Comment by disambiguation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by disambiguation | Hacker News Reader

This feels like a spectator sport to me - elite classes fighting amongst themselves while ordinary people are caught in the crossfire.

Sure, I do feel bad for the well meaning professors, scientists, and researchers (some of whom are personal friends) that are losing their grant funding - techies of all people should be sympathetic to a sudden disruption in funding. But if the elites are asking us to take sides, they need to make a stronger case that they're really on _our side_ - that requires more than appealing to mutual self-interest. Academia must reconcile a litany of shortcomings and broken promises.

For the promise of education, we see a large and growing contingent of debt holders outweighing the number of available employment opportunities. Tuition is at an ATH, yet more and more students are walking away with worse outcomes. A grim forecast for the younger generation.

For the promise of research, we've seen a shift from truth-seeking to grant-seeking, a punitive culture of ideological conformity, and a pipeline to brain-drain the rest of the world, favoring foreign talent over local. Hardly the unbiased bastion of free-thought we've been taught is the foundation of good science.

As for ideology, I'm not sure the intelligentsia has ever been neutral, if that's even possible, or if neutrality itself isn't another ideology. As far as I can tell, this is just the pendulum swinging back. Academia is experiencing the consequences of its failure to live up to its promises to society and hold itself accountable for the negative externalities of its own agenda.

So... Burn down academia with no replacement? Shutter and board research and leave America with no future?

And, of course, not in even the guise of reform. But an outright and open political witch hunt to ban all those who oppose "dear leader" and dare allow opposing free speech, progressive anthropological research, and objective sciences in unpopular topics like climate change?

That's your preferred approach? That is what "academia deserves" for... What? Charging too much? And that's not even an objective statement - the market bears this cost! If the US government was actually worried, maybe they could put all this effort into an actual reform effort, or modernized scholarships / financing, or tightening accreditation requirements.

Not to mention, US education and research is still one of our strong points, drawing in the brightest minds from the entire world.

> US education and research is still one of our strong points, drawing in the brightest minds from the entire world.

The Average Joe graduates with enormous student debt and ends up in a low paying job, one that's entirely unrelated to their degree. They never experienced the benefits of education nor research. In fact, they feel quite ripped off by the whole affair, so this point holds no stock for them.

> So... Burn down academia with no replacement? Shutter and board research and leave America with no future?

This is a bit of a hysterical reaction to "budget cuts." Academia isn't going anywhere and probably won't change much, it's just going to have less money. In fact, k-12 education is seeing far more severe budget cuts as part of the bill, but there are fewer prophecies of doom in its honor. Academics argue passionately for their own bread, but not for those who are starving. (They also send their kids to private school)

Median student loan debt is about $25,000 dollars.

That's a lot, but not so much that it wouldn't be covered by a very modest increase in lifetime earnings.

The mean is closer to $40,000, which is still going to be covered by a modest improvement in earnings.

I think we should be working on changing things so that students graduate with less debt, and working on ensuring that time spent studying is worthwhile to the individual, but it's weird to treat extreme cases as if they are universal.

Your math is incomplete. The whole formula includes interest rates and total amortized cost as well as the average / median income, cost of living, time to employment, and employment rates of new graduates. Additional exercises for the reader: find the average TTL of full loan repayment (~20 years) and the percent of graduates where debt exceeds earnings (~20%).

This isn't to say that degree attainment isn't statistically better on average, much like paying off ransomware. The price of tuition seems to reflect the lack of reasonable alternatives more than the intrinsic value of the education.

> The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) froze all outgoing funding, including new awards and scheduled payments on active grants. Over 1,000 NSF research projects were abruptly canceled in a few days, resulting in roughly $739 million in halted research funding. The directive, issued with little explanation, has created chaos across the academic research ecosystem, part of a broader trend Nature described as an unprecedented assault.

Just normal budget cuts. Everyone, close your eyes and don't look at Columbia or Harvard or refusing foreign students (and requiring loyalty to the administration in your social media to be admitted) or deporting dissidents (now to South Sudan!)

And completely ignore that people are actively upset about the cuts to K-12, because it's not the focus of an article specifically about higher education. It's not like one of the top posts on HN when it happened was the announcement of killing the Department of Education. Or that the same people upset about the gutting higher education are upset about the voucher program designed to funnel taxpayer money to private and religious institutions while destroying the quality public education, furthering evermore the wealth gap.

You may even be shocked to find out that I also care about children and think they have an intrinsic right to food and that school lunches should be free and nutritious and tasty. If I don't include that in a footer on every post, will you accuse me of siding with Republicans - the party whose currently saying kids should get jobs while in primary school to pay for their food needs?

Utterly ridiculous and offensive.

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Someone already covered the prices thing.

This is a very odd way to put this, as a battle between elites. Scientific research is a general benefit to the entire US economy, one of its greatest strengths that makes the US economy so much better than anywhere else in the world.

How does framing this as a competition between elites even affect the common person? Shouldn't I care about what helps the US the most? I don't give a damn about elites or taking sides or being on a side of that battle. I want what's best for the US.

