Knowledge-based society, my ass
mihaiolteanu.me
mihaiolteanu.me
On topic, it’s probably another example of why scaling a system is so hard. Especially when it comes to tasks that require deep thinking. I can’t help but notice the government policy of sponsoring mass PhDs in the hope of raising a knowledge based society is itself changing the definition of knowledge here.
On the second point, yes the total number of PhD graduates for a similar time period was 12.000 (official Government numbers) so this was a doubling of PhD's just like that, out of the blue. No wonder it was chaotic. There was also enormous political pressure regarding "the Government is incompetent as it cannot absorb what is basically free EU money". So, ok, they've absorbed it, sort of.
I think you are right. Reading the online articles and official documentation from that period, which is really scarce (there is no such program available on the EU official website, for example, or I wasn't able to find it), it feels like this was a big experiment, the success of which is not mentioned in the news either.
What I could find is that it was part of the Lisbon Strategy [1], also mentioned in the official documents published by the Government. From the linked wikipedia article: "Its aim was to make the EU the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, by 2010. It was set out by the European Council in Lisbon in March 2000. By 2010, most of its goals were not achieved. It was succeeded by the Europe 2020 strategy."
As a fun question, what would you do now, to do what you did, but better?
I actually still have the emails asking for the project coordinator, the one responsible for scholarships for all of us (I've searched them out, out of curiosity while writing this article and their CV is 12 pages long and, naturally, this project is listed there as a success) for ways to abandon the whole thing. I didn't even get a reply. I was already 2 years in so I've would have had to return the whole sum back, money I didn't have. I was penniless, as all PhD candidate seem to be. So I did what I had and could do, which is summarized in the post.
Oh, that page is darkly funny itself. ‘[The Lisbon Strategy’s] aim was to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion,” by 2010.’ Yeah, that didn’t happen.
‘Spain's prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero pointed out that the non-binding character of the Lisbon Strategy contributed to the failure.’ Typical bureaucratic response: freedom is the problem.
There is definitely a role for government in fostering innovation and productivity, but it is very much a secondary role. Providing a predictable, stable, safe environment, and using government funds for things that the government actually needs to use seems to have worked for the U.S. for a long time, even before the two world wars.
That's a lot of people to actually try to get on board as to what a "knowledge-based society" should be, they would have to relate it to something they were already familiar with.
If the only resource you have to work with is a "not-as-much-knowledge-as-you-thought" based institution, then start calling it a beacon of a knowledge-based society. Somebody's going to have to spread the word anyway, and if more functional resources don't come within reach, at least you've done your part.
It's interesting that some people are bound to believe you have achieved a knowledge-based society if it's just repeated over and over.
mix the two, and one gets annihilated.
> I can’t help but notice the government policy of sponsoring mass PhDs in the hope of raising a knowledge based society is itself changing the definition of knowledge here.
If anything, I'm of the belief that you abandon the notion of efficiency as with governments, returns on investments can be long term (much longer than for a company). In general, people pursuing high levels of academia (or adjacent domains like research labs), are naturally interested in things that are pushing the bounds of our knowledge. We have a really bad track record at per-determining what is impactful and not. If anything, we're pretty good at rejecting things that have high impact (paradigm shifts). Frankly I'm aware of little to no fields that do not result in practical utility in the long run. There's plenty of math research that was long thought to be of no practical importance but did end up greatly influencing other domains
Research is expensive, but certainly we have the money for it. And frankly, a huge chunk in that cost is the administration. Which a large portion of that comes down to the measuring and determination. I wouldn't argue to distribute funds without question, but I'd wager that the amount we spend to ensure research funds are spent effectively is greater that the funds we would lost/spend ineffectively were we to perform significantly less administration.
[0] https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incent...
To put a little context, and this is a bit speculation on my part but seems to conform based on conversations I've had from people who have lived at that time.
This kind of policy at institutions started right after Sputnik. There was a sudden surge in demand for mathematics and engineers, and they couldn't find enough people so they threw money at the problem. The unfortunate side effect was that its a problem that money can't solve, and so when you can't find anyone that meets the rigorous standards, you must lower standards. This seems to have happened in math education around that time the effects of which did not become visible until much later, and it eventually snowballed to most of academia.
The effect has been that most math teachers, excluding a few professors that buck the norm which are the exception, started teaching by rote following what is known today as a lying to children paradigm.
This is a pedagogical approach that is the opposite of the paradigm that was taught prior which was a first-principled approach (based in the greeks and rome).
