"It became clear, both from my own experiences and from advice I received, that if I wanted to succeed in academia I would need to churn out incremental research papers every year — at very least until I had tenure."
"In many ways, starting my own company has given me the sort of freedom which academics aspire to"
This comment contributes nothing to the discussion except steering people away from reading the whole thing (a whopping 5 minute read), and the author actually wrote this in the second paragraph:
> I considered replying in the thread, but I think it deserves an in-depth answer — and one which will be seen by more people than would notice a reply in the middle of a 100+ comment thread.
I feel like you're going directly against the long-form answer the author intended to give, so I'm downvoting you.
Is it pithy? The summary given is "academia sucks, be an entrepreneur". IMO the actual point of the post is "I didn't pursue an academic career, here are the various things I did instead and why I think they are meaningful".
It sounds like you have the free time to read long form writing of potentially good/bad value, however I do not and almost all of my engagement and value seeking from this site comes from the comments section.
I typically read the shortest and most down voted comments as those are clear pointers to things that I need to learn/research further, such as "do I gain anything from a piece of writing longer than a tweet?"
The length of this exchange is probably more than the reading time of the OP. So if you haven't already, I would suggest go ahead and reading the whole thing.
I feel like the TLDR'ing of someone else's writing is a negative reinforcement loop that needs to be challenged because it leads us all into doing the same.
Personally I read comments sections to find things that are not in the OP and point out weak points or blind spots--you know, actual discussion.
Why would I read the full source code of the HashMap implementation in OpenJDK when I could read the API in 5 minutes and obtain 97% of the information I need to use it?
The answer of course, is if someone can provide me a two sentence reason that explains very clearly why that extra 3% of value is so crucial.
Really interesting point of view. I have some opinions about your logic and I in no way am trying to attack you. I disagree... the irony is not lost on me, either.
Comparing:
- Reading the source code of HashMap vs reading the API.
to
- Reading HN comments vs source articles.
...is not a fair comparison, IMO. Well what is, then? Ok, glad you asked!
Reading HN comments vs source articles is more like:
- Reading the book vs reading the reviews on Amazon about the book.
Comments on an article are not the API docs to the article. Going with your analogy, the API docs of an article would be something like the spec for how a concept fits into a perspective of a topic (...this sounds so confusing...but, just work with me for a minute, please :D). Unlike something like HashMap, articles are almost always going to be less objective and more subjective. When something is subjective, you could think of it like everyone designs their own API docs; the protocol with which you interact with a concept can be designed by yourself.
The problem with not designing your own protocols (perspectives) for interacting with a concept is that you could be missing an arbitrary 3% of information or the information that your gleaned could be of a completely different taxonomy (or unforeseen perspective dependancies, maybe deps that you don't agree with) than what you would have designed if you had read the article.
This matters because when your perspective is guided by the perspectives of others, you miss out on a lot of opportunities to make connections across topics throughout time. Maybe the cryptographic inventions the author describe connect with another detail in an article about DIY satellite programming or some voting machine vulnerability that inspires you to do something bold (whatever, who knows, that's the point); changing the course of your life.
As a species, I think (super opinionated part) we will advance further if as many of us as possible are actively 'reading the books' and 'forming the opinions'. I don't think the amount of value someone can bring to the world is strictly correlated with their IQ. So everyone can bring value to a discussion or a body of work or whatever, if they think critically about it and develop their own opinions based on their own unique perspectives.
The point is somewhere between the two. I'm not telling anyone that they should be an entrepreneur; but I'm saying that being an entrepreneur has worked well for me because it has allowed me to do a surprising number of things which are not entirely part of the job description.
Recall that the original academics were not primarily paid to do it, but were wealthy-enough people who devoted their spare time to it.(Theoretical scientists needed less money to do this then experimentalists and field scientists.)
I feel like we do academics wrong. We should encourage a large gap between undergrad and graduate school for two reasons. First, develop empathy for the realities of shipping software (or whatever the field is). Second, build some wealth to not chase wrong grants.
I take Arnold Schwarzenegger as an inspiration on this front. He did hard work and had some good fortune due to great timing (real-estate in California) to build up wealth before becoming an actor, and this manifested in the freedom to go all in on Acting.
The thing that I take as inspiring is that instead of chasing the money via that path or just chilling out, he went hard on a passion.
This is really excellent, thanks for being willing to share Colin. It's an impactful essay and the last paragraph in particular hits very hard. I'm a big fan of your work and the path you have taken!
Its not ideal, so I dont recommend it to anyone. It just so happens I am super tired after work, so I need to give my brain a rest. But because I’m sleeping so early (like 7pm - 9pm), I inevitably wake up during the late evening. Then i try not to waste the remainder of the evening and end up staying up late for math and programming. Programming is easy to stay up, math is hard to do consistently.
Then I sleep 3.30am or so to 8.30am, am cranky for the whole morning, but that is okay since I can do my work in autopilot most of the time.
The end result is I am definitely getting a solid few hours each day for my studies, whilst maintaining a job.
Thanks. I was just curious because I don't seem to have the mental focus at night for such endeavors, but that is the only time I have for such things.
I struggle a lot without that small nap. Would recommend trying that, alternatively maybe wake up early and spend the first hour on your chosen personal field before work. That way, you can be happy the rest of the day, knowing you accomplished the most important thing for you (your personal endeavours), and spend the day at work more relaxingly :)
Many Thanks for the kind words. I felt I misjudged the purpose of this thread and did not want to sidetrack the conversation / steal the attention.
Also I feel like I am personally a better talker then doer, so I always get a bit of internal backlash within myself when I spend time talking about what I am doing vs doing it. In a similar vein, I need to reduce my addiction to Hacker News and use the time to study theorem proofs ;) But I think we all suffer from something similar :)
I think backup system ops are super important. If an invisible college exists for security research, then the dude who invented scrypt would be pretty close to its top. He's also too modest for not using an anchor tag to link to his business, and too generous for not naming the HN user who insulted him.
Read a different way I suppose it's actually a compliment. It's not everyday I see people voicing frustration that someone chose not to solve P vs. NP.
Also, we shouldn't forget his hashing algorithm, scrypt, powers a popular cryptocurrency with a market cap over 3 Billion USD. Colin has added so much beyond 'backups' and should feel quite accomplished in his technical contributions to society. I am glad he has the commercial independence to follow his dreams, rather than being trapped in academia.
Colin, you are an inspiration. You have achieved so much and I can't wait to see what comes next.
Frankly, working backups are good enough because his service has allowed people to recover from disaster. Hope instead of misery is a fine way to spend one's life.
> In 2009, having had many users ask for passphrase-protected Tarsnap key files, and having determined that the current state of the art of password based key derivation was sorely lacking, I invented scrypt — and in the process, opened up a whole new field of cryptography. Sure, I was doing this because it was something I could do to make Tarsnap more secure; but it would be a stretch to place this under the umbrella of "spending my time working on backups".
> scrypt, powers a popular cryptocurrency with a market cap over 3 Billion USD
For those who (like me) were wondering what cryptocurrency this was referring to: Litecoin has a ~$3B market cap and uses scrypt. Dogecoin also uses it but has a much smaller market cap, closer to $350M.
scrypt is an interesting choice for cryptocurrencies because it does not only need a significant amount of compute resources – which can be scaled using GPUs to perform huge amounts of work in parallel – but also requires large amounts of memory which is much more difficult to scale to the same level.
I don't believe in irreplaceable geniuses that will solve every problem if given the time.
Let's take the most archetypal genius: Einstein.
First, he was here at the right time. Relativity was begging to be discovered, at the time we had observations good enough to invalidate the previous theories and fit the new ones. The mathematical groundwork was here, all that was needed was a spark of genius, which Einstein had, but I'm quite many others had it too. But maybe the others chose a topic other than physics, had a different education, or were born too early or too late...
Furthermore, Einstein essentially took 10 years to revolutionize physics. And then, not much. By not much, I mean he was still a top class physicist, but he couldn't restart the spark of genius, or he simply didn't have fuel for it.
So what if after finishing his work on general relativity, he just died, or pursued a career in management, or something like that. Many people would have probably said he would have discovered all the secrets of the universe, when in reality, it wouldn't have made much of a dent in history.
So don't worry and live your life as you want to, and don't expect too much of others. Things will get discovered eventually, and just because someone did great things in the past doesn't mean they will in the future, and vice versa.
