I strongly agree with the premise of the article, and I wish more of society was aware of the issues that propagate what the author calls "Elite Underproduction". However, while I agree with the premise, I think the precise factors that create this issue are not sufficiently discussed or agreed upon (Not enough money goes into science research? Regulation imposes too heavy a burden on the outputs of scientific endeavors in the material world? We culturally are not sufficiently accepting of those people who would like to do elite-esque style research?). I'm not sure what the precise ratios of the causes are but I feel each of those question marks I just wrote contribute somewhat.
Personally, I have no idea what the ratio is or a great way to go about fixing it. But hey, if some awareness of the issue helps, I'm all for it. Regardless of what you feel about Peter Thiel or Eric Weinstein, their discussion in the first episode of Eric Weinstein's podcast at least discusses the issue around "Elite Underprudction". In that episode, Eric brings a perspective from a more left-leaning viewpoint and Thiel with his signature more libterarian/right-leaning viewpoint.
Thiel's hawkish military (and self-interested, given Palantir's contracts with Defense) positions on China probably put him outside of the pale of "normal" libertarian politics.
Normally libertarianism has an 'exception' for defense because it's a pure commons. There's no obvious way to have private sector military due to the nature of wars and invasions. Indeed, the government having a monopoly on violence is a core part of libertarian thinking.
Yes, libertarians generally define a government as having a monopoly on violence. That does not necessarily mean they think the government should have a monopoly of violence.
I've never encountered a libertarian who thought otherwise, although I guess you can have 'sub-contracted violence' via things like private police forces licensed by the government. What exactly are you thinking of here?
> Normally libertarianism has an 'exception' for defense because it's a pure commons. There's no obvious way to have private sector military due to the nature of wars and invasions. Indeed, the government having a monopoly on violence is a core part of libertarian thinking.
This is an entirely parallel subject. The monopoly on violence (which is just a concept in the theory of state, not a uniquely libertarian concept) doesn't imply a hawkish foreign policy outlook. Put another way: the libertarian perspective (even the minarchist variants) don't entail the kind of aggression that Thiel publicly advocates.
Being a hawk on China (e.g., extolling the US MIC to take a more aggressive stance in territorial disputes and information warfare) is a very conservative, not libertarian, position.
Anarchism-capitalism isn’t a exactly a right wing ideology. It’s really only useful to think of it that way in comparison to the traditional anti-capitalist flavors of anarchism.
Right anarchism and left anarchism only really differ in what they predict the steady state of anarchic conditions would be… and the culture of their advocates I suppose.
That's sort of what I'm driving at. I would note that anarcho-capitalists are not pro social hierarchy which is a central belief in right wing political philosophy. Murray Rothbard described the ideology as being neither of the left nor fo the right, basically saying that self ownership is incompatible with both traditions.
Notwithstanding Thiel isn't and anarcho-capitalist, he seems in practice to be almost a neoconservative. He describes himself as a "conservative libertarian", but has wrapped himself up in the war state and the surveillance industry, both of which are HIGHLY at odds with any kind of libertarianism. Thiel is much more like Liz Cheney than say Ron Paul.
> anarcho-capitalists are not pro social hierarchy
Are you sure about that? I mean, I believe they don't explicitly argue for it. But the ones I've come across seem to be practically in favor of the sort of wealth concentration and freedom of the rich to do as they please that they seem to be effectively in favor of strong social hierarchy.
Some of them are natural law types and some are definitely misanthropic but they are all opposed to central authority and hierarchy. The high concentration of wealth we see today seems to be met with Teo main responses by the more well read ancaps I know. They either view it as the result of government capture or in some cases the reward for finding a great idea first.
I think it’s a weak spot for them ideologically, personally.
In which case, it sounds like they're perfectly ok with authority and hierarchy as long as they see it as "fairly" achieved via amassing wealth in ways that they deem moral, yes?
I'd certainly agree that's a weakness, in that it really seems to undercut the "anarcho" portion.
I think they'd see it as fine as long as you don't come to it by force, either your own or the government's. Generally these folks seem to think that in a free market that it's easy to be toppled by upstarts and hard to become very large without the state helping you. Would that be the case? I have no clue.
I mean, anarchy is about removing the central state first and foremost. The economics bit is where these folks differ from the traditional anarchists.
Huh. That's not my impression of anarchism. Not the people I've met for sure. And given the long history of anarchism in labor activism, I have a hard time believing it was ever purely about "the central state".
I'm obviously simplifying a complicated topic quite a bit. I'm leaving out the whole distinction to be made around Anarcho-syndicalism which is the labor organizing focused strain of anarchy, however these folks are very much against the state. These folks are sometimes historically called left-libertarians and have a strong historical claim on the term libertarian itself. But again, they all don't like the state.
There are also collectivist and communist anarchists, however the latter may even be possible.
I thought Theil was a self-described neoreactionary, which is explicitly anti-democracy.
Which I interpretted to mean something like Aristotelian philosopher-king style governance. A fairly obvious logical conclusion when one's starting assumption that people (the polis) are fundamentally stupid and corrupt. By the standards of the self annointed philosopher-king, of course.
Honestly don't know the true nature of his politics, and I didn't mean to get political in my comment. I simply meant that in Thiel's discussion alone during the podcast comes from a less-government-would-help-here perspective. I don't know his opinions on virtually anything nor do I really care; I just thought that a variety of the points he made in that episode were at least interesting and made me think in a way I had not thought previously.
> However, while I agree with the premise, I think the precise factors that create this issue are not sufficiently discussed or agreed upon (Not enough money goes into science research? Regulation imposes too heavy a burden on the outputs of scientific endeavors in the material world? We culturally are not sufficiently accepting of those people who would like to do elite-esque style research?). I'm not sure what the precise ratios of the causes are but I feel each of those question marks I just wrote contribute somewhat.
In terms of funding, I don't think increasing the amount of funding is going to be more than a short-term fix. Seems to me that there's a lot of induced demand: Add more money and it's quickly gobbled up.
While I don't know all the details, it seems to me that we simply have far too many PhD students. I have a PhD, and I feel that a lot of well-intentioned people pushed me towards that before I was wise enough to understand the implications. The cynic in me thinks that some of them were more concerned with advancing their own careers than helping me out, as they need students to advance their careers.
Too much science funding goes towards PhD students in my view. We need to reduce the amount going towards PhD students and increase the amount going towards more permanent research positions. Yes, the total headcount for researchers likely would decrease as PhD students are cheaper than experienced researchers, but I think overall scientific productivity would improve as experience matters, and we'd stop disappointing people who want jobs in science before they waste too much time on it.
You've got some timely details drawn from an experienced point of view.
Even beyond formal credentials scientific progress can primarily only be made by relatively fewer workers then ever holding their position or inching upstream against an increasing current flowing downstream.
I think what you will find is that the rewards for STEM creatives who are in position for their abilities to be leveraged by mass media, will always be greater than those without it.
Microsoft started selling CD's as fast as Michael Jackson but for 10X the price.
DOS had already been pulling people away from natural science since the '80's.
Apple mass-marketed pop music to sell hardware.
Google started as an anti-advertising utility but reversed stance to convert a huge user base into a mass market.
Amazon was all about a mass market to begin with.
Facebook is what the National Enquirer would be like if they had gotten the idea to scale an internet concept and had that kind of capital to strategically deploy earlier.
Mass media has such a major component consisting of fiction this is an attraction plain natural science does not possess. Scientific research has such a focus on pure reality that mainstream interest just can not be maintained continuously, as so much relatively unexciting time must pass before progress finally pushes one little bit of reality to actually become better than fiction.
Yeah that's the podcast, but I glance at those notes and they are kind of lacking in my opinion when compared to actually listening to the podcast. I'd recommend listening to it as it's fascinating to listen it. Enjoy the listen :)
The "academic meatgrinder" ignores the fact that a plurality of top PhD and MS programs' students are international, usually from Europe, India or China. There are deeper issues at play - like the fact that American K-12 schools often have an anti-intellectual culture and American culture as a whole does not place sufficient emphasis on doing well in school.
I can't help but wonder if the current economy, with all its inequality and disproportionate rewards for the highly skilled, is a necessary step on the path towards changing the anti-intellectual US culture.
You get more of what you reward and less of what you don't. It's not always a pleasant truth, but it's a powerful one.
Calling it a “step” implies moving in that direction. But the problem in America is that the counter-movement against “anti-intellectualism” is just as anti-intellectual. More people are going to college, but they’re not majoring in math and science. We have an ever expanding ecosystem of non-rigorous *studies fields. These are arguably even less valuable than the cultural norms of Bible-thumping small towns. At least the latter has demonstrated itself as a framework capable of socially supporting communities of people who build things. The former has no track record whatsoever.
You can see this exemplified in the fact that, even as we are mocking people for not going to college, we are lowering academic standards and getting rid of gifted programs: https://www.teachforamerica.org/one-day/opinion/stop-elimina.... It’s magical thinking on all sides.
The *studies folks are complaining loudly and bitterly of their debt and not having cushy jobs handed to them on a silver platter. In principle this should encourage future students not to take those paths.
I agree that I don't like the direction we're headed, but hopefully the natural consequences of that direction will encourage people to revisit their ideological assumptions.
The natural consequences of this will be China overtaking the US. Americans are not going to enjoy a world where they’re not the dominant power. Among other things they’re really going to hate not being able to print money for consumption free of consequences.
It's a concern, but a strong dollar isn't all roses and sunshine either. For one thing, it makes it hard for the American economy to compete in anything but the highest-margin industries.
I'm not convinced that the rise of China will be so bad. Boomers and neocons want us to think so, but their "arguments" are mostly just paranoia and sentimentality.
> I'm not convinced that the rise of China will be so bad. Boomers and neocons want us to think so
You're not convinced that going from "living in the most economically dominant and militarily powerful country in the world" to "not" is going to somehow not be a painful experience?
You can use the "I am not convinced" line for anything. "I am not convinced that being homeless is worse than living in a nice house" but... ok, what would convince you?
A lot of our ability to simply ignore reality—e.g. budget deficits, or comically high infrastructure costs—comes from having the biggest economy and being the most attractive target of investment.
When UK Parliament wanted Zuk to answer some tough question about his company facilitating electoral fraud, he simply refused to show up. Even first world nations struggle in dealing with American corporation, which often act as if they are above the law.
God forbid you are a developing nation. British American Tabacco has taken poor developing nations to court for trying to ban children from smoking (!!) and got compenation and the law repealed
And yet the US is not #1 in pretty much any quality of life metric. The point is there are plenty of nations with varying degrees of US influence that are far from miserable or painful places to live.
Living in USA will be more painful than it is now when USA no longer gets to import a lot of goods giving nothing in return. USA hasn't had a positive trade balance in half a century, people will want back their stuff at some point and that point wont be fun for the Americans.
It’s going to be painful for Americans to adjust to being an only-ran. Consider how much of democratic politics right now is driven by the ability to run insane deficits to avoid taxing the upper middle class professional base. (Taxes on people making under $500k are still at Reagan levels and Biden promised not to raise them.) EU countries have to tax the middle class to balance their budgets, like proles.
> These are arguably even less valuable than the cultural norms of Bible-thumping small towns.
Since you seem to be a fan of intellectual rigor, can you describe the process by which you arrive at the relative worth of (apparently) social science programs vs. small town social behavior?
Can that method also tell us whether citrus flavors are more valuable than ballet?
Nothing he said referenced the social sciences in any way. He referred to * Studies. The Social Sciences all aim at truth in some way, whether you're talking about Sociology, Anthropology, Economics or Political Science.
Both social sciences and cultural studies are quite self consciously meant to be applied to understanding and improving society. It’s not the study of dead societies, but our own.
Culture, meanwhile, is the organically developed heuristics and norms of communities.
You can measure the relative worth of these things by looking at the functioning of society on various metrics. Unlike say civil engineers, practitioners of *studies and social sciences have demonstrated little ability to come into a community and make live measurably better for everyone. Arguably, as traditional social norms have been eroded, many communities are less healthy than ever—much more so than you’d expect looking at just the economic numbers. Millennials as a generation are the richest ever, yet seem profoundly unhappy and unsatisfied.
This stuff is complicated so make sure you’re comparing like with like. Even the chart above ignored one critical adjustment: in 1970 just 5% of the population was foreign born, while today its 15%. Millennials are much more likely today to be recent economic migrants, or the children of them, than boomers. That drags the numbers down, but doesn’t imply anything negative about millennials’ economic status. Indeed, those immigrants are experiencing upward economic mobility, and are seeing themselves that way. The dour attitude among millennials seems to be mainly on the native born, who really are doing as well or better than their parents.
At least, they’re doing better economically. Thanks to social changes, they have less agency than their parents did. They have few opportunities to garner authority and respect in their communities. They’re not building families and getting the hope that comes from nurturing the next generation. They have many reasons to be dour. Their parents failed them!
Thats a good perspective and adjustment, but we know wealth inequality has increased, and a few billionaires can inflate that number unrealistically - it would be good to compare median and standard deviation.
Most college students go for practical and business majors. They literally go for what seems to promiss them money.
The *studies fields are rather small proportion of students. They also cluster mostly in top universities. It is just not true that they would dominated universities.
That one is just paranoia and blaming what you hate anyway.
Name-calling like this will get you banned here. Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully and respectfully?
Edit: your account has already been repeatedly posting comments that either break the site guidelines or are on the edge. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I don't really think the connection you're trying to draw follows immediately. There are very strong domestic students, probably enough to fill all the top PhD programs. The calculus for pursuing a PhD is different if you're a domestic vs international student. If you're international and want to move to and eventually live in the US, where some of the highest paying jobs in the world are available, then first getting into a well regarded graduate program, which will attract potential employers, coming in on a student visa and then getting an employer to sponsor an H1B is a pretty good strategy. If you're already a top student in the US at a top university, you already have access to those employers and intend to stay in the same country long term, so the opportunity cost of going to graduate school is so much higher.
If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population. I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism.
If you look at top public school undergrad programs that don't practice affirmative action (UC's, UW) the programs are almost 50% Asian.
To be clear, when I say American I mean someone whose ancestors have lived in America for multiple generations, since at least the 1950's. I'm the child of immigrants and I don't consider myself an American. My culture places a distinctly different emphasis on educational achievement compared to what you might consider an American.
I don't know that America is anti-intellectual beyond a facade. It's easy to not like something that you'll perceivably never have or can manage to live without. Education is mainly reserved for the select few, and those select few aren't so revered anymore. People all want the same opportunities, but they're definitely not anywhere close to universally attainable. If you give people access to those things then I think you'll see that facade drip away.
The smartest Americans go into law and medicine and banking, because the expected value is even higher for bright people in those fields than technology.
Maybe this is implicitly understood, but I don't think everyone's goal is to maximize income/wealth. That is, not everyone would calculate "expected value" in the same way.
I don't think thats true anymore, unless you become a partner at a large law firm (very unlikely even for top grads) or are a very specialized surgeon (extremely difficult job) most FAANG level senior developers will out earn you and work far less. Might be true of banking but idk
Not quite. American across the sea immigration selects for the smartest and most ambitious people in the world. It's natural that they and their descendants will outperform most Americans.
& it benefits Americans (even those whose families have been here for generations) tremendously.
I am a “native born” American, and I’ve benefited a lot from having a whole bunch of extremely smart immigrants in my field. My physics graduate school mentor was from Ukraine, my advisor was an immigrant from China. The person who hired me out of graduate school to an aerospace/materials science job was an immigrant from the Philippines. Several of the coworkers who have best coached and mentored me were immigrants from Zimbabwe and Korea. Generally more helpful and kind to me than native-born coworkers. It is as positive sum as it gets.
(although I don’t think it lasts very long past first or second generation immigrants. It’s more individual choice and family culture than anything. So the only way to keep the benefit of cherrypicking & equipping the most ambitious and brightest among the world is to continuously encourage high skilled immigration.)
> If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population. I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism.
In a land where money buys everything, you think culture is the reason why a thing exists or doesn't exist? I think you're drinking too much of your own ideological kool aid.
High paying tech companies want to pay less, so they recruit internationally to not be so high paying. Along the same lines, American kids with the access to generational wealth to do whatever they want find it more lucrative to choose some other more localized field of work that doesn't compete with indentured servitude (H1s) for wages.
Obviously FAANG (and most companies) want to pay as little as possible for their labour. They don't pay $500,000 for senior engineers because of their innate generosity and desire to pay them well. They pay that much because they have to if they want to attract and retain the employees they are looking for.
H1B's in Big tech are about as far from indentured servants as you can imagine, they're in high demand and switch jobs for better pay constantly. American kids with access to generational wealth aren't as interested in difficult technical subjects.
> H1B's in Big tech are about as far from indentured servants as you can imagine
False.
> they're in high demand and switch jobs for better pay constantly.
And each time they do so, their new employer has to go through the entire process of getting them a new H1 visa. When your right to be in a place is dependent upon your labor to a specific contracted employer, you are an indentured servant.
>new employer has to go through the entire process of getting them a new H1 visa.
this is not true, saying this as a person on h1 who changed jobs easily.
when talking about indentured servants you are probably referring to small Indian IT bodyshops, that keep people on low wages due to them being on a very long green card queue, but this has nothing to do with H1 per se. These people do not work in big tech
Part of it is control. If you’re on an H1B, applying for a green card you are often chained to your company. If you quit (or get fired), you have 60 days to find a job or you have to leave the country.
This isn’t the case with citizens who have much more freedom and mobility.
> If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population. I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism.
There are schools in every country.
There are not FAANG headquarters in every country.
The top candidates from around the world (who are willing to relocate) will emigrate to whatever country has the highest paying jobs. That happens to be FAANG companies in the United States right now.
So of course FAANG jobs will not mirror the population of schools. It will mirror the population of educated engineers who are able and willing to relocate (especially pre-COVID before remote was an option)
Trying to draw parallels between FAANG employment and American schools in this fashion is nonsensical.
> The top candidates from around the world (who are willing to relocate) will emigrate to whatever country has the highest paying jobs. That happens to be FAANG companies in the United States right now.
This view is only correct if a) the US border is completely open and b) all the candidates around the world can speak professional English. We know that both the above conditions are false.
How about this: the easier it is to relocate and work for FAANG companies, the more the FAANG workforce will resemble the global supply of people who would like to work for them. If the skill sought is coding, not sales, sufficient English fluency is not a great barrier. There are plenty of programmers who do fine without ever having mastered definite articles or the present perfect.
The difference between American and Soviet schools back in the day was that Soviet curriculum was designed for ~80% to pass, while American was designed for ~99% to pass. (Nowadays, Russia has lowered the bar significantly, so the difference is no longer as huge.)
An average student who finished 5th grade in an average school in USSR could start 6th grade in the U.S. and coast along on what they'd learned until the first year of high school.
> If you look at top public school undergrad programs that don't practice affirmative action (UC's, UW) the programs are almost 50% Asian.
That's why, when looking at resumes, I've heard "Yeah, you know X is good, he went to Y (a school with affirmative action) and he's Asian/International, so you know he's there on merit".
it is hilarious how historical racism towards blacks leads to reverse racism (affirmative action) and leads to another racisms.
it's like you can't fix racism issues by instituting even more racism, it will only lead to more and more racism.
I hear often that Black employees are often looked down upon, because of the AC in hiring and education (the bar is extremely low for them). I think that Affirmative Action was created to reinforce stereotypes and racism, after the Civil Rights Movement
> If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population.