You are given flawed models upfront, which you must learn some things, and unlearn other things you previously learned to unconscious competence with little guidance. This includes all the elements and structure of real torture (from the 1950s), and the process is repeated over and over sieving only the most compliant or blind people forward, and inducing PTSD in the creative, brilliant, and genius. The process destroys minds, steals economic benefit of intelligence, and selects for average.
Torture is known to reduce, often permanently, the capability for rational thought.
It follows the now refuted ideology of gnosticism. Intuitive understanding is eschewed, and you only become useful the closer you progress to gnosis (mastery), and informally, only the masters decide who gets to progress (through clever gimmicks, deceit, and orchestrated structural failure, that takes advantage of the drive to do less work, government funded work trends towards the least common denominator of production which often becomes negative).
You now have more pHd's, but fewer people who actually met the 1960s definition of a pHd.
There are exceptions because this is a spectrum, but this has been the trend for the majority for decades, and the issues described are known issues with any centralized hierarchy. It hasn't been strictly knowledge-based since at least the late 60s. You see a sharp degradation of published material in education across all subjects starting in the 70s.
We were the friends and family attending my cousin defending his thesis. He spent half his time title-ing, naming, and thanking Professors, chairs, heads, and what not. When it was all over, I asked him why did you name them all? He answered, "because they like the sound of their name."
Look what they've made us do.
(Also, tolerance and acceptance when faced with many arbitrary roadblocks.)
In times of surplus/peace, perhaps.
In times of competition/conflict, results are needed.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/382389
> The French engineering schools which were developed immediately after the French Revolution were sui generis in the field of education. Their astonishing success caused them to become known as the grandes écoles of Paris. They included the Ecole Polytechnique, the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, the Ecole des Mines, and the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manu-factures. It was these schools that set the tone and the fundamental pattern of engineering education in the United States as it is known today.
"he is the best professor, I am so glad he is my supervisor"
"he is the worst supervisor, I am wondering how I can get the university to transfer me"
"he is the best professor, he helped me get a job after I graduated"
I never got my PhD, my first day as a lowly research assistant in a university in central london (which shall remain nameless) I was given a professorial suite to camp in, and I remained there for 3 months, imposing furniture and a giant oak table and all. Another staffer used to sleep on the floor and park his bicycle there. Eventually I was evicted and sent to the top floor, an ex-statistics research unit teaching room, like army Barracks, where I and a fellow research assistant opened a cupboard to find the 10 Brunsviga calculators left over from a mechanical actuarial risk calculation exercise the department did for money up until the advent of electronic computers. Their entire previous 5 years work was completed in under 1 days run of the machine code on the new University of London computer in the early 60s. Oh, the Joys.
“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.
Suddenly, everything about my professor's bizarre lack of development skills in my computer science course makes sense.
i made the transition from embedded C to low level tensor wrangling in about a week, it takes some work but it's definitely doable, of course i'm not an expert but it's enough time to go pretty deep, i went from "yeah i've run ollama" to optimizing inference code to get research papers to run on consumer hardware
if the task is to get up to speed on C++ enough to teach undergrads and you're a reasonably competent academic programmer who gives at least half a shit about the task at hand a weekend is plenty
From a US perspective, students paying $50,000+ per year in tuition deserve better than an overworked PI who has crammed C++ over the weekend.
My general model for how "being good at programming works" is that it's just mostly a stacking buff based on how much you've touched, I'm choosing to give the person in the anecdote the benefit of the doubt and believe in both their technical expertise and skill as an educator. Most technical things are kind of like other technical things, and if you've been around for a while everything is kind of like something you've done before, it makes it very easy to pick up new tools/domains. I fully believe that someone can open up a VAST gulf of knowledge of C++ between themselves and intro to C++ folks in a weekend if they're already a seasoned practitioner.
Also, remember that you could pick up a new language and start to dabble in it after a few days, but teaching it, ah, that requires much more than using it . Usually teaching something requires a much deeper understanding than just using it.
I won’t speak to crafting a good curriculum, God knows I’ve seen plenty of bad ones but it’s just not hard for me to be vastly better at any topic in English or History than any student I’m likely to see in a high school in two days because I’m that much better than them at what I do. I presume the same yawning gulf in capability exists between the average freshly minted PhD and undergraduates, or professors teaching graduate courses and PhD students.
Expertise exists, which is why I can be teaching a course that’s supposed to take 300 hours of instruction to cover in 15 hours, reasonably comfortably.
However, assuming no C knowledge, there's no way in hell you'll be a good teacher of C++ in a weekend, even with LLMs.
The article talks about a literal "learn c++ in 48hs".
