My wife is prof at a decent uni in the states teaching big stuff™ and I got into a conversation about this with her recently, where we landed was "will academia ever trust plebs like me?" and after an hr or so of back and forth it was evident to me on average: it will not. I'm still thinking about what I think about that, but it was certainly my resolve, at least within my wifes institution (will remain unnamed).
My disillusion with credentialism reached its peak when I published my first paper as an undergraduate student. That paper was based on a project I'd worked on part-time for maybe half of a semester. After my professor pushed for me to write a paper about it, I obscured the subject matter with the adequate specialist jargon and convoluted technical style and it was accepted by a fairly well-regarded publication uneventfully. I was on an accelerated curriculum planning to pursue a Master's degree and had much higher expectations for academia. I ended up dropping out after earning my Bachelor's. I'm much more sympathetic to independent researchers than to academics these days, and if I were to engage in serious research again, I would probably publish it independently rather than going through academic channels.
Academia is a walled garden protected by paper degrees and the cost of tuition and time.
Anyone who can achieve results without suffering the same tribulations to join the ranks of professors is a threat at best, a charlatan at worst, and to be dismissed regardless.
That’s not at all what this article is about. It’s a piece of published work by an established scientist who used data collected by users of birding apps. The non credentialed bird app users did not publish this paper…
I mean, for like, some ML research, sure. For certain, even most, aspects of electrical engineering, absolutely. But for biology? Absolutely not.
And even in more computer-adjacent fields, this is still ridiculously reductive. Geoff Hinton is an academic through-and-through, and he changed the world even for computer scientists. What about someone like Don Knuth? I mean, even google's pagerank started as an academic project.
Engineering firms do great research too, but this is not the only way.
Good news, or just deserts, the feeling is mutual.
A large part of the electorate distrusts academics and is in turn dismissive of academics’ priorities and recommendations. It’s correct for members of the public to distrust institutions that are not earnest.
Get a billion dollar to get a new particle collider? Buy 1000 lab rats and try some experiment? Get 3 graduate students to expand your personal theory? -> The answer is no. But even someone with credentials will have a hard time getting that unless they have a good team and track record in similar task.
A position as a collaborator in a research group? -> Perhaps. As a full researcher is difficult but not impossible. The main problem is to ensure you know everything that "everyone" already know. You must start with a small collaboration in a side task. Also, there are many positions in helper task, like sysadmin or lathe expert or ... that don't require a Ph.D. but they require someone who really knows what is doing and can understand both the requirements of the team and the tools.
Publish your own research? -> Possible, if you pay for the 1000 rats yourself. The main problem is that what is "useful", "interesting" and "interesting for academia" may have a weird intersection. So you may get something that is useful or interesting but nobody in academia may care about it. Or you may reinvent the wheel with another name. Or the theory is "obviously wrong". Do you have a control group? There is a finite time to read new ideas, so people in academia has to filter too weird theories (even weird theories published in papers). Sometimes the theory that is obviously wrong is correct, but most of the time is just wrong. Does the new theory has at least one experimental prediction?
In some cases is like wanting to be a F1 racer. Nobody will give you a position unless you are an expert F2 racer (or something).
On the other hand, pg published "A plan for spam" in a blog post. No new academic research. No new weird structure. Nothing new. Just useful when nobody knew how to deal with spam. Also, cperciva made a comment a few weeks ago telling that his most cited "paper" is only a "preprint" that was never accepted for publication, because nobody care about a weird side channel timing attack (or something like that, I can't find the comment).
There is definitively a problem, but a few years ago got we got in our university like 5 independent persons that solved the Goldbach conjeture. Each one got a voluntary graduate student to talk and explain the ideas. After a few month of meetings, the conclusion was that none of them had good ideas to prove the Goldbach conjeture.
Is it accurate that there are 544 rosters? If so, even at 2 minutes a roster isn't that days of work, even if you coded something? How would you go about completing this task in 1 hour as a human? (also chatgpt 4.1 gave me 2,503 and it said it used the NFL 2024 fact book)
544 rosters but half as many games (because the teams play each other).
