I dunno why people seem to have these weird relationships with commercial companies where they get disillusioned, feeling betrayed even, and then have to go through what essentially is a break up with these tax entities. Is there a term for this psychological phenomena?
I've seen slides from marketing agencies where they're called Brand Fanatics. Apparently if customers are emotionally invested in a company, they pay 3x more or something like that.
This is crackpot physics. The only reason this gets any sort of publicity is because Mr. Weinstein has a (non-scientific) podcast and is associated with Joe Rogan and Sam Harris. People wasting their time invalidating the work of a man who can't be bothered to even publish it is completely ludicrous.
It’s sad to see Mr. Weinstein squander his supposedly not entirely inconsequential intellect on nonsense out of some misguided angst against “the establishment” and deeply rooted insecurities and egotistical tendencies.
Not to mention the embarrassing and cringe-inducing attempts to coin the term “The Intellectual Dark Web” as a way for him to leverage Joe Rogan’s and Sam Harris’s popularity. Dark indeed, alas not for the adolescently edgy reasons he has in mind.
Here’s to him rebounding from this foolishness and doing some actual scientific work worth of merit.
I've worked in the tech industry for almost a decade and I'm returning to the academy because the tech landscape is filled with scam artists, MBA's and ego-tripping managers - which would be tolerable if you actually got to work on something that wouldn't be completely rewritten or became irrelevant in two years time, but that's just not the case...
Correct me if I'm wrong but in the academy I hope to work on research which has at least some consequences on the future, and to find smart and kind people who are actually interested in knowledge for knowledge's sake, even if they are surrounded by gray bureaucrats.
Some people are like that, sure. But please don't make the mistake of idolizing academia because it's different than industry. There are plenty of scam artists doing P-hacking, MBAs leading universities and ego-tripping professors in academia as well. There's a reason the article describes a chapter titled "How to Survive Grad School With Your Soul Intact"; that'd be unnecessary if grad school was a very healthy place in the first place.
This is probably not what you want to hear, but in any place where lots of people work together (whether industry, academia, government or charity organisations) the social aspects of the work and the competition for status and resources will eventually overtake the actual work.
Your question "if not grad school, then what?" may well not have an answer at all.
I agree with this take, having dropped out from my PhD.
I have reluctantly come to accept over the years that my intellectual interests need to be catered to separately from whatever I need to do to economically sustain myself as an adult.
Some lucky people find a good fit (irrespective of institution, academia or industry) but most of us flail around most of the time.
You must know that many in tech have a very different experience than you (proud of their work, like their colleagues, feel care and development from their boss.)
Similarly many in academics love their work and others hate it.
The difference probably has to do more with who you are / how you go about it / attitude than the field.
It would be valuable to reflect what makes you so miserable in your current field while others are able to thrive. I don't know your situation but some guesses: do you have enough focus on getting into the good environments (eg, Google?) and if so - what's holding you back? Skills, drive, attitude? Do you relate to people or are you a judgmental asshole? etc etc.
I don't know the answer but what I am saying is - you probably won't be happy in academia or anywhere else unless you figure out what's making you not happy where you are.
Of course, one must consider the possibility that the issues lie with him and not blame circumstances blindly, but as you can see we are many - and all of us have very similar difficulties and problems with how things are. This points to something systemic. To dismiss all of this as the complaints of malcontent crybabies would be silly.
People can find bliss and happiness even in the direst of circumstances - and sometimes they have no choice but to do just that. As obscenely well educated people living in first world countries, we do have a choice - and advocating complacency for the sake of making your life easier reeks of moral degeneracy if not outright solipsism (same goes for repurposing Zen - "wherever you go, there you are" - to help you turn a blind eye to the world). We can do better.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Theoretically nothing you said is wrong. However the truth in my experience is that people who casually refer to their coworkers using language like "scam artists, MBA's and ego-tripping managers" have a lot wrong with them.
If this guy engages with his colleagues with that mindset, what kind of experience can he possibly expect?
And my point is - if he brought that attitude into academia he'd get he same outcome as well.
It's not as simple as one being universally "better" than the other. It very much depends on which university/research group you are part of in academia, and which company you work for in industry.
My own grad school experience was pretty good overall, and I had little to complain about. I read the book mentioned in this post fairly early on and it sounded like the experience would be horrific, but mine wasn't. Possibly this was due to cultural differences between the US and Australia, the latter being where I studied. As I went through my degree and got into teaching though, I started to see enough warning signs that staying long term wasn't going to be a good experience, so as soon has I had my PhD I decided that's where I get off the train.