Give me a break. You'd be absolutely mediocre and those of us who know our shit do notice. Source: I've been that student that worked and studied the topic he worked with and found some of the TAs absolutely wanting.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
I have never spend more than a few days learning a language.
I have spent decades mastering several of these.
Any language that takes longer than a few days to learn the basics should be avoided, it will always be difficult to use.
APL being the most famous of such a language.
You can put Scala on that list as well.
The higher your rise, the easier it is to maintain your blind-spots because nobody will dare question your worldview. Even those few who do, they're a nobody, so what could they possibly know about anything? Surely, it's only the people on top who have a bird's eye view of the big data, who know what's going on... Everyone else is like an ant following breadcrumbs laid out in front of them. What is there to learn about the real world that you cannot see from above?
I just looked that up to be sure; the article itself has a very strong eastern Europe vibe to it. I was figuring it would be Bulgaria, Slovakia, or Romania initially.
Hit a little too close to home with that one. Had to finish reading despite how painful a mirror can be. God does it make me wish something would change.
Ironically, the only one of my university friends who I'd regard as "actual PhD material" ended up _not_ finishing their PhD in 3yrs time (I surmise because they picked a topic they _actually_ thought worthy) and went to serve in the army.
On the other hand, humans are pretty terrible at organizing and planning projects without pressures like profit.
Most of the ones I encountered generally treated students who actually tried reasonably well
Someone should write a list of "Power Gradients Considered Harmful", eg Crew/Cockpit Resource Management
I used the PhD to get into a new field (statistics) just in time for me to get into Data Science as it started being cool. My papers weren't interesting, but I got to try things out on real data and report on them.
If you want to do a PhD, DO NOT limit yourself to your home country. Many countries simply are not capable of properly training researchers. The US can. China mostly can by now, I expect. Northern Europe can, to some degree, in some fields. Elsewhere, you are at risk of wasting important years of your life.
Trump might end US dominance, but the general point that academia is international and entire countries can simply not have a functioning pipeline for new researchers.
Europe can etc. FTFY.
And since with such decision one frequently sort of selects where they will reside afterwards (ie by finding partner and settling down), its also about choosing a society one wants to grow older and potentially raise kids in.
We all have our preferences but me personally I would never choose US for such, even when disregarding current admin excesses (which in some form are not going away, its the new norm and don't hold your breath for next election cycle).
This applies to the UK and Germany, for example, not just Eastern Europe. There are certainly spots of excellence, but even among high quality UK universities, very often PhD training is on the "apprenticeship" model where you're just thrown into research without graduate-level courses. You can judge the result by looking at the proportion of US-trained staff in EU departments.
> Elsewhere, you are at risk of wasting important years of your life.
Unfortunately, as a 5th year PhD student in the US at a tier-1 STEM research university I'm disappointed to say: students here are very very very much at risk. I can't compare to universities in Europe, but I can say OP's story is the story of most students I know.
While I personally know a solid handful of exceptions, don't expect the US to meaningfully avoid what the OP describes. Regardless of country or university, your advisor is the ultimate decider of whether or not you will be a doll for them to "play scientist" with or be pushing the boundaries of science.
Of the exceptions I do know, while they are intelligent, it was not their intelligence or work ethic that allowed them to be exceptions.
Maybe Academic Batpoop Insanity disease is spread at international conferences.
> Yet another example of how <startups/stock brokers/etc> serve no purpose in real life. Yes, there have been ground breaking innovations and discoveries from <startups/stock brokers/etc> folks but that's likely 10% of the good ones. Rest is just pure misery, like the one OP describes
It seems the pendulum of the world has reached its opposite climax. There was a time when young students fought communism, sacrificed theiir lives for ideals (egged on by unfullfilled promises from the west - remember Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 50s?). Now the enemy is not ideological but generational. The old guard seeing the base of the pyramid's numbers eroded, realize they dont have enough meat to do the work. So the old prey on the young - even making them dance for entertainment.
But do not despair my Romanian friend, you are not alone. Millions of PhDs in America and the west are also in your shoes. Spending the best years of our lives in the service of our masters, publishing papers and writing grants, we were hoping for a 'career' of even a job. But now we see the world turned inside out. The budgets of the NSF and the NIH are being sacrificed and burned on the altar of a new 'reich'.
There is a saying - 'idle hands are the devil's workshop'. Payback is a bitch.
Not Romanian, but Polish - that account is eerily similar to the vast majority of technical PhD stories amongst my friends.
As a PhD student in my 5th year at a tier-1 U.S. STEM research university, I know a good handful of exceptions, exceptions who are not "playing scientist".
But, ...they are the exception. Sadly this story is painful, uncanny and downright spooky for how similar some of the details are to students I know too.