“ just because someone did great things in the past doesn't mean they will in the future”
I would say a Picasso or a Da Vinci is much more likely to create something meaningful given the track record at the height of their career, than some random person off the street.
I think you’re underestimating the amount of effort it takes to master a given field, and the subsequent dividends that are paid when you achieve mastery.
Not necessarily. After some point, any new Picasso was just "more of the same". The reason his later works are still valuable is mostly because of our fetishism with the products of (already) famous artists + inflation by galleries and art merchants -- not because of any unique new insight/style/proposition/innovation/inherent value they had.
There's a good reason why many laws in math and physics have two or three names. They are oftentimes discovered simultaneously by several people and it's not always possible to tell who was first.
Additionally, I think the "inevitability of discovery" is more true now than it has ever been. In the early 1830s there were relatively few young naturalists and geologists looking at the islands and species of the south Pacific that were well positioned to develop a theory of evolution by natural selection. Today, looking at comparable questions, there are a great deal more young scientists competing to answer those questions.
One thing that I think the original comment and this response both point out is that we as a society could still do a much better job of encouraging young thinkers towards challenging and meaningful problems, despite the fact that we do a much better job of it relative to the early 1830s. This encouragement influences not whether the problems get solved, but how quickly.
Not exactly. Steam Engine time doesn't come on its own; it's created by people.
It's like any job -- we don't need all of the available workers, but we do need some. And in creative work, we need multiple perspectives to help improve the idea.
The funny thing is that the theory of evolution is an instance of multiple discoverers, one is just much more famous than the other. Alfred Russel Wallace is "the other guy." There are a few examples of truly heroic discoveries, but often they aren't recognized in their lifetime, the discovery needs other supporting discoveries to be identified. Mendel and Bayes are examples of people who should have revolutionized their field, but their importance wasn't recognized u til after their deaths. The progress of society is based on a lot of little discoveries over a few big ones. I agree that we need to be encouraging people to make those little discoveries.
> he couldn't restart the spark of genius, or he simply didn't have fuel for it.
In other words, by the time he had proven himself for academia, it was too late to fund him. You are proving the OPs point that academia isn't the place to do novel research in.
> What do you mean? Einstein was well funded for decades, and his famous work wasn't funded at all.
That's exactly what is being pointed out.
His famous work wasn't funded, so perhaps funding at that point would have resulted in even more work at that level of insight and impact, or perhaps the we would have had the special and general theories of relativity sooner.
Conversely, by the time he was famous and therefore well-funded, he was no longer producing work at that level.
So, the idea is that funding doesn't go where and when it would do the most good.
Personally I think generalizing from one famous person's track record isn't such a great idea, but there is certainly data that suggests that committees aren't particularly good at choosing which grant proposals to fund[0][1][2], and that it would be a good idea to choose at least some proposals randomly[3] (as long as they meet a minimal threshold of quality/sanity), if only to shift the incentives away from trying to game the system.
I think there is another angle to it. After a major result, is the purpose to continue finding major results or broadcast, proselytize, and teach.
One of the crazy things that I have found as a senior engineer, I focus much more on growing people in the space I created. Afterall, if the space I create can't be occupied by people, then I failed.
For Einstein, how much of his time was dedicated towards the education of ideas versus trying to solve new problems. I don't know, but it is worth considering what the purpose of tenure. Is the idea of tenure to encourage people to find new results, or to continue teaching their ideas?
I understood tenure to more or less mean "We've found your contributions valuable enough to date that we are now ensuring that you can never be fired for having the 'wrong' opinions, thus guaranteeing your academic freedom."
Whether that academic freedom is intended to enable teaching or further research probably varies by institution and subject/department, and maybe individually as well.
> Sure, I have customers to assist, servers to manage (not that they need much management), and business accounting to do; but professors equally have classes to teach, students to supervise, and committees to attend.
When I made this sort of comparison myself, my day job didn't seem quite so bad. I've seen a few different studies into how academics spend their time. Seems that full professors spend about 9-10 hours per week doing research, and that's working around 55 to 60 hours week in total. (The numbers vary depending on which study you look at.)
So, if you work 40 hours per week and then do 10 hours per week of research, in some sense you're doing better than someone who did things "right". As someone who just completed a PhD but was unable to get a research position, I'm keeping this in mind. (And, more importantly, I'm doing vauable research that would be hard to do in academia.)
The unstated assumption in my comment was that I want to do the research myself. As I have a PhD, I am of course aware that advising students is a core part of the job of most professors.
That is a really good article. The question that prompted is very telling: the asker fails to see nuance, and reduces OP's work to "backups." He/she might be more impressed if Colin were an author of tons of papers that collectively amounted to less than scrypt.
I did not realize scrypt was invented to secure Tarsnap backups. Funny. I imagined the backup problem as being a matter of just careful engineering and the pbkdf problem as requiring novel insight. Solving the latter to improve the former is pretty cool.
Anyway, this guy walks the walk. But how did he do on the Putnam?
I've thought about it, but that would just be another expensive bill that I have to pay. I'm not sure I can swing that now with my kid's medical issues and my wife's legal issue.
Please reconsider therapy. If your wife won't engage in couple's therapy, then please consider therapy on your own. You sound depressed, and you are providing reasons to not bother taking action to be not depressed. I am worried by that.
Sometimes, yes. But you're assuming a result. Divorce is not the goal. Improving your own satisfaction with your life is. Hopefully, that will not lead to divorce, and that's the goal of couple's therapy.
There are some skills that will help you a lot in your situation. I learned them from a book called Nonviolent Communication by Marshal Rosenberg. My therapist recommended it. I hope you will try reading it.
She doesn't just pursue hobbies. She turned one of her hobbies into income (tennis teacher). She uses almost all that money for her hobbies like dressage (she saves a tiny amount).
She refuses to learn how to do most chores, like shopping or cooking. She doesn't have the technical mindset/background for others, such as handyman, mechanic, or yardwork stuff.
Okay, so at least she is earning income. But it isn't really a good situation if you work 8 hours and she works 8 hours, but then you also do 4 hours of housework per day and she does zero. There are a million mindless tasks that need to be done regularly in a house...putting dishes in the dishwasher, cleaning a bathroom, folding laundry, that takes zero learning.
She does 3 chores - most of the dishes, most of the laundry, and vacuuming. And she still won't get that stuff right. So there is some learning involved.
She consistently ruins the seasoning on the cast iron because she insists on using scotch-brite on everything (plastic, glass, enamel, etc). She asks me to do the laundry if there are stains or if I need to pre soak the whites. Otherwise she always does it cold water with soap only and they come out dull or still dirty. And she insists on using the 2" vacuum cleaner tube to do the vinyl floor. It would be sooo much more efficient to just run it over the floor normally (won't hurt this floor).
She also has a tendency to break things and expect me to fix them - like it's not her problem. I even have to tell her stuff like keep the dog on a leash. Now I have to take care of a bunch of legal stuff for her (side not is that the officer wrote it up incorrectly or it would just be a fine).
Isn't one of the points of getting married to work as a team and make each other's lives easier? In my opinion she makes my life more difficult. I swear I'm the only adult in the house.
Never underestimate your impact on the lives of others. The most meaningful impact you can ever have is in your own home with your own family.
I made a really cool dependency manager that I thought was groundbreaking but not a lot of people use it and those that do are strangers. I found a lot more meaning in my life comes from gardening and helping around the house. Real people who depend on me need that.
Lately I found something to look forward to in knitting and listening to a book on tape at the same time at night. Just 45 minutes or so every night after my chores really helps me feel like I can get up the next morning.
With all of Collin's many accomplishments, I'm sure he still feels that the best thing that ever happened to him was his family, in this case his new wife.
Sorry, but you don't know that at all. Your presence or a couple of happy words might have been the thing that kept someone from taking a dark path. The smile to a stranger, a head nod, or just holding the door open might have brought some back a bit. We don't have perfect information, so we really don't know.
I am sorry for your situation. The treadmill truly sucks, and I hope you find a way to discuss your situation with your wife in a constructive manner.
Sometimes the best we can do is be kind to others and work at getting to a good place ourselves. I've worn the mask more than once myself.
It is amazing the impact of finding something in your life you can control and build on that.
Start off by putting 24*7 hours on an Excel sheet, fill them in with your sleep and obligations and necessary rest, then work out whether you have 60 minutes a week for you. If you do, start from there.
