"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. Moreover, much of the rest of the world was still crippled by the after-effects of the war. At the same time, the G.I. Bill of Rights sent a whole generation back to college transforming the United States from a nation of elite higher education to a nation of mass higher education. Before the war, about 8% of Americans went to college, a figure comparable to that in France or England. By now more than half of all Americans receive some sort of post-secondary education. The American academic enterprise grew explosively, especially in science and technology. The expanding academic world in 1950-1970 created posts for the exploding number of new science Ph.D.s, whose research led to the founding of journals, to the acquisition of prizes and awards, and to increases in every other measure of the size and quality of science. At the same time, great American corporations such as AT&T, IBM and others decided they needed to create or expand their central research laboratories to solve technological problems, and also to pursue basic research that would provide ideas for future developments. And the federal government itself established a network of excellent national laboratories that also became the source of jobs and opportunities for aspiring scientists. Even so, that explosive growth was merely a seamless continuation of a hundred years of exponential growth of American science. It seemed to one and all (with the notable exception of Derek da Solla Price) that these happy conditions would go on forever.
By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific talent to ensure the Nation's future competitiveness, especially since by now other countries have been restored to economic and scientific vigor, but in fact, jobs are scarce for recent graduates. Finally, it should be clear by now that with more than half the kids in America already going to college, academic expansion is finished forever.
Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since. ..."
"The picture so far is pretty bleak. The American academic scientist earns less than an airplane mechanic or child support profiteer, has less job security than a drummer in a boy band, and works longer hours than a Bolivian silver miner. ... Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your atlas. Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China. Your high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate programs in China. The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University of Nebraska or University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher standard of living than any job you could hope for in China. The desperate need for graduate student labor and lack of Americans who are interested in PhD programs in science and engineering means that you'll have no trouble getting a visa. When you finish your degree, a small amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your continued place in the legal American work force. Science may be one of the lowest paid fields for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better than most jobs in China or India. ..."
That last part may be less true two decades later giving rising standard of living in China and elsewhere.
That said, like the lottery, the PhD system does work out for some people.
""Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.""
Also related From the Village Voice from 2004 about Humanities PhDs who generally have it even worse than STEM PhDs:
"Wanted: Really Smart Suckers: Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty"
https://web.archive.org/web/20050228044956/http://www.villag...
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off.
Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. In the past week, Columbia's graduate teaching assistants went on strike and temporary, or adjunct, faculty at New York University narrowly avoided one. Columbia's Graduate Student Employees United seeks recognition, over the administration's appeals, of a two-year-old vote that would make it the second officially recognized union at a private university. NYU's adjuncts, who won their union in 2002, reached an eleventh-hour agreement for health care and office space, among other amenities.
Grad students have always resigned themselves to relative poverty in anticipation of a cushy, tenured payoff. But in the past decade, the rules of the game have changed. Budget pressures have spurred universities' increasing dependence on so-called "casual labor," which damages both the working conditions of graduate students and their job prospects. Over half of the classroom time at major universities is now logged by non-tenure-track teachers, both graduate teaching assistants—known as TAs—and adjuncts. At community colleges, part-timers make up 60 percent of the faculties. ..."
If all that is not bad enough, here is an even worse aspect of it all: "Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt": https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
One reason I am for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is so everyone who wants it has a chance to live like an impoverished graduate student and pursue their intellectual dreams in cooperation with others of their choosing and without being exploited by an academic pyramid scheme.
Anyway, having passed through three PhD programs (in Industrial Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Ecology and Evolution plus essentially visiting another in Computing/Robotics for about a year), there is a lot more I could say on this (and have elsewhere).
You don't need UBI to pursue your intellectual dreams. The upper classes already have UBI which is called living off interest and dividends. Even if you don't have a trust fund, you can still pursue your dreams. Just go backpacking and surf some couches. People will feed you and put a roof over your head if they believe in your dream too.
Maybe "Bullies to Buddies"? https://www.izzykalman.com/
""We will never win the war against bullying by trying to convince people to stop being bullies. We need to teach people how not to be victims!