I don't think you can draw a cultural difference from this. I get what you're trying to say, particularly by narrowly defining "American"; that cultural influences put pressure/status on academics both by immigrant parents and non-American parents and that pressure causes students to excel academically and achieve these high paying positions. But there is so much selection bias here; both in the types of people who immigrate to a new country and those who leave their home country to attend school abroad. It's not clear to me Asian culture results in FAANG being disproportionally Asian, or simply that there are 2 billion Asian people in the world, and while the same percentage of people are sufficiently qualified as top American students (let's say 2%), 2% of 2 billion people is 40M people! Do you see the problem with jumping to this conclusion? You don't have sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis, that both cultures produce tops students at similar percentages.
A personal anecdote: I spend a lot of my interviewing candidates. Students for all the top schools in the world, international students and domestic students, undergrads and PhDs. Conditioned on having gone to a top university, I've never noticed a difference in performances between domestic students and international ones. (Or undergrad vs PhD to be honest.)
I also take a bit of issue with your definition of "American" on a personal level.
> To be clear, when I say American I mean someone whose ancestors have lived in America for multiple generations, since at least the 1950's.
My parents are immigrants, I'm a first generation American. But I am absolutely culturally American. There is no other country were I would feel at home culturally, and I've been heavily influenced by the country I grew up in. I'm also the product of US public schools, most notably UC Berkeley, which you cite. And I'm not Asian or Russian. And I do work at a FAANG level firm.
%34 of the world population are from India and China. And to be honest there isn't as many ex-soviet engineers in FANG as you would think, they are vastly outnumbered to chinese and indian engineers.
When you hire the world, your demographics are going to represent the world for the most part. There are a few modifications as to why latin america, africa and developed nation people are not as well represented, but it still holds.
That's an interesting observation, because paired with the elite overproduction hypothesis, it implies that allowing skilled immigration destabilises the country those people are entering, and stabilises the one they have left.
By playing to win like the tech companies do, they created a growth frontier that allows for more total elite capacity, and it shows as pretty much only growing part of the US economy. Overall if the US didn't allow immigration in this regards, it probably would have been way worse overall. Do you want to be a king of a trash pile or a player in an empire?
That’s because of visas. In the US you can study CS at a good school now and make $200k straight out of undergrad. Makes a technical PhD a lot less tempting
Also most of the generic pay sites in my experience are down weighted by a bunch of underpaid visa workers, boot camp graduates and so on. Also government workers who don't get paid well but get great benefits.
OP said you can make $200k straight out of undergrad, which is probably technically true, like it's technically true that I can win the lottery or get struck by lightning. There is probably a new grad somewhere making $200k in far-far right tail of the distribution. Just like it's technically true that you can make $400k (or $600k or $1M, whatever the popular number to cite is now) as a software engineer. Yes, these people probably do exist in that long tail, at certain top levels in certain top companies in certain top locations.
I really don't think it's that far out in the tails, especially given we're discussing top universities. If you're at MIT/Harvard/Stanford you're definitely aiming for 200k TC fresh out of undergrad.
Its far more likely that you make 200k out of college than win the lottery, in fact at top schools i think most students would disappointed if they didn't get close to that number
His comment was in reference to the lack of PhD as an explanation of the lack of PhDs as mentioned in TFA. He then went to say that the ability to get $200k out of undergrad was, and I quote:
> Makes a technical PhD a lot less tempting
If it's as rare as you are saying, then it wouldn't factor into the broader reasoning of people debating to get PhDs at all. That's my point. I wasn't making any point that it isn't possible to make $200k/year out of undergrad.
Entry level at Google is SDE III. According to levels.fyi the average total compensation for that is $191,860. There are lots of people making $200,000 straight out of undergrad. CMU, MIT, Berkeley and Stanford do not graduate enough students every year to fulfil Google's demand, never mind FAANG's and the same would be true if you expanded hiring to the top 20 CS universities.
If your not from a top school , maybe you have to work in startups or lesser tier companies for $50k less for a year or two, and then go work at MAGMA at the same pay as your stanford equivalent peer.
Somewhat unrelated to the point you’re making, something seems off about the results in that Glassdoor link.
Searching “computer science” in the jobs tab treats that as a keyword and shows results for a variety of job titles related to computer science. The salaries tab, however, seems to indicate it’s only collecting information about job titles that have “computer science” in the title.
You probably won't make 200k right out of undergrad in bigtech these days. But you will within 2-3 years. Most of my acquaintances in bigtech make 220-260K by age 25 doing run-of-the-mill stuff. This does not require elite level skill or knowledge - just merely bright people who put in the time and pass the filters. Most of us are fairly mediocre.
The top bin in the first link was labeled $187K and the bins are at least $13K wide so it's possible there might be a data point at $193K (probably a bit higher) which is not so far from $200K/yr as a new grad, according to the glassdoor dataset anyway.
America produce huge amount of smart educated people. They choose to not do PhD, because financially it is often sucky decision.
It has nothing to do with elementary or high schools performance. Those produce capable kids enough. It has to do with decisions and priorities those people have as young adults. And they are not even making bad decisions, for them not doing PhD is rational choice.
As an immigrant to USA in my teens in mid-2000s, one of the striking and underappreciated things about Americans (those that are born in USA) as well as the entire culture of America embodies a sort of a liberating spirit that resonates everywhere. Once you graduate high-school, the world is yours. The transition is quite remarkable and college students have a tremendous amount of ambition. I hated highschool because it was too easy (even AP courses), but loved college. There is also a deep disdain for hierarchical structure in USA and it is one of the most unique aspects that I don't see anywhere else. It gets developed in college years and then continues onwards to the professional world. If we have a spectrum from "Individualism" to "Hierarchical", we can draw USA on one end and may be Japan on the other. Germany would fall in the middle. I don't think international students like myself bring anything new, but we learn a lot from Americans and then obtain citizenship. These observations were at the center of my conscience as I was growing up into adulthood.
It feels like the problem is tied to our understanding of what's important as a society. We agree more or less that money represents value, even if people say it doesn't their actions say they it does. I think the more we double down on this as gospel the further our manufactured/perceived reality can move away from the underlying truth of the world. Money only represents short term value well. I think at some point the tension there will be too much for the fiction to hold and the fault line will have to fall back into equilibrium. It would probably be best if we were to do it gently.
"In my line of work I meet plenty of lapsed physicists. These are people with physics degrees, even physics Ph.D's, who don't do physics. Instead they're usually some sort of programmer, or occasionally some version of a quant."
I now PhDs that became High School teachers and they were some of the most gifted. I know PhDs that wait tables to make ends meet.
I think if the guy has fundamentally not understood what Peter Turchin was talking about. They are getting priced out of the housing market, won't ever be able to afford to buy a house. Even raising a family might be difficult. At the same time you pay for services for the boomers and a retirement and social security that yourself might never see.
As somebody who's about to finish a CS dissertation, I sometimes think the best way to do CS research is to get a somewhat interesting software engineering job that allows for a 4-day week and to do research as a side project. Most likely, this gives one more research time than staying in academia (with the exception of the first Post Doc, perhaps).
Edit: This works for most of CS, but not for most of Physics, I assume.
Historically, i tried to get software dev jobs that maximized my free time to do whatever i what on the side (also helped that i've been working remotely for ~6 years).
Does anyone know a good resource rich details the change in job demographics over time for different nations?
(Possibly just my google fu escapes me today)
> In the long run, creating more understanding of the physical world is probably more universally valuable to human flourishing than the far more parochial 'make money number go up'
Citation needed.
Moreover, dedicating resources to finance can be seen as dedicating resources to better dedicate resources.
(I upvoted the article since it's interesting stuff)
I think the money number go up thing is not working, and I'm sure study of the physical world is part of the solution, but the biggest gains for our society seem to be in the way we structure our lifes. I think the coming decades, the study of eudaimonia will be key to our advancement as a species.
I asserted that using money as a mechanism for gradient ascent is not working. I will walk you through my thinking, since this is an off beat claim.
1) Not all human needs are related to resources. Money cannot buy dignity, or love, and in-fact can generate the opposite of these qualities in one's life.
2) Most 1st World Humans have everything they need, materially, and more
3) Suicide is the ultimate statement of 'I am not having a good time'
4) Wealth is not hugely overwhelmingly correlated with lower suicide rates, with some of the wealthiest countries clocking in the highest rates of suicide. Source: List of countries by suicide rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r... (Sort by all descending)
5) I believe some other element or spirit is being maximized in happy countries, which also leads to wealth.
6) We should try to maximize a certain social spirit, which then maximizes wealth, instead of trying to directly maximize wealth.
7) GDP is a strange metric, which doesn't directly map to abundance. Yet, socially, we try to maximize it. I think this metric is victim to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
i think you're absolutely right. one issue here is kind of 'streetlight' problem. money gets you a crude, and perhaps a counterproductive way of measuring value.
but what other metric are you going to use?
not an anti-communist, but so far central planning has shown itself to be equally ripe for corruption.
I'm not ready to pose a solution (to the problem, of 'what metric do we follow?'), but I agree, central planning is gross. Its likely that there is no numerical method that is going to map to human happiness, and perhaps that's a good thing.
I believe that balancing our minds and our heart's influence on our decision is how we should proceed.
My thought is please don't do this. You get no useful information. Wikipedia strips out all the necessary context. The source that Wikipedia uses explicitly tells you that comparing rates across countries is difficult and fraught with problems.
Heck, comparing rates across a single country - the US - is tricky because they've only just developed a unified definition of "suicide".
> Globally, the availability and quality of data on suicide and suicide attempts is poor. Only some 80 Member States have good-quality vital registration data that can be used directly to estimate suicide rates. This problem of poor-quality mortality data is not unique to suicide, but given the sensitivity of suicide – and the illegality of suicidal behaviour in some countries – it is likely that under-reporting and misclassification are greater problems for suicide than for most other causes of death.
Ok, so besides my use of data which is very difficult to collect and verify, do you disagree with my statements of money failing to map to love and dignity?
GDP per capita maps excellently to dignity. The richer we get the less grinding, soul sucking poverty there is. The fewer children die of easily preventable diseases. The longer people live. The less people work jobs they hate just because they need sustenance. The more people work jobs they like. The more of their life people spend retired or just not working "in education".
Insofar as wealth makes life less nasty and brutish it probably makes life more loving but money buys a lot of dignity.
Point taken, and I agree... somewhat based on how you framed it. I believe that we have long gone past the point where people are questioning whether their needs are going to get met (in the United States, which is all I know well).
I assert that around the 1990s money started to disconnect with utility generation. Instead of the work week reducing in hours, with the advent of telecommunication, we start getting always-on-call jobs, yet people are paid basically the same. Productivity goes parabolic; median wages stay the same. You have to admit that there is something fishy about this, right? I think we basically have found a method to optimize towards a local maximum in productivity, but we are missing the strategies which lead us to a global maximum. And I think this method of optimization towards the maximum is basically serfdom.
In the long run, creating more understanding of the physical world is probably more universally valuable to human flourishing than the far more parochial 'make money number go up'
The Economist once commented that the last subatomic particle to have commercial value was the neutron, discovered in 1932.
It is simple, but not easy. Just replicate DARPA+NIH+NSF, and increase the total research budget by 100x, and ensure there are stable career paths to be a researcher until retirement.
more importantly, have money in DARPA+NIH+NSF like institutions and find some success metric that lets you reward fundamental basic science rather than things that are of interest to the military or commercial establishments.
i worked on DARPA contracts for quite a number of years...they were...ok? but you still had to spend some energy talking about how this was going to benefit the warfighter or lead to something that was going to make someone alot of money
NIH and NSF are certainly better, but my impression is that you still get alot of points in NSF land for showing a path towards commericialization
That would result in extremely large quantities of junk science of use to nobody. Increasing research funding must be entirely off the table until non-replicable research papers are no longer field-destroying problems.
I find this kind of thinking kind of insulting actually.
As a guy with a physics degree who's doing machine learning (precisely what the author bemoans), I don't feel like I "lapsed". I have other interests besides physics. There's a lot of things that aren't physics.
> What they're not doing is advancing the human understanding of the physical world.
I don't owe you anything. If this is your dream than do it yourself.
And countra argument is that smart capable educated people choosing to do machine learning instead of physics is not social issue. That it is them not lapsing and doing less worthy intellectual pursuit.
> And countra argument is that smart capable educated people choosing to do machine learning instead of physics is not social issue.
You want your brightest in society to do things that further society/humanity as a whole; playing the stock-market game or optimizing models to further consumerism (which is what most ML in the industry boils down to, let's be honest) isn't exactly doing that.
Everyone's absolutely free to work on whatever they want, that's for sure. But from a society point of view, we should ask ourselves if our system sets the right incentives.
> smart capable educated people choosing to do machine learning instead of physics is not social issue
It definitely is a social issue, the main reason people make that switch is money and money is a social issue. Why would you make less money doing physics research than helping advertisers better manipulate people? There is no reason, currently society rewards the later more than the former, but in another society it could be the other way around.
So the problem isn't if you as an individual choose to switch field since you'd like that field better, but all those who switched since that field pays better. That is the social issue.
Support steers choices for ambitious youth. Those MBAs are deployed to put ears on the ground and markets, to surface consumer needs, generate demand for products at companies, and vet investment worthy projects in the market. They steer capital and engineers where the work is valuable, that makes money, and that fuels the demand for more MBAs.
Researchers are building branches in the forest of knowledge, but to do it they have to bend to the will of an academic apparatus that is made to be self serving and zero sum in the hands of few who may or may not be worthy of the trust placed in them. There is also plenty of fraud and cheating globally among academic contributors. It’s almost like we need an HN for each branch or academic work, so anyone can contribute and see what’s novel, and the feedback is from vetted experts only, but that would put an undue burden on the experts and reduce their own productivity. There is room for an open collaborative solution somewhere, but it needs a lot of iteration to get it right.
Is their much evidence for your view of MBAs? I understand that's their self-myth, of course. But I don't see much of that in practice. And MBAs play a big role in the more predatory reaches of corporate America. E.g.: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/buyout-firms-profite...
I disagree with the article's premises and conclusions, my perspective is that of a physicist who also knows many lapsed physicists.
The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum. So to me the article really is "I agree with the elite overproduction thesis, I just don't think it applies to physics".
OK lets talk about that then.
If there is something that's gone wrong with pushing forward the boundaries of our knowledge it isn't a lack of bodies producing the standard unit of scientific knowledge: "the peer-reviewed publication". These have grown exponentially. I don't think I've seen anyone even argue the rate of knowledge increase is growing commensurately. It *might* be the case that new knowledge requires exponentially more people looking for it but that's a pretty different article. Personally, I'm skeptical more NSF funding would help.
I do agree with this part:
Our apparatus of scientific education, especially mathematics education, is deeply flawed. It takes too long to bring young people to the research front, and it produces a false view of what doing science is really like.
But this research is in a academic setting, and there is definitely, unambiguously, an overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available. Letting more new students in the door wouldn't help anyone!
I took the author as saying we should have more research positions for those PhDs to inhabit and while we're at it, why don't we let them do that research instead of playing the current academy games that undermine research production.
Part of the problem with Physics PhDs is they take too long. Median of like 7 years in graduate school. And they’re hyper-specialized, not as useful as the general education you get in physics undergrad.
Good argument for making more undergrad physics students but stopping the emphasis on graduate degrees.
Graduate degrees: 7 years of your young life focusing on a very specific topic that might be better spent applying the really useful physics undergraduate education in industry (or perhaps adding a couple more years in engineering graduate school beforehand).
Not to say that graduate school has no function. But The cost benefit is not nearly as clear as the education you get in undergrad.
> overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available
Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We probably don't need too many more physics professors but we sure could use more physics research. Or maybe better physics research. Either way, more/better physics discoveries.
That said, our scientific communication channels seem filled to the brink. So maybe we need more efficient scientific communication before we can make good use of more researchers.
Is this actually the case? There is a lot of research that is occuring in the private sector or research labs and the such. A lot of it is being done at universities, but us there an actual quantified measure if what percentage of research is not in a teaching institution versus what is?
Instead of trying to quantify research (not really measuable in any meaningful sense) perhaps ask yourself how physics has improved your every day life and then ask yourself which improvements you think society should have given up in exchange for a greater supply of quants.
Things like the microchip, wifi, rocketry, satellites, jet engines, etc.
If the answer is "none of it" that tends to suggest underproduction.
This is some rather flawed logic. The productivity of physicists at the time the microchip was invented doesn’t suggest anything at all about the productivity of physicists today, and the utility of productive physics research doesn’t suggest anything at all about the existence of non-productive physics research.
Do we need more physics research? I guess it depends a lot on how you define physics, but it seems like outside of possibly better silicon nodes, there isn't a whole lot of low hanging fruit in physics at the moment. When physics does get research funding it gets dropped into building giant machines that, at vast expense, have discovered virtually nothing.
It feels like right now most areas of academia are consuming far more resources than their useful output could really justify, which is perhaps why in so many fields it's so heavily dependent on government funding (vs say computer science where academic/corporate lab collaborations are quite common).
What is the likelihood of discovering a new phenomena or largely unexplored field of science akin to the discovery of electricity and electrochemistry?
There may be a finite amount of works on physics that we can do, or technological niches that we can exploit thanks to discoveries in physics or any relevant field of knowledge.
The well of discoveries isn't running dry today, but it may in future generations.
> What is the likelihood of discovering a new phenomena or largely unexplored field of science akin to the discovery of electricity and electrochemistry?
We have zero idea how gravity works, how to predict the properties of vast stretches of new materials, if the island of stability is real, what the limits to know propulsion technologies are, what the limits to know fusion technologies are, et cetera. And I’m not even getting to batteries or biology or hosts of related fields.
Everyone here is missing the point. It's not that physics is running out of questions to ask. It's that the questions are getting increasingly more expensive to answer, and the answers are increasingly less compelling. The low-hanging fruit picked long ago, modern physics produces fewer discoveries that change people's lives in the way that radar, lasers, microwaves, and transistors did, which makes science investment less compelling to the public.
Remember that from the first public microwave demonstrations in 01895 by Bose to the first deployments (as radar in the 01940s) took 45 years; the Amana Radarange brought microwaves into people's homes in 01967, another 27 years later; and microwave ovens didn't really go mainstream until about 01990, another 23 years after that, 95 years after Bose's first public demonstrations. The LASER was first built in 01960 (following numerous physics advances starting in 01917) but the first mass-market laser product was the CD player, introduced in 01982 and surpassing vinyl records in sales for the first time in 01988, 28 years after Maiman's first LASER.
If anything, the time gap seems to be shortening, but the place to look for "discoveries that change people's lives" is not in basic physics research of today but basic and applied physics of a few decades ago turning into common practice more recently. And in that case there are a lot of examples, especially if we go further afield from just physics discoveries:
- modern LED lighting comes from the physics discovery of how to make stable blue LEDs (though, for reasons of market failure, most LED lights still last only 3000 hours instead of 30,000);
- modern cellphones, computers, GPS, broadband, and in particular broadband wi-fi come from numerous physics discoveries that have enabled chip feature sizes to continue reducing over the last 20 years;
- optoelectronics advances are largely a question of physics, and without even counting blue LEDs, better optoelectronics have over the last 20 years dramatically improved TV screens, computer monitors, cellphone screens, fiber-optic communication, Blu-Ray data storage, and LIDAR for, e.g., self-driving cars;
- the mRNA vaccine for covid, while a biological discovery rather than a physics discovery, was designed within a few day after the genome was published, and seems to have both higher efficacy and less side effects than previous kinds of vaccines (though unfortunately for political reasons it wasn't rolled out for another 9 months, during which tens of millions of people died);
- lithium-ion batteries have gone mainstream, enabling a transition to electric cars and wireless power tools;
- better power electronics, resulting from solid-state physics research, have made induction stoves widespread;
- modern solar panels cost a tenth of what they did a decade ago, in significant part due to physics discoveries over the past 20 years, now account for the majority of new power generation capacity being built, and will probably dramatically drop the cost of energy by 02030;
- due to chemistry discoveries, Spectra/Dyneema fishing line is cheap, strong enough to make bulletproof vests, in fact as strong as the strongest steel, and floats on water;
- superhydrophobic coatings, a physics discovery, are going mainstream now.