In those 60 minutes of your time, figure out how you can increase it to 120 minutes a week. Maybe you say NO to that unpaid overtime, or let some of those chores slip, or ask your wife to do 1 particular chore.
Then slowly build out from there. Once you are at 8 hours a week you can possibly consider a bigger thing, for example learning new tech or passing interviews that could land you a job that you love, that you do less hours. Or seeing if you can be a digital nomad and plan that out for after covid.
And then let it snowball.
Eventually you will not feel like "I have no agency over my own life".
What you do with your marriage - then that's up to you but you'll be in a better place to answer it.
> Eventually you will not feel like "I have no agency over my own life".
The fact that you have to resort to an excel spreadsheet implies that you have no agency over your life. People with actual agency over their lives don't have to squeeze a few minutes for themselves no more than a wealthy person has to search between the cushions for pocket change.
I disagree, but even assuming you are correct there, I think there is a roadmap. The key is to get some wins under your belt. It's like getting fit. Don't try to run 10k from sedate lifestyle. Try to walk 2k with a couple of jogs along the way.
Right on, man. I'm following the same path--couldn't afford college, decided to start a business, then freelance, then became a yuppie, then started living in my car to write software, started selling it, and now I'm making money (minimum wage, at-least) writing the software I want to. I've so-far released an OS and desktop sync client for this weird tablet, and now I'm writing a libre handwriting recognizer.
If you have faith in yourself, and follow your spirit, you can be successful and not accountable to anyone--complete intellectual and creative freedom. However, it does require some nerve to stand against the corporate machine.
Well, I'm now 39, and still stutter when I'm nervous, but I'm slightly less socially awkward. I'm still diabetic -- no cure for that yet, sadly -- and overweight, but I've been getting more exercise and am somewhat more fit.
The biggest change since I wrote that almost 5 years ago, however, is that I found a wonderful woman who somehow manages to put up with me, and we got married in June. :-)
Thank you for writing that. The "everyone's life has difficulties" is true and often said, but it's such a platitude without someone providing a concrete example.
Congrats bud. As a bit of an introvert, getting married made a significant improvement on my life. I'm much calmer and happier. My then recent occuring panic and anxiety attacks even disappeared. I hope yours is enriched similarly.
Taking care of health is interesting optimization problem. Too bad that almost advice in the topic is given by people trying to change fit bodies to professional bodybuilders. Or from crash course to fastest results with diminishing returns of time invested. My personal experience that not exercising takes more time than exercising. Yes, when I didn't exercise, I lost a lot more time of being tired and sick than I spend when I started to exercise.
Here's how I started and lost 10kg in under a year, and more than that in fat but didn't measure fat, but belt holes showed it even when I stagnated in weight. Not diabetic so this is just my personal experience should consider your own body.
1) Lifting adjustable dumbbells at home. Done right before taking shower anyway. So avoiding transition time to exercise and avoiding taking extra shower and drying time can go back to computer right after shower. For beginners maximal muscle growth is 3 exercise sessions per week to have enough recovery between sessions, and single well done set is enough stimulation per muscle, it doesn't grow during exercise but during recover from exercise. I had my exercise sessions on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to be in constantly in a state that if I eat slightly too much it goes to growing muscle instead of fat. Not because maximizing muscle growth, but just to avoid gaining fat at random times. I just had random bodybuilding dumbbell program moves that I thought would hit every muscle and learned those from a book. I didn't have any body weight exercises since moving my weight would of put strain on joints. The time recommendation for that would be more when learning the moves and doing them slowly and checking correct way of doing them and after a while under 30 minutes per session, but keep minimum 10-15 minutes.
Now healthy muscles with about a hour per week after initial investment, and not feeling as tired definitely worth doing.
2) Slowly reducing sugar consumption, and my taste buds eventually adjusted to the change.
3) Random eating habits based on if I'm too concentrated on something to miss a meal. If I eat too little I loose fat, if I eat too much I gain muscle.
4) Once I was healthier I spend some of my thinking time just walking outside thinking the problem before returning to computer for actual implementation. Worked since there was quiet forest path near by.
Now my mistake. I upgraded to going gym trying to gain more muscle after my dumbbells became too small. It increased time requirements for each exercise session. After a while I got so busy that "I'll exercise next week", and it stayed that way for a year. And once the habit was broken it was really hard to get back.
IDK how old are you, I am 42 and I am better off, health-wise, than I was at 38. Those are the changes:
1) Just like you, I started to work out, but I have one more recommendation: a weighted vest. An absolutely great tool for plankings, push-ups etc. If you want your body core to get really tough, weighted vest is a great tool.
2) This, plus intermittent fasting. Got my blood pressure back into the normal range, I am no longer on medication which I took for 17 years, hooray.
3) See 2), it seems that eating/fasting time matters a lot, not just total calories. Constant snacking is probably really bad for us. (The pancreas is forced to produce too much insulin too often).
4) Absence of civilizational noise is definitely something that has healing effects.
To this, I would add
5) Some supplementation is useful, if not outright necessary. Lots of people are vitamin D deficient, for example. 4000 IU a day should help a lot. It seems that vitamin D is even more important for us than we thought. (Specifically, D3).
6) People who like the entire anti-aging and longevity field, can horse around with things like resveratrol and NMN, or perhaps senolytics like fisetin. I like to do that, so far the only visible difference is that my eyesight got a lot better (unexpectedly so for someone who looks into screens all day long). But there is a risk that you are wasting money on "producing expensive urine".
I told you what I did when my first real transformation from unhealthy to healthy happened in my early 30's . Now I'm 41 and I'm having second transformation beyond what happened in the first. Most people really need the first transformation. And one of the driving factor of getting it rolling reasonably well was that I realized how little was truly required to get a lot healthier. There ways to optimize it, but most important thing is to make one simple change and stick with it. Two were real changes I decided were the lifting weights and slowly reducing number of spoons I put sugar in my tea. Everything else was just what I did naturally anyway. The huge point helping me to stick with it was that there were only two simple rules that I had to stick, and both of those were low enough effort for me to stick with.
It wasn't completely without civilization noise, but it was something where I could actually think better when walking outside than when sitting still in front of computer. It was quiet enough that fresh air and walking actually helped me to think.
I started off with 16:8, but my body shifted to longer intervals (20:4, 21:3) on its own. Only rarely did I try longer than 24 hours fasts.
My blood pressure definitely responds to fasting. I went from 150/100 to 115/75 within months. IDK if this can happen in other people, we are a fairly diverse lot.
Food eaten during the eating window matters. Fats (avocado, olive oil, bone broth) will carry you longer than carbs. But one of the things I enjoy about IF is that I no longer have to watch my food intake too strictly. An occasional treat is OK.
As for resources, I believe that Jason Fung, a Canadian doctor, is a good start. He has a lot of videos on YouTube and a few books out. His main idea is that you need to keep your insulin level fairly low in order to avoid metabolic disease, and that IF helps with that a lot.
Also, the r/intermittentfasting subreddit has a lot of veterans.
Depends on the type of diabetes. There are several. If it's type 2, then yes a keto diet, or just plain fasting (Jason Fung seems to be the expert to read up on for this) can help.
I've tried losing weight many times with varying success. The only time I've had full control over my appetite was after attending a silent meditation course (the free Goenka one). For 5 weeks after the course, I meditated twice a day for about 30 mins each time and resisted eating sweets. I lost 10 lbs. Then I ate some cake at a friend's birthday party and fell off the wagon. Maybe meditation would work for you?
I'm in violent agreement with Colin here. I have had far more opportunity to do seriously novel work on hard hitting problems in industry than I could ever accomplish in academia. And I have an academic appointment. Which, in pandemic land, pretty much means I have a .edu email address that I also have to attend to.
On the industry side, I generate and move data at scale and my teams produce industrial strength models where the SoTA won't be attempted again for years, if ever. Household brands are changing their businesses based on we've done so far, and we're just getting started.
The academic system is not where you go to have staggering impact in your lifetime. $500k or $1M a year isn't how innovation scales. Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile designs. He told Bennie Schriever: I need to deliver a payload to Moscow in 30 minutes, gave him $500M, and kept everyone out of Schriever's business.
Finally, I would point to the real meat of Colin's experience: if you take on a problem, one problem, like really take it on and try to develop it, you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order. Mind-breakingly hard problems abound when you actually try to solve hard problems in the world.