(Izzy Kalman, Nationally Certified School Psychologist)"
Also from there: "What does the research show? The most highly revered and intensive anti-bullying programs rarely produce more than a minor reduction in bullying and often lead to an increase. A large-scale study conducted by the University of Texas at Arlington found that kids who attend schools with anti-bullying programs are more likely to be bullied than kids who attend schools without such programs. Why? And how can schools determine what is more likely to be effective? ..."
And: "Bullies to Buddies teaches how to understand the Golden Rule as a scientific, psychological formula and how to apply it in real life. It provides materials and training to students, school staff, mental health professionals, and parents. Because the lessons are simple yet counterintuitive and taught largely via entertaining role-plays, they enable people to quickly understand their mistakes and how to rectify them. Rather than teaching students that they need to rely on others to protect them from each other, Bullies to Buddies teaches them how to solve their social problems on their own.
What students learn:
* The “optical illusion” that causes bullying
* How to use the Golden Rule to stop being bullied without anyone’s help, including dealing with:
* Verbal attacks
* Rumors
* Physical aggression and threats
* Social exclusion
* Cyberbullying
As a result, kids grow in happiness, resilience, independence, and emotional maturity. These techniques will unleash their sense of humor and make them more popular with their peers. And they will get along better with their parents, teachers, and siblings."
To be clear, Izzy Kalman also outlines situations where the approach works (e.g. teasing, name calling, rumors, shoving) and where it doesn't (e.g. serious physical violence). And he also points out that while the approach may greatly reduce issues it may not resolve all issues. There is a certain low-level of social negativity people have to learn to live with (as contrasted with "zero tolerance" policies where people can learn to game the system to use it to bully others).
There is a videos section on the site with a a couple dozen of videos. Example showing in general the distinction between most programs (modify the entire social environment) and what Izzy Kalman suggests (train the person suffering in skills of resilience and social interaction):
"The Golden Rule System - Simple Solution to Bullying"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVVAx_kGM7w
Example showing to learn to deal with (mild) physical aggression:
"Magic Response for Physical Aggression" - Bullying Prevention for Educators"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRPusaSSqqE
I find Mithril simple enough to be low maintenance for Single Page Applications. We still use a version one of it on a project launched about ten years ago -- although I use version two for later things. And you can use it from plain JavaScript with no compile step.
https://mithril.js.org
Not suggesting anyone try this but some people claim to sleep only two hours a day with this approach:
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/polyphasic-s...
"Uberman Sleep Schedule: Six 20-minute naps are spaced evenly throughout the day, totaling two hours of sleep per 24-hour period."
A book on sleep and how important it is to learning and health:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
"Walker spent four years writing the book, in which he asserts that sleep deprivation is linked to numerous fatal diseases, including dementia. ... The values of sleep and the consequences of sleep deprivation are also brought up in the book. One particular research conducted in the past, where people volunteered themselves to sleep for only six hours in a span of 10 nights, is brought up by Walker. This resulted in the volunteers being "cognitively impaired" along with their brains being heavily damaged, regardless of the three week eight-hour sleep schedule they received later."
> Physicians were initially unaware or dismissive of brain zaps due to limited information and a focus on downplaying the addictive nature of antidepressants.
Seems like another example of: "Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial" https://www.deadlymedicines.dk/deadly-psychiatry-and-organis...
"Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial explains in evidence-based detail why the way we currently use psychiatric drugs does far more harm than good. Professor, Doctor of Medical Science, Peter C. Gøtzsche documents that psychiatric drugs kill more than half a million people every year among those aged 65 and above in the United States and Europe. This makes psychiatric drugs the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer. Gøtzsche explains that we could reduce our current usage of psychotropic drugs by 98% and at the same time improve patients’ mental and physical health and survival. It can be difficult, however, to come off the drugs, as many people become dependent on them. As the withdrawal symptoms can be severe, long-lasting and even dangerous, slow tapering is usually necessary. In his book, Gøtzsche debunks the many myths that leading psychiatrists – very often on drug industry payroll – have created and nurtured over decades in order to conceal the fact that biological psychiatry has generally been a failure. Biological psychiatry sees drugs as the “solution” for virtually all problems, in marked contrast to the patients’ views. Most patients don’t respond to the drugs they receive but, unfortunately, the psychiatrists’ frustrations over the lack of progress often lead to more diagnoses, more drugs and higher doses, harming the patients further."