Radar, microwaves, transistors, and nuclear physics (which you strangely forgot to mention, even though it's fundamental to modern oncology, and produces a significant part of the electrical power in many countries) resulted from WWII. We've had an atypically low level of great-power wars over the last 75 years, which has been great, but it wouldn't be surprising to have another great-power war in the next decade. If that happens, maybe the survivors will be reduced to sticks and stones, but if not, you can bet that they will have spent a lot on physics research.
Official one yes. Idk about tens of millions but I’m also thinking 5 million is lower than the true numbers. Though I’m also not sure there is a qualitative difference (as much as it pains me to say).
Yes, but those new discoveries are less fundamental.
One of the reasons we had such an explosion of new theoretical physics in the first half of the 20th century (which gave birth to all the practical discoveries you mentioned) is that, in 1900, there was just so much unexplained weird shit.
Shit like:
1. How do you predict the energy of electrons produced by shining light on a surface? And why does light cause electrons to be produced?
2. Why is the speed of light the same in every direction, to really, really high precision?
3. Why are there spectral bands in the light from stars? And why are they sometimes shifted?
4. Why can current pass only one way through a metal pin poking a semi-insulator?
5. Why does pollen appear to move randomly in the sunlight in still air?
6. Why the fuck is the sky blue? Why does light sometimes act like a way, but sometimes like a particle?
Remember, a lot of this weird shit went unexplained for 25-50-100 years. Then, between 1900 and 1950, smart people came up with theories that explained all the weird shit. So we don't really have so much weird shit anymore because most of it has been explained. Sure, super-conductors are kinda weird, but we also seem to be able to predict a lot of their properties from existing theory.
So, we're really just riding the coat-tails of scientists from 100 years ago. People 100 years from now aren't going to have coat tails to ride.
Less fundamental than transistors? How much less fundamental can you get? There were no transistors floating around in the asteroid belt. Unlike, say, fission reactors, no natural transistor has ever been found.
There's a lot of unexplained weird shit today, too, including the arrow of time, turbulence, dark matter, dark energy, "tuning" of physical constants, solar flares, extreme-energy cosmic rays, ball lightning, the unresolved inconsistency between quantum mechanics and special relativity, structures up to the edge of greatness like the Sloan Wall, the bizarrely low-entropy state the universe began in, and consciousness. Short gamma-ray bursts were finally explained in 02017 thanks to LIGO. (The explanation had been hypothesized previously, but Lucretius correctly hypothesized the explanation for Brownian motion, too, 2080 years ago.) You may be interested in my longer overview in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144119.
Your list of 6 weird turds unexplained in 01900 is mostly correct, except that #6 was correctly explained by Rayleigh in terms of Maxwellian electrodynamics in 01881, and Fizeau correctly explained the redshift of stellar spectra in terms of the Doppler effect in 01848, though of course not the spectra themselves. We could add, "Why is the Andromeda Nebula's spectrum so smeared out?" (leading to the Shapley-Curtis Great Debate in 01920), "How can the Earth be older than the Sun?", and "What powers Becquerel's uranium rays?"
While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.
The curious thing is that Michelson in 01894 already knew about at least four of your five weird pieces of shit (the Schottky diode had been discovered but was not yet well known), as well as numerous others. In fact, he was personally responsible for discovering #2 in 01887.
So how could even Michelson make such a grievous error, the same error you're making now?
Well, I guess he underestimated the importance of the pieces of shit that were unexplained.
However, I think that error is less understandable today, though, since among the things we know we know virtually nothing about are the nature of 95% of the mass in the universe and the bulk dynamics of plasma, the state of matter in which we see 99% of the remaining 5%.
There's still the question of whose coattails we'll be riding in 100 years, assuming we somehow manage to survive. The Nobel Prize is imperfect and backward-looking by nature, but it suggests Ghez and Gensel for discovering Sagittarius A*, Penrose for black hole robustness, Mayor and Queloz for discovering exoplanets, Peebles for physical cosmology stuff including dark matter, Mourou and Strickland for petawatt lase...
Part of this question is whether there is a limit to human cognition that we can leverage to answer increasingly difficult questions. It isn't whether there are still unanswered questions. So this is truly an issue of diminishing resources and exhausted low hanging fruit. One of those resources is human cognitive ability, relative to difficulty of finding new discoveries.
Just as there are true limits to for example pursuing economic growth from burning finite cheap fossil fuels, "growth" in the forms that pertain to the issue at hand... economic, cheap energy consumption, scientific discoveries, human cognitive ability to solve problems..these can all certainly bump up against at least short term limits, and the issue of cost matters greatly in a given time period because even bringing to bear the actual resource we have to develop new science and technology suffers from crowding out if economic "growth" is constrained because of diminishing cheap energy.
This shouldn't be surprising if one conceives of what consistent and steady compound growth even at small rates results in after a relatively short period of time. Inevitable that limits in many inter related areas will be reached...and either a collapse occurs or a long period of low or negative growth happens with all the sort of conflict that entails (competition within scarcity).
> this is truly an issue of diminishing resources and exhausted low hanging fruit
The fulcrum of disagreement is the power of paradigm shifts. Paradigm shifts change how existing knowledge is interpreted, even by a feeble mind. These are, from what we can tell, randomly distributed. There is no indication that we are running out of them. If anything, their rate of discovery is increasing.
Since paradigm shifts are about prospective, not knowledge, there is no reason to believe they are limited. If anything, our growing knowledge base implies the next shifts will be more powerful than the prior ones.
Well, maybe we won't find anything akin to electricity again; the electroweak force is one of the three fundamental interactions we know affect matter in the universe, and knowledge of electricity as such dates back at least to Plato, 2500 years ago. It was unified with magnetism in 01873, and unified with the weak force in the 01970s. Maybe we'll find a fourth one; maybe we won't. (Gravitational waves weren't observed until 02015, and they solved the mystery of short gamma-ray bursts in 02017.) Here's a list of candidates for similarly fundamental discoveries:
1. Maybe we'll find a fourth fundamental force that we just haven't noticed yet. This sounds stupid until you realize that we hadn't noticed Archaea until 01977 or dark matter (85% of matter in the universe) until 01980 (though the phrase is from the 01930s), and we still know almost nothing about the behavior of dark energy, the existence of which wasn't known until 01992.
2. Maybe we'll find a way to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics ("quantum gravity").
3. Maybe quantum computers won't work, demonstrating a flaw in the assumptions of quantum theory in the same way that the Michelson-Morley failure to detect an ether wind demonstrated the flaw in the assumptions of Newtonian physics that Einstein resolved with special relativity. More likely, they will work, and this will change a lot of things; their computational power is still poorly understood. They were originally proposed (by Feynman) as an engine for simulating quantum physics.
4. Maybe dark matter and dark energy don't involve a fourth fundamental force like the strong force, gravity, or the electroweak force, but we still know almost nothing about how they behave. So almost everything about them is unknown. Can we use them for communication, propulsion, computation, energy sources, mass sources, etc.?
5. General relativity hasn't been shown to conserve energy or (equivalently) momentum. Does that mean reactionless drives and perpetual-motion machines are possible, or (more likely) that there's a more subtle symmetry to GR that hasn't yet been discovered?
6. Where does consciousness come from? It's the most perceptually salient phenomenon in the entire universe, but we don't have any convincing account of what it is.
7. We know very little about plasma dynamics. We don't know how to make a usable plasmoid gun, we don't know how ball lightning works (or even if it belongs in this item), and although we know they're a magnetohydrodynamic phenomenon, we don't know how solar prominences are formed, and similarly for solar flares, which accelerate some particles to GeV speeds by means we don't understand at all. We don't know why the solar cycle happens. Coronal waves weren't discovered until 01995. We don't know how to stabilize fusion plasma in a tokamak. We don't know if there are significant magnetohydrodynamic phenomena at scales larger than a star, much less larger than a galaxy. We don't know what heats the corona. This is important because a large majority of the matter in the universe is plasma, and our understanding of it is mostly just empirical, like stamp collecting. We're used to thinking of plasma as an undifferentiated homogeneous continuum like a well-mixed liquid, where nothing interesting happens, quite unlike all our complicated organic molecules (which can't survive in it), but obviously from looking at the sun that isn't the case; we really have no idea about the possible complexities. Is this where the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall comes from? Perhaps more excitingly, if MHD makes stable structures possible in large-scale plasma systems (as it evidently does in the sun), are there analogous phenomena that can occur in a quark-gluon plasma?
8. Forget about magnetohydrodynamics for a moment. We don't even understand regular hydrodynamics. Ta...
Considering the fact that what we don't know is potentially infinite, and what we don't know we don't know is a potentially infinite chunk of that, how could that ever be true? :-)
Well, I guess we could hit a local minima where we need some out-of-this-world resources or research to level up, but let's not be so pessimistic so soon. We've only been doing this modern research thing for a few centuries. You could go back 4-5 generations in an especially long lived family and you'd find someone in the family tree that was still alive before the modern scientific method was created.
In addition to all that's been said about this quote, in my view there can actually be new physics in those precise measurements. For instance astronomical measurements are where you learn if there's something wrong with our accounting of the amount of mass in galaxies, or our understanding of gravity.
Now, I'm not personally likely to discover any new physics, but I'm a physicist, and my bag is precision measurement. And it's a blast. It involves not only physics but also often optics, electronics, mechanics, math, and programming. It's recognized as a branch of physics, and is intensely experiment driven. Among the small handful of people who are crazy enough to be interested in all of those things at once, most are physicists.
Precision measurements are also an area where physics discoveries tend to escape the lab and end up in practical use. When a new effect is announced, I always wonder to myself: "When will they turn that effect into a sensor?" I can think of all kinds of measurements that benefit people, including GPS, atomic clocks, and blood oxygen sensors, that are practically all over the place.
I suspected I'd get an answer like this. Please read again: maybe there's not much low hanging fruit at the moment. Invictus0 has it right: this isn't the same thing as "no new discoveries ever".
Fields do have dry periods where for whatever reason, making progress is hard. Most famously AI had its "AI winter" for decades. We know now that there were new discoveries waiting to be made there but they required technology and datasets that simply didn't exist at the time. The last decade of AI progress has depended utterly on the growth of the public internet and then fast GPUs for processing that data. No matter how much funding the government had given symbolic AI in the 80s and 90s it'd have got nowhere. At least not on the use cases people seem to care about.
I find canned answers to this question increasingly tiresome. Academia and government funded research operates on a massive scale. It's unacceptable to me, as one of the people who actually pays for all this, that researchers entirely opt themselves out of any questions of utility or accountability. Fundamental physics in particular should take a good hard look at itself as it's both very expensive and in recent years, delivered very little. Consider string theory. It's been developed since the 1970s. 50 years now and for what? As far as I know this has delivered nothing concrete.
This isn't unique to physics, that's just an example. Epidemiology went down the statistical modelling rabbit hole 20 years ago and never emerged: I've yet to encounter a non-misleading claim coming from this field. If the entire field had been defunded 20 years ago we'd have a much healthier and saner world.
It's also not true that simply labelling something research means it'll one day be useful. Phrenology was once considered to be research. Critical race theory is labelled research. I think we can safely say these fields will never be useful and in fact have had sharply negative utility.
It is really hard to predict when research will become valuable- the most valuable US Government grant ever just might turn out to be the NSF/DARPA grants for information science management that funded Brin and Page in their initial work on the PageRank algorithm.
But my favorite example of how research flows into a better world is the Sagnac effect. In 1913, French Physicist Georges Sagnac built a circular interferomter and found interference bands. He thought that this disproved Relativity and showed that an aether existed, but it turned out that German Physicist Max von Laue had predicted the existence of those interference bands under relativity two years earlier, so 10 points for Einstein.
For the next 50 years Sagnac interferometery was a dead end, a minor curiosity in the history of physics. Then in 1963, Macek and Davis at the Sperry Gyroscope Co. figured out how to build this in a laboratory environment with the recently invented lasers. The coherent beam of a laser unlocked the usefulness of the Sagnac effect. Meaning that just another 30-odd years of work by hundreds of people around the world got to a situation where ring-laser and fiber-optic gyros are superior to mechanical gyroscopes and capable of things that mechanical gyros could never do.
So, the Sagnac effect itself was worth nothing, and for a long time afterwards was just something that a few scientists even knew about. But a century later the world depends on it.
Maybe what we need is cheaper physics apparatus so you don't need a physics professorship or a big lab to advance the state of human knowledge. You aren't going to scale down the LHC to fit under your bed when you aren't using it, but you could surely fit an XRF, ICP-AES, AFM, and maybe an optical bench in there. For a while I worked at a satellite company whose first cleanroom was made only a few years back by covering the concrete walls with polyethylene film, and a class-10 clean bench that you stick your hands into is within the reach of lots of people. Lots of amateurs have built fusors, but mostly they aren't doing the work necessary to measure reliable, reproducible results, in part because Vixra doesn't offer any incentive to do so. Radio amateurs are one shining exception here, even if most of them are just using store-bought equipment these days.
Like Einstein or Newton? Theoretical physics tends to be way ahead of experimental physics, it took 50 years from higgs boson existing as a theory to finding traces of the higgs boson in the LHC etc.
Physics is done using the true scientific method. First you make a theory, then you make experiments to test the theory. Theoretical physicists made a theory and proposed some possible experiments to test it. Then 50 years later data was found in those experiments to match the theory. What we lack today to further physics isn't experiments, we lack theories that are well formed enough that we can perform experiments to test them.
The Ultraviolet Catastrophe was discovered immediately after theoretical physicists derived the radiation law, the limit was theory and not experiments there as well. And the most important part here is that another physicist had already derived an alternative radiation law at the time that fit perfectly with the observed deviation and had a good explanation for it: Quantum Physics.
Edit: The problem with physics today is exactly like back then, we have no predictions to test. If someone comes up with a new theory that joins quantum physics with gravity in a way that is consistent with all past experiments, then we can test that. But there is no such theory today, nobody has figured out a way that the domains can work together.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144119 I listed a lot of the big unsolved problems in physics, though many would argue that the question of how consciousness arises isn't part of physics. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29153894 I also listed a lot of recent advances, many of which came from experimental physics. Some of those problems are susceptible to experimental investigation even with the theories we have.
But, aside from these big problems, many smaller problems are susceptible to experimental investigation. You may not create an Einstein-style paradigm shift by detecting CNO-fusion neutrinos from the sun, observing Higgs decay, improving quantum-dot solar cells, fabricating nanotube rope whose strength approaches that of a single nanotube, understanding the lubricity of BAM well enough to design more similar materials, deriving useful energy from the fission of lithium, making a metamaterial with a higher Young's modulus than diamond with negative-elasticity inclusions, constructing logic gates out of fluid vortices, building a usable hypersonic plasmoid pistol (one that doesn't require explosive flux compression pumping!), building transistors that function at 800 degrees, finding a SHS route to cubic boron nitride, making a 50-tesla magnetic field in the lab, finding a way to construct quantum-dot solar panels that's cheap and scalable enough to undercut poly-Si, confining a particle of gold in a stable minimum of the Casimir potential, or finding a way to fabricate high-quality optics apparatus rapidly out of aluminum foil; but the obstacles to these problems are (or were) mostly not that we don't have any useful hypotheses to test.
"The fasted way to get the right answer is to post the wrong one on the internet"
Actually, Kepler came before Newton. Kepler's laws of planetary motion were derived from observations of others. They also follow straightforwardly from Newton's laws of motion. In particular, Kepler's second law is equivalent to conservation of angular momentum. Kepler's third law is equivalent to "Newton's universal gravitation + conservation of angular momentum". And Kepler's first is a consequence of Newtonian kinematics. That is to say, Newton generalized Kepler's laws.
Similarly with Einstein: His theoretical treatment of Brownian motion was based on observations by... Robert Brown half a century ealier. The photoelectric effect (for which Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize) was an extension of theoretical work by Plank, who started theorizing to explain observations made by Hertz.
Special Relativity resolved a conflict between E&M and Mechanics, but it was really needed to explain why the Michelson-Morley experiment couldn't find a difference in the speed of light, despite increasingly-sophisticated apparatus (which was an unsolved paradox for a quarter of a century before SR was invented).
And, while not on your list, quantum theory had many experimental inspirations. The Millikan oil drop experiment, for one. And spectral lines in stellar observations, for another.
Einstein's work on relativity (01905) was inspired by the Michelson-Morley experiment (01887), less than 20 years before, and its many improved replications. His work on the photoelectric effect was inspired by Hertz's experimental discovery of it (also 01887), followed by numerous further experiments which clarified the nature of the effect. Although Brownian motion had been observed, in some sense, since Lucretius (00060 BCE), Brown's 01827 observations under a microscope less than a century before were crucial to Einstein's theorizing about it.
Newton's work on orbital mechanics, which gave rise to understanding of universal gravitation (published 01687 but finished years earlier), derived from Kepler's laws of planetary motion (01621, say) and his published tables of planetary observations (01627), the Tabulae Rudolphinae. Not coincidentally, Kepler is also known for his dramatic improvements in the tele-scope, but much of the improvement in the Tabulae was actually due to the meticulous work done at the pre-telescope observatory of his predecessor Brahe, a huge stone structure.
Certainly the traffic between theoretical physics and experimental physics is not entirely a one-way flow from experiment to theory; that would lead only to the sort of overfitting we find in Ptolemy. But neither is it, as you paint it, entirely a one-way flow from theory to experiment.
It's probably true that we aren't going to resolve the problem of quantum gravity, dark matter, or consciousness with experiments, because our theories aren't good enough to design the experiments yet. But turbulence, magnetohydrodynamics, and especially quantum computers are eminently subject to experiment.
(Although I disagree with your comment, it certainly seems to be made in good faith, so I deplore the knuckle-draggers who are downvoting it.)
Hmm, are you saying that high Tc superconductivity, the Geiger-Marsden results falsifying the plum-pudding model, and the quantum Hall effect were predicted theoretically before they were discovered empirically? I thought that these were three of the more spectacular cases of unexpected experimental results that bore great theoretical fruit.
Possibly you intended to post your comment in reply to one of Jensson's comments rather than mine?
Rajchman had two students, one of whom (Antoni Zygmund, who also studied under Mazurkiewicz, and founded the Chicago school of analysis) had 40 students, five of whom had over 100 students of their own. 18 of those 40 had at least one student of their own. Consequently Rajchman had 1658 descendants in only a century, a mentorship growth rate of 7.7% per year despite Rajchman himself having his career cut short by being murdered by the Nazis in 01940 and apparently ceasing to mentor anyone officially for the previous 15 years of his career.
Yes but the exponential scaling doesn't really work to anyone's benefit. It just means that N people can each mentor an average of N people and so on and so forth. An active community means that the people who are working on the problems can all share results and bring people up to speed. I'm not convinced THIS scales well.
I can buy more people in physics working on more problems. There are a wealth of interesting problems in physics and more people all going in different directions would be great. But ten times as many people working on the LHC? A hundred times as many people working on string theory? I don't buy it.
To me, the ideal model of fully open, accessible research is the speedrunning community. I don't see speedrunning as all that different from experimental work. You probe, you hypothesize, you have breakthroughs, you compete in what's generally a pretty healthy way, and you communicate and document. Look at how this scales, how many people get in and get obsessed, etc. To really master quantum hall, you need to have have a devotion to the field that's comparable to "completing Super Mario 64 with half an A press."