Ok but finding teams like this in the real world is not simple. Half the roles billed this way are cynically lying. The other half think that because they’re struggling to stay afloat, they must be swimming in the ocean, but they’re actually in backyard kiddie pools and just not very sophisticated.
Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault.
>Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault.
"interesting and novel" in academia currently translates to "incremental improvements on the status quo". The article directly talks about an example of not being able to do anything too novel because there was no journal to review it.
The way I see it is that academia and self-entrepreneurship are much alike. Comparing working in academia and for a company is apples to oranges, as working for a company is literally about working in company, i.e., not by yourself.
It's also easy to see the distinction between different phases in academia: after PhD it's much more about what could be done against what can be done. It's more like trying to get VC money with just an idea. It's hard, but some can do it, but it requires a vastly different playbook than what is required to get the degree. If you already know how to make things work, it's easier to transition into a bootstrapped mode where you can sideline as an independent researcher without all the fluff of publishing.
Surprisingly not much (if you mean the knowledge discovered after WW2). Scientific endeavors were financed differently during the Cold War, and the academia people were quite anti-militaristic usually, so they didn't get money to work on these sort of problems. It is only after 1990 the funding started to shift to the universities back again, somewhat.
It does seem like an edge case, and often this type of industry experience is limited to candidates from academia. (Not 100% limited, but research experience is preferred).
> you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order
a problem i am facing doing this myself is that people need all that signaling ceremony to recognize it ... the real value of any credential is extracting compliance. The entrepreneur of course invests in marketing. It's a big complicated world out there and people need brands to help make sense of it.
I will say that my experience in industry after academia, I feel a lot more personal satisfaction (bigger paychecks and frequency of promotions are probably a big part), but a sense of faster progress.
That said, the success criteria for solutions to problems is different. In academia, my analysis needed to be irrefutable. In industry I have often felt in different companies that whatever the sales team can push is good enough to move on. I do sometimes wonder how much of what we have given to the world is just flat wrong, because we weren't validating with the same seriousness.
Tangential topic: I'd prefer a synonym to your 'violent' agreement. I appreciate your desire to emphasize your support, but I think we can do with less violence and brutality in discussion overall. Maybe 'vehement' or 'passionate'?
You can compare Groves with his Manhattan project and Mueller with his Apollo project. Schriever is right between in the story line. He advanced the atomic weapon pioneered by Groves and prepared rocket science for "human payloads".
> Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile designs.
On the other hand this is the venture capital model. I wonder if we'd have worse, equal or better results if Eisenhower somehow applied the venture capital and entrepreneurial model of today to missile R&D back then. It's an interesting thought experiment.
I don't think that approach would be as fast. The ICBM program created the whole airospace industry within a few years through massive investment directed by a military industrial complex scared by the soviet union.
If you give so much money to a single company they squander it like during the dot com bubble. If you disperse it over many companies a chaos ensures as everybody struggles to find product market fit.
> The academic system is not where you go to have staggering impact in your lifetime.
This is a really a generalization. Plenty of people do have "impact" while working in academia. There are also a lot of very smart people who are working on boring projects in companies or banks. It depends on so many factors...
> Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile design
Uh, ok, if that's what you want to do I guess academia isn't the right place.
Pretty odd example though. You might as well have chosen some of the 20th century academic scientist who discovered, I don't know, relativity, quantum mechanics, the genetic code, the neural action potential or synaptic transmission to make the opposite point.
Is it likely to be among these people? No. But that's what motivates people in academia, rather than bombing Moscow.
Your examples are only ideas, he is talking about actual systems. In fact his points still stands for the actual experiments that validated the most recent advances in relativity and quantum mechanics..
Which experiments are those? I can't think of one foundational experiment in modern physics (>20th c.) that was developed in industry rather than academia.
The point of op is that you need a lot of money at the same place to make great things happens, and that's mostly in industry. Large colliders for example were only possible because of that. I didn't say it was not possible in academia, just that money is in industry...
> Your examples are only ideas, he is talking about actual systems.
Yes, exactly, that's the distinction between engineering and foundational research. Academia is for the latter.
The examples that I quoted have arguably had more impact on civilization than any single engineering project, because they define what engineering can even be.
There's a separate (and IMO more interesting) discussion to be had about why many academics feel like they're not contributing to highly relevant foundational advances. But this thread right here just seems like a big misunderstanding about what academia is.
There's a story that an academic was telling the world that heavier-than-air flight was impossible at the same time that the Wright brothers flew the first plane. Not all engineering advances are based on science, often the engineering comes first.
Physics has been stuck in a quagmire for 50+ years. The "foundational research" hasn't moved, possibly since Einstein (who only became an academic after publishing his important work). Meanwhile the engineers have done awesome things.
The impact on civilisation from string theory: zip
The impact on civilisation from the internet: huge
I'm not sure what foundational advances you mean, but the impact is definitely on the engineering side for the last 100 years.
OK, but only partially. The invention of IP protocol and HTML happened as byproducts of government-funded projects (they were certainly never invented to be what they are). Since then all the impact (and further development) has happened because of things deliberately developed by industry.
>* Physics has been stuck in a quagmire for 50+ years. The "foundational research" hasn't moved, possibly since Einstein (who only became an academic after publishing his important work).*
You forgot all Quantum Mechanics. His only collaboration was the explanation photoelectric effect. (He got a Nobel price for this but is it a very tiny part of Quantum mechanics.)
The electroweak unification and quantum chromodynamics were discovered after Einstein's death. Also the Higgs boson prediction and experiments are post Einstein's death.
Not the OP, but instead of "bombing Moscow", try "designing and building a reusable space rocket". A similar task, but much nobler intentions.
This is exactly what SpaceX pulled off, and cheaply so. No wonder that they are a magnet for young engineering talent, even with their insane workaholic corporate culture.
You also have to keep in mind that SpaceX pulled this off 40 years after NASA created the Space Shuttle. I'm not sure if that invalidates the example per se, but it seems a little like giving Apple credit for inventing the modern GUI, when they basically took it from Xerox PARC.
Saturn V was a huge feat, but Apollo program consumed about 2 per cent of American GDP in 1965.
This is not a trivial cost. In fact, the nation was so unwilling to carry it on, that Apollo ended and the last footprints on the Moon will soon be fifty years old.
Doing things affordably is a huge, huge leap for mankind (to paraphrase Armstrong). Look, for example, at healthcare. A cancer treatment that costs 1 million USD may be theoretically revolutionary, but out of reach of most people. Drive the cost down to 15 thousand, now that is a real revolution from the point of view of a regular Joe.
But a great example of the difference between academia and private industry. The shuttle was reusable in theory, but required $1.5B in refurbishment between flights. Refurbishment of the boosters cost more than simply buying new ones would have.
Sure, and the Falcon rocket is not fully reusable, either. It's a lot harder to reuse the second stage, because it's the part that goes to orbit, which means it's moving very fast, and has to lose a lot of energy in order to land softly.
Again, this makes me wonder if the gulf here is academia vs industry, or if it's just 1980 vs 2020.
Original creators definitely need credit, but in my opinion, they are not the only ones who should be adequately respected.
Taking an existing, but very expensive or impractical idea, and reengineering it to be orders of magnitude cheaper or practical, is a huge feat.
In case of SpaceX, development costs of the Falcons was a fraction of Space Shuttle's and refurbishment of the first stage is very simple.
To be fair, their operated under very different constraints. SS program had a lot of money, but to win over senators from across the US, the manufacturing process had to be spread over half of North America, which exploded the engineering complexity and the costs. SpaceX had to integrate internally, precisely because they did not have such a war chest of money.
Falcon 9 vs. Space Shuttle is also an interesting case study on the "more money is not necessarily better" topic. Ceteris paribus perhaps, but in practice, more money tends to come with strings attached and those strings may more than compensate (negatively) for the advantages of a larger budget.
I can corroborate this: "If you take on a problem, one problem, like really take it on and try to develop it, you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order. Mind-breakingly hard problems abound when you actually try to solve hard problems in the world."
Every area that I explored deeply because I had an almost "irrational obsession" yielded new general insights about the world. For me it has been, among other things, smart volume control via signal coherence, typically only applied in radar applications. This opened up a whole world of signal math that I would not have stumbled on before. And there is plenty to develop there for the future of communications.
