Am I an academic?
zephoria.org
zephoria.org
The author points out that he or she is as much of a scholar as any professor, but I'd argue this could (and should) be extended even to people who are not called researchers.
The general problem here concerning a group of people with special state-granted privileges is not new.
It seems like research in other fields of computer science are tied more closely to practical applications: Systems, Compilers, Distributed Computation etc. but it's rare to find that kind of work in HCI.
This is where MSR is something different. Work there is published if and only if it is in Microsoft's interest to do so. Often a bare outline is published: enough to impress people but not enough for an outsider to duplicate the work. This isn't academia.
Xerox PARC and Bell Labs back in their respective days did function like academia.
Do you have any evidence for that claim?
Often a bare outline is published: enough to impress people but not enough for an outsider to duplicate the work. This isn't academia.
Actually, there are plenty of research papers that describe a system in some detail, but not nearly enough detail to allow an "outsider to duplicate the work". Both academics and industrial researchers sometimes accompany a research paper with a working prototype; in both cases, they often do not.
Another is students and admissions. Hiring some students who are already in a PhD program doesn't count.
A conceptual framework that I think you might find helpful..<elided for brevity>...
I personally think that there are important differences between universities and corporations linked to their respective knowledge domain and notion of contribution (e.g. to the public good vs private gain). To miss this is to collapse all of social life into the market. """
Wow. Just wow.
If you're in academia, and you don't do original research, you've got to be an amazing lecturer/teacher to make yourself worth a damn to society. Most of American education from middle school on is credentialing based on your ability to follow instructions carefully.
You could say it "shows how well you'll fit in at a job" if you're being charitable; you could call it "obedience school" if you're being less charitable.
Without fail, all of the wealthiest people I know didn't graduate college and half of them didn't graduate high school. Engineering and programs that follow a curriculum similar to engineering do okay. But most of the rest is junk unless your goal is to be a moderately salaried reasonably secure employee. High school and college never have and can't teach you what you need to be perform on the highest levels.
Mark Twain said it pretty well: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
The vast majority of folks in academia are doing original research, that's why they're there. Most of 'em see teaching as a somewhat annoying obligation which they have to go through in order to be allowed to do research.
Without fail, all of the wealthiest people I know didn't graduate college and half of them didn't graduate high school.
This is, of course, a quirk of the particular people whom you happen to know, and not reflective of society as a whole.
The wealthiest people I know have beards.
In the hard sciences, many of them do. Vast majority? Maybe. Outside of the hard sciences? No.
> Most of 'em see teaching as a somewhat annoying obligation which they have to go through in order to be allowed to do research.
Yes. Those research professors actually tend to be the best, because they're producing new and interesting results. My professor of project management used to run a defense company, making advanced weapons for the U.S. military. When he got older, he started doing supply and manufacturing research. He joked that he just taught so that he could do research, but he was one of the best professors I had.
Yet, most American undergraduate degrees require some form of "general requirements", often taught by professors who are doing something other than original research and don't do a particularly good job.
> This is, of course, a quirk of the particular people whom you happen to know, and not reflective of society as a whole.
I should phrase that differently. Medicine and law have upper-bounds on what you'll earn normally, unless you work in medical devices or open a hospital or law firm. Yet, university doesn't prepare doctors and lawyers to open shops - that's just old school business right there. As for business school, it could be better called "consultant training" - I know, I studied business. 10-20% of the program is incredibly valuable, the other 80-90% is useless theoretical nonsense. All the MBAs I know make decent to good coin. But nothing compared to the entrepreneurs, businessmen, hustler types. I know lots of people with degrees and without degrees. Putting the time into working for yourself is much more likely to make you wealthy than getting the degree. The only exception is if you've got a passion or knack for one of the few fields that higher education does a halfway decent job with.
> The wealthiest people I know have beards.
