In case you wonder where the current trends come from.
“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.””
Also, Andreessen’s wife of two decades attended Stanford. Her billionaire father ensured that their surname (Arrillaga) is plastered all over the campus.
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)
> 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.”
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?
Bureaucracy and momentum can lead to rot. It’s not a bad idea to tear things down and rebuild in order to extirpate that rot and misdirection.
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.
Move fast and break things is, in fact, a bad philosophy to work by and govern by. Especially when the people in charge admit to not wanting to rebuild.
I summarily reject any notion that our "universities" are broken.
This claim has been parroted around for the better part of a decade now. IT is an obvious right wing think tank target. Sprinkle in some heritage foundation too.
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's not at all what privatization does. It tears down a system built to benefit the public, and rebuilds a structure designed to profit a small number of individuals instead.
There certainly is a problem in universities and some of it might be a recent cultural development. It also isn't restricted to US universities either and some of it mirrors the a church that wanted to keep some knowledge under wraps. Publishing is also a perverted circus if you indeed are employed as a scientist and want to publish your work/findings.
That said, just razing everything down is probably not the solution, especially if there are indeed no ideas how to improve the current state.
The problem is really one of supply and demand. Whatever SV talking heads say is a post-hoc rationalization on top of this basic fact.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Most PhD topics are incremental, because you are supposed to do a PhD very early in your career. Because the American system won and the PhD become the terminal degree. Which you often do as a student rather than even a junior professional.
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.
Your comment about PhD topics incremental reminds me of what someone once told me about getting a PhD - you learn absolute everything about almost nothing.
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.
Honest question, not really related to the story: What makes someone "exploited"?
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.
Well, my wife, a math teacher with an advanced math degree, has been seeing data classification/labeling jobs for people with advanced math degrees. They pay well (USD$60/hr), but are, of course, contract work. There are similar jobs for people with law degrees. So, yeah, STEM/white-collar is definitely getting a bit gig-ified.
I think it cuts both ways because these types of people are the ones who can wield this technology as a Swiss army knife to do really interesting things and in fact if they can build on top of their own peers' collective toil then they can avoid doing that toil themselves and potentially do greater things.. at least that's the theory.
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
Ironic how a libertarian would impose his personal views on "the system". Doesn't work? Let it die. Too many PhDs? Perhaps, let them search for a job. If they're indeed too many, a generation of plumbers etc. will emerge naturally. No one is impeding their businesses, if anything governments worldwide are aiding big technology companies in any way possible.
Every time someone goes to a college or university and pays out of their own pocket to learn the skills necessary to work for a corporation, that's society subsidizing the costs of the corporation.
We're being robbed. We need to actively shame people that spend massive amounts of money on college.
104 comments
“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.””
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.
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.
> Musk
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)
> 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.”
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?
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.
> It’s not a bad idea to tear things down and rebuild in order to extirpate that rot and misdirection.
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.
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.
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.
> The problem is really one of supply and demand.
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...
> 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.
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.
> Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking.
Why? Most science is incremental. And there's nothing wrong with that.
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.
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
https://archive.ph/IbdD4
We're being robbed. We need to actively shame people that spend massive amounts of money on college.