Yeah, although maybe mentorship can scale reasonably well (or at any rate much faster than we are scaling it at present), I agree with you about collaboration: ten times as many people working on the LHC (or HEP in general) probably wouldn't be very effective. Now that we have Sci-Hub, the General Index, Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, and Google Scholar, we can probably collaborate a little more effectively than before, but not enough to cram orders of magnitude of people into a given subfield.
There might be a path forward in the work on making computational work easily reproducible, by people like Konrad Hinsen, Yihui Xie, Jeremiah Orians, Eelco Dolstra, Ludovic Courtès, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Ricardo Wurmus, and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, but clearly it hasn't been a panacea so far. Speedrunning results are in many cases reproducible by virtue of nailed-down console hardware and bit-identical game images, but that's harder to achieve even for FEM simulations of turbulent MHD systems, much less actual experimental MHD systems like a Farnsworth fusor.
How do people initially get up to speed on speedrunning? Are there tutorials, the equivalent of a textbook with problem sets, some other onramp? Can we gamify learning quantum mechanics? (I've tried QiskitBlocks but so far haven't been impressed.)
You'll also need to pay for the people doing the research to buy houses, have cars, retirement savings, raise families, and have a decent quality of life too.
Add that to a bare bones optics lab with a few staff and you will be running about $1 million startup costs for benches, lasers, optics, closed loop cryogencics, He4, interferometers, etc, plus half a million a year salary costs for 3-5 people in a low cost of living area.
It would also need job security to be competitive with going into something like data science, making the startup costs a careers worth of funding otherwise it would be insanity to choose.
Source: PhD in quantum optics, no longer do science.
> You'll also need to pay for the people doing the research to buy houses, have cars, retirement savings, raise families, and have a decent quality of life too.
Newton and Cavendish didn't have any of those, except that Cavendish had retirement savings. So while not having houses, cars, retirement savings, the ability to raise a family, and a decent quality of life might be a reason for not achieving more than Newton or Cavendish, it's not a reason for achieving less.
(I suspect that raising a family is actually counterproductive. I've seen an awful lot of promising researchers of both genders stop publishing after their first baby.)
I don't have any of those things, but while I'm no Newton or Cavendish, I can't attribute the difference to my lack of a car. Most of the people in my country don't have any of those except for houses; most of the people here who own houses built them with their own hands rather than buying them.
It's true that if you have to choose between going into data science and owning your own house and car, or doing quantum optics while living in poverty, the former is a lot better for you. But for most of us it's not an either-or choice:
1. Why not both? Lagrange did a significant amount of his work while subsisting on a day job teaching ballistics to gunners. Vipul Ved Prakash wrote Vipul's Razor by working one month out of the year in Delhi, then spending the other 11 months up in the mountains working on whatever he wanted to. Sidis deliberately didn't do anything others would consider useful, surviving on a series of menial jobs, but if he'd turned his formidable intellect on the problems of automatic computation or chemistry instead of collecting streetcar transfers, possibly he would have made significant progress. I've been living on US$6k a year, so a single year of a US$250k salary and stock package at Google or Fecebutt would allow me to survive for 40 years.
2. For most of us, it's neither. Most people don't have a data-science job available, or cars, or job security, or retirement savings. Given the choice between spending your spare time on watching Westworld and setting up experiments with Kerr cells and third-harmonic-generation crystals, what could possibly make the former a better choice? Though I'm one to talk! Here I am wasting my time commenting on the orange website, arguing about physics with people (who aren't you) whose understanding of physics evidently comes from WGBH Boston.
So, while I agree that everyone should live in material abundance, I don't agree with your apparent conclusion that more abundance of non-experimental-apparatus material goods would boost the world's research productivity. Many more people can buy houses, buy cars, have retirement savings, and raise families than 50 or 100 years ago, while the speed of scientific advancement has increased only modestly.
Scientific apparatus is by definition “pre-engineering.” It’s low volume and generally designed by a few people with no BOM optimization. OTOH, everything that’s engineered is generally just EE or optics lab stuff that’s already high volume and aggressively cost optimized. Good luck making a cheap MBE or dilution fridge, and good luck making a 10 GHz oscilloscope cheaper.
I've been seeing a lot of 3-D printed FDM parts showing up in labs in recent years. Of course you can't 3-D print an MBE or FIB, but maybe you could automate the manufacturing of some significant apparatus to the point where you really could download a cutfile from Thingiverse, cut it out on a CNC plasma table, and have it MIG-welded together by robots, so that, like custom T-shirts or FDM-printable parts, it can be cheap even without being high-volume. Even some high-vacuum apparatus might be accessible by that kind of route. A friend of mine has been doing a lot of optics fabrication via UV stereolithography.
* GTRI
* Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
* MIT Lincoln Labs
* ~All the national labs (NIST, Argonne, etc...)
They are still mostly full as I understand.
If I was to write an article on what might be improved: We need more translational research (product focused, using existing knowledge) and less academic research.
One problem I see is that there just isn't the springboard from academic research to commercialization in physics like there is in comp sci or biotech.
Granted I'm biased. I founded my company (zeroK NanoTech) to capitalize on laser cooling research. Two Nobel prizes and countless professors pushing the boundaries on this stuff since the 90's. And my little company is going to be the first to deliver a product that's a black box to the user wrt to the science but delivers some new capabilities. The ion trap quantum computing may yet pay (much larger) dividends to society and those guys are also now making big pushes as well. Might be fair to count the resurgence of rocketry and fusion in this category as well.
" there just isn't the springboard from academic research to commercialization"
I worked in tech transfer for a bit.
There isn't such a thing as 'translation of science' because knowledge itself is pretty useless, even applied research is.
Products - which hopefully embody some of those things - are what people buy and the things that go into making good products are a bit orthogonal to classical R&D approach. Thinking about things from a 'user centric' instead of things having 'intrinsic' value is a big leap that I think takes a few years for some to get.
In Academia we think of knowledge as having inherent meaning and value unto it's own - which is totally fine I'm not hear to argue otherwise.
But in the real world, it's almost as if you have to view Science as just 'fancy pants tooling' and give it about as much love as your ruler or hammer, i.e. think of it as just a tool to meet some 'ends' wherein the 'ends' is not 'publishing a paper'.
In biotech, the 'ends' maybe more mappable, i.e. 'this drug regrows hair in men and women' but as you indicate, it mostly doesn't work this way.
Even then, even if we got our surplus PhD's into industry, we still may have this over-capacity.
So all of that aside, maybe we are entering the phase where the standard/normative level of education is just really, really high. Like in one of those corny Star Trek places where everyone has a PhD.
Just like many of the wealthy, effete folks in the past who got degrees because they were rich and not even interested in pursuing something applied or interesting, 'we're all getting rich now' and perhaps should turn our focus to the 5B people on planet earth who still have material needs.
Translational research is its own subfield in biotech too. And it's plausibly one key place where a lot of low-hanging fruit might still be hidden, both in biotech and in the harder sciences. In general, it would be nice if academia did its part as an alternate, fully formalized source of what's usually left to tacit "folk" know-how in all sorts of industry-relevant pursuits.
True that, with the caveat that biotech has much longer development cycles, and often socialized markets, which make them an odd fit for scrappy entrepreneurs and VC.
Personally I think we are turning discoveries into products pretty fast, at the least faster than any time in history. My thought was that we need more fundamental discoveries (e.g. like understanding gravity or theories that predict and unlock high temperature superconductors), but the people who discover those things needn't be teaching staff.
> Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions?
Because it's cheaper that way. A lab that had to pay market-rate salaries would be outcompeted by the ones that sucker grad students with the promise that a few of them might get tenure someday and pay them peanuts in the meantime.
Academics can subsidize some research costs through tuition and splitting work researchers do to teaching. It's a business model that has been working well because of ever increasing demand for people to get at least a bachealors degree. It's not really about tenure per se, it's more that the academic business model can provide a stable revenue stream for some research work.
Labs that don't have this often require either a business to subsidize their work or they suddenly become completely reliant in grants. These environments are highly unstable in terms of job security. Positions are tied to a grant or a mixture of grants and difficult to maintain. If one or enough sources fail and the role is completely paid through grant money, it suddenly becomes untenable and people leave the role. The advantage academic environments have is that revenue stream to cushion the instability and provide stability.
It also lures in cheaper labor from grad students and post docs which helps.
I had the impression that even at very prestigious schools lab funding is mostly from grants.
I'd be interested to see how much of, say, the UNC Chapel Hill chemistry department's research expenditures come out of grants. Do you know how I'd find the information?
Two other points:
> Labs that don't have this often require either a business to subsidize their work or they suddenly become completely reliant in grants.
In what sense is the first case, a business sponsoring the lab, not "grants"?
> It's not really about tenure per se, it's more that the academic business model can provide a stable revenue stream for some research work.
But the original claim was that the cost of employing researchers is lower for an academic lab than it would be for a new lab. ("other labs could hire many more grad students for the same cost.") That has nothing to do with the availability of funding or cross-subsidies! Is it true or not?
Grants are definitely also important in academia, but at least the base salary of professors and some of the grad students ends up being covered by the university out of separate revenue sources (mostly tuition, but sometimes state funding or endowment), which makes it a bit easier. It also means that if you go a few years between grants you still get paid, and you can still get your grad students paid by having them be TAs for classes (instead of RAs on your grants). I'm not sure how to get hard data on what percentage of expenditures in a given department come from which sources, which would definitely be interesting.
There are so-called "soft money" positions that really are 100% grant-funded. In academia, people with those usually have a title like Research Professor and they're expected to pay their own salary out of their grants! They have no teaching responsibilities, since the university isn't directly paying them anything. But imo this is a much more stressful arrangement since you don't have the regular university salary to fall back on. Some researchers at small companies are essentially like that, having to bring in a stream of SBIRs to keep themselves paid.
I don't think researchers' base employment necessarily has to go through universities, it's just ended up as the most common mechanism for researchers to get a stable salary. The Institute for Advanced Study [1] is an alternate model, funding researchers' salaries out of its nearly $1 billion endowment and a stream of donations and institution-level grants, without being attached to a university. Kind of like a "think tank", but for science. But institutions along that model currently (at least in the U.S.) employ a tiny number of researchers compared to either universities or industrial research labs.
> I'm not sure how to get hard data on what percentage of expenditures in a given department come from which sources, which would definitely be interesting.
Well, I picked UNC Chapel Hill as the example mostly because it's a public school and therefore (as far as I know) its budget is public information. Is that not true?
I'm perfectly happy to do the calculation in terms of "the chemistry department spend $X this year, and received $Y in grants, so their funding comes out of grants in a Y/X proportion".
> There are so-called "soft money" positions that really are 100% grant-funded. In academia, people with those usually have a title like Research Professor and they're expected to pay their own salary out of their grants!
I was aware of this (well, not that there was a title difference), but there is something I've been wondering about.
When salaries are part of the purpose of the grant, are they itemized in the grant? It obviously doesn't constitute corruption or embezzlement to help yourself to some of the grant money -- that's what a salary is. How much of it can you take?
> it's a public school and therefore (as far as I know) its budget is public information. Is that not true?
Public university budgets should generally be public information, but tbh I don't have any idea where I'd start looking for granular data, especially in an easy to process format.
> When salaries are part of the purpose of the grant, are they itemized in the grant? ... How much of it can you take?
Yeah, pay is itemized on grants. Despite being expected to bring in your own salary, there is still some kind of official pay grade you're at. How that's set when you're hired I don't have great insight into (I imagine it varies a lot). But after the initial hire generally pay raises work the same as with any other faculty (annual cost of living or merit increases, occasional promotions between ranks, etc.). The grant agencies all work in terms of "percent effort", where you say what percentage of your time you're going to spend on this grant, and the amount requested is that percentage times your annual salary, plus a percentage for benefits. People on soft money positions sometimes piece together support from multiple grants. So you might write a grant as PI asking for 75% support over 3 years, then on a different grant your colleague is writing, they ask for money to cover 25% of your time as co-PI over 3 years. Larger institutions might also have some internal money available to smooth over shortfalls. Also, some agencies have a salary cap (e.g. NIH's is $200k).
> The grant agencies all work in terms of "percent effort", where you say what percentage of your time you're going to spend on this grant, and the amount requested is that percentage times your annual salary, plus a percentage for benefits.
This seems like it would tend to promote collusion between researchers and universities, where whenever somebody is hired into a soft money position, they would prefer to have a high official salary, and the university doesn't care because the actual salary is $0. The granting agencies aren't a party to salary negotiations -- what's keeping salaries down? Say someone's job is to get grants from NIH. Why would they ever be salaried below $200k?
Your assessment is dead on. This is becoming more common in research related positions. For many years, I've "paid" almost the entirety of my salary in similar roles, I essentially pay a toll to an institution for its name, prestige, and connections as well as networking opportunities to support my continued employment.
The reason you don't set starting salaries too high is that for the business managing this (be it a university, private lab, etc.), although they essentially hire someone who makes money for them and pays their salaries through overhead costs that almost always exist (indirect costs), if you set the salary too high the role won't be able to reliably maintain itself, and therefor the indirect percentage you draw from incoming grants from that role becomes less stable. You could set a research associate for a fresh post doc at say $500k, but they'll probably never be able to pay themselves and therefor you because they won't be able to secure that. So you'll constantly be hiring for that position so it has to drop down to an amount that can be reliably filled and reliably bring in money.
From the institution's perspective, they want to get your comp rate as high as they possibly can to maintain their salaries but not to a point where it self sabotages their own position. The way these institutions maintain their administrative positions is to find these sweet spots and then diversify risk by hiring more and more researchers to pull in money for themselves and their own salaries. If several fail to pull in grants, admin is cushioned by the total number of grants (likely enough pulled in grants to provide enough indirect for admin). Take the additional pool and reinvest it in research so you get researchers to do even more free work for you. Some research orgs I've seen have incredibly high turn over rates (on the order of 1-2 years) and their model seems to be as long as they can keep a fresh batch of unsuspecting individuals in at high enough rates they can draw grants and indirect from to pay their salaries, it doesn't matter if that individual hired becomes resource pressured and burns out, there's a line of other qualified people more than happy to step in and naively fall into the same game. Rinse repeat.
Eventually it can tarnish the reputation of the organization itself where external money pools stop looking at the person receiving the grant but more at the organization of the person receiving the grant where they begin to lose faith that the organization can follow through on its employees promises. There seems to be enough turnover from funding agencies and the research orgs that do this themselves that institutional memory is short enough to keep the whole game going on. It's getting to a point at some organizations where people who pull in grants are joining the same gig as the research org and the idea is to act as a figurehead to the project where they then convince naive other lower level research positions to do most the legwork and pay themselves a portion of the total grant acting as another layer of administration. You'll see such grant recipients often as the recipient or lead on multiple grants they couldn't possibly be working on all of simultaneously. They play similar risk games to the research orgs that employ them in that if those they hire can't follow through, they may lose their own role.
It's quite a gig in some places, a bit of a pyramid scheme, really. This is why I've lost so much faith in research publications anymore, because the underbelly is pretty ugly. I've seen this at universities, private labs, even national labs and "think tanks." We really need to reevaluate and restructure how research is performed in the US.
Communication is a two-way street, if your questions are not being understood maybe you should put some effort into making them clearer.
Non-academic labs can't offer tenure because there's no tradition of it outside academia and by its very nature it only has value if an organisation can make a credible commitment to maintain for decades or centuries.
Labs that can dangle the carrot of a tenure-track position can pay much less than those that can't; workers overvalue it both because people generally overvalue potential prizes and because it's been gradually made rarer and pushed back further and further.
> Non-academic labs can't offer tenure because there's no tradition of it outside academia and by its very nature it only has value if an organisation can make a credible commitment to maintain for decades or centuries.
This would imply that it's impossible for non-academic institutions to offer pensions, too. Now, they are certainly moving in that direction, but it seems strange to argue that they can't.
It would imply that prospective workers don't put a lot of value on private companies' pension plans when weighing employment offers, which in my experience is true (employees do perhaps value governmental workers' pensions, because the government is the kind of stable organisation that can make multi-decade commitments). There's also a level of governmental support (high-profile bailouts and the like) of private pensions that lends credibility to pensions, whereas governments seem if anything anti-tenure.
> Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We probably don't need too many more physics professors but we sure could use more physics research. Or maybe better physics research. Either way, more/better physics discoveries.
It's the American system, frankly.
In Germany research institutes are frequently separated from universities.
I agree with everything you wrote and you said it better than I was going to. I just want to add that I actually see "lapsed physicist" as a good sign: in physics PHD grads, we have a lot of people who as part of their formation undertook a focused study on some area at the forefront of human knowledge. Only by doing a lot of these studies will be make real advances, because science is mostly finding things that dont work. And the byproduct is someone with "useful" skills in the sense that they can use them to easily transition to highly paid work, or what the author calls a lapse. Less often, one goes on to a research career, and less often still, one makes a big breakthrough. But overall, it's win-win. Not saying its perfect, but I think having a meaningful offramp after grad school is the best way to do more exploration and push the frontier of science. If you had to do a PHD and then risk complete unemployability after, the situation would be much worse
Alternately, we may be selecting or training those who would be successful through the wrong mechanisms. Those who choose to chase a numerically improbable outcome may not be the most likely to succeed. Tenure commitees weigh a variety of factors including research acumen, teaching ability, office and field politics etc.
Decades of a hypercompetitive market will eventually create entrenched power structures.
> the professions he lists are "lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum.
True, people with zero-sum, "I want more!" attitudes might very well self-select for the listed lines of work, perhaps because of the greater potential payoffs and arguably-weaker checks and balances there. But at the risk of sounding defensive, zero-sumness really does depend greatly on individuals' attitudes: Lawyers can be useful in the same sense that cars' transmissions and oil pumps are useful; MBA types are trained in planning and management, which, I dunno, have their uses; financiers can get people who have money to part with it voluntarily so that others can make use of it.
When I took a review course for the patent bar exam many years ago, Professor Irv Kayton told us forcefully that our job as patent attorneys was not to be scientists or engineers ourselves — we all had science- or engineering backgrounds — but instead to be the "noble servants" of those innovators in society.
In all fairness the legal <=> political feedback loop seems to act to make law less zero sum, by continually increasing the amount of law and regulation, hence an ever-growing pie of legal work.
And all cynicism aside, a growing economy might organically increase the need for lawyers.
> a growing economy might organically increase the need for lawyers.
I've long thought that; the need for lawyers grows non-linearly with population, because the need is correlated with the number of transactions, which would tend to increase (exponentially? factorially?) with population.
> the need for lawyers grows non-linearly with population, because the need is correlated with the number of transactions
This is a cultural artifact, not a cross-cultural truth. The historical norm is to use zero lawyers even for the largest-scale transactions. It's still the modern norm to use zero lawyers for small-scale transactions.
Or use fractional lawyers on one side. All that paper work, and how many use lawyer to check it? Or check when it is forcibly updated...
What should be asked do we have shortage of lawyers? From pricing point of view clearly no, they make more than minimum wage, but in general? Outside court-side is someone struggling to find one? Or are cases waiting cause we do not have them?
> It's still the modern norm to use zero lawyers for small-scale transactions.
It's great when that happens — and to make it work, there are a couple of conditions that need to be satisfied.
1. All parties to a transaction need to know "the protocol," or "the drill," that is, how to conduct themselves as the transaction proceeds. (Imagine a complicated, multi-person dance where people could crash into each other if they didn't know the steps — or knew the steps but chose not to follow them.)