Since then I've worked in industry, and had both good and bad experiences. There are plenty of horror stories about poor managers, toxic company culture, etc. around I'm sure you're aware of. But there are also companies that have a good working culture, place a high priority on quality and technical excellence, and are generally great to work for.
Am I glad I went to grad school? Absolutely. It was a tough but rewarding experience, my current job (in the latter category above) is an opportunity that came about only because of the research work I did in grad school. I'd say the benefit of grad school is it opens up more opportunities for you to choose from, whether you decide to stay in academia afterwards or return to industry. Both can be good or bad depending on the specific institution/company you work for.
It could be that you're engaged in "the grass is always greener" thinking. "Scam artists, MBA's, ego-tripping managers" and people who exhibit similarly off-putting behavior are found in every area of human endeavor. But so are smart and kind people if you find the right environment. That being said, some fields do seem to select for the more unpleasant personality types because they are optimizing for other qualities.
That's not necessarily true. The difference between a brilliant postdoc working in a hot field who never made it and a tenured PI is the willingness to play the game. So if the game is filled with scammers exaggerating the value of their models, or overfitting to dubious metrics, then these PIs will go right along with it. In this case the con is at the systemic level, so that depresses the "honesty" of each individual across the board, regardless of their personal conduct. The other thing to consider is that in academia your PI is your boss, your principle source of professional reputation, and your HR. So there is no barrier between you and his/her human nature. Therefore pick wisely.
I think the best bet to remain independent and be provocative is to retired. I'm preparing to join the FIRE movement, but I'll do my own thing on my own dime because I spent the last decade bending the knee to corporate overlords. I have learned much.
What would be a good way to make this a reality with serious consequences and satisfaction for the independent researchers? What specific platforms do you suggest? I know in today's world you can get information on any topic for free, and follow the path you desire in your knowledge journey, but to do it in a organized manner (with groups of people working towards some goals) is still a challenge. I was visualizing some sort of a dynamic topic/project based community website which has enough inbuilt authentication to allow serious groups of people to congregate, co-work, plan, execute and be successful in implementing their ideas, without suffering from the drawbacks of academia (or industry)? Does such a thing exist, or does it need to be built. We can of course extend this idea (if successful) to a more sustainable ecosystem of academia and industry including financial independence.
> I'm returning to the academy because the tech landscape is filled with scam artists,
...then I have some very bad news.
If you're doing a PhD, good luck and enjoy it - I think there's value in a PhD, still, despite the flawed system.
If you're doing research or going on to do research, then I hope you can find a niche full of scientists and not politicians. Those niches are hard to find.
There is also the startup founder path. That's what I chose, and I'm glad I did. I was tired of meaningless research and meaningless work. I wanted to build something real.
Congrats, you are enlightened. It's sometimes a bit sad to see things for what they are, but it's better than being naive.
If you want to just learn stuff, why not do some Master's degrees? You get close enough to the edge that you'll know a field well, but not so close that you end up spending a lot of time doing politics and advancing very little. You'll also get close enough to soak up advances from people who decided to do phds.
Through these experiences, you meet others in the same situation. Keep track of the good ones. An opportunity might come up for a group of you to do something later on. Regard each charlatan as a trainer.
I thought about this as well for a long time and a friend just switched from academy to the industry.
She does math and statistics and stuff; She said she is fed up of writing papers with or without real usecases; Reproducability and co.
She also is now regretting the low salary and her not having much of savings due to it.
I gave myself a new goal instead: making as much money in a normal ethical way as possible, exiting with 50 and then doing what i want without pressure.
Perhaps i will write code or will do something totally different.
this is incredible. And I thought I had it bad with politics in tech companies... this is some next level not giving a fuck right there - people who cheat like that should be punished severely, and work as supermarket cashiers, not become fricking professors. Unfortunately, I too, were I in your shoes, wouldn't pursue it much further past filing a formal complaint or two: the game is asymmetrical, it's much harder to nail someone for wrongdoing than it is for them to fudge up some lab results. Not to mention the emotional toil and waste of time and potential political blowback the would be whistle blower would suffer...