> Academia is experiencing the consequences of its failure to live up to its promises to society and hold itself accountable for the negative externalities of its own agenda.

I'm sorry but could you explain any of this? There's a lot of assumptions in here that I can not even begin to unpack, and any possible meaning I can assign to your statements here are easily disproven with even a minimum of research, so I don't want to misunderstand you.

Feel free to unpack at your leisure, it's all in my original comment. I think it's both clear and concise, though you're welcome to be specific about what's left you feeling confused.

Scientific research is NOT "elite".

The institutions are elite. So are the people who study there, and so are the decision makers directing the goals and strategies behind the research.

There's no great definition of elite but a reasonable approximation is the one often used for intellectual: people whose income or status in society depends on their production of ideas, without needing to test if the ideas actually work.

This definition captures academics, university administrators, journalists, writers, analysts and other talking heads on TV, Hollywood screenwriters, many kinds of civil servant, people rich enough to be philanthropists, and frequently but not always politicians. Those are the classes of people that are usually being handwaved towards when the word elite is used.

> people whose income or status in society depends on their production of ideas, without needing to test if the ideas actually work.

In general I'd agree -- but academic researchers (and the projects previously funded by the National Science Foundation) are not this. By definition, they are testing "if the ideas actually work", that testing is what the funding is paying for.

These folks aren't really "elite" -- not in perception, nor in class or wages. (they usually make less than the average programmer or CS graduate).

The definition of elite people seem to be using doesn't depend on wages. It's not a synonym for well paid.

There's no requirement to test if your ideas work if you're an academic. The funding pays for papers to get published, and that's all that's checked. To publish a paper you might need to at least pretend to test your ideas, maybe, but only in some of the better fields and journals. Nobody will check if you actually did test them though, so just making data up is a perfectly viable strategy. Worst case, you might get caught ten years from now if some random independent chooses to investigate and manages to go viral on social media. In very extreme cases you might get fired, but that won't stop you immediately getting another job doing exactly the same thing at another university (c.f. Brian Wansink).

But those are in the best, most scientific fields. In others you can just write papers all day that say all kinds of things, never test or even predict anything, and still have a successful career. That's how you get papers like the famous "feminist glaciology" paper [1], or thousands of COVID papers that present model outputs but never validate if the results matched reality, or thousands of string theory papers that don't make any predictions.

None of these problems will stop academics from being cited by journalists in high profile news outlets as if their ideas are already validated, nor being consulted by powerful politicians who then transcribe their policy demands into law, nor having their claims be automatically taken as gospel on forums like HN. If their ideas do become law and then cause a disaster, nothing will happen to them and they won't even suffer loss of reputation. For example, Einstein was a big supporter of Soviet-style planned economies, as were many academics of his era. That was a disastrous idea, and his supporting it - as late as 1949 no less - should have harmed his reputation for being a genius. But nobody remembers this today.

In these respects, they are the very epitome of what it means to be elite.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0309132515623368

> you can just write papers all day that say all kinds of things, never test or even predict anything, and still have a successful career. That's how you get (snip) thousands of COVID papers that present model outputs but never validate if the results matched reality...

Disliking some papers is not really a fair or relevant metric by which to judge academia.

This would be like saying, "programmers are elite people, because they never have to test their work. Just look at the thousands of broken, shoddy-programmed repositories on GitHub full of junk code that's been abandoned! Half of it doesn't build, and isn't even testable. Why are we paying for hackathons just to get this garbage. Why do we hire interns and new CS grads, if they won't be seasoned veterans on day one".

A paper can be seen as kind of like the "pull request" of the academic world -- not every PR gets merged in, and a PR isn't always a waste just because it didn't get merged. Some number of bad papers does not mean "science" is "elite".

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> That's how you get papers like the famous "feminist glaciology" paper [1]

That's probably a bad example, because the feminist glaciology paper isn't even bad or wrong. (Did you actually read it? Or did you only read the "feminist" and "glacier" and then get outraged?).

A quick scan of the actual paper, and Carey's argument seems to be that geologists and historians have been neglecting or ignoring how glaciers impact women (both the women in science doing these studies, and the women whose lives have been impacted by glaciers, or melt flow, flooding, disaster recovery, etc).

That's...like objectively true? And very well sourced. This isn't some crackpot theory, this is 100% a "validated idea" whose "results match reality".

Carey is an Environmental Historian and Professor of History. His papers are research and recordings of history, they won't be "testable" (under your definition of rubric) because he's reporting on things that have already happened. And this title specifically represents one (1) single paper that focuses on the impact to women, out of the 25(+?) he's published on Glaciers, Climate Change, and Societal impacts, over the past two decades.

If you want to remove Sociology and History from Science, so be it. (That would be Wrong, but I won't argue the point). But it should probably be expected that if you fund an Environmental Historian, you're going to get a lot research on Geological History and its societal impacts -- that's kind of the whole point of History as a discipline.

Your argument is that elitism is good, not that academics don't fit the criteria. Getting paid by the government to write entirely subjective, untestable ideas about the interaction between glaciers and feminist ideology is a perfect fit for the definition. Pull requests, on the other hand, are not. Their correctness is often tested automatically!

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