Funny you joke that - same here. But maybe there's something more to that - office dress codes in formal areas typically require clean shaven people. People who work for themselves or in small companies usually have less strict appearances. A mentor of mine in Dubai makes $200k/month roughly. He dresses semi-casual most of the time. He calls putting on a formal suit and tie, "Dressing up and playing business." (Incidentally, he grew up in the ghettos of London and didn't graduate middle school. But that's a tangent)
The beard thing? Yeah, there might be something to do that. Wealth creators are more concerned with creating wealth than looking respectable. Mainstream American education? More concerned with credentialing than learning. By a landslide.
True story: A good Chinese-Canadian friend got a PhD and was offered a professor's post. Then he jumped onto a part time project before taking his professor's post that hit it big, found it enjoyable, and got quite wealthy from it. He lectured one year before quitting to go private, and laments the time and money he wasted in academia. Maybe 10 people on the planet read his thesis.
So, anonymous downvoter, are you a graduate student? Or a high school teacher or professor perhaps? I paid for all my school bills myself. I attended university full time while running a company full time and putting 20+ hours into a startup. And you know what? I estimate I'd be worth something like $100,000 - $250,000 more if I'd put the efforts into work and getting paid for it and had the tuition money for investments later. I had exactly three highly useful university classes: Business law, project management, microeconomics. Maybe 4 or 5 somewhat useful classes, and the rest were an epic waste of time and money. So, please come out and discuss with me, especially if I've struck a nerve. It's a nerve that should be struck, discussed, and worked out. Society will be better and the would-be academic will be wealthier and more productive.
Edit: It's funny watching the score of the parent go up and down. I'm hanging around, waiting for a reply so we can get a discussion going if anyone would like to. But people would not like to. They don't want to come and say, "You said this, which I sort of agree, and you said that, which I think is wrong, and here is why." No, they read the above and go, "OhmygoshnoIdon'tlikethat." Or something like that - I don't know exactly, because they don't weigh in and establish why they disagree.
I took time and wrote my take on American education and the fact that the wealthiest people I know are not college graduates. Will there be dispute? Discussion? A half dozen people or so have voted the comment up now, another half dozen have voted it down without explaining why. If this were a less civil environment, I would call those people cowards - not cowards for not confronting my views, but cowards for not confronting themselves.
I know education/academia is a big part of identity for a lot of people. Confront yourself if you are an academic, weigh in on this thread. Am I mistaken? I would love to learn more. Please share your perspective. Maybe I will disagree with you and discuss, maybe I will agree with you and learn and amend my own perspective. But I've written candidly, thoughtfully, with real observations I've had and some people have voted that down anonymously without explaining why. Please join the conversation, if you can confront these foreign ideas in your mind.
1. The point of attending university is to teach yourself how to makes lots of money.
2. Of the people I know, the wealthiest are those who didn't attend university.
3. Hence, attending university is a waste of time.
I myself disagree with 1 and 2. Many people would argue that the role of the university is not vocational training, but rather to provide students with a reasonable summary of human knowledge, to learn for the sake of learning. Even if going to university didn't make any impact on my future earning capacity, I myself would still attend.
On the second issue, your anecdotal evidence is irrelevant. If you're going to make a decision about whether or not to attend university, you make a judgement based on empirical evidence. I myself could easily list self-made men who have graduated from elite universities: Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, Steve Ballmer, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Jim Rogers, Ronald Perelman, Carl Icahn, Phil Knight, Jeff Bezos. I have no idea if going to university will make you more or less likely to become incredibly wealthy, the answers I suspect lie in an academic journal somewhere.
Also, you also seem to be implying that people should only be interested in making huge amounts of money. That it's a bad thing to become a doctor or a lawyer because it places a ceiling on how much money you can make. Most people would rather do a job the enjoy and make a decent amount of money rather than doing a job they hate and making enormous amounts of money. Many people aren't interested in business or management, they'd rather spend their time doing engineering, academic research, writing, journalism, music, law, medicine, whatever.