One example from there: "The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs" by Stephen S. Ilardi
From the Amazon book blurb: "In the past decade, depression rates have skyrocketed, and one in four Americans suffer from major depression at some point in their lives. Where have we gone wrong? Dr. Stephen Ilardi sheds light on our current predicament and reminds us that our bodies were never designed for the sleep-deprived, poorly nourished, frenzied pace of twenty-first century life. Inspired by the extraordinary resilience of aboriginal groups like the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, Dr. Ilardi prescribes an easy-to-follow, clinically proven program that harks back to what our bodies were originally made for and what they continue to need with these six components:
* Brain Food [supplement with Omega 3s; remember your brain is mostly fat]
* Don't Think, Do [avoid excessive rumination by doing things]
* Antidepressant Exercise [aerobic exercise is medicine]
* Let There Be Light [get natural sunlight and supplement as needed with vitamin D3]
* Get Connected [engage in face-to-face social activities regularly]
* Habits of Healthy Sleep [get enough sleep by following basic guidelines]
The Depression Cure's holistic approach has been met with great success rates, helping even those who have failed to respond to traditional medications. For anyone looking to supplement their treatment, The Depression Cure offers hope and a practical path to wellness for anyone."
TL;DR as Ilardi says: "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"
That said, if you are on prescription psychotropic meds already, do not stop taking them or change doses without some medically-approved plan for getting off them. Peter Gøtzsche wrote an entire book about that: "Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs: A User's Guide" https://www.amazon.com/Mental-Health-Survival-Withdrawal-Psy...
"This book can help people with mental health issues to survive and return to a normal life. Citizens believe, and the science shows, that medications for depression and psychosis and admission to a psychiatric ward are more often harmful than beneficial. Yet most patients take psychiatric drugs for years. Doctors have made hundreds of millions of patients dependent on psychiatric drugs without knowing how to help them taper off the drugs safely, which can be very difficult. The book explains in detail how harmful psychiatric drugs are and gives detailed advice about how to come off them. You will learn: ... that psychiatric drugs should never be stopped abruptly because withdrawal reactions can be dangerous..."
There is probably some true to this advice, but the issue is not that it's some hidden secret, it's that fact that is basically infeasible for a majority of people.
Trust me, while I benefit from psychiatry, I am by no means a fan of psychiatry as a whole. However, your comment only focuses on depression. There are plenty other disorders that psychiatry deals with, like Schizophrenia, that the list of advice above would hardly make a dent in for many.
I'll add this to my reading list. Send like it's a good compliment to "This Is Your Brain on Food" by Uma Naidoo and "Brain Energy" by Christopher Palmer. Both very insightful and well researched.
"The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. ..."
How much value is there in formal proof that a program optimally meets precisely-described requirements if the requirements themselves are sub-optimal for the problem area of concern?
In other words, "software is hard":
https://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html
"The difference is that the overruns on a physical construction project are bounded. You never get to the point where you have to hammer in a nail and discover that the nail will take an estimated six months of research and development, with a high level of uncertainty. But software is fractal in complexity. If you're doing top-down design, you produce a specification that stops at some level of granularity. And you always risk discovering, come implementation time, that the module or class that was the lowest level of your specification hides untold worlds of complexity that will take as much development effort as you'd budgeted for the rest of the project combined. The only way to avoid that is to have your design go all the way down to specifying individual lines of code, in which case you aren't designing at all, you're just programming. Fred Brooks said it twenty years ago in "No Silver Bullet" better than I can today: "The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence.""
I prefer a conceptual model more like "Software as Gardening".
https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...
"Andy Hunt: There is a persistent notion in a lot of literature that software development should be like engineering. First, an architect draws up some great plans. Then you get a flood of warm bodies to come in and fill the chairs, bang out all the code, and you're done. A lot of people still feel that way; I saw an interview in the last six months of a big outsourcing house in India where this was how they felt. They paint a picture of constructing software like buildings. The high talent architects do the design. The coders do the constructing. The tenants move in, and everyone lives happily ever after. We don't think that's very realistic. It doesn't work that way with software.