About half of my friends in grad school have had their careers damaged to varying extent by academic fraud, some have wasted lives chasing bad results (one friend lost several years chasing a bad result by Homme Hellinga), some have had bad stuff perpetrated upon them by bad actors with big names (one had her result we suspect - stolen by Carolyn Bertozzi via the review process, luckily her boss was a member of NAS and PNAS track-III'd the paper ahead of Bertozzi's publication).
Just be aware that it's not always like this, and that some fields are less prone to it than others.
In my 8 years in research mathematics, I didn't see a single case that would come close to this horror show (not that mathematics is free of unethical behavior, of course). Collaborating with biologists, however, I got exposed to a world far more backstabby than I've since experienced in the corporate world.
I think this is largely because results in math are easily verifiable compared to chemistry, or as an even worse example, the social sciences. The latter are also suffering from the replication crisis the most.
Math has a different problem. Because of the wide breadth of the field, and highly specialized nature of problems, it can take a very long time for anyone to actually verify a result with confidence. If ever. Unless you’re doing something famous like P!=NP, there might not be many people capable of checking your work in a reasonable amount of time.
The story of Fermat’s Last is a great example, what would have happened if that wasn’t a famous problem?
I agree, even proofs are wrong more often than you’d think, but I’m not sure whether math is actually so uniquely broad that other fields don’t suffer from this problem.
Maybe it's not its breadth, but its depth. That isn't to say that other fields aren't deep, don't get me wrong. But the more tightly coupled with the high-level physical world a field is (think for example medicine or biology), the more it is prone to having technologoical advances from the outside make new sub-fields crop up and old ones die. Think of for example the multitude of research areas made possible by gene editing, or high-resolution NMR imaging.
Of course this happens to some extent in math too, but a lot of subfields aren't killed or born due to outside technological changes. Number theory remains number theory, and still builds directly on centuries of work, even if computer verification has helped in some cases (disclaimer: I'm not a number theorist).
For most subfields of mathematics, you have a lot of depth to cover before you get to the forefront of research. That isn't to say that it's by any means easy to get to the forefront of more high-level physical sciences, but there are certainly subfields in biology or medicine that didn't exist a mere 40 years ago (also true in math, but in general far more rare there).
Also math can hinge on small technicalities. Like Andrew Wiles got a pre review for the proof of fermat conjecture and all was well. I depth review later found a serious gap/flaw which fortunately with hard work and luck he could plug. In contrast if you invent the electron microskop and you get images, you still made the invention (even if small or even big details might be wrong, and the result could be better). In other science often the gist is not effected.
I moved from Physics to Biology. It was quite a culture shock and I ended up leaving after a few years. The amount of shady practices, outright data manipulation, PIs ignoring students just making up stuff was just hard to be in on.
yikes, what a sleazebag. Larry hit the anti-Semitic trifecta (Jews, Israel and media moguls in bed with politicians) in under a minute of just random chit chat. The mind reels at the shady backroom deals this man was responsible for.
Nothing especially bad. He talks about how incredible it is he reaches so many countries with his broadcast-- at the time a staggering thought-- and to illustrate tells a story of seeing a praying Rabbi at the Wailing/Western wall in Jerusalem who turns to ask king about domestic US politics (Ross Perot, who ran against Clinton and Bush).
Then he basically says Ted Turner, founder of CNN, is a nice guy to work for and is a fan of Clinton (as if he is not allowed to be?) and could "serve you" whatever that means which I guess could be as ominous as your imagination allows but probably means in his administration.
There is zero antisemitism expressed. Only Larry King and the Israeli rabbi interested in American politics are Jewish. Clinton, Perot, and Turner are not.
The way I interpret it, Mr. King is suggesting to Clinton he (Clinton) might be interested in establishing a reciprocal relationship with one of most prominent media moguls and politically influential billionaires, Ted Turner.
Teddy helps Billy with the optics on CNN, maybe funding various campaigns, and in turn Billy helps Teddy with his own projects, like I dunno, passing a bill to kill off competitors and so on.
Long and short of it: Ted Turner is the guy who created CNN, a very influential news source in the US. Many people consider CNN to be a "left-wing" news source, and in the clip King talks to Bill Clinton, a democratic politician, about Ted Turner "serving" Clinton after he was elected president.
The use of the word "serving" is the issue, as it sounds like a quid pro quo.
You have to see this through 90's lens: back then the media wasn't nearly as polarized, and the public had much greater trust in news networks, especially in CNN. "Fake news" was mostly relegated to the domain of conspiracy theories, and blatant promotions of political agendas as neutral news wouldn't fly back then (although, of course, the networks did have an agenda and did promote it, but they were... much more subtle and civil about the whole thing).
