Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?
thenation.com
thenation.com
“Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have parlayed their extensive ties with the president into an unabashed assault on universities and institutional science. In private text messages leaked to The Washington Post last year, Andreessen wrote that “universities are at Ground Zero of the counterattack.” He characterized Stanford and MIT as “mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point” and vowed that universities would “pay the price” after “they declared war on 70% of the country.” Most troublingly, Andreessen called for the National Science Foundation to receive “the bureaucratic death penalty.””
Companies tend to have restructurings and stack ranking. Obviously these have their downsides too. But they also serve to shake things up and reassess direction and needs. If you’re swimming in money often you can skip this till you hit the skids.
The reality is, these universities were independent institutions that did their jobs to teach without bias.
Only when fox news and right wing media captured all the news sources did "universities" suddenly become "liberal thinktanks".
Our science and research institutions arent broken. It never was. It's under attack by right wing propaganda to "bring them in line".
That said, just razing everything down is probably not the solution, especially if there are indeed no ideas how to improve the current state.
Fact is that a university that must simultaneously handle education, research, publishing, estate management, legal stuff, media coverage, health and safety etc etc etc ends up being somewhat bureaucratic.
Regardless of whether it’s actually a bad idea or not, there’s been zero effort by this administration to rebuild what’s been destroyed.
Musk uses Twitter to keep up appearances and routinely posts UBI propaganda that will obviously never materialize. Why would the guy who slashes social security (except for his corporations) introduce UBI?
The genuine worry is that these people have too much money and do seem unhinged. Thiel promotes the Antichrist and the apocalypse, Musk reposts weird Grok pictures of women as dark angels with wings as well as constant pictures of his mother. Material for a Hitchcock movie.
Both should be under anti-constitutional observation in the EU just like Scientology, which was also inspired by SciFi junk.
He’s been nuts for a while. See naming one of his (many many many) children some keyboard smash nonsense (supposedly the name of some guardian angel because he believes in that)
Thiel went to Stanford, and Andreessen to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
That wealth was completely the result of work funded by the government, and the resulting initial wealth was his golden ticket into making even more.
Oh? He vowed what? To make them pay the price? Or did he just predict a cause and effect and The Nation (your source) is libeling him?
We have too many PhDs (I say this as one). It's never been easier to get one. Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking.
Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate. Soon people will complete two just to qualify for an academic position.
Why? Most science is incremental. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Complaining that "Why doesn't progress go fast like before?!" when the newest tool-side improvement is a slightly faster CPU or a new clanker model.
I think there's this group of folks who are like "Why don't we have flying cars?" and eventually realize the problem is physics, but have to somehow blame people instead.
This trope gets repeated every so often but it's just a trope. In 1900s people felt all physics was solved, then came relativity and the photoelectric effect. In the 1940s, after the second world war, atomics was the ultimate of physics, then we developed transistors. Until 1950s, sand was basically a worthless resource, and now, good quality silica commands a high price in the global marketplace. Truth is, there are many low-hanging fruit, we cannot even guess what we don't know when we don't know it. I wager that we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.
It's still possible to make ground-breaking innovations. In fact, they come with regularity, along with all the pulp that qualifies as research nowadays. Here's an example from my field: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/hits09/gentry-homomorphic-e...
In any case, I agree with the argument for funding more general research because we don't know where the next advance will happen, and even a discovery that only applies in exceptional/narrow cases can have a lot of value.
There are actually hard limits to things, too. For example, we basically can't make transistors any smaller. Like, physically it's not possible.
Yes, most PhD theses are scientific and commercial dead-ends (even more reason not to gate the degree on ground-breaking results!) but they do serve to cull the problem space, and that's exactly why we need more of them. In fact we should even provide some incentives to publish negative results in academia.
In a PhD, you learn everything about nothing
This nonsense falls apart at the barest inspection. Science IS BORING. And it should be.
Take for example a muscle building study that found that the biceps grew significantly more when tension was maximized in the stretched position. Science based lifting people hawked for years that the "stretch mediated growth" was king. All based on that one "seminal and groundbreaking" research. Years later when a "incremental and derivative" study was done on the hamstrings found no stretch mediated growth effect. Without the boring work, we wouldn't know that some muscles grow faster when tensioned under stress and some don't. And we still don't know exactly why. The current leading theory is it's something to do with the balance of fast vs slow switch fibers that make up the muscle, but we don't know without more derivative and incremental research.
Hell even under your criteria, if the stretch mediated effect wasn't found in the original study you'd probably classified it as incremental and derivative too.
Want another example? How about this one, a scientist was studying which tricep movement produced the most growth. It's obvious right? It's the one that lets you load the most weight onto the triceps, or at least the one that lets you load the most weight onto the most heads of the triceps. Boring. Derivative. Incremental. Except this study found that despite "common sense" it was actually the overhead tricep extension. You can't load it the heaviest, it's mainly targeting just one head of the tricep, it makes absolutely no sense. But science has proven it to be the case. Later "incremental and derivative" research has proposed a theory that since it's overhead, the muscles go slightly hypoxic during the lift and that triggers a stronger growth reaction, and in fact, applying a band for vasoconstriction around the arm and doing bicep curls was found to lead to more bicep growth than doing it without the vasoconstriction. All of this is incremental science. All of this advances our knowledge of how the body grows.
Science is slow. Science is advanced unpredictability. Science is boring.