Competent lawyers can provide the necessary knowledge, but they don't necessarily have to be the sole source of such knowledge: Various industries have developed standardized protocols for different categories of transaction. Examples: the Incoterms [0] and the ISDA Master Agreement [1], to name just two that come immediately to mind.
2. There's another reason parties use lawyers, and contracts, in their transactions: At bottom, companies are just people [2], and people can be perfidious; at some point The Other Side might choose to behave opportunistically. Contracts can help dissuade such behavior. For better or worse, lawyers are one of the principal groups who (might) know how to draft contracts to that end; good lawyers know how to do so without unduly getting in the way of the parties' business.
Consider Alice and Bob, who agree to a contract on behalf of their employers Alpha Corp. and Bravo LLC. Each might be a fine, trustworthy, cooperative individual. But they're human; at some point they might be tempted — or pressured by colleagues — to cheat, or to seek unfair advantage, especially if circumstances were to change. Moreover, one or both of their successors Allen and Betty might be less trustworthy. This means that Alpha and Bravo's contract must guard against opportunistic behavior by one or both of them. Lawyers (can) help to negotiate contracts with appropriate roadblock language.
Again lawyers aren't necessarily the sole source of the necessary knowledge; it just happens to have worked out that they're one of the main sources of it.
Also, lawyers can be useful targets of finger-pointing by business people if a transaction doesn't work out as desired. That can be another, usually-unstated reason why people hire lawyers: To offload at least some of the risk of failure.
[2] In the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney was pilloried for saying "corporations are people," but in one sense the criticism was unfair: If Romney had said "corporations are just people," his statement would have been far more defensible.
> MBA types are trained in planning and management, which, I dunno, have their uses
I'm assuming you didn't mean it this way (I guess it was an ironic comment), but planning and management are incredibly important.
The most important part to our scaling is how we organize ourselves. A top notch organizer allows a group of people to scale seamlessly. That's worth everything in the modern world.
Imagine thousands of brilliant minds, organized elegantly and efficiently to work together at maximum efficiency. It's rare because it's incredibly hard to achieve. But when it does happen, we get so much output, both creative and physical, that it's almost unbelievable. Think Bell Labs & co.
> I'm assuming you didn't mean it this way (I guess it was an ironic comment), but planning and management are incredibly important.
I was making a joke; I meant it exactly the way that you put it.
Human efforts can tend to go in different directions. Without foresight, planning, leadership, and communication — MBAs get at least some training in these skills — the individuals within organizations can end up mutually interfering with each other, even when they don't intend to do so. So yeah, MBAs "do have their uses" (another joke).
> The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum
I disagree with you. From the article, those very professions existing would be explained by Elite Underproduction. It is an example of the system optimizing for all surplus to be competed away. Thus we have created an Elite which include the science and study of competing where only so many resources and only so much status is available.
If you read his argument, it is that we create an "elite" whose role is not to advance the frontier of understanding and achievement, but instead to capitalize on the currently available resources and status.
I think the part that is a little bit of a stretch, is that he's redefining "elite", he seems to say that "elite" should be a status held by those who innovate our capabilities of understanding and producing for all. And then he says, if you take "elite" to mean that, you'll see that we do not produce a lot of those, therefore we are "underproducing elites".
That said, I think generally people think of "elites" more as the "aristocracy", a.k.a, those who have entrenched themselves with social capital and status. With that definition, you can say we produce too many "elites", as in, too many people who are trained in trying to acquire a big slice of the social capital and status, and because there is a limited pool of that, these people fail to acquire a big chunk of it as they all compete for that limited resource. Thus the theory of "Elite overproduction".
So you see, it really just depends how you define "Elite".
But the main point of OPs' article is valid, our system does not reward or invest enough in trying to push our understanding and capabilities in order to advance all of humanity. And because of that, if you have the qualifications to try and do so, you instead choose to capitalize on maximizing your slice of the existing wealth by going into Quants for example, because the system pays well to do that, but doesn't for true research.
> standard unit of scientific knowledge: "the peer-reviewed publication"
I think part of the problem with shown with the replication crisis, even though it's less in physics, points to an issue with that being the "standard unit" although. Science, like a lot of the world today, "waste enormous potential, mainly in the causes of legibility and standardization" as the author said. A lot of science busywork is subject to goodharts law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
> The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum.
I think Turchin percieves the matter better than the author.
For some reason the author presumes everyone who decides to to study physics should not veer from this path or else they have failed. This is an extraordinary queer point of view.
As such a "failed" physicist myself now in software, having a degree in physics makes me actually quite malleable for all sorts of fun things, and my studies have indoctrinated me to basically view everything as an unknows system, that can be modelled even though current models don't exist.
This is very usefull!
It's great to have this sort of dialogue, but the n physicists doing programming have found a niche for themselves and their talents. I would not call that failing.
The other side of the coin is that should science be better supported? Instill insight and ambition to students? None of those are bad things from the point of view of the discpline.
But attacking the argument from the point of view that "everyone who started studying physics, and are now doing something else signal a failure of the system" smells very much of propagating a view that people at the young age when they decide their university program should have a great understanding of the world, their position in it, and absolute certainty that physics is the best way to spend their working life. Which most 18-20 year olds probably don't have (well, I did not for one). And having thus chosen a profession out of poor understanding of the complete picture, should stick to their decision and pull through, even though it seems to them other professions would be more suitable.
The author mixes the bag even more by off-the-cuff random judgment calls on the intrinsic human value of others labour, which never really results in a sane dialogue. The claim itself is incredibly elitist - "Optimizing an algorithm at Google has less human value than repeating an known experiment at a physics lab to dot the i:s on a well understood theory".
Physics is very important! But individual career choices are in a different category altogether. If you go and study physics and stick to it you might have ended up wasting your intellectual potential on hyped dead-ends like string theory . Now where is the benefit for mankind in that? (the comment is intended as a naughty swipe and I'm smirking while typing this).
This seems to subscribe to the "bulb theory" of technological advancement; that if we have ten times as many physicists we will make physics advances ten times as quickly.
That's just not true. And the various "lapsed physicists" he meets are in fact proof of elite overproduction.
Offtopic, but the article uses and defines "MAGMA", meaning Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. That actually makes a lot of sense to me. How did Netflix make it into the usual acronym and not Microsoft?
Most of the frontiers our society explored and expanded in the last 80 years were borne from world war 1 and 2 technological advancements I'd argue, more so than true elites emerging (or those elites emerged due to WW2, e.g. Turing and Von Braun). If you agree with the author that we need these frontiers, then that's a scary thing for the future of civilization.
Nuclear bombs and rockets came out of WW2, but the revolutions of general relativity and quantum physics were being researched without any war to create them.
Im curious about one thing and im self-taugh so please forgive lack of understanding of uni world. Youre saying that physicist who do machine learning should be instead trying to unserstand physical world. While not having academic background i do read a lot of science news (its my porn:D) and now and then i see stuff like "new strong material discoveded by ml", "ml speeds up discovery of composite materials" or "ml speeds up new drugs discovery" and so on. How that does not improve our understanding of physical world?
Physics itself is about creating models of the world that are simple and understandable, and provide profound insights. ML is the opposite of that, a black box that works but cannot explain itself. A drug discovered by ML is not increasing our understanding of the world.
And IF we get to explainable models (i.e. https://aithority.com/machine-learning/neural-networks/deep-...) would that change its "usefulness" in physics world in your opinion? Not trying to fight or say that youre wrong. Just curious about perspective, im extremely detail oriented so i pick on them ^_^
it doesnt even need to be explainable. If a model comes up with an equation that reconciles quantum physics with gravity then we could try to reason how it came to it, but we don't need to. As long as the model described in the equation is understandable by humans it should be enough. However most ML models are black boxes that solve problems without generating models of the world (that we know of)
Physicists and mathematicians are uncomfortable with computer-generated proofs. I think they 'd be less uncomfortable with computer-generated theories because they can understand those
I don't think the author meant to imply that ML as a whole doesn't improve our understanding of the physical world. The point seems to be more that the kind of ML work done by a lot of people who have the qualifications necessary to expand the borders of our understanding of the physical world doesn't meaningfully contribute to our knowledge.
I think this guy has a point, but it's not actually a rebuttal to the elite overproduction thesis, it's more like "for this one angle of one piece of the elite overproduction issue we could actually do something."
There are lots more people with PHDs that get pushed out of the academic research career direction they might have aspired to. And if more of them could successfully follow their dreams it'd probably be good. But that doesn't seem like a rebuttal to me.
In our society, Elite Overproduction can be explained as a form of Malthusian social competition where only so many resources and only so much status is available, and the only way to access a satisfactory slice is to compete within the power structures that control them. In turn, our institutions evolve mainly to facilitate this competition rather than performing their ostensible material functions. In turn this causes resentment to grow among those who never had access to those institutions in the first place.
This situation is a consequence of Elite Underproduction. Our society is chronically bad at producing and nurturing true elites, the individuals who are capable of creating and sustaining frontiers. That makes malthusian competition inveitable, and the only thing going - the kinds of 'elites' we end up producing are good at that kind of competition and not much else.
Yes it’s important to have elites that go out and create new frontiers, but at the same time status in a hierarchical society is inherently zero-sum. We can’t all be high status, because there needs to be some reference point.
As an example in the world of law there are only so many spots available at Harvard Law School, even fewer spots for clerking with Supreme Court justices, and of course a very very small amount of actual Supreme Court justices.
What happens when someone loses the high-status tournament to become a Supreme Court justice? Ideally they find another tournament/status game to play, somewhere they can succeed. But even so, if we saturate our society with too many lawyers, there are simply not enough tournaments they can play in (that will also pay them enough to pay off their student loans).
>What happens when someone loses the high-status tournament to become a Supreme Court justice? Ideally they find another tournament/status game to play, somewhere they can succeed.
If someone reasonably bright orients their entire endeavor around the goal of becoming a Supreme Court Justice, they will be totally fine in life even if they fall well short of their goal. "Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you will land among the stars."
The problem we have is actually the opposite - too many people believe that no opportunity is available to them, thus they don't pursue anything, and end up stagnant or declining ("Aim for the ground... can't miss!")
Law is an interesting example, cuz it has so many points of the non-static nature of all of this.
The number of people on the SC changes. The relative status of being a fancy defense lawyer changes. We could in the future set term limits to court judges. there are appelate courts (which are pretty close to the top)!. We could pack the court! We could also make it so that being a lawyer isn't actually prestigious, as a society. We could also stop just choosing people from Harvard & Yale.
There are so many choices as a society about what is done, and how many people are or are not needed in certain roles, that the implicit premise in all of this (that the current state of things involve some static limits, _and_ that we have reached those limits right now, instead of 100 years ago or 100 years from now) doesn't stand.
Even if I agree that everybody in US elite political circles going through law school is extremely bizarre and bad, I don't think either argument presented in the article holds up.
My view is that the problem isn't "lapsed physicists". They are largely still productive and contributing elites. The problem is the "pseudo elite" masters of sociology graduate who ends up at starbucks with a ton of debt and a chip on their shoulder. The incentives are "college is good" without regard for the demand for the degree. While I agree that "college is good", it clearly isn't a good investment for everyone. Most current policy de-emphasizes other ways of learning like apprenticeships which may actually be well suited for technical things. It may be the better description is "pseudo elite overproduction" will cause social and political instability.
I think this is it, and matches my recall of the original theory. The sociology graduate working at Starbucks perceives himself elite ("much smarter than the Trump-voting plumber who didn't go to college") but in reality lives in poverty because there's a demand mismatch for his eliteness.
This kind of dynamic adds to instability because such people are downwardly mobile (poorer than their parents) and rather than recognizing the key error that sent their life down the wrong track (choice of major/not going to a trade school) they "plant the seeds" of discord by shouting loudly that the situation is hopeless and "the system" is to blame.
This is related to the modern version of academia, turned to a paper-making factory where mediocre professors toil away grant after grant waiting retirement. Still, young people will do a PhD just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes research-wise, even if they know that somewhere around middle life they'll switch to writing expensive software or overselling their skills to groups of developers. The problems are not well-defined. There is no grand scientific mountain to climb (despite the global narrative about climate crisis, photovoltaics and battery chemistry are not the sexiest of subjects). It does feel like science loses some of the mystery of previous generations and has become a lot more procedural. How do you motivate people to become mystics?
There are way too many examples to validate the elite overproduction theory. Just right now we don’t have enough skilled trade workers to execute on the infrastructure plan.
I don't share the same sentiment that we don't have enough talented workers. We just don't have enough workers who are willing to work minimum wage with a $0.5/hour raise year over year.
The article claims there is not enough trained skilled workers which might force the government to delay the execution of the plan and dedicate part of the budget to training people.
Trade jobs require a certain amount of training/experience and pay far above minimum wage. A plumber did a job for me a couple months ago and the guy made six figures a year easily, I asked him. Right now getting any remodeling done in the Bay Area is impossible because there is not enough contractors; availability times are three months in the future and often you get outbid for their time.
Doubling the salary wouldn't make more workers with 10 years of experience building bridges materialize out of thin air. It might help recruit entry level workers to the field.
Also, infrastructure construction jobs are not minimum wage.
The lack of skilled trades people is not a consequence of elite overproduction, it is a result of the collapse of the apprentice class. The combination of improvements in technology making low skill work easier and an expansion of bureaucracy that requires more certification for more complicated work have made it such that there is a wide gulf between unskilled and skilled labor in most industries. Where in the past people would gain experience on the job and their employers would get useful work out of entry level employees, now training represents a significant investment which is liable to be poached, and thus there is no training pipeline. To reach the skill level required to make good money at a trade, you need to be willing to invest large amounts of time and money into your own tools and training, and anyone who can afford to do that can afford to work in better conditions in other fields. This is short term thinking by corporations biting them in the butt, not some "millenials are too entitled to do real work" bs.
Started off interesting (RE institutions evolving into infrastructure for supporting zero-sum games), but then devolved into some hypotheses (stated as facts) about physicists moving to computer science and machine learning being a bad thing.
As a physics PhD turned coder I am not sure more physicists would mean more progress in most fields, particularly in fundamental physics and cosmology. In these places experimental results are just too hard to win. For instance, String Theory lumbers on without evidence to confirm or deny it.
There are a few areas where a little boundary crossing might make a difference (e.g. we got 30 years of bogus papers on universal power laws because no physicist ever talked to a statistician) but many areas have run into barriers that seem insurmountable (Chaos theory was stillborn, I think, because there was little reward for hard work cataloging phenomenology when Noether’s and KAMs conserved quantities ran out of steam.)
I can't really do any more justice to the topic than what's been said there.
I'll just note that 1999 is now the good old days when you'd only spend 10 years as a post doc. I left in 2011 and postdocs who had been there for 10 years are still post docs. Out of my class of 30 PhD's there's now no one left in Academia. The golden girl of the class who spend time in Antarctica, CERN and all the other places which take one in one thousand applicants is a data scientist at a bank as of last month.
It's sad how the protesting Egyptian students are asking for exactly the wrong thing. Large numbers of public sector jobs are the problem not the solution. If they can't manage such a basic analysis correctly then it indicates that their elite educations didn't teach them much of value.
In a lot of ways. This is due to the professionalization of the natural sciences.
We need to let amateurs be amateurs while still contributing meaningfully let. Let teachers teach professionally and let physicists in industrial applications do the same. Obviously most experimental physics costs money, but that doesn't mean that everything needs to be a status competition.
When there are a few slots, a lot of status up for grabs, and an entrenched elite, you get exactly what you describe. Far too few true elites, and a great deal too many trained to be "elites".
But the very nature of elites is that they rise despite these hurdles, or perhaps because of them.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadPersonally, I have no idea what the ratio is or a great way to go about fixing it. But hey, if some awareness of the issue helps, I'm all for it. Regardless of what you feel about Peter Thiel or Eric Weinstein, their discussion in the first episode of Eric Weinstein's podcast at least discusses the issue around "Elite Underprudction". In that episode, Eric brings a perspective from a more left-leaning viewpoint and Thiel with his signature more libterarian/right-leaning viewpoint.
So pretty far right and extremely (in the literal sense) libertarian.
EDIT: anachro->anarcho
This is an entirely parallel subject. The monopoly on violence (which is just a concept in the theory of state, not a uniquely libertarian concept) doesn't imply a hawkish foreign policy outlook. Put another way: the libertarian perspective (even the minarchist variants) don't entail the kind of aggression that Thiel publicly advocates.
Being a hawk on China (e.g., extolling the US MIC to take a more aggressive stance in territorial disputes and information warfare) is a very conservative, not libertarian, position.
Notwithstanding Thiel isn't and anarcho-capitalist, he seems in practice to be almost a neoconservative. He describes himself as a "conservative libertarian", but has wrapped himself up in the war state and the surveillance industry, both of which are HIGHLY at odds with any kind of libertarianism. Thiel is much more like Liz Cheney than say Ron Paul.
Are you sure about that? I mean, I believe they don't explicitly argue for it. But the ones I've come across seem to be practically in favor of the sort of wealth concentration and freedom of the rich to do as they please that they seem to be effectively in favor of strong social hierarchy.
In which case, it sounds like they're perfectly ok with authority and hierarchy as long as they see it as "fairly" achieved via amassing wealth in ways that they deem moral, yes?
I'd certainly agree that's a weakness, in that it really seems to undercut the "anarcho" portion.
I mean, anarchy is about removing the central state first and foremost. The economics bit is where these folks differ from the traditional anarchists.
Which I interpretted to mean something like Aristotelian philosopher-king style governance. A fairly obvious logical conclusion when one's starting assumption that people (the polis) are fundamentally stupid and corrupt. By the standards of the self annointed philosopher-king, of course.
In terms of funding, I don't think increasing the amount of funding is going to be more than a short-term fix. Seems to me that there's a lot of induced demand: Add more money and it's quickly gobbled up.
While I don't know all the details, it seems to me that we simply have far too many PhD students. I have a PhD, and I feel that a lot of well-intentioned people pushed me towards that before I was wise enough to understand the implications. The cynic in me thinks that some of them were more concerned with advancing their own careers than helping me out, as they need students to advance their careers.
Too much science funding goes towards PhD students in my view. We need to reduce the amount going towards PhD students and increase the amount going towards more permanent research positions. Yes, the total headcount for researchers likely would decrease as PhD students are cheaper than experienced researchers, but I think overall scientific productivity would improve as experience matters, and we'd stop disappointing people who want jobs in science before they waste too much time on it.
I wrote a bit about this earlier today, by coincidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29141107
Even beyond formal credentials scientific progress can primarily only be made by relatively fewer workers then ever holding their position or inching upstream against an increasing current flowing downstream.
I think what you will find is that the rewards for STEM creatives who are in position for their abilities to be leveraged by mass media, will always be greater than those without it.
Microsoft started selling CD's as fast as Michael Jackson but for 10X the price.
DOS had already been pulling people away from natural science since the '80's.
Apple mass-marketed pop music to sell hardware.
Google started as an anti-advertising utility but reversed stance to convert a huge user base into a mass market.
Amazon was all about a mass market to begin with.
Facebook is what the National Enquirer would be like if they had gotten the idea to scale an internet concept and had that kind of capital to strategically deploy earlier.
Mass media has such a major component consisting of fiction this is an attraction plain natural science does not possess. Scientific research has such a focus on pure reality that mainstream interest just can not be maintained continuously, as so much relatively unexciting time must pass before progress finally pushes one little bit of reality to actually become better than fiction.
But that's where it starts to get good.
You get more of what you reward and less of what you don't. It's not always a pleasant truth, but it's a powerful one.
You can see this exemplified in the fact that, even as we are mocking people for not going to college, we are lowering academic standards and getting rid of gifted programs: https://www.teachforamerica.org/one-day/opinion/stop-elimina.... It’s magical thinking on all sides.