In the 90's the bias was shown in the stories they choose to cover and what they choose to ignore not in the coverage itself
this is still true today but now in addition to this bias there is almost zero "strait" reporting, everything has political commentary mixed in, some more subtle than others but it is still there. Even in places like APnews where it is more subtle
CNN is not really “left-wing” in a broad ideological sense. It’s the unofficial mouthpiece of the Democratic Party and the “liberal” side of the US culture war. Note for example how poorly they treated Sanders who was further left than any of the other mainstream candidates.
I'm tired of fact-based and reason-based news being painted as 'left-wing". CNN is just the news. I miss when we all watched the same news and it tried to be objective and half the country wasn't watching provably false news and wanting to split off into madness and domestic terror cells and make the human race go backwards.
If you believe CNN is "just the news" then you are suffering from reinforcing confirmation bias as well as echo chamber.
You agree with the positions CNN takes there for it is "news" and outlets that have differing positions to those you agree with are "fake news" and "want to make the human race go backwards"
There is a difference between “this news source strikes me as not being too politically extreme in either direction compared to my own views” and “this news source is completely neutral and objective with respect to all political views.”
How can you be sure you’re not seeing the former and calling it the latter?
It is 100% NOT the liberal side of the cultural war. There really is no liberal side
The right side is theological authoritarian, the Left side is illiberal Identitarianism which is ironic because identitarianism started out as a "far right" ideology but in a real world example of the horseshoe theory of politics has become far-left authoritarian
You’re the same type of person who wants to dictate where and how his taxes are used (“I’d like a 70%-30% split on health and education. What’s that? Defense? Yeah I don’t like tanks, no thanks. Oh but do make sure it goes to building MRI machines - I do like those very much, the hum is soothing to me”).
While the sheer arrogance and borderline solipsism do bring a smile to ones face, they are completely impractical.
Skepticism is thinking they exaggerated some facts and perhaps over emphasized the importance of Stoicism and his mental fortitude to paint a prettier picture.
What you're describing is unfounded paranoia. The elites are out to get us? McCain is a hoax?
No. Skepticism is refusing to believe in something until it has been shown to be true.
What commonly passes as skepticism is a very tame effort. To say accept 50% of the claims, rather than 100%. You should accept 0% of claims that you have not verified. This is also known as the scientific method. (But don't look to science to be upholding it...)
The elites govern us. They have always governed us. One of the methodologies is that is to sell us on stories from the cradle that allow them to operate in reality, while we are living in unsubstantiated stories.
When we take no action to verify, when we trust our experts, politicians, anyone apart from ourselves, when we accept the authority of another over our own experience, we are badly lost.
Do you recollect when it was going to be 2 weeks to flatten the curve? Do you think the curve will be flattened? Do we need to 'mask harder'? Get vaccinated? Why didn't we have cold vaccines previously? Do we need to isolate healthy people, is that how it works? The contradictions in the current narrative are impossible to resolve if you are a thinking person with authority over your own thinking.
McCain is clearly from the governance clique. His father was an admiral. He then does a dog and pony show in the intimidating country of 'Vietnam', and comes back into governance and plays his role. He is an actor. We get indications of this, eg the broken leg that changes legs! Here's the explanation:
"Finally on Thursday, McCain himself took to Twitter to put the conspiracy theories to rest.
'My left leg was doing extra work to compensate for the boot, so I'm giving it a break,' the senator tweeted.
'I still hate wearing this boot, but it won't slow us down from frying 7 turkeys today!'"
That explanation explains nothing. NOTHING. But the headline says it "solves the riddle of his moveable leg". Maybe you read it wrong? Perhaps you had better doubt yourself, and trust the experts! And then you have to read a load more soft spin and fluff about how wonderful man, what a wonderful family, etc, etc, and nothing about him being a criminal that should have spent most of his time in jail for being an enemy of humanity - being part of the governance system.
The reality unfortunately is that no one is checking anything, and that people's brains are turned off. Especially well educated brains. They have fully accepted the stories, and are better at filling in the blanks, rather than letting the evidence do the talking.
I (very seriously) suggest consulting a mental health professional. Please take this with the kind intention it was meant. I had a good friend a while back that also was quite intelligent and got off on conspiracy theories, had severe trust issues, and used his intellect to drive himself up a wall.