We paint a different picture. Instead of that very neat and orderly procession, which doesn't happen even in the real world with buildings, software is much more like gardening. You do plan. You plan that you're going to make a plot this big. You're going to prepare the soil. You bring in a landscape person who says to put the big plants in the back and short ones in the front. You've got a great plan, a whole design.
But when you plant the bulbs and the seeds, what happens? The garden doesn't quite come up the way you drew the picture. This plant gets a lot bigger than you thought it would. You've got to prune it. You've got to split it. You've got to move it around the garden. This big plant in the back died. You've got to dig it up and throw it into the compost pile. These colors ended up not looking like they did on the package. They don't look good next to each other. You've got to transplant this one over to the other side of the garden.
--- Dave Thomas: Also, with a garden, there's a constant assumption of maintenance. Everybody says, I want a low-maintenance garden, but the reality is a garden is something that you're always interacting with to improve or even just keep the same. Although I know there's building maintenance, you typically don't change the shape of a building. It just sits there. We want people to view software as being far more organic, far more malleable, and something that you have to be prepared to interact with to improve all the time."
And it helps to keep things simple.
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/
"Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity’s virtues over easiness’, showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path."
Love the gist of this, but just wanted to point out, but there's no need to draw the line between buildings and gardening. Anyone who has built a house or done major remodel knows that it too suffers from fractal complexity. It may not be a nail that becomes a wormhole of complexity (as neither is something simple arithmetic operations in programming), but all kinds of things can crop up. The soil has shifted since last survey, the pipes from city are old, the wiring is out of date, the standards have changed, the weather got in the way, the supplies changed in price / specification, etc. Everything in the world is like that, software isn't special in that regard. In fact, software only has such complexity because its usually trying to model some real-world data or decision. For the totally arbitrary toy examples, the code is usually predictable, simple, and clean ; the mess starts once we try to fit it to real-world usecases (such as building construction).
This is from work over 30 years ago on our garden simulator by my wife and me. Being too ambitious (and perfectionist) at the start with product plans for software. Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) instead which prioritized essential needs would have engaged customers years sooner in our case and provided valuable feedback for deciding on future directions for new features or changes. A couple of people early on warned us to simplify and prioritize, but we ignored that. Learned lots of other lessons from that project and others, but that was the biggest and most costly lesson overall.
Sorry, off topic but a garden simulator like animal crossing or garden simulator like planning a garden?
Because if it's the second one, please try again. There are ZERO user friendly garden planning software options that account for climate, soil type, partner plants, and rotation schedule.
Thanks for the reply. It is not quite either, but between the two it is more of the second (planning). It actually focused more on learning the science of gardening than planning an actual garden in a way you might use for your own backyard. https://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ "The Garden with Insight garden simulator is an educational simulation that uses weather, soil, and plant growth models to simulate a simple garden in an open-ended microworld setting. You can plant vegetables and grow them to learn more about plants, the soil, the weather, gardening, and science."
It was in Delphi Pascal for Windows, and I would still like to port it to the Web with JavaScript/TypeScript at some point.
That said, like the lottery, the PhD system does work out for some people.
But in general, the PhD process is a deeply broken system that chews up most people who go through it. Freeman Dyson has written on this as well. One example: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/freeman-dyson-phd-...
Also related From the Village Voice from 2004 about Humanities PhDs who generally have it even worse than STEM PhDs: "Wanted: Really Smart Suckers: Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty" https://web.archive.org/web/20050228044956/http://www.villag... If all that is not bad enough, here is an even worse aspect of it all: "Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt": https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ One reason I am for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is so everyone who wants it has a chance to live like an impoverished graduate student and pursue their intellectual dreams in cooperation with others of their choosing and without being exploited by an academic pyramid scheme.Anyway, having passed through three PhD programs (in Industrial Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Ecology and Evolution plus essentially visiting another in Computing/Robotics for about a year), there is a lot more I could say on this (and have elsewhere).
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