-Stephen Jay Gould
> In the realm of genius, might the “Raphael without hands” — the term understood in its broadest sense — be not the exception, but the rule? — Genius is perhaps not so rare after all: but the five hundred hands it needs to tyrannize the καιρὁς, “the right time” — to seize chance by the scruff of the neck! [0]
[0] http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/JGB-274 (translated from German)
This is not a rebuttal of what I stated. You dismiss my data and provide no data of your own, just feelings. I appreciate what you're trying to say, but bring data or else we can't discuss it meaningfully.
Science is and always was incremental. The breakthroughs come from truly unforeseeable places. It takes seemingly niche and unprofitable and incremental research like studying bacteria living in volcano vents, for us to have PCR.
VCs expect a sliver of their companies to become Unicorns, we understand it to be a numbers game. That grace is given to entrepreneurs but scientists need to grovel for cash and endlessly show that their research is "translatable" or sufficiently impactful.
Sorry, I've heard this one too many times before. Thanks for your contribution to our world's knowledge, I hope you value it as much as I do.
None of these spheres of life are, uhm, perfect, but this PR problem is completely the fault of academia, that they cannot sell this lottery model as well as the biz world. (Though I think maybe we should take a minute to consider how well loved investors and capitalists are nowadays!)
I would blame the monopolization of the economy. A few corporations purchasing big chunks of the industry control the job market create a bottleneck where supply of jobs is controlled by a few corporations. Once all jobs are controlled by a few decision makers the precarious work conditions, diminished salaries, abuses, etc. come naturally.
> Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate.
Even if everybody had high education, companies would still compete for the best employees. There is no competition for employees because large corporations have agreed to not do so.
Apple, Google, Intel... discussed no-poach as a way to keep salaries low. Has anything changed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Yes, but the degree itself used to be a signal. Of course the school mattered, but getting the degree was considered something. Now the only thing that matters is the school.
> Apple, Google, Intel... discussed no-poach as a way to keep salaries low. Has anything changed?
They wouldn't be able to do that if supply was low. In the 70s-80s, PhDs could incorporate themselves and consult to a very comfortable middle-class living. Nowadays, that's basically impossible for an average PhD. Supply really does matter.
In my experience, academic researchers are more likely to do significant independent work in their 30s than in their 20s. Some academic cultures have higher doctorates, habilitations, or similar milestones to wrap up this period of peak productivity, but those remain national oddities.
That’s not a knock on PhDs, rather it’s a waste of great talent to be so hyperfocused on one deep incremental topic, then to hope someone has a job for you in that specialized topic upon graduation so you can add the most value.
Most of us trade our time for money, so at what point does the money become too little and be considered exploitative? Are all gig workers exploited? Didn't they make a rational choice that this is the best opportunity for themselves?
It certainly feels wrong, the low wages. I'm just wondering where the threshold is.
According to Marx it's basically always you are selling your time/labor for money because you are paid less than the value of the labor. The employer keeps the surplus.
And when it comes to a theory being “bad at guiding policy changes and decisions”, attempts to implement Marxism killed more people than the world wars, many through famine.
Probably a better framework would be to look at the power imbalance in the respective labor market. Is the employer incentivized to hire people even at a relatively high wage, because there's competitive pressure from other employers? Do people have enough savings (and unemployment payments or other safety nets) to be able to find a good job? (Even relocate if necessary.)
Company towns were bad, and small rural towns with only one big employer also exhibit similar problems.
Where are scientists in this model? Do they have ample of opportunities? Are they simply settling for a low pay because they really really like their niche work?
That doesn't matter in that particular theory (I'm not a marxist, just explaining). The employees are always exploited like a natural resource.
> Company towns were bad, and small rural towns with only one big employer also exhibit similar problems.
Well the funny thing is Marx advocated for that in the Communist Manifesto. He might have been a good philosopher but the solutions he proposed weren't very successful.
If some of them want to temporarily participate in the toil, nothing wrong with that, after all that's what doing a PhD is anyway. Same goes with homework and problem sets earlier in the science trajectory.
The greater fear that we won't need these types of experts b/c in the future machines will have all the intelligence or the ratio of humans with expertise to the overall population will somehow drift is certainly a societal level concern as we offload intelligence to the machines but the flip side of it is that will not be able to learn how to higher level of abstraction or more quickly than ever before enabling more of us to actually develop expertise, or at least a new type of expertise.
Not that Star Trek is meant to be real but when I think about the crew of the Starship Enterprise I imagine few of them actually know all of the ins and outs of how the warp drive work but they're able to travel around with star system
There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people today using computers without understanding how transistors work or which register they're writing to at any given moment. Many of these people also drive cars without understanding how gears can shift or how the radial motion of the main drive shaft gets transferred in the transverse direction to the drive axle. I suppose a few of them wear clothes without having ever sheared a sheep and without knowledge of the best way to felt wool.
Even the guy pushing the button for the teleporter is some kind of technical genius.
It's not ironic when you understand that libertarianism is really about maximizing personal liberty for an individual, and that often means constraining the liberty of others who would stand in their way.
It's the most libertarian thing for millions of people to have very constrained lives under the rule of some wealthy person who gets to do whatever he wants.
I understand this isn't the perspective of many that call themselves "libertarian".
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
We're being robbed. We need to actively shame people that spend massive amounts of money on college.