In my mind, your opinion is the epitome of capitalist thinking. You have an extremely low bar for the definition of lifetime impact. In a century, will "changing how household brands do business" be remembered, or rather the low-paid scientists who will have discovered the thing that will make nuclear fusion work? Admittedly, academic work is often a dead end. That's because it's high-risk, low pay. You're choosing the high pay, low risk path. It's almost certainly a better path personally speaking, but will people remember you for it? I think not, and nor should they.
Nuclear fusion is an interesting example. Right now academia is mostly focused on conventional tokamaks, and while they're learning a lot, the exponential rise in the fusion triple product essentially stopped while we wait 25 years for ITER to finish construction. Now private startups are building reactors to explore all sorts of alternative ideas.
The example was chosen on purpose, as I'm aware of that. However, pure research startups although private, definitely do not fall in the same basket as companies which produce something they can sell. Otherwise and following the alternate opinion, the distinction between academia and private businesses disappears (in the US) since US research depts are in good part funded by private money.
Truth is that modern academia is a poorly regulated and inefficient industry. It wasn't always like that I think, and I am still hoping for better days to come back.
I am still blown away by what you did with BSDiff. Recently I was benchmarking it against architecturally optimized delta generators like Courgette. Amazingly BSDiff outperformed Courgette on my payload of AMD64 binaries. You have projects with years of dev time getting outclassed by simple BSDiff.
So I am not familiar with those tools at all, but I feel like it's worth noting this is the difference between academia and general practitioners/laymen. laymen and general practitioners may often be the first to explore an area that academia overlooked, but with the way academia is supposed to work, the amount of deep study and essentially throwing minds at the problem is supposed to produce completely separate classes of solutions (or the understanding that a better solution can't be made).
General practice is often incremental improvement, research is supposed to produce paradigm shifts. This is why PhDs are worth something to all the FAANG employers -- they can get by just hiring smart people without worrying if they can write good code or not, because it's way easier to find someone who can write you the code to implement the algorithm created by someone who's steeped their brain in a problem for 5+ years.
@cperciva -- I was very surprised to see you not mention bsdiff here as one of your accomplishments. Incidentally, did you ever succeed in freeing the enhanced version of bsdiff from Oxford University? Seems a shame for it to still be going to waste, even now.
It's the man in the arena who counts, per Teddy Roosevelt. I really enjoyed your work on PiHex and haven't used any of your later more notable works. Loved it! But should you have done that the rest of your life? Who should you serve? Was it great progress and good for you to move from PiHex to tarsnap or a step backwards? By what standard? Do we really have as much agency as the questioner implies? Do we choose problems or do they choose us? Is there only one true joy in the world? Is there only one good work to be done? I find the original question contains false premises that I personally found very ridiculous. You responded very maturely though, and it is a credit to you. Thanks Colin. You be you.
I actually went back into academia to try and maximise my utility. I am not particularly interested in forging my own path in enterprise or as the head of a laboratory. Instead I try to be a helper within other people's teams. This seems to work pretty well for me so far. Some might think I am "not the master of my own ship". However, I would argue I have chosen this pathway into high utility subservience because it does achieve my goals.
A life spent on a backup system is unproductive? Ha ha, if only mine had been so productive. I'd say the majority of code that I've worked on was dubious in the first place, and decommissioned by now.
Thankfully I'm a nihilist and don't have any expectation that my life will be meaningful. I happily work on things that most people would consider pointless and a waste of time.
And after an HN comment touched some nerve, he took a few hours out of the life "working on backups" to explain to the rest of us why he thinks his lifes activities were impactful. (And it seems it was!)
I'm not sure HN comments (intentional or not) should ever put someone else in a position of feeling they need to explain the impact of their life.
On the one hand I agree with you: no one should be expected to justify their life. (Who would have the wisdom to judge, anyway?) But on the other hand, I do think it's useful to ask whether the limited supply of genius in our society is being well-employed. Thinkers in the finance industry worry about this a lot, for example. Is it really a "good thing" that huge pools of quantitative talent are being drawn away from math and physics towards complex derivatives trading? Is shaving a few fractions of a fraction of a fraction of a second off the duration of a securities trade a good use of their time and talents? While I agree the original comment could have been more sensitive to the real person on the other side of the screen, I still think it asked a useful question and we're getting a good discussion out of it.
I didn't feel that I needed to explain things. Indeed, I could easily have ignored the comment and -- buried in the middle of a large thread as it was -- very few people would have noticed it.
I'm nowhere near as smart as Colin but I'll also share here a little personal story which relates to the topic.
I was also a very high achieving student in high school and university and was similarly all set for a career in academia (also studying mathematics). In my final year however, I had a full-time position doing research with CSIRO, which is a leading research organisation in Australia. I did some interesting work there - applying neural nets for classifying micro-seismic events around mine sites, and won some awards for my research. If I had wanted to, I could have stayed on and continued down that path. But I didn't.
What ultimately pushed me away was everyone I bumped in to in academia was so unhappy. There was constant bickering and frustration around getting funding (a common sentiment in the division I worked in was that you had pander to big mining/oil companies and propose research topics with clear financial gain for them). It was not a happy place to be, and at the end of my time there I jumped head first in to a software job instead.
Tangentially, this I think is also why I'm more open to hearing ideas from organisations like Numenta, and seeing research done outside of academia by folks like Stephen Wolfram. I think increasingly much of the most novel interesting research will be done outside of traditional academia.
+1 to pandering in mining/oil. The field really felt like a fraternity (House SPE), where ideas only moved as fast as the old guard felt like it. I also felt like a necessary skill as an academic in the field was vetting ideas early for clear financial gain.
Drake meme:
1. NN's for classifying micro-seismic events a la Oklahoma
2. Coming up with something new to blast shale with
Not sure if the vibe is different elsewhere, but my department was similarly unhappy. At the very least, I'm glad that the experience gave me a taste of shoddy research enough to hate it and develop my own preferences.
I don't think your last point is a good thing. It sounds like the problem with Academia is the source and requirements of the funding, rather than the work itself.
I'd much rather academia had ample enough funding where people could work on what they wanted and what they felt was useful without the need to appeal to large businesses or metaphorically knife-fight for grants.
> I'd much rather academia had ample enough funding where people could work on what they wanted and what they felt was useful without the need to appeal to large businesses or metaphorically knife-fight for grants.
That can only ever be a temporary state of affairs unless you deliberately keep the population of researchers small. Competition for scarce resources exists except in high growth domains and growth does not stay high forever. Realistically an even larger majority of PhDs than nowadays would get expelled to industry and other places academics don’t care about like unemployment.
I like your anecdote because it very clearly shows how nuanced and unique to each individual experiences with academia and the industry at large are.
I find it particularly interesting that you mentioned you decision being influenced by how unhappy people in academia seemed. Also, how frustrating it could be to secure funding.
I find that interesting because, you can easily find people outside of academia making the same argument.
I assume your experience in the industry is better than academia was (considering your account) but I also wonder how much of that was brought up by your prominent success in college. In my own anecdotal experience, that sort of experience, knowledge, and access can lead you to opportunities that are not representative of the majority of cases.
I'll add my anecdata to this. The lab I got my Masters in was, well, saddening. So were all the other labs. My SO has a higher degree in another field from another location. My SO's lab was ok, well maybe okay-ish, but all the other labs were similarly saddening.
I remember one student who just couldn't laugh. Sure a chuckle here and there, but not real laughter. When we'd go grab lunch with a prospective new student, he's warn them off academia altogether. Such lunch meetings weren't all that uncommon with people in other labs.
Maybe our experiences were unique and rare, but they felt more common than not.
272 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] thread"academia is a lousy place to do novel research"
"It became clear, both from my own experiences and from advice I received, that if I wanted to succeed in academia I would need to churn out incremental research papers every year — at very least until I had tenure."
"In many ways, starting my own company has given me the sort of freedom which academics aspire to"
> I considered replying in the thread, but I think it deserves an in-depth answer — and one which will be seen by more people than would notice a reply in the middle of a 100+ comment thread.
I feel like you're going directly against the long-form answer the author intended to give, so I'm downvoting you.
I typically read the shortest and most down voted comments as those are clear pointers to things that I need to learn/research further, such as "do I gain anything from a piece of writing longer than a tweet?"
I feel like the TLDR'ing of someone else's writing is a negative reinforcement loop that needs to be challenged because it leads us all into doing the same.
Personally I read comments sections to find things that are not in the OP and point out weak points or blind spots--you know, actual discussion.