I agree that I don't like the direction we're headed, but hopefully the natural consequences of that direction will encourage people to revisit their ideological assumptions.
I'm not convinced that the rise of China will be so bad. Boomers and neocons want us to think so, but their "arguments" are mostly just paranoia and sentimentality.
this is what's going to happen to the US, but on much larger scale and worse consequences
You're not convinced that going from "living in the most economically dominant and militarily powerful country in the world" to "not" is going to somehow not be a painful experience?
You can use the "I am not convinced" line for anything. "I am not convinced that being homeless is worse than living in a nice house" but... ok, what would convince you?
Maybe it's good that other groups of people besides Americans and Europeans can make leading contributions to economic growth, science and technology.
Maybe America's dominance is mainly good for the rich and those who like to invade countries on a whim. I don't care about either of those groups.
When UK Parliament wanted Zuk to answer some tough question about his company facilitating electoral fraud, he simply refused to show up. Even first world nations struggle in dealing with American corporation, which often act as if they are above the law.
God forbid you are a developing nation. British American Tabacco has taken poor developing nations to court for trying to ban children from smoking (!!) and got compenation and the law repealed
https://youtu.be/6UsHHOCH4q8
I am not even mentioning illegal stuff: bribes, threats, drone strikes, strong-arming, etc.
Even the EU was strong armed when it comes to GPS:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/dec/08/world.internation...
Those that think that American economic advantage was won in a 'fair game' are super naive
Since you seem to be a fan of intellectual rigor, can you describe the process by which you arrive at the relative worth of (apparently) social science programs vs. small town social behavior?
Can that method also tell us whether citrus flavors are more valuable than ballet?
Culture, meanwhile, is the organically developed heuristics and norms of communities.
You can measure the relative worth of these things by looking at the functioning of society on various metrics. Unlike say civil engineers, practitioners of *studies and social sciences have demonstrated little ability to come into a community and make live measurably better for everyone. Arguably, as traditional social norms have been eroded, many communities are less healthy than ever—much more so than you’d expect looking at just the economic numbers. Millennials as a generation are the richest ever, yet seem profoundly unhappy and unsatisfied.
That's plain wrong, they have less disposable income and lower net worth than the two generations before them had at the same stage in their life.
Just because stock market grew doesn't mean life of an average Joe improved.
This stuff is complicated so make sure you’re comparing like with like. Even the chart above ignored one critical adjustment: in 1970 just 5% of the population was foreign born, while today its 15%. Millennials are much more likely today to be recent economic migrants, or the children of them, than boomers. That drags the numbers down, but doesn’t imply anything negative about millennials’ economic status. Indeed, those immigrants are experiencing upward economic mobility, and are seeing themselves that way. The dour attitude among millennials seems to be mainly on the native born, who really are doing as well or better than their parents.
At least, they’re doing better economically. Thanks to social changes, they have less agency than their parents did. They have few opportunities to garner authority and respect in their communities. They’re not building families and getting the hope that comes from nurturing the next generation. They have many reasons to be dour. Their parents failed them!
The *studies fields are rather small proportion of students. They also cluster mostly in top universities. It is just not true that they would dominated universities.
That one is just paranoia and blaming what you hate anyway.
Your comment is kind of meaningless drivel with abstruse language.
Edit: your account has already been repeatedly posting comments that either break the site guidelines or are on the edge. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you look at top public school undergrad programs that don't practice affirmative action (UC's, UW) the programs are almost 50% Asian.
To be clear, when I say American I mean someone whose ancestors have lived in America for multiple generations, since at least the 1950's. I'm the child of immigrants and I don't consider myself an American. My culture places a distinctly different emphasis on educational achievement compared to what you might consider an American.
I am a “native born” American, and I’ve benefited a lot from having a whole bunch of extremely smart immigrants in my field. My physics graduate school mentor was from Ukraine, my advisor was an immigrant from China. The person who hired me out of graduate school to an aerospace/materials science job was an immigrant from the Philippines. Several of the coworkers who have best coached and mentored me were immigrants from Zimbabwe and Korea. Generally more helpful and kind to me than native-born coworkers. It is as positive sum as it gets.
(although I don’t think it lasts very long past first or second generation immigrants. It’s more individual choice and family culture than anything. So the only way to keep the benefit of cherrypicking & equipping the most ambitious and brightest among the world is to continuously encourage high skilled immigration.)
In a land where money buys everything, you think culture is the reason why a thing exists or doesn't exist? I think you're drinking too much of your own ideological kool aid.
High paying tech companies want to pay less, so they recruit internationally to not be so high paying. Along the same lines, American kids with the access to generational wealth to do whatever they want find it more lucrative to choose some other more localized field of work that doesn't compete with indentured servitude (H1s) for wages.
Obviously FAANG (and most companies) want to pay as little as possible for their labour. They don't pay $500,000 for senior engineers because of their innate generosity and desire to pay them well. They pay that much because they have to if they want to attract and retain the employees they are looking for.
That's the basic premise of markets.
Conversely, they are posting huge profits, why don't they pat even more?
False.
> they're in high demand and switch jobs for better pay constantly.
And each time they do so, their new employer has to go through the entire process of getting them a new H1 visa. When your right to be in a place is dependent upon your labor to a specific contracted employer, you are an indentured servant.
this is not true, saying this as a person on h1 who changed jobs easily.
when talking about indentured servants you are probably referring to small Indian IT bodyshops, that keep people on low wages due to them being on a very long green card queue, but this has nothing to do with H1 per se. These people do not work in big tech
Or perhaps awful schools
This isn’t the case with citizens who have much more freedom and mobility.
There are schools in every country.
There are not FAANG headquarters in every country.
The top candidates from around the world (who are willing to relocate) will emigrate to whatever country has the highest paying jobs. That happens to be FAANG companies in the United States right now.
So of course FAANG jobs will not mirror the population of schools. It will mirror the population of educated engineers who are able and willing to relocate (especially pre-COVID before remote was an option)
Trying to draw parallels between FAANG employment and American schools in this fashion is nonsensical.
This view is only correct if a) the US border is completely open and b) all the candidates around the world can speak professional English. We know that both the above conditions are false.
An average student who finished 5th grade in an average school in USSR could start 6th grade in the U.S. and coast along on what they'd learned until the first year of high school.
That's why, when looking at resumes, I've heard "Yeah, you know X is good, he went to Y (a school with affirmative action) and he's Asian/International, so you know he's there on merit".
I somehow feel we regressed over time.
it is hilarious how historical racism towards blacks leads to reverse racism (affirmative action) and leads to another racisms.
it's like you can't fix racism issues by instituting even more racism, it will only lead to more and more racism.
I hear often that Black employees are often looked down upon, because of the AC in hiring and education (the bar is extremely low for them). I think that Affirmative Action was created to reinforce stereotypes and racism, after the Civil Rights Movement
I don't think you can draw a cultural difference from this. I get what you're trying to say, particularly by narrowly defining "American"; that cultural influences put pressure/status on academics both by immigrant parents and non-American parents and that pressure causes students to excel academically and achieve these high paying positions. But there is so much selection bias here; both in the types of people who immigrate to a new country and those who leave their home country to attend school abroad. It's not clear to me Asian culture results in FAANG being disproportionally Asian, or simply that there are 2 billion Asian people in the world, and while the same percentage of people are sufficiently qualified as top American students (let's say 2%), 2% of 2 billion people is 40M people! Do you see the problem with jumping to this conclusion? You don't have sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis, that both cultures produce tops students at similar percentages.
A personal anecdote: I spend a lot of my interviewing candidates. Students for all the top schools in the world, international students and domestic students, undergrads and PhDs. Conditioned on having gone to a top university, I've never noticed a difference in performances between domestic students and international ones. (Or undergrad vs PhD to be honest.)
I also take a bit of issue with your definition of "American" on a personal level.
> To be clear, when I say American I mean someone whose ancestors have lived in America for multiple generations, since at least the 1950's.
My parents are immigrants, I'm a first generation American. But I am absolutely culturally American. There is no other country were I would feel at home culturally, and I've been heavily influenced by the country I grew up in. I'm also the product of US public schools, most notably UC Berkeley, which you cite. And I'm not Asian or Russian. And I do work at a FAANG level firm.
When you hire the world, your demographics are going to represent the world for the most part. There are a few modifications as to why latin america, africa and developed nation people are not as well represented, but it still holds.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/computer-science-salary-S...
https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Co...
https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Master_of_Scienc...
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
Also most of the generic pay sites in my experience are down weighted by a bunch of underpaid visa workers, boot camp graduates and so on. Also government workers who don't get paid well but get great benefits.
A CS degree from Stanford almost has to start at at least 90k.
> Makes a technical PhD a lot less tempting
If it's as rare as you are saying, then it wouldn't factor into the broader reasoning of people debating to get PhDs at all. That's my point. I wasn't making any point that it isn't possible to make $200k/year out of undergrad.
edit: Also, $400k is about standard for a senior SE at a large tech company or late stage startup nowadays.
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
If your not from a top school , maybe you have to work in startups or lesser tier companies for $50k less for a year or two, and then go work at MAGMA at the same pay as your stanford equivalent peer.
Searching “computer science” in the jobs tab treats that as a keyword and shows results for a variety of job titles related to computer science. The salaries tab, however, seems to indicate it’s only collecting information about job titles that have “computer science” in the title.
www.levels.fyi
Getting a job at Google, isn't exactly easy. But it is a far cry from "as hard as winning the lotto" that other people were implying it is.
It has nothing to do with elementary or high schools performance. Those produce capable kids enough. It has to do with decisions and priorities those people have as young adults. And they are not even making bad decisions, for them not doing PhD is rational choice.
I now PhDs that became High School teachers and they were some of the most gifted. I know PhDs that wait tables to make ends meet.
I think if the guy has fundamentally not understood what Peter Turchin was talking about. They are getting priced out of the housing market, won't ever be able to afford to buy a house. Even raising a family might be difficult. At the same time you pay for services for the boomers and a retirement and social security that yourself might never see.
Edit: This works for most of CS, but not for most of Physics, I assume.
Historically, i tried to get software dev jobs that maximized my free time to do whatever i what on the side (also helped that i've been working remotely for ~6 years).
Does anyone know a good resource rich details the change in job demographics over time for different nations? (Possibly just my google fu escapes me today)
Citation needed.
Moreover, dedicating resources to finance can be seen as dedicating resources to better dedicate resources.
(I upvoted the article since it's interesting stuff)
I asserted that using money as a mechanism for gradient ascent is not working. I will walk you through my thinking, since this is an off beat claim.
1) Not all human needs are related to resources. Money cannot buy dignity, or love, and in-fact can generate the opposite of these qualities in one's life.
2) Most 1st World Humans have everything they need, materially, and more
3) Suicide is the ultimate statement of 'I am not having a good time'
4) Wealth is not hugely overwhelmingly correlated with lower suicide rates, with some of the wealthiest countries clocking in the highest rates of suicide. Source: List of countries by suicide rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r... (Sort by all descending)
5) I believe some other element or spirit is being maximized in happy countries, which also leads to wealth.
6) We should try to maximize a certain social spirit, which then maximizes wealth, instead of trying to directly maximize wealth.
7) GDP is a strange metric, which doesn't directly map to abundance. Yet, socially, we try to maximize it. I think this metric is victim to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Thoughts?
but what other metric are you going to use?
not an anti-communist, but so far central planning has shown itself to be equally ripe for corruption.
I believe that balancing our minds and our heart's influence on our decision is how we should proceed.
> Thoughts?
My thought is please don't do this. You get no useful information. Wikipedia strips out all the necessary context. The source that Wikipedia uses explicitly tells you that comparing rates across countries is difficult and fraught with problems.
Heck, comparing rates across a single country - the US - is tricky because they've only just developed a unified definition of "suicide".
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/suicide
> Globally, the availability and quality of data on suicide and suicide attempts is poor. Only some 80 Member States have good-quality vital registration data that can be used directly to estimate suicide rates. This problem of poor-quality mortality data is not unique to suicide, but given the sensitivity of suicide – and the illegality of suicidal behaviour in some countries – it is likely that under-reporting and misclassification are greater problems for suicide than for most other causes of death.
Insofar as wealth makes life less nasty and brutish it probably makes life more loving but money buys a lot of dignity.
I assert that around the 1990s money started to disconnect with utility generation. Instead of the work week reducing in hours, with the advent of telecommunication, we start getting always-on-call jobs, yet people are paid basically the same. Productivity goes parabolic; median wages stay the same. You have to admit that there is something fishy about this, right? I think we basically have found a method to optimize towards a local maximum in productivity, but we are missing the strategies which lead us to a global maximum. And I think this method of optimization towards the maximum is basically serfdom.
The Economist once commented that the last subatomic particle to have commercial value was the neutron, discovered in 1932.
i worked on DARPA contracts for quite a number of years...they were...ok? but you still had to spend some energy talking about how this was going to benefit the warfighter or lead to something that was going to make someone alot of money
NIH and NSF are certainly better, but my impression is that you still get alot of points in NSF land for showing a path towards commericialization
As a guy with a physics degree who's doing machine learning (precisely what the author bemoans), I don't feel like I "lapsed". I have other interests besides physics. There's a lot of things that aren't physics.
> What they're not doing is advancing the human understanding of the physical world.
I don't owe you anything. If this is your dream than do it yourself.
You want your brightest in society to do things that further society/humanity as a whole; playing the stock-market game or optimizing models to further consumerism (which is what most ML in the industry boils down to, let's be honest) isn't exactly doing that.
Everyone's absolutely free to work on whatever they want, that's for sure. But from a society point of view, we should ask ourselves if our system sets the right incentives.
It definitely is a social issue, the main reason people make that switch is money and money is a social issue. Why would you make less money doing physics research than helping advertisers better manipulate people? There is no reason, currently society rewards the later more than the former, but in another society it could be the other way around.
So the problem isn't if you as an individual choose to switch field since you'd like that field better, but all those who switched since that field pays better. That is the social issue.
Researchers are building branches in the forest of knowledge, but to do it they have to bend to the will of an academic apparatus that is made to be self serving and zero sum in the hands of few who may or may not be worthy of the trust placed in them. There is also plenty of fraud and cheating globally among academic contributors. It’s almost like we need an HN for each branch or academic work, so anyone can contribute and see what’s novel, and the feedback is from vetted experts only, but that would put an undue burden on the experts and reduce their own productivity. There is room for an open collaborative solution somewhere, but it needs a lot of iteration to get it right.
The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum. So to me the article really is "I agree with the elite overproduction thesis, I just don't think it applies to physics".
OK lets talk about that then.
If there is something that's gone wrong with pushing forward the boundaries of our knowledge it isn't a lack of bodies producing the standard unit of scientific knowledge: "the peer-reviewed publication". These have grown exponentially. I don't think I've seen anyone even argue the rate of knowledge increase is growing commensurately. It *might* be the case that new knowledge requires exponentially more people looking for it but that's a pretty different article. Personally, I'm skeptical more NSF funding would help.
I do agree with this part:
But this research is in a academic setting, and there is definitely, unambiguously, an overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available. Letting more new students in the door wouldn't help anyone!Good argument for making more undergrad physics students but stopping the emphasis on graduate degrees.
Graduate degrees: 7 years of your young life focusing on a very specific topic that might be better spent applying the really useful physics undergraduate education in industry (or perhaps adding a couple more years in engineering graduate school beforehand).
Not to say that graduate school has no function. But The cost benefit is not nearly as clear as the education you get in undergrad.
Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We probably don't need too many more physics professors but we sure could use more physics research. Or maybe better physics research. Either way, more/better physics discoveries.
That said, our scientific communication channels seem filled to the brink. So maybe we need more efficient scientific communication before we can make good use of more researchers.
Things like the microchip, wifi, rocketry, satellites, jet engines, etc.
If the answer is "none of it" that tends to suggest underproduction.
It feels like right now most areas of academia are consuming far more resources than their useful output could really justify, which is perhaps why in so many fields it's so heavily dependent on government funding (vs say computer science where academic/corporate lab collaborations are quite common).
The purpose of scientific advancement cannot be understood on the timetables of capitalistic utility.
There may be a finite amount of works on physics that we can do, or technological niches that we can exploit thanks to discoveries in physics or any relevant field of knowledge.
The well of discoveries isn't running dry today, but it may in future generations.
We have zero idea how gravity works, how to predict the properties of vast stretches of new materials, if the island of stability is real, what the limits to know propulsion technologies are, what the limits to know fusion technologies are, et cetera. And I’m not even getting to batteries or biology or hosts of related fields.
Remember that from the first public microwave demonstrations in 01895 by Bose to the first deployments (as radar in the 01940s) took 45 years; the Amana Radarange brought microwaves into people's homes in 01967, another 27 years later; and microwave ovens didn't really go mainstream until about 01990, another 23 years after that, 95 years after Bose's first public demonstrations. The LASER was first built in 01960 (following numerous physics advances starting in 01917) but the first mass-market laser product was the CD player, introduced in 01982 and surpassing vinyl records in sales for the first time in 01988, 28 years after Maiman's first LASER.
If anything, the time gap seems to be shortening, but the place to look for "discoveries that change people's lives" is not in basic physics research of today but basic and applied physics of a few decades ago turning into common practice more recently. And in that case there are a lot of examples, especially if we go further afield from just physics discoveries:
- modern LED lighting comes from the physics discovery of how to make stable blue LEDs (though, for reasons of market failure, most LED lights still last only 3000 hours instead of 30,000);
- modern cellphones, computers, GPS, broadband, and in particular broadband wi-fi come from numerous physics discoveries that have enabled chip feature sizes to continue reducing over the last 20 years;
- optoelectronics advances are largely a question of physics, and without even counting blue LEDs, better optoelectronics have over the last 20 years dramatically improved TV screens, computer monitors, cellphone screens, fiber-optic communication, Blu-Ray data storage, and LIDAR for, e.g., self-driving cars;
- the mRNA vaccine for covid, while a biological discovery rather than a physics discovery, was designed within a few day after the genome was published, and seems to have both higher efficacy and less side effects than previous kinds of vaccines (though unfortunately for political reasons it wasn't rolled out for another 9 months, during which tens of millions of people died);
- lithium-ion batteries have gone mainstream, enabling a transition to electric cars and wireless power tools;
- better power electronics, resulting from solid-state physics research, have made induction stoves widespread;
- modern solar panels cost a tenth of what they did a decade ago, in significant part due to physics discoveries over the past 20 years, now account for the majority of new power generation capacity being built, and will probably dramatically drop the cost of energy by 02030;
- due to chemistry discoveries, Spectra/Dyneema fishing line is cheap, strong enough to make bulletproof vests, in fact as strong as the strongest steel, and floats on water;
- superhydrophobic coatings, a physics discovery, are going mainstream now.
Radar, microwaves, transistors, and nuclear physics (which you strangely forgot to mention, even though it's fundamental to modern oncology, and produces a significant part of the electrical power in many countries) resulted from WWII. We've had an atypically low level of great-power wars over the last 75 years, which has been great, but it wouldn't be surprising to have another great-power war in the next decade. If that happens, maybe the survivors will be reduced to sticks and stones, but if not, you can bet that they will have spent a lot on physics research.
The total death toll has just passed 5 million.
One of the reasons we had such an explosion of new theoretical physics in the first half of the 20th century (which gave birth to all the practical discoveries you mentioned) is that, in 1900, there was just so much unexplained weird shit.
Shit like:
1. How do you predict the energy of electrons produced by shining light on a surface? And why does light cause electrons to be produced?
