and the third time you give it to the engineers". This is how they think in top level academia.

"This is a real problem"

> Pedantry and insight are the same thing

Never met any academic who believed that pedantry and insight are the same thing.

Thank you for this insight.

Pedants don't think they're pedants. Like Carlin said, anyone driving faster than you is a maniac, anyone driving slower is a moron. (Anyone less rigorous than you is sloppy, anyone more is a pedant.)

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