The answer of course, is if someone can provide me a two sentence reason that explains very clearly why that extra 3% of value is so crucial.
Comparing:
- Reading the source code of HashMap vs reading the API.
to
- Reading HN comments vs source articles.
...is not a fair comparison, IMO. Well what is, then? Ok, glad you asked!
Reading HN comments vs source articles is more like:
- Reading the book vs reading the reviews on Amazon about the book.
Comments on an article are not the API docs to the article. Going with your analogy, the API docs of an article would be something like the spec for how a concept fits into a perspective of a topic (...this sounds so confusing...but, just work with me for a minute, please :D). Unlike something like HashMap, articles are almost always going to be less objective and more subjective. When something is subjective, you could think of it like everyone designs their own API docs; the protocol with which you interact with a concept can be designed by yourself.
The problem with not designing your own protocols (perspectives) for interacting with a concept is that you could be missing an arbitrary 3% of information or the information that your gleaned could be of a completely different taxonomy (or unforeseen perspective dependancies, maybe deps that you don't agree with) than what you would have designed if you had read the article.
This matters because when your perspective is guided by the perspectives of others, you miss out on a lot of opportunities to make connections across topics throughout time. Maybe the cryptographic inventions the author describe connect with another detail in an article about DIY satellite programming or some voting machine vulnerability that inspires you to do something bold (whatever, who knows, that's the point); changing the course of your life.
As a species, I think (super opinionated part) we will advance further if as many of us as possible are actively 'reading the books' and 'forming the opinions'. I don't think the amount of value someone can bring to the world is strictly correlated with their IQ. So everyone can bring value to a discussion or a body of work or whatever, if they think critically about it and develop their own opinions based on their own unique perspectives.
You can mitigate that risk by reading a summary from a trusted source, however you can never fully eliminate it. Everything is a trade-off.
I feel like we do academics wrong. We should encourage a large gap between undergrad and graduate school for two reasons. First, develop empathy for the realities of shipping software (or whatever the field is). Second, build some wealth to not chase wrong grants.
I take Arnold Schwarzenegger as an inspiration on this front. He did hard work and had some good fortune due to great timing (real-estate in California) to build up wealth before becoming an actor, and this manifested in the freedom to go all in on Acting.
The thing that I take as inspiring is that instead of chasing the money via that path or just chilling out, he went hard on a passion.
Could you elaborate? You take two naps at night in lieu of 7+ solid hours? Is this sufficient? Why?
Then I sleep 3.30am or so to 8.30am, am cranky for the whole morning, but that is okay since I can do my work in autopilot most of the time.
The end result is I am definitely getting a solid few hours each day for my studies, whilst maintaining a job.
Also I feel like I am personally a better talker then doer, so I always get a bit of internal backlash within myself when I spend time talking about what I am doing vs doing it. In a similar vein, I need to reduce my addiction to Hacker News and use the time to study theorem proofs ;) But I think we all suffer from something similar :)
I figure that my my readers probably know what Tarsnap is by this point; or if they don't, they know how to use Google.
and too generous for not naming the HN user who insulted him.
I saw no insult. I omitted the users's name because thought the question was interesting independent of the person who asked it.
Colin, you are an inspiration. You have achieved so much and I can't wait to see what comes next.
Frankly, working backups are good enough because his service has allowed people to recover from disaster. Hope instead of misery is a fine way to spend one's life.
> In 2009, having had many users ask for passphrase-protected Tarsnap key files, and having determined that the current state of the art of password based key derivation was sorely lacking, I invented scrypt — and in the process, opened up a whole new field of cryptography. Sure, I was doing this because it was something I could do to make Tarsnap more secure; but it would be a stretch to place this under the umbrella of "spending my time working on backups".
For those who (like me) were wondering what cryptocurrency this was referring to: Litecoin has a ~$3B market cap and uses scrypt. Dogecoin also uses it but has a much smaller market cap, closer to $350M.
scrypt is an interesting choice for cryptocurrencies because it does not only need a significant amount of compute resources – which can be scaled using GPUs to perform huge amounts of work in parallel – but also requires large amounts of memory which is much more difficult to scale to the same level.
Let's take the most archetypal genius: Einstein. First, he was here at the right time. Relativity was begging to be discovered, at the time we had observations good enough to invalidate the previous theories and fit the new ones. The mathematical groundwork was here, all that was needed was a spark of genius, which Einstein had, but I'm quite many others had it too. But maybe the others chose a topic other than physics, had a different education, or were born too early or too late...
Furthermore, Einstein essentially took 10 years to revolutionize physics. And then, not much. By not much, I mean he was still a top class physicist, but he couldn't restart the spark of genius, or he simply didn't have fuel for it.
So what if after finishing his work on general relativity, he just died, or pursued a career in management, or something like that. Many people would have probably said he would have discovered all the secrets of the universe, when in reality, it wouldn't have made much of a dent in history.
So don't worry and live your life as you want to, and don't expect too much of others. Things will get discovered eventually, and just because someone did great things in the past doesn't mean they will in the future, and vice versa.
I would say a Picasso or a Da Vinci is much more likely to create something meaningful given the track record at the height of their career, than some random person off the street.
I think you’re underestimating the amount of effort it takes to master a given field, and the subsequent dividends that are paid when you achieve mastery.
Picasso is famous for reinventing himself and abandoning cubism (which he invented) to study and pursue classical painting.
He abandoned cubism in his 20s or so. He afterwards had 50+ years of more boring work with less re-invention.
Additionally, I think the "inevitability of discovery" is more true now than it has ever been. In the early 1830s there were relatively few young naturalists and geologists looking at the islands and species of the south Pacific that were well positioned to develop a theory of evolution by natural selection. Today, looking at comparable questions, there are a great deal more young scientists competing to answer those questions.
One thing that I think the original comment and this response both point out is that we as a society could still do a much better job of encouraging young thinkers towards challenging and meaningful problems, despite the fact that we do a much better job of it relative to the early 1830s. This encouragement influences not whether the problems get solved, but how quickly.
It's like any job -- we don't need all of the available workers, but we do need some. And in creative work, we need multiple perspectives to help improve the idea.
In other words, by the time he had proven himself for academia, it was too late to fund him. You are proving the OPs point that academia isn't the place to do novel research in.
That's exactly what is being pointed out.
His famous work wasn't funded, so perhaps funding at that point would have resulted in even more work at that level of insight and impact, or perhaps the we would have had the special and general theories of relativity sooner.
Conversely, by the time he was famous and therefore well-funded, he was no longer producing work at that level.
So, the idea is that funding doesn't go where and when it would do the most good.
Personally I think generalizing from one famous person's track record isn't such a great idea, but there is certainly data that suggests that committees aren't particularly good at choosing which grant proposals to fund[0][1][2], and that it would be a good idea to choose at least some proposals randomly[3] (as long as they meet a minimal threshold of quality/sanity), if only to shift the incentives away from trying to game the system.
[0] https://elifesciences.org/articles/13323
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/12/2952
[2] https://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d4797
[3] https://mbio.asm.org/content/7/2/e00422-16
One of the crazy things that I have found as a senior engineer, I focus much more on growing people in the space I created. Afterall, if the space I create can't be occupied by people, then I failed.
For Einstein, how much of his time was dedicated towards the education of ideas versus trying to solve new problems. I don't know, but it is worth considering what the purpose of tenure. Is the idea of tenure to encourage people to find new results, or to continue teaching their ideas?
Whether that academic freedom is intended to enable teaching or further research probably varies by institution and subject/department, and maybe individually as well.
When I made this sort of comparison myself, my day job didn't seem quite so bad. I've seen a few different studies into how academics spend their time. Seems that full professors spend about 9-10 hours per week doing research, and that's working around 55 to 60 hours week in total. (The numbers vary depending on which study you look at.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180509023409/https://thebluere...
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/if-you-love-resear...
So, if you work 40 hours per week and then do 10 hours per week of research, in some sense you're doing better than someone who did things "right". As someone who just completed a PhD but was unable to get a research position, I'm keeping this in mind. (And, more importantly, I'm doing vauable research that would be hard to do in academia.)
Anyway, this guy walks the walk. But how did he do on the Putnam?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
They don't announce the ranks of the top 6 because they want to just say that all the Putnam Fellows won without drawing distinctions between them.
I have no agency over my own life at work or home - I hate it. I will make no meaningful contributions to society in my life.