2. Why is the speed of light the same in every direction, to really, really high precision?
3. Why are there spectral bands in the light from stars? And why are they sometimes shifted?
4. Why can current pass only one way through a metal pin poking a semi-insulator?
5. Why does pollen appear to move randomly in the sunlight in still air?
6. Why the fuck is the sky blue? Why does light sometimes act like a way, but sometimes like a particle?
Remember, a lot of this weird shit went unexplained for 25-50-100 years. Then, between 1900 and 1950, smart people came up with theories that explained all the weird shit. So we don't really have so much weird shit anymore because most of it has been explained. Sure, super-conductors are kinda weird, but we also seem to be able to predict a lot of their properties from existing theory.
So, we're really just riding the coat-tails of scientists from 100 years ago. People 100 years from now aren't going to have coat tails to ride.
There's a lot of unexplained weird shit today, too, including the arrow of time, turbulence, dark matter, dark energy, "tuning" of physical constants, solar flares, extreme-energy cosmic rays, ball lightning, the unresolved inconsistency between quantum mechanics and special relativity, structures up to the edge of greatness like the Sloan Wall, the bizarrely low-entropy state the universe began in, and consciousness. Short gamma-ray bursts were finally explained in 02017 thanks to LIGO. (The explanation had been hypothesized previously, but Lucretius correctly hypothesized the explanation for Brownian motion, too, 2080 years ago.) You may be interested in my longer overview in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144119.
Your list of 6 weird turds unexplained in 01900 is mostly correct, except that #6 was correctly explained by Rayleigh in terms of Maxwellian electrodynamics in 01881, and Fizeau correctly explained the redshift of stellar spectra in terms of the Doppler effect in 01848, though of course not the spectra themselves. We could add, "Why is the Andromeda Nebula's spectrum so smeared out?" (leading to the Shapley-Curtis Great Debate in 01920), "How can the Earth be older than the Sun?", and "What powers Becquerel's uranium rays?"
The quote from Kelvin in this thread turns out to be incorrect (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Thomson#Misattributed https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/physics/lord-kelvin-...) but Albert Michelson did make just such a claim in 01894:
While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.
The curious thing is that Michelson in 01894 already knew about at least four of your five weird pieces of shit (the Schottky diode had been discovered but was not yet well known), as well as numerous others. In fact, he was personally responsible for discovering #2 in 01887.
So how could even Michelson make such a grievous error, the same error you're making now?
Well, I guess he underestimated the importance of the pieces of shit that were unexplained.
However, I think that error is less understandable today, though, since among the things we know we know virtually nothing about are the nature of 95% of the mass in the universe and the bulk dynamics of plasma, the state of matter in which we see 99% of the remaining 5%.
There's still the question of whose coattails we'll be riding in 100 years, assuming we somehow manage to survive. The Nobel Prize is imperfect and backward-looking by nature, but it suggests Ghez and Gensel for discovering Sagittarius A*, Penrose for black hole robustness, Mayor and Queloz for discovering exoplanets, Peebles for physical cosmology stuff including dark matter, Mourou and Strickland for petawatt lase...
Just as there are true limits to for example pursuing economic growth from burning finite cheap fossil fuels, "growth" in the forms that pertain to the issue at hand... economic, cheap energy consumption, scientific discoveries, human cognitive ability to solve problems..these can all certainly bump up against at least short term limits, and the issue of cost matters greatly in a given time period because even bringing to bear the actual resource we have to develop new science and technology suffers from crowding out if economic "growth" is constrained because of diminishing cheap energy.
This shouldn't be surprising if one conceives of what consistent and steady compound growth even at small rates results in after a relatively short period of time. Inevitable that limits in many inter related areas will be reached...and either a collapse occurs or a long period of low or negative growth happens with all the sort of conflict that entails (competition within scarcity).
The fulcrum of disagreement is the power of paradigm shifts. Paradigm shifts change how existing knowledge is interpreted, even by a feeble mind. These are, from what we can tell, randomly distributed. There is no indication that we are running out of them. If anything, their rate of discovery is increasing.
Since paradigm shifts are about prospective, not knowledge, there is no reason to believe they are limited. If anything, our growing knowledge base implies the next shifts will be more powerful than the prior ones.
1. Maybe we'll find a fourth fundamental force that we just haven't noticed yet. This sounds stupid until you realize that we hadn't noticed Archaea until 01977 or dark matter (85% of matter in the universe) until 01980 (though the phrase is from the 01930s), and we still know almost nothing about the behavior of dark energy, the existence of which wasn't known until 01992.
2. Maybe we'll find a way to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics ("quantum gravity").
3. Maybe quantum computers won't work, demonstrating a flaw in the assumptions of quantum theory in the same way that the Michelson-Morley failure to detect an ether wind demonstrated the flaw in the assumptions of Newtonian physics that Einstein resolved with special relativity. More likely, they will work, and this will change a lot of things; their computational power is still poorly understood. They were originally proposed (by Feynman) as an engine for simulating quantum physics.
4. Maybe dark matter and dark energy don't involve a fourth fundamental force like the strong force, gravity, or the electroweak force, but we still know almost nothing about how they behave. So almost everything about them is unknown. Can we use them for communication, propulsion, computation, energy sources, mass sources, etc.?
5. General relativity hasn't been shown to conserve energy or (equivalently) momentum. Does that mean reactionless drives and perpetual-motion machines are possible, or (more likely) that there's a more subtle symmetry to GR that hasn't yet been discovered?
6. Where does consciousness come from? It's the most perceptually salient phenomenon in the entire universe, but we don't have any convincing account of what it is.
7. We know very little about plasma dynamics. We don't know how to make a usable plasmoid gun, we don't know how ball lightning works (or even if it belongs in this item), and although we know they're a magnetohydrodynamic phenomenon, we don't know how solar prominences are formed, and similarly for solar flares, which accelerate some particles to GeV speeds by means we don't understand at all. We don't know why the solar cycle happens. Coronal waves weren't discovered until 01995. We don't know how to stabilize fusion plasma in a tokamak. We don't know if there are significant magnetohydrodynamic phenomena at scales larger than a star, much less larger than a galaxy. We don't know what heats the corona. This is important because a large majority of the matter in the universe is plasma, and our understanding of it is mostly just empirical, like stamp collecting. We're used to thinking of plasma as an undifferentiated homogeneous continuum like a well-mixed liquid, where nothing interesting happens, quite unlike all our complicated organic molecules (which can't survive in it), but obviously from looking at the sun that isn't the case; we really have no idea about the possible complexities. Is this where the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall comes from? Perhaps more excitingly, if MHD makes stable structures possible in large-scale plasma systems (as it evidently does in the sun), are there analogous phenomena that can occur in a quark-gluon plasma?
8. Forget about magnetohydrodynamics for a moment. We don't even understand regular hydrodynamics. Ta...
Well, I guess we could hit a local minima where we need some out-of-this-world resources or research to level up, but let's not be so pessimistic so soon. We've only been doing this modern research thing for a few centuries. You could go back 4-5 generations in an especially long lived family and you'd find someone in the family tree that was still alive before the modern scientific method was created.
Now, I'm not personally likely to discover any new physics, but I'm a physicist, and my bag is precision measurement. And it's a blast. It involves not only physics but also often optics, electronics, mechanics, math, and programming. It's recognized as a branch of physics, and is intensely experiment driven. Among the small handful of people who are crazy enough to be interested in all of those things at once, most are physicists.
Precision measurements are also an area where physics discoveries tend to escape the lab and end up in practical use. When a new effect is announced, I always wonder to myself: "When will they turn that effect into a sensor?" I can think of all kinds of measurements that benefit people, including GPS, atomic clocks, and blood oxygen sensors, that are practically all over the place.
Fields do have dry periods where for whatever reason, making progress is hard. Most famously AI had its "AI winter" for decades. We know now that there were new discoveries waiting to be made there but they required technology and datasets that simply didn't exist at the time. The last decade of AI progress has depended utterly on the growth of the public internet and then fast GPUs for processing that data. No matter how much funding the government had given symbolic AI in the 80s and 90s it'd have got nowhere. At least not on the use cases people seem to care about.
I find canned answers to this question increasingly tiresome. Academia and government funded research operates on a massive scale. It's unacceptable to me, as one of the people who actually pays for all this, that researchers entirely opt themselves out of any questions of utility or accountability. Fundamental physics in particular should take a good hard look at itself as it's both very expensive and in recent years, delivered very little. Consider string theory. It's been developed since the 1970s. 50 years now and for what? As far as I know this has delivered nothing concrete.
This isn't unique to physics, that's just an example. Epidemiology went down the statistical modelling rabbit hole 20 years ago and never emerged: I've yet to encounter a non-misleading claim coming from this field. If the entire field had been defunded 20 years ago we'd have a much healthier and saner world.
It's also not true that simply labelling something research means it'll one day be useful. Phrenology was once considered to be research. Critical race theory is labelled research. I think we can safely say these fields will never be useful and in fact have had sharply negative utility.
But my favorite example of how research flows into a better world is the Sagnac effect. In 1913, French Physicist Georges Sagnac built a circular interferomter and found interference bands. He thought that this disproved Relativity and showed that an aether existed, but it turned out that German Physicist Max von Laue had predicted the existence of those interference bands under relativity two years earlier, so 10 points for Einstein.
For the next 50 years Sagnac interferometery was a dead end, a minor curiosity in the history of physics. Then in 1963, Macek and Davis at the Sperry Gyroscope Co. figured out how to build this in a laboratory environment with the recently invented lasers. The coherent beam of a laser unlocked the usefulness of the Sagnac effect. Meaning that just another 30-odd years of work by hundreds of people around the world got to a situation where ring-laser and fiber-optic gyros are superior to mechanical gyroscopes and capable of things that mechanical gyros could never do.
So, the Sagnac effect itself was worth nothing, and for a long time afterwards was just something that a few scientists even knew about. But a century later the world depends on it.
Physics is done using the true scientific method. First you make a theory, then you make experiments to test the theory. Theoretical physicists made a theory and proposed some possible experiments to test it. Then 50 years later data was found in those experiments to match the theory. What we lack today to further physics isn't experiments, we lack theories that are well formed enough that we can perform experiments to test them.
Edit: The problem with physics today is exactly like back then, we have no predictions to test. If someone comes up with a new theory that joins quantum physics with gravity in a way that is consistent with all past experiments, then we can test that. But there is no such theory today, nobody has figured out a way that the domains can work together.
But, aside from these big problems, many smaller problems are susceptible to experimental investigation. You may not create an Einstein-style paradigm shift by detecting CNO-fusion neutrinos from the sun, observing Higgs decay, improving quantum-dot solar cells, fabricating nanotube rope whose strength approaches that of a single nanotube, understanding the lubricity of BAM well enough to design more similar materials, deriving useful energy from the fission of lithium, making a metamaterial with a higher Young's modulus than diamond with negative-elasticity inclusions, constructing logic gates out of fluid vortices, building a usable hypersonic plasmoid pistol (one that doesn't require explosive flux compression pumping!), building transistors that function at 800 degrees, finding a SHS route to cubic boron nitride, making a 50-tesla magnetic field in the lab, finding a way to construct quantum-dot solar panels that's cheap and scalable enough to undercut poly-Si, confining a particle of gold in a stable minimum of the Casimir potential, or finding a way to fabricate high-quality optics apparatus rapidly out of aluminum foil; but the obstacles to these problems are (or were) mostly not that we don't have any useful hypotheses to test.
Actually, Kepler came before Newton. Kepler's laws of planetary motion were derived from observations of others. They also follow straightforwardly from Newton's laws of motion. In particular, Kepler's second law is equivalent to conservation of angular momentum. Kepler's third law is equivalent to "Newton's universal gravitation + conservation of angular momentum". And Kepler's first is a consequence of Newtonian kinematics. That is to say, Newton generalized Kepler's laws.
The order is:
1. Astronomical observations (Brahe et. al.) 2. Kepler's laws 3. Newton's laws + universal gravitation.
Similarly with Einstein: His theoretical treatment of Brownian motion was based on observations by... Robert Brown half a century ealier. The photoelectric effect (for which Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize) was an extension of theoretical work by Plank, who started theorizing to explain observations made by Hertz.
Special Relativity resolved a conflict between E&M and Mechanics, but it was really needed to explain why the Michelson-Morley experiment couldn't find a difference in the speed of light, despite increasingly-sophisticated apparatus (which was an unsolved paradox for a quarter of a century before SR was invented).
And, while not on your list, quantum theory had many experimental inspirations. The Millikan oil drop experiment, for one. And spectral lines in stellar observations, for another.
Einstein's work on relativity (01905) was inspired by the Michelson-Morley experiment (01887), less than 20 years before, and its many improved replications. His work on the photoelectric effect was inspired by Hertz's experimental discovery of it (also 01887), followed by numerous further experiments which clarified the nature of the effect. Although Brownian motion had been observed, in some sense, since Lucretius (00060 BCE), Brown's 01827 observations under a microscope less than a century before were crucial to Einstein's theorizing about it.
Newton's work on orbital mechanics, which gave rise to understanding of universal gravitation (published 01687 but finished years earlier), derived from Kepler's laws of planetary motion (01621, say) and his published tables of planetary observations (01627), the Tabulae Rudolphinae. Not coincidentally, Kepler is also known for his dramatic improvements in the tele-scope, but much of the improvement in the Tabulae was actually due to the meticulous work done at the pre-telescope observatory of his predecessor Brahe, a huge stone structure.
Certainly the traffic between theoretical physics and experimental physics is not entirely a one-way flow from experiment to theory; that would lead only to the sort of overfitting we find in Ptolemy. But neither is it, as you paint it, entirely a one-way flow from theory to experiment.
It's probably true that we aren't going to resolve the problem of quantum gravity, dark matter, or consciousness with experiments, because our theories aren't good enough to design the experiments yet. But turbulence, magnetohydrodynamics, and especially quantum computers are eminently subject to experiment.
(Although I disagree with your comment, it certainly seems to be made in good faith, so I deplore the knuckle-draggers who are downvoting it.)
Possibly you intended to post your comment in reply to one of Jensson's comments rather than mine?
Rajchman had two students, one of whom (Antoni Zygmund, who also studied under Mazurkiewicz, and founded the Chicago school of analysis) had 40 students, five of whom had over 100 students of their own. 18 of those 40 had at least one student of their own. Consequently Rajchman had 1658 descendants in only a century, a mentorship growth rate of 7.7% per year despite Rajchman himself having his career cut short by being murdered by the Nazis in 01940 and apparently ceasing to mentor anyone officially for the previous 15 years of his career.
I can buy more people in physics working on more problems. There are a wealth of interesting problems in physics and more people all going in different directions would be great. But ten times as many people working on the LHC? A hundred times as many people working on string theory? I don't buy it.
To me, the ideal model of fully open, accessible research is the speedrunning community. I don't see speedrunning as all that different from experimental work. You probe, you hypothesize, you have breakthroughs, you compete in what's generally a pretty healthy way, and you communicate and document. Look at how this scales, how many people get in and get obsessed, etc. To really master quantum hall, you need to have have a devotion to the field that's comparable to "completing Super Mario 64 with half an A press."
There might be a path forward in the work on making computational work easily reproducible, by people like Konrad Hinsen, Yihui Xie, Jeremiah Orians, Eelco Dolstra, Ludovic Courtès, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Ricardo Wurmus, and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, but clearly it hasn't been a panacea so far. Speedrunning results are in many cases reproducible by virtue of nailed-down console hardware and bit-identical game images, but that's harder to achieve even for FEM simulations of turbulent MHD systems, much less actual experimental MHD systems like a Farnsworth fusor.
How do people initially get up to speed on speedrunning? Are there tutorials, the equivalent of a textbook with problem sets, some other onramp? Can we gamify learning quantum mechanics? (I've tried QiskitBlocks but so far haven't been impressed.)
Add that to a bare bones optics lab with a few staff and you will be running about $1 million startup costs for benches, lasers, optics, closed loop cryogencics, He4, interferometers, etc, plus half a million a year salary costs for 3-5 people in a low cost of living area.
It would also need job security to be competitive with going into something like data science, making the startup costs a careers worth of funding otherwise it would be insanity to choose.
Source: PhD in quantum optics, no longer do science.
Newton and Cavendish didn't have any of those, except that Cavendish had retirement savings. So while not having houses, cars, retirement savings, the ability to raise a family, and a decent quality of life might be a reason for not achieving more than Newton or Cavendish, it's not a reason for achieving less.
(I suspect that raising a family is actually counterproductive. I've seen an awful lot of promising researchers of both genders stop publishing after their first baby.)
I don't have any of those things, but while I'm no Newton or Cavendish, I can't attribute the difference to my lack of a car. Most of the people in my country don't have any of those except for houses; most of the people here who own houses built them with their own hands rather than buying them.
It's true that if you have to choose between going into data science and owning your own house and car, or doing quantum optics while living in poverty, the former is a lot better for you. But for most of us it's not an either-or choice:
1. Why not both? Lagrange did a significant amount of his work while subsisting on a day job teaching ballistics to gunners. Vipul Ved Prakash wrote Vipul's Razor by working one month out of the year in Delhi, then spending the other 11 months up in the mountains working on whatever he wanted to. Sidis deliberately didn't do anything others would consider useful, surviving on a series of menial jobs, but if he'd turned his formidable intellect on the problems of automatic computation or chemistry instead of collecting streetcar transfers, possibly he would have made significant progress. I've been living on US$6k a year, so a single year of a US$250k salary and stock package at Google or Fecebutt would allow me to survive for 40 years.
2. For most of us, it's neither. Most people don't have a data-science job available, or cars, or job security, or retirement savings. Given the choice between spending your spare time on watching Westworld and setting up experiments with Kerr cells and third-harmonic-generation crystals, what could possibly make the former a better choice? Though I'm one to talk! Here I am wasting my time commenting on the orange website, arguing about physics with people (who aren't you) whose understanding of physics evidently comes from WGBH Boston.
So, while I agree that everyone should live in material abundance, I don't agree with your apparent conclusion that more abundance of non-experimental-apparatus material goods would boost the world's research productivity. Many more people can buy houses, buy cars, have retirement savings, and raise families than 50 or 100 years ago, while the speed of scientific advancement has increased only modestly.
* GTRI * Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab * MIT Lincoln Labs * ~All the national labs (NIST, Argonne, etc...)
They are still mostly full as I understand.
If I was to write an article on what might be improved: We need more translational research (product focused, using existing knowledge) and less academic research.
One problem I see is that there just isn't the springboard from academic research to commercialization in physics like there is in comp sci or biotech.
Granted I'm biased. I founded my company (zeroK NanoTech) to capitalize on laser cooling research. Two Nobel prizes and countless professors pushing the boundaries on this stuff since the 90's. And my little company is going to be the first to deliver a product that's a black box to the user wrt to the science but delivers some new capabilities. The ion trap quantum computing may yet pay (much larger) dividends to society and those guys are also now making big pushes as well. Might be fair to count the resurgence of rocketry and fusion in this category as well.
So maybe things *are* looking up after all!
I worked in tech transfer for a bit.
There isn't such a thing as 'translation of science' because knowledge itself is pretty useless, even applied research is.
Products - which hopefully embody some of those things - are what people buy and the things that go into making good products are a bit orthogonal to classical R&D approach. Thinking about things from a 'user centric' instead of things having 'intrinsic' value is a big leap that I think takes a few years for some to get.
In Academia we think of knowledge as having inherent meaning and value unto it's own - which is totally fine I'm not hear to argue otherwise.
But in the real world, it's almost as if you have to view Science as just 'fancy pants tooling' and give it about as much love as your ruler or hammer, i.e. think of it as just a tool to meet some 'ends' wherein the 'ends' is not 'publishing a paper'.