Technically I can probably do it in about 10 minutes because I've worked with these kind of stats before and know about packages that will get you this basically instantly (https://pypi.org/project/nfl-data-py/).
It's exactly 4 lines of code to find the correct answer, which is 2,227.
Assuming I didn't know about that package though I'd open a site like pro football reference up, middle click on each game to open the page in a new tab, click through the tabs, copy paste the rosters into sublime text, do some regex to get the names one per line, drop the new one per line list into sortmylist or a similar utility, dedupe it, and then paste it back into sublime text to get the line count.
I see. When you said "game day rosters for many NFL teams are available on many sites" - I thought "that sounds like a lot of hours!!" heh. - I didn't realize it was packaged well, I also know sweet fa about football. Thanks for explaining it more. :)
If the rosters are in some sort of pretty easily parsed or scrapable format from the nfl, as sports stats typically are, this is just a matter of finding every unique name. This is something that I imagine would take less than an hour or two for a very beginner coder, and maybe a second or two for the code to actually run
FYI for readers: All the major leagues have a stats API, most are public, some are public and "undocumented" with tons of documentation by the community. It's quite a feat!
Interesting (in Canada), if my order is wrong I just click the item that is wrong and the chatbot automatically refunds me either on my card or via a credit, and often gives me an extra $5 in credit for my trouble, wonder what account flag I have you don't.
In my experience, in Australia; you don’t get to select the item that was wrong, and simply get a refund on the cheapest item.
Seems the vendors are catching on, with orders often dramatically wrong without any consequence. This is pure speculation, however.
I also found vendors would often substitute items out of stock with those of a lesser value, but write a semi-cute message on it. Nothing like buying some fancy cola, only to get a can of coke and a love letter..
Endless chatbot and help option loops; I gave up, and refuse to use their services - though use was rare anyway.
I've never had any of these problems at all with uber eats, probably part of why I use it so often. I click "help with a past order" and the first option I get is "my order was wrong" if I click it, it presents me with my order and everything I paid for and asks me what to pick that is wrong, it then asks for a photo if it's a larger $ item (unless it's missing) and then it asks me if I want a refund via card or credit, and as I mentioned, it typically gives me a credit for the trouble.
Super interesting to me we have such different experiences. Maybe because I have UberOne?
It's always me coming into these comment sections on animal intelligence posting shadow the rat videos, well, I love rats sooo much, so here I am again. They're really wonderful pets who are clearly very loving and extremely intelligent. Cannot recommend them enough, they're fantastic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA
I think this isn't quite the same thing, never the less: I have dyscalculia on extreme mode (/dyslexia/autism), and I was forced to do math in the 90s in the UK, rote style. I don't know if they didn't know about dyscalculia, didn't care, or whatever, but holy hell I wish I'd never been forced to do that, it's still today a fairly painful memory and I'm in my 40s now. If you're gonna force kids into math, at least make sure they're not unable to process it correctly.
> What separates a crackpot from an eccentric person or someone with weird ideas, or is that just a crackpot?
I believe it is how a person construct their beliefs and how they defend it. I don't know enough about Giordano Bruno to claim that he was a crackpot though. All I want to say is that if Giordano Bruno shared some good ideas including some novel and good ideas of the time, it doesn't mean he was not a crackpot.
> And, is it ok to be a crackpot?
No, from the point of view of a Catholic Church of the time, it was not. And Giordano Bruno should have known that. I'm not trying to whitewash Catholic Church, just that Giordano Bruno could have predict what was coming to him and ignored it, while having some really weird ideas. I have a very little knowledge of him, but I heard of some of his ideas and I tend to think that he was a crackpot.
To add/refine: Bruno didn't incur his punishment because of "weird ideas" or because he was a crackpot, specifically, much less for believing in heliocentrism [0][1].
Thanks for your thoughtful and educational reply! I had to go do some digging on the views of the Catholic Church of the time and I hadn't realized, "crackpottery", if you will, was taken so seriously, but after researching I see the problems. Thanks again for taking the time, that was some good learnings.
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