Comparatively, you’ve had an incredible impact and driven change in the world.
(I think that’s accurate)
Sounds like you are not happy with the way your wife is treating you. Something will snap if you don't sort that out.
She refuses to learn how to do most chores, like shopping or cooking. She doesn't have the technical mindset/background for others, such as handyman, mechanic, or yardwork stuff.
She consistently ruins the seasoning on the cast iron because she insists on using scotch-brite on everything (plastic, glass, enamel, etc). She asks me to do the laundry if there are stains or if I need to pre soak the whites. Otherwise she always does it cold water with soap only and they come out dull or still dirty. And she insists on using the 2" vacuum cleaner tube to do the vinyl floor. It would be sooo much more efficient to just run it over the floor normally (won't hurt this floor).
She also has a tendency to break things and expect me to fix them - like it's not her problem. I even have to tell her stuff like keep the dog on a leash. Now I have to take care of a bunch of legal stuff for her (side not is that the officer wrote it up incorrectly or it would just be a fine).
Isn't one of the points of getting married to work as a team and make each other's lives easier? In my opinion she makes my life more difficult. I swear I'm the only adult in the house.
You sound like a huge pushover.
I made a really cool dependency manager that I thought was groundbreaking but not a lot of people use it and those that do are strangers. I found a lot more meaning in my life comes from gardening and helping around the house. Real people who depend on me need that.
Lately I found something to look forward to in knitting and listening to a book on tape at the same time at night. Just 45 minutes or so every night after my chores really helps me feel like I can get up the next morning.
With all of Collin's many accomplishments, I'm sure he still feels that the best thing that ever happened to him was his family, in this case his new wife.
I am sorry for your situation. The treadmill truly sucks, and I hope you find a way to discuss your situation with your wife in a constructive manner.
Sometimes the best we can do is be kind to others and work at getting to a good place ourselves. I've worn the mask more than once myself.
Start off by putting 24*7 hours on an Excel sheet, fill them in with your sleep and obligations and necessary rest, then work out whether you have 60 minutes a week for you. If you do, start from there.
In those 60 minutes of your time, figure out how you can increase it to 120 minutes a week. Maybe you say NO to that unpaid overtime, or let some of those chores slip, or ask your wife to do 1 particular chore.
Then slowly build out from there. Once you are at 8 hours a week you can possibly consider a bigger thing, for example learning new tech or passing interviews that could land you a job that you love, that you do less hours. Or seeing if you can be a digital nomad and plan that out for after covid.
And then let it snowball.
Eventually you will not feel like "I have no agency over my own life".
What you do with your marriage - then that's up to you but you'll be in a better place to answer it.
The fact that you have to resort to an excel spreadsheet implies that you have no agency over your life. People with actual agency over their lives don't have to squeeze a few minutes for themselves no more than a wealthy person has to search between the cushions for pocket change.
If you have faith in yourself, and follow your spirit, you can be successful and not accountable to anyone--complete intellectual and creative freedom. However, it does require some nerve to stand against the corporate machine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10524346
Well, I'm now 39, and still stutter when I'm nervous, but I'm slightly less socially awkward. I'm still diabetic -- no cure for that yet, sadly -- and overweight, but I've been getting more exercise and am somewhat more fit.
The biggest change since I wrote that almost 5 years ago, however, is that I found a wonderful woman who somehow manages to put up with me, and we got married in June. :-)
Here's how I started and lost 10kg in under a year, and more than that in fat but didn't measure fat, but belt holes showed it even when I stagnated in weight. Not diabetic so this is just my personal experience should consider your own body.
1) Lifting adjustable dumbbells at home. Done right before taking shower anyway. So avoiding transition time to exercise and avoiding taking extra shower and drying time can go back to computer right after shower. For beginners maximal muscle growth is 3 exercise sessions per week to have enough recovery between sessions, and single well done set is enough stimulation per muscle, it doesn't grow during exercise but during recover from exercise. I had my exercise sessions on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to be in constantly in a state that if I eat slightly too much it goes to growing muscle instead of fat. Not because maximizing muscle growth, but just to avoid gaining fat at random times. I just had random bodybuilding dumbbell program moves that I thought would hit every muscle and learned those from a book. I didn't have any body weight exercises since moving my weight would of put strain on joints. The time recommendation for that would be more when learning the moves and doing them slowly and checking correct way of doing them and after a while under 30 minutes per session, but keep minimum 10-15 minutes. Now healthy muscles with about a hour per week after initial investment, and not feeling as tired definitely worth doing.
2) Slowly reducing sugar consumption, and my taste buds eventually adjusted to the change.
3) Random eating habits based on if I'm too concentrated on something to miss a meal. If I eat too little I loose fat, if I eat too much I gain muscle.
4) Once I was healthier I spend some of my thinking time just walking outside thinking the problem before returning to computer for actual implementation. Worked since there was quiet forest path near by.
Now my mistake. I upgraded to going gym trying to gain more muscle after my dumbbells became too small. It increased time requirements for each exercise session. After a while I got so busy that "I'll exercise next week", and it stayed that way for a year. And once the habit was broken it was really hard to get back.
1) Just like you, I started to work out, but I have one more recommendation: a weighted vest. An absolutely great tool for plankings, push-ups etc. If you want your body core to get really tough, weighted vest is a great tool.
2) This, plus intermittent fasting. Got my blood pressure back into the normal range, I am no longer on medication which I took for 17 years, hooray.
3) See 2), it seems that eating/fasting time matters a lot, not just total calories. Constant snacking is probably really bad for us. (The pancreas is forced to produce too much insulin too often).
4) Absence of civilizational noise is definitely something that has healing effects.
To this, I would add
5) Some supplementation is useful, if not outright necessary. Lots of people are vitamin D deficient, for example. 4000 IU a day should help a lot. It seems that vitamin D is even more important for us than we thought. (Specifically, D3).
6) People who like the entire anti-aging and longevity field, can horse around with things like resveratrol and NMN, or perhaps senolytics like fisetin. I like to do that, so far the only visible difference is that my eyesight got a lot better (unexpectedly so for someone who looks into screens all day long). But there is a risk that you are wasting money on "producing expensive urine".
It wasn't completely without civilization noise, but it was something where I could actually think better when walking outside than when sitting still in front of computer. It was quiet enough that fresh air and walking actually helped me to think.
My blood pressure definitely responds to fasting. I went from 150/100 to 115/75 within months. IDK if this can happen in other people, we are a fairly diverse lot.
Food eaten during the eating window matters. Fats (avocado, olive oil, bone broth) will carry you longer than carbs. But one of the things I enjoy about IF is that I no longer have to watch my food intake too strictly. An occasional treat is OK.
As for resources, I believe that Jason Fung, a Canadian doctor, is a good start. He has a lot of videos on YouTube and a few books out. His main idea is that you need to keep your insulin level fairly low in order to avoid metabolic disease, and that IF helps with that a lot.
Also, the r/intermittentfasting subreddit has a lot of veterans.
Eat animal products, avoid processed/sugars/carbs/grains etc
Stick to low FODMAP vegetables, and cook/ferment them when you can.
If it's type 1, then no.
I don't know which kind of diabetes you have. Did you know that some people with type 2 diabetes are cured with weight loss?
https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20180917/lose-weight-rev...
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12549482/what-is-new-nhs-type-...
I've tried losing weight many times with varying success. The only time I've had full control over my appetite was after attending a silent meditation course (the free Goenka one). For 5 weeks after the course, I meditated twice a day for about 30 mins each time and resisted eating sweets. I lost 10 lbs. Then I ate some cake at a friend's birthday party and fell off the wagon. Maybe meditation would work for you?
On the industry side, I generate and move data at scale and my teams produce industrial strength models where the SoTA won't be attempted again for years, if ever. Household brands are changing their businesses based on we've done so far, and we're just getting started.
The academic system is not where you go to have staggering impact in your lifetime. $500k or $1M a year isn't how innovation scales. Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile designs. He told Bennie Schriever: I need to deliver a payload to Moscow in 30 minutes, gave him $500M, and kept everyone out of Schriever's business.
And, have a read of Rickover: http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf
Finally, I would point to the real meat of Colin's experience: if you take on a problem, one problem, like really take it on and try to develop it, you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order. Mind-breakingly hard problems abound when you actually try to solve hard problems in the world.
Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault.