I ought to be more eloquent - though I've been under the impression that a lot of people do become doctors and lawyers for the mix of prestige and money. Many lawyers love the law - but many go in because it is a high paying field. Yet, there are better paths to wealth than law. That's why I wanted people to come and discuss - there's young readers here, they ought to consider that if they'd like to be wealthy, university may not be the best path.
> Most people would rather do a job the enjoy and make a decent amount of money rather than doing a job they hate and making enormous amounts of money.
This is such a false dichotomy. You can have both - really. You can find an intersection of doing something you enjoy and making enormous amounts of money. It's such a brutally bad false dichotomy - choose between hatred/enormous money or enjoyable/decent money, and a lot of people are poorer or lead less enjoyable lives because they don't fight it. It's a societal cliche, but it is false. That's worth pondering.
What I should've said is this: Many people have to choose between a job they really enjoy with a good salary, and a job they wouldn't enjoy as much but with a bigger salary.
Consider a Maths Phd whose ideal job is to work as an academic in the field of algebraic geometry. The salary for this sort of job is decent, but not enormous. If he wanted to make an enormous amount of money, he could find related work, like working at a hedge fund or starting an engineering firm. Although he would enjoy doing that sort of work, he wouldn't enjoy it as much as working as an academic. So he has to decide between a job he really enjoys with a good salary, and a job he wouldn't enjoy as much but with a huge salary.
(1) First, you say that education is about your "ability to follow instructions carefully." This is entirely 100% false for PhD candidates. The PhD is about conducting original research, often with minimal guidance from the professor. Saying that PhD students attend "obedience schools" is absolutely ridiculous -- real jobs are much more "obedience schools" than universities in these cases.
(2) You speak over and over about how you don't need to attend college to become wealthy. Well, this point is moot because very few PhD students are motivated to go to school by wealth. Most PhD students pursue a doctoral degree because they are interested in the subject. Ask any PhD student and they will tell you that they realize it is not the path to wealth.
(3) Frankly, you sound a bit paranoid and confrontational from your frequent posts (and edits of them) challenging downvoters. I don't think this is a good practice ...
> (3) Frankly, you sound a bit paranoid and confrontational from your frequent posts (and edits of them) challenging downvoters. I don't think this is a good practice ...
That runs a risk of halting discussion in a somewhat unfriendly way. See, it puts the person you're speaking to in a sort of a bind - respond and come across paranoid/confrontational, or do not respond at all (after being said to be "sounding paranoid and confrontational"). A similar tack in a real life argument would be someone saying, "Why are you getting so worked up and making such a big deal out of this?"
It makes responding a delicate thing - about the only choices are to directly point it out, or high ground/bow out. It tends to halt discussion.
This is obviously polarizing to people, and originally no one was writing in as to why. Now, many people have done so, and I have learned. I'll refine my thoughts and lines of explaining to paint with less broad brushes going forwards, and keep context in mind more. I'm retiring from the discussion now, but thanks for taking a moment and sharing your perspective.
I'd really like to know why - agreement or disagreement, actually. I would truly, respectfully like to hear it. I've shared my experience and opinion, and would like to hear yours. Or your rationale for saying "this comment ought not to have been made and/or is completely wrong", which is what a vote against says.
Was it uninsightful? Misguided or inaccurate? Not enough politeness? Certainly, there was some thought and introspection before writing. I am at a loss to understand people's views on this - I will not speculate further, but instead, again, humbly, ask for a reply so that we may have a discussion, if you feel it worth your time to make known how you feel.
Personally, I'm not interested in engaging you in discussion because I think you've painted a caricature of our educational system - recognizable features are there, but greatly exaggerated. Addressing all of these would take more time and effort than I want to invest in a discussion that I've seen and participated in before.
Also keep in mind that people don't owe you a response. Scolding people into talking to you is not a good tactic.