In biotech, the 'ends' maybe more mappable, i.e. 'this drug regrows hair in men and women' but as you indicate, it mostly doesn't work this way.
Even then, even if we got our surplus PhD's into industry, we still may have this over-capacity.
So all of that aside, maybe we are entering the phase where the standard/normative level of education is just really, really high. Like in one of those corny Star Trek places where everyone has a PhD.
Just like many of the wealthy, effete folks in the past who got degrees because they were rich and not even interested in pursuing something applied or interesting, 'we're all getting rich now' and perhaps should turn our focus to the 5B people on planet earth who still have material needs.
Because it's cheaper that way. A lab that had to pay market-rate salaries would be outcompeted by the ones that sucker grad students with the promise that a few of them might get tenure someday and pay them peanuts in the meantime.
Labs that don't have this often require either a business to subsidize their work or they suddenly become completely reliant in grants. These environments are highly unstable in terms of job security. Positions are tied to a grant or a mixture of grants and difficult to maintain. If one or enough sources fail and the role is completely paid through grant money, it suddenly becomes untenable and people leave the role. The advantage academic environments have is that revenue stream to cushion the instability and provide stability.
It also lures in cheaper labor from grad students and post docs which helps.
I'd be interested to see how much of, say, the UNC Chapel Hill chemistry department's research expenditures come out of grants. Do you know how I'd find the information?
Two other points:
> Labs that don't have this often require either a business to subsidize their work or they suddenly become completely reliant in grants.
In what sense is the first case, a business sponsoring the lab, not "grants"?
> It's not really about tenure per se, it's more that the academic business model can provide a stable revenue stream for some research work.
But the original claim was that the cost of employing researchers is lower for an academic lab than it would be for a new lab. ("other labs could hire many more grad students for the same cost.") That has nothing to do with the availability of funding or cross-subsidies! Is it true or not?
There are so-called "soft money" positions that really are 100% grant-funded. In academia, people with those usually have a title like Research Professor and they're expected to pay their own salary out of their grants! They have no teaching responsibilities, since the university isn't directly paying them anything. But imo this is a much more stressful arrangement since you don't have the regular university salary to fall back on. Some researchers at small companies are essentially like that, having to bring in a stream of SBIRs to keep themselves paid.
I don't think researchers' base employment necessarily has to go through universities, it's just ended up as the most common mechanism for researchers to get a stable salary. The Institute for Advanced Study [1] is an alternate model, funding researchers' salaries out of its nearly $1 billion endowment and a stream of donations and institution-level grants, without being attached to a university. Kind of like a "think tank", but for science. But institutions along that model currently (at least in the U.S.) employ a tiny number of researchers compared to either universities or industrial research labs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study
Well, I picked UNC Chapel Hill as the example mostly because it's a public school and therefore (as far as I know) its budget is public information. Is that not true?
I'm perfectly happy to do the calculation in terms of "the chemistry department spend $X this year, and received $Y in grants, so their funding comes out of grants in a Y/X proportion".
> There are so-called "soft money" positions that really are 100% grant-funded. In academia, people with those usually have a title like Research Professor and they're expected to pay their own salary out of their grants!
I was aware of this (well, not that there was a title difference), but there is something I've been wondering about.
When salaries are part of the purpose of the grant, are they itemized in the grant? It obviously doesn't constitute corruption or embezzlement to help yourself to some of the grant money -- that's what a salary is. How much of it can you take?
Public university budgets should generally be public information, but tbh I don't have any idea where I'd start looking for granular data, especially in an easy to process format.
> When salaries are part of the purpose of the grant, are they itemized in the grant? ... How much of it can you take?
Yeah, pay is itemized on grants. Despite being expected to bring in your own salary, there is still some kind of official pay grade you're at. How that's set when you're hired I don't have great insight into (I imagine it varies a lot). But after the initial hire generally pay raises work the same as with any other faculty (annual cost of living or merit increases, occasional promotions between ranks, etc.). The grant agencies all work in terms of "percent effort", where you say what percentage of your time you're going to spend on this grant, and the amount requested is that percentage times your annual salary, plus a percentage for benefits. People on soft money positions sometimes piece together support from multiple grants. So you might write a grant as PI asking for 75% support over 3 years, then on a different grant your colleague is writing, they ask for money to cover 25% of your time as co-PI over 3 years. Larger institutions might also have some internal money available to smooth over shortfalls. Also, some agencies have a salary cap (e.g. NIH's is $200k).
This seems like it would tend to promote collusion between researchers and universities, where whenever somebody is hired into a soft money position, they would prefer to have a high official salary, and the university doesn't care because the actual salary is $0. The granting agencies aren't a party to salary negotiations -- what's keeping salaries down? Say someone's job is to get grants from NIH. Why would they ever be salaried below $200k?
The reason you don't set starting salaries too high is that for the business managing this (be it a university, private lab, etc.), although they essentially hire someone who makes money for them and pays their salaries through overhead costs that almost always exist (indirect costs), if you set the salary too high the role won't be able to reliably maintain itself, and therefor the indirect percentage you draw from incoming grants from that role becomes less stable. You could set a research associate for a fresh post doc at say $500k, but they'll probably never be able to pay themselves and therefor you because they won't be able to secure that. So you'll constantly be hiring for that position so it has to drop down to an amount that can be reliably filled and reliably bring in money.
From the institution's perspective, they want to get your comp rate as high as they possibly can to maintain their salaries but not to a point where it self sabotages their own position. The way these institutions maintain their administrative positions is to find these sweet spots and then diversify risk by hiring more and more researchers to pull in money for themselves and their own salaries. If several fail to pull in grants, admin is cushioned by the total number of grants (likely enough pulled in grants to provide enough indirect for admin). Take the additional pool and reinvest it in research so you get researchers to do even more free work for you. Some research orgs I've seen have incredibly high turn over rates (on the order of 1-2 years) and their model seems to be as long as they can keep a fresh batch of unsuspecting individuals in at high enough rates they can draw grants and indirect from to pay their salaries, it doesn't matter if that individual hired becomes resource pressured and burns out, there's a line of other qualified people more than happy to step in and naively fall into the same game. Rinse repeat.
Eventually it can tarnish the reputation of the organization itself where external money pools stop looking at the person receiving the grant but more at the organization of the person receiving the grant where they begin to lose faith that the organization can follow through on its employees promises. There seems to be enough turnover from funding agencies and the research orgs that do this themselves that institutional memory is short enough to keep the whole game going on. It's getting to a point at some organizations where people who pull in grants are joining the same gig as the research org and the idea is to act as a figurehead to the project where they then convince naive other lower level research positions to do most the legwork and pay themselves a portion of the total grant acting as another layer of administration. You'll see such grant recipients often as the recipient or lead on multiple grants they couldn't possibly be working on all of simultaneously. They play similar risk games to the research orgs that employ them in that if those they hire can't follow through, they may lose their own role.
It's quite a gig in some places, a bit of a pyramid scheme, really. This is why I've lost so much faith in research publications anymore, because the underbelly is pretty ugly. I've seen this at universities, private labs, even national labs and "think tanks." We really need to reevaluate and restructure how research is performed in the US.
Why would the other labs pay less per worker than the new lab?
Non-academic labs can't offer tenure because there's no tradition of it outside academia and by its very nature it only has value if an organisation can make a credible commitment to maintain for decades or centuries.
Labs that can dangle the carrot of a tenure-track position can pay much less than those that can't; workers overvalue it both because people generally overvalue potential prizes and because it's been gradually made rarer and pushed back further and further.
This would imply that it's impossible for non-academic institutions to offer pensions, too. Now, they are certainly moving in that direction, but it seems strange to argue that they can't.
So what are you talking about?
When we were focused on building hydrogen bombs and rockets to obliterate civilization, everyone needed a friendly neighborhood physicist.
It's the American system, frankly.
In Germany research institutes are frequently separated from universities.
Decades of a hypercompetitive market will eventually create entrenched power structures.
True, people with zero-sum, "I want more!" attitudes might very well self-select for the listed lines of work, perhaps because of the greater potential payoffs and arguably-weaker checks and balances there. But at the risk of sounding defensive, zero-sumness really does depend greatly on individuals' attitudes: Lawyers can be useful in the same sense that cars' transmissions and oil pumps are useful; MBA types are trained in planning and management, which, I dunno, have their uses; financiers can get people who have money to part with it voluntarily so that others can make use of it.
When I took a review course for the patent bar exam many years ago, Professor Irv Kayton told us forcefully that our job as patent attorneys was not to be scientists or engineers ourselves — we all had science- or engineering backgrounds — but instead to be the "noble servants" of those innovators in society.
And all cynicism aside, a growing economy might organically increase the need for lawyers.
I've long thought that; the need for lawyers grows non-linearly with population, because the need is correlated with the number of transactions, which would tend to increase (exponentially? factorially?) with population.
This is a cultural artifact, not a cross-cultural truth. The historical norm is to use zero lawyers even for the largest-scale transactions. It's still the modern norm to use zero lawyers for small-scale transactions.
What should be asked do we have shortage of lawyers? From pricing point of view clearly no, they make more than minimum wage, but in general? Outside court-side is someone struggling to find one? Or are cases waiting cause we do not have them?
It's great when that happens — and to make it work, there are a couple of conditions that need to be satisfied.
1. All parties to a transaction need to know "the protocol," or "the drill," that is, how to conduct themselves as the transaction proceeds. (Imagine a complicated, multi-person dance where people could crash into each other if they didn't know the steps — or knew the steps but chose not to follow them.)
Competent lawyers can provide the necessary knowledge, but they don't necessarily have to be the sole source of such knowledge: Various industries have developed standardized protocols for different categories of transaction. Examples: the Incoterms [0] and the ISDA Master Agreement [1], to name just two that come immediately to mind.
2. There's another reason parties use lawyers, and contracts, in their transactions: At bottom, companies are just people [2], and people can be perfidious; at some point The Other Side might choose to behave opportunistically. Contracts can help dissuade such behavior. For better or worse, lawyers are one of the principal groups who (might) know how to draft contracts to that end; good lawyers know how to do so without unduly getting in the way of the parties' business.
Consider Alice and Bob, who agree to a contract on behalf of their employers Alpha Corp. and Bravo LLC. Each might be a fine, trustworthy, cooperative individual. But they're human; at some point they might be tempted — or pressured by colleagues — to cheat, or to seek unfair advantage, especially if circumstances were to change. Moreover, one or both of their successors Allen and Betty might be less trustworthy. This means that Alpha and Bravo's contract must guard against opportunistic behavior by one or both of them. Lawyers (can) help to negotiate contracts with appropriate roadblock language.
Again lawyers aren't necessarily the sole source of the necessary knowledge; it just happens to have worked out that they're one of the main sources of it.
Also, lawyers can be useful targets of finger-pointing by business people if a transaction doesn't work out as desired. That can be another, usually-unstated reason why people hire lawyers: To offload at least some of the risk of failure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterms
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/isda-master-agreement.a...
[2] In the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney was pilloried for saying "corporations are people," but in one sense the criticism was unfair: If Romney had said "corporations are just people," his statement would have been far more defensible.
(Disclosure: I'm a lawyer.)
I'm assuming you didn't mean it this way (I guess it was an ironic comment), but planning and management are incredibly important.
The most important part to our scaling is how we organize ourselves. A top notch organizer allows a group of people to scale seamlessly. That's worth everything in the modern world.
Imagine thousands of brilliant minds, organized elegantly and efficiently to work together at maximum efficiency. It's rare because it's incredibly hard to achieve. But when it does happen, we get so much output, both creative and physical, that it's almost unbelievable. Think Bell Labs & co.
I was making a joke; I meant it exactly the way that you put it.
Human efforts can tend to go in different directions. Without foresight, planning, leadership, and communication — MBAs get at least some training in these skills — the individuals within organizations can end up mutually interfering with each other, even when they don't intend to do so. So yeah, MBAs "do have their uses" (another joke).
I disagree with you. From the article, those very professions existing would be explained by Elite Underproduction. It is an example of the system optimizing for all surplus to be competed away. Thus we have created an Elite which include the science and study of competing where only so many resources and only so much status is available.
If you read his argument, it is that we create an "elite" whose role is not to advance the frontier of understanding and achievement, but instead to capitalize on the currently available resources and status.
I think the part that is a little bit of a stretch, is that he's redefining "elite", he seems to say that "elite" should be a status held by those who innovate our capabilities of understanding and producing for all. And then he says, if you take "elite" to mean that, you'll see that we do not produce a lot of those, therefore we are "underproducing elites".
That said, I think generally people think of "elites" more as the "aristocracy", a.k.a, those who have entrenched themselves with social capital and status. With that definition, you can say we produce too many "elites", as in, too many people who are trained in trying to acquire a big slice of the social capital and status, and because there is a limited pool of that, these people fail to acquire a big chunk of it as they all compete for that limited resource. Thus the theory of "Elite overproduction".
So you see, it really just depends how you define "Elite".
But the main point of OPs' article is valid, our system does not reward or invest enough in trying to push our understanding and capabilities in order to advance all of humanity. And because of that, if you have the qualifications to try and do so, you instead choose to capitalize on maximizing your slice of the existing wealth by going into Quants for example, because the system pays well to do that, but doesn't for true research.
I think part of the problem with shown with the replication crisis, even though it's less in physics, points to an issue with that being the "standard unit" although. Science, like a lot of the world today, "waste enormous potential, mainly in the causes of legibility and standardization" as the author said. A lot of science busywork is subject to goodharts law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
https://sketchplanations.com/goodharts-law
What makes you think so?
For some reason the author presumes everyone who decides to to study physics should not veer from this path or else they have failed. This is an extraordinary queer point of view.
As such a "failed" physicist myself now in software, having a degree in physics makes me actually quite malleable for all sorts of fun things, and my studies have indoctrinated me to basically view everything as an unknows system, that can be modelled even though current models don't exist.
This is very usefull!
It's great to have this sort of dialogue, but the n physicists doing programming have found a niche for themselves and their talents. I would not call that failing.
The other side of the coin is that should science be better supported? Instill insight and ambition to students? None of those are bad things from the point of view of the discpline.
But attacking the argument from the point of view that "everyone who started studying physics, and are now doing something else signal a failure of the system" smells very much of propagating a view that people at the young age when they decide their university program should have a great understanding of the world, their position in it, and absolute certainty that physics is the best way to spend their working life. Which most 18-20 year olds probably don't have (well, I did not for one). And having thus chosen a profession out of poor understanding of the complete picture, should stick to their decision and pull through, even though it seems to them other professions would be more suitable.
The author mixes the bag even more by off-the-cuff random judgment calls on the intrinsic human value of others labour, which never really results in a sane dialogue. The claim itself is incredibly elitist - "Optimizing an algorithm at Google has less human value than repeating an known experiment at a physics lab to dot the i:s on a well understood theory".
Physics is very important! But individual career choices are in a different category altogether. If you go and study physics and stick to it you might have ended up wasting your intellectual potential on hyped dead-ends like string theory . Now where is the benefit for mankind in that? (the comment is intended as a naughty swipe and I'm smirking while typing this).
That's just not true. And the various "lapsed physicists" he meets are in fact proof of elite overproduction.
Physicists and mathematicians are uncomfortable with computer-generated proofs. I think they 'd be less uncomfortable with computer-generated theories because they can understand those
There are lots more people with PHDs that get pushed out of the academic research career direction they might have aspired to. And if more of them could successfully follow their dreams it'd probably be good. But that doesn't seem like a rebuttal to me.
This situation is a consequence of Elite Underproduction. Our society is chronically bad at producing and nurturing true elites, the individuals who are capable of creating and sustaining frontiers. That makes malthusian competition inveitable, and the only thing going - the kinds of 'elites' we end up producing are good at that kind of competition and not much else.
Yes it’s important to have elites that go out and create new frontiers, but at the same time status in a hierarchical society is inherently zero-sum. We can’t all be high status, because there needs to be some reference point.
As an example in the world of law there are only so many spots available at Harvard Law School, even fewer spots for clerking with Supreme Court justices, and of course a very very small amount of actual Supreme Court justices.
What happens when someone loses the high-status tournament to become a Supreme Court justice? Ideally they find another tournament/status game to play, somewhere they can succeed. But even so, if we saturate our society with too many lawyers, there are simply not enough tournaments they can play in (that will also pay them enough to pay off their student loans).
If someone reasonably bright orients their entire endeavor around the goal of becoming a Supreme Court Justice, they will be totally fine in life even if they fall well short of their goal. "Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you will land among the stars."
The problem we have is actually the opposite - too many people believe that no opportunity is available to them, thus they don't pursue anything, and end up stagnant or declining ("Aim for the ground... can't miss!")
The number of people on the SC changes. The relative status of being a fancy defense lawyer changes. We could in the future set term limits to court judges. there are appelate courts (which are pretty close to the top)!. We could pack the court! We could also make it so that being a lawyer isn't actually prestigious, as a society. We could also stop just choosing people from Harvard & Yale.
There are so many choices as a society about what is done, and how many people are or are not needed in certain roles, that the implicit premise in all of this (that the current state of things involve some static limits, _and_ that we have reached those limits right now, instead of 100 years ago or 100 years from now) doesn't stand. Even if I agree that everybody in US elite political circles going through law school is extremely bizarre and bad, I don't think either argument presented in the article holds up.
This kind of dynamic adds to instability because such people are downwardly mobile (poorer than their parents) and rather than recognizing the key error that sent their life down the wrong track (choice of major/not going to a trade school) they "plant the seeds" of discord by shouting loudly that the situation is hopeless and "the system" is to blame.
This is related to the modern version of academia, turned to a paper-making factory where mediocre professors toil away grant after grant waiting retirement. Still, young people will do a PhD just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes research-wise, even if they know that somewhere around middle life they'll switch to writing expensive software or overselling their skills to groups of developers. The problems are not well-defined. There is no grand scientific mountain to climb (despite the global narrative about climate crisis, photovoltaics and battery chemistry are not the sexiest of subjects). It does feel like science loses some of the mystery of previous generations and has become a lot more procedural. How do you motivate people to become mystics?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/us/politics/biden-infrast...
Trade jobs require a certain amount of training/experience and pay far above minimum wage. A plumber did a job for me a couple months ago and the guy made six figures a year easily, I asked him. Right now getting any remodeling done in the Bay Area is impossible because there is not enough contractors; availability times are three months in the future and often you get outbid for their time.
Also, infrastructure construction jobs are not minimum wage.
There are a few areas where a little boundary crossing might make a difference (e.g. we got 30 years of bogus papers on universal power laws because no physicist ever talked to a statistician) but many areas have run into barriers that seem insurmountable (Chaos theory was stillborn, I think, because there was little reward for hard work cataloging phenomenology when Noether’s and KAMs conserved quantities ran out of steam.)
I can't really do any more justice to the topic than what's been said there.
I'll just note that 1999 is now the good old days when you'd only spend 10 years as a post doc. I left in 2011 and postdocs who had been there for 10 years are still post docs. Out of my class of 30 PhD's there's now no one left in Academia. The golden girl of the class who spend time in Antarctica, CERN and all the other places which take one in one thousand applicants is a data scientist at a bank as of last month.
Why Are Egyptian Youth Burning Their University Diplomas? The Overeducation Crisis in Egypt
https://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/middle-east-brie...
We need to let amateurs be amateurs while still contributing meaningfully let. Let teachers teach professionally and let physicists in industrial applications do the same. Obviously most experimental physics costs money, but that doesn't mean that everything needs to be a status competition.
When there are a few slots, a lot of status up for grabs, and an entrenched elite, you get exactly what you describe. Far too few true elites, and a great deal too many trained to be "elites".
But the very nature of elites is that they rise despite these hurdles, or perhaps because of them.