"interesting and novel" in academia currently translates to "incremental improvements on the status quo". The article directly talks about an example of not being able to do anything too novel because there was no journal to review it.
It's also easy to see the distinction between different phases in academia: after PhD it's much more about what could be done against what can be done. It's more like trying to get VC money with just an idea. It's hard, but some can do it, but it requires a vastly different playbook than what is required to get the degree. If you already know how to make things work, it's easier to transition into a bootstrapped mode where you can sideline as an independent researcher without all the fluff of publishing.
a problem i am facing doing this myself is that people need all that signaling ceremony to recognize it ... the real value of any credential is extracting compliance. The entrepreneur of course invests in marketing. It's a big complicated world out there and people need brands to help make sense of it.
That said, the success criteria for solutions to problems is different. In academia, my analysis needed to be irrefutable. In industry I have often felt in different companies that whatever the sales team can push is good enough to move on. I do sometimes wonder how much of what we have given to the world is just flat wrong, because we weren't validating with the same seriousness.
Tangential topic: I'd prefer a synonym to your 'violent' agreement. I appreciate your desire to emphasize your support, but I think we can do with less violence and brutality in discussion overall. Maybe 'vehement' or 'passionate'?
On the other hand this is the venture capital model. I wonder if we'd have worse, equal or better results if Eisenhower somehow applied the venture capital and entrepreneurial model of today to missile R&D back then. It's an interesting thought experiment.
If you give so much money to a single company they squander it like during the dot com bubble. If you disperse it over many companies a chaos ensures as everybody struggles to find product market fit.
You're not really in "violent agreement" when you're just agreeing with him from the outset.
https://wiki.c2.com/?ViolentAgreement
I definitely think of the term pretty much exclusively in the sense of (a) here, i.e. extreme, vehement agreement:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2007-Septem...
This is a really a generalization. Plenty of people do have "impact" while working in academia. There are also a lot of very smart people who are working on boring projects in companies or banks. It depends on so many factors...
Uh, ok, if that's what you want to do I guess academia isn't the right place.
Pretty odd example though. You might as well have chosen some of the 20th century academic scientist who discovered, I don't know, relativity, quantum mechanics, the genetic code, the neural action potential or synaptic transmission to make the opposite point.
Is it likely to be among these people? No. But that's what motivates people in academia, rather than bombing Moscow.
Yes, exactly, that's the distinction between engineering and foundational research. Academia is for the latter.
The examples that I quoted have arguably had more impact on civilization than any single engineering project, because they define what engineering can even be.
There's a separate (and IMO more interesting) discussion to be had about why many academics feel like they're not contributing to highly relevant foundational advances. But this thread right here just seems like a big misunderstanding about what academia is.
Physics has been stuck in a quagmire for 50+ years. The "foundational research" hasn't moved, possibly since Einstein (who only became an academic after publishing his important work). Meanwhile the engineers have done awesome things.
The impact on civilisation from string theory: zip
The impact on civilisation from the internet: huge
I'm not sure what foundational advances you mean, but the impact is definitely on the engineering side for the last 100 years.
I think there is some dubious domain claiming in these industry vs academia anecdotes.
You forgot all Quantum Mechanics. His only collaboration was the explanation photoelectric effect. (He got a Nobel price for this but is it a very tiny part of Quantum mechanics.)
The electroweak unification and quantum chromodynamics were discovered after Einstein's death. Also the Higgs boson prediction and experiments are post Einstein's death.
This is exactly what SpaceX pulled off, and cheaply so. No wonder that they are a magnet for young engineering talent, even with their insane workaholic corporate culture.
This "Industry, industry über alles!" chest beating is very unconvincing.
This is not a trivial cost. In fact, the nation was so unwilling to carry it on, that Apollo ended and the last footprints on the Moon will soon be fifty years old.
Doing things affordably is a huge, huge leap for mankind (to paraphrase Armstrong). Look, for example, at healthcare. A cancer treatment that costs 1 million USD may be theoretically revolutionary, but out of reach of most people. Drive the cost down to 15 thousand, now that is a real revolution from the point of view of a regular Joe.
Again, this makes me wonder if the gulf here is academia vs industry, or if it's just 1980 vs 2020.
Taking an existing, but very expensive or impractical idea, and reengineering it to be orders of magnitude cheaper or practical, is a huge feat.
In case of SpaceX, development costs of the Falcons was a fraction of Space Shuttle's and refurbishment of the first stage is very simple.
To be fair, their operated under very different constraints. SS program had a lot of money, but to win over senators from across the US, the manufacturing process had to be spread over half of North America, which exploded the engineering complexity and the costs. SpaceX had to integrate internally, precisely because they did not have such a war chest of money.
Falcon 9 vs. Space Shuttle is also an interesting case study on the "more money is not necessarily better" topic. Ceteris paribus perhaps, but in practice, more money tends to come with strings attached and those strings may more than compensate (negatively) for the advantages of a larger budget.
Every area that I explored deeply because I had an almost "irrational obsession" yielded new general insights about the world. For me it has been, among other things, smart volume control via signal coherence, typically only applied in radar applications. This opened up a whole world of signal math that I would not have stumbled on before. And there is plenty to develop there for the future of communications.
Truth is that modern academia is a poorly regulated and inefficient industry. It wasn't always like that I think, and I am still hoping for better days to come back.
General practice is often incremental improvement, research is supposed to produce paradigm shifts. This is why PhDs are worth something to all the FAANG employers -- they can get by just hiring smart people without worrying if they can write good code or not, because it's way easier to find someone who can write you the code to implement the algorithm created by someone who's steeped their brain in a problem for 5+ years.
Thankfully I'm a nihilist and don't have any expectation that my life will be meaningful. I happily work on things that most people would consider pointless and a waste of time.
I'm not sure HN comments (intentional or not) should ever put someone else in a position of feeling they need to explain the impact of their life.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532469
I was also a very high achieving student in high school and university and was similarly all set for a career in academia (also studying mathematics). In my final year however, I had a full-time position doing research with CSIRO, which is a leading research organisation in Australia. I did some interesting work there - applying neural nets for classifying micro-seismic events around mine sites, and won some awards for my research. If I had wanted to, I could have stayed on and continued down that path. But I didn't.
What ultimately pushed me away was everyone I bumped in to in academia was so unhappy. There was constant bickering and frustration around getting funding (a common sentiment in the division I worked in was that you had pander to big mining/oil companies and propose research topics with clear financial gain for them). It was not a happy place to be, and at the end of my time there I jumped head first in to a software job instead.
I later found time to still do mathematics on my own, and have written about that journey and shared it previously on HN: https://www.neilwithdata.com/mathematics-self-learner and have had some other little successes in my life that make me feel like I made the right choice: https://www.neilwithdata.com/how-i-built-bbsmart
Tangentially, this I think is also why I'm more open to hearing ideas from organisations like Numenta, and seeing research done outside of academia by folks like Stephen Wolfram. I think increasingly much of the most novel interesting research will be done outside of traditional academia.
Drake meme: 1. NN's for classifying micro-seismic events a la Oklahoma 2. Coming up with something new to blast shale with
Not sure if the vibe is different elsewhere, but my department was similarly unhappy. At the very least, I'm glad that the experience gave me a taste of shoddy research enough to hate it and develop my own preferences.
I'd much rather academia had ample enough funding where people could work on what they wanted and what they felt was useful without the need to appeal to large businesses or metaphorically knife-fight for grants.
That can only ever be a temporary state of affairs unless you deliberately keep the population of researchers small. Competition for scarce resources exists except in high growth domains and growth does not stay high forever. Realistically an even larger majority of PhDs than nowadays would get expelled to industry and other places academics don’t care about like unemployment.
I find it particularly interesting that you mentioned you decision being influenced by how unhappy people in academia seemed. Also, how frustrating it could be to secure funding. I find that interesting because, you can easily find people outside of academia making the same argument.
I assume your experience in the industry is better than academia was (considering your account) but I also wonder how much of that was brought up by your prominent success in college. In my own anecdotal experience, that sort of experience, knowledge, and access can lead you to opportunities that are not representative of the majority of cases.
I remember one student who just couldn't laugh. Sure a chuckle here and there, but not real laughter. When we'd go grab lunch with a prospective new student, he's warn them off academia altogether. Such lunch meetings weren't all that uncommon with people in other labs.
Maybe our experiences were unique and rare, but they felt more common than not.
In a word: owned.