Interesting - that's fair. I suppose a lot of people's experience differs too, so it's easy for people to talk past each other. I do know quite a lot of people, including a lot of self made people, and it's a subject I've discussed a lot. I've done teaching and training myself and I think our system is in disrepair, but perhaps I should be more balanced and less caricaturizing.
> Also keep in mind that people don't owe you a response.
Owe? Well, certainly not, though perhaps it's considerate for someone to explain why they downvoted a comment and it lets discussion get going. My own sense of decorum is I'll downvote noise ("right on! lol!" type posts) without explaining why, otherwise I won't unless there's already a good reply explaining why the disagreement.
> Scolding people into talking to you is not a good tactic.
I'm torn by whether to make a joke or a serious reply to this. I'll go the serious route: There's no scolding involved. I think people downvote identity-held issues without writing a disagreement, and I think it means people's worldviews don't evolve as quickly as they could, both mine and others'. I've had some fantastic disagreements with my comments in the past that led to very good discussion where I've learned a lot. For instance:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723610
So, I appreciate replies. Especially on an identity-level issue, yes, I'll absolutely ask again if I think people might be kneejerk voting based on identity. I want to learn on here, and want to be entertained, and I want others to learn, and I want others to be entertained. With discussion, we can do that. That's why I invite it. Thank you for your response.
Yes, there was.
You seem to think that downvotes are a bad thing. They're actually feedback that you don't get in most circumstances.
You seem to think that you're owed feedback that you like. You're wrong.
But most of the rest is junk unless your goal is to be a moderately salaried reasonably secure employee.
This seems to imply that there is something wrong with wanting to be a "moderately salaried reasonably secure employee". That's actually more or less what most people want, and our society and educational system, despite its problems, still does a remarkably good job of making that happen.
High school and college never have and can't teach you what you need to be perform on the highest levels.
College (and graduate school) isn't going help you perform at the highest levels in things the 100m sprint, or in car salesmanship, or how to hustle. But academia is still the best currently evolved system for training people to do research in disciplines like computer science or sociology.
Third, both of your posts imply that the only measure of value - of self, and to society - is wealth. It isn't news to anyone that academia isn't the optimal, shortest-path to make a lot of money. That's not why people do it.
Finally, you're making sweeping claims about the value of college and the entire educational system, when the original post was about a much more focussed issue of corporate basic research vs. academic research.
> Third, both of your posts imply that the only measure of value - of self, and to society - is wealth.
This reminded me of something I took for granted that most people thought - when most people don't think it.
I'd done quite a lot of cowboy frontier-style research when I was younger, and written much of it up. But I really disliked marketing, producing, selling.
Eventually I met the head of Apple's Market Research for Canada, and he was an amazing guy. He taught me so much. One thing he really, really hammered into me was that it's good and right to be compensated for the value you create. I got a motto from one of those talks in Toronto - "Edison not Tesla."
By all accounts, Tesla was the greater scientist and probably better human being than Edison. But Edison became very wealthy, and Tesla had a bit of a hard life. So I do absolutely believe that the making the greatest contribution to society and wealth are and should be married - and that it keeps you on track. I think researchers ought to become wealthy as they benefit humanity, and it's a tragedy when they don't. So bettering of people's lives, truly, measurably, ought to result in the doer of good also having their life improved. Wealth isn't the only measure of that, but it is a large one. Thanks again for your reply, very insightful to me.
There are ways to be compensated other than wealth, however. For example, many people would consider that a tenured position at a prestigious university, with a generally very pleasant work environment, the freedom to work on whatever you like, to collaborate with whomever you choose, and to have the security of tenure, is ample non-monetary compensation. Academics also enjoy considerable prestige -- both in terms of their reputations to others in their field, and their respect from society at large. You may not value these sorts of non-monetary compensation, but some people do.
making the greatest contribution to society and wealth are and should be married
Perhaps they "should be", but in reality, I think they clearly are not. Perhaps an ideal system would be different, but that's not the system we have.