- DMSP satellites are up and measuring data
- These data will continue to be measured after Monday
- the government is discontinuing processing and public access to the data
- This will impact our capacity to predict hurricanes and monitor sea ice.
Yes, but you had to re-enable it due to the cert change. Bartender doesn't explain this is what happened and simply states "there's a known issue where certain apps, including Bartender, might not receive Accessibility and Screen Recording permissions properly, despite the user granting them in System Settings."
I agree the communication about this change of ownership has been far from ideal.
But issues with permissions (e.g. the user needing to disable/re-enable some macOS permission after an update, even if the cert doesn't change) are fairly common.
"But for many years her career at the University of Pennsylvania was fragile. She migrated from lab to lab, relying on one senior scientist after another to take her in. She never made more than $60,000 a year"
The class of people who seem to do well in academia these days are those focused on grinding out masses of papers on incremental advances. Professors good at writing grant applications do well too, because with those grants they can afford to hire lots of graduate students to help with those incremental advances and masses of papers.
Individuals focused on real discovery and not publishing much until they really have something significant to say don't fit into this well.
This is especially true in U.S. health sciences, where to get money from the NIH, you must plan and describe the outcome of the next 3-5 yrs of research. It's not acceptable to say, "We're going to explore this area for 5 years and see what we find and hope for a surprise."
Obviously, you then only get very incremental, low-risk, low-reward research, but high-profile scientists who mainly serve on the committees at the NIH and dole out funding get to keep their small business (err, I mean lab) going with minimal disruption in funding.
I am in academia and I see the same thing among my colleagues. In physics and chemistry. I also see a lot of data manipulation, lies in methodology, omission of any flaws in the studies, just to get published. Because that is the only measure of your value ti the institution.
Fuck, even the head of the institution publicly announced that only quantity matters, not quality. Because the government funding for research also depends only on quantity.
Graduate school, MS at Harvard & MIT, PhD at UIUC.
Both my MS and PhD supervisors were brilliant and strongly believed in publishing only when they had something real to talk about, which I respected a lot. But it was clear this wasn't what the top professors were doing. They were running paper mills.
>> What fields in academia?
Elec engineering & CS.
>> Do you work there or have friends there
I don't work there, although I was offered several positions. This culture is pretty much why I chose industry. In the real world, most customers care about real achievements.
I wonder if there's a way to measure the proportions of impactful science coming from private companies versus universities. Perhaps measure by field, too, since the proprotions may differ in genomics vs electrical engineering, for example.
I don't have any idea how to calculate those proportions, but it's an awesome puzzle.
Private companies are interested in profitable science, not impactful science. In fact it can have negative impact: Discovering a way to extend intellectual property rights for an expiring patent, or a formulation that they can charge more for. Discovering a cheap cure for cancer wouldn't help profits.
And have their own internal politics - they want science that does not disrupt the VP/CEO's plans, or make the chief scientist look bad.
Many companies, unfortunately, go out of their way to not produce meaningful science in the sense of publicly available (trade secrets) or publicly usable (patents) knowledge. Biotech especially.
How is that different from any profit seeking endeavor? You could write the same company about software companies that don't open source all of their code..
Fundamentally, it isn‘t. Practically, some industries are more open about their work than others—computer graphics (both game and cinematic) come to mind as an example on the opposite end of the spectrum from the secretive worlds of biotech or (say) semiconductor manufacturing.
My point was only that (by the definition I think makes the most sense here) they are doing science to the exact extent they give up the intellectual-property monopoly, whatever that extent happens to be.
I mean, there’s definitely a date in the past before which this definition is not useful. On the other hand, if a human learns something new, but nobody else does as a consequence of that, has human knowledge advanced? There are always edge cases—occasionally the mere awareness that something is possible has allowed others to rediscover the method—but generally I’d say no.
That does not mean that dissemination of new information has to work like it does now. The Republic of Letters was very different but quite successful. But if you have taken no effort to make your discovery available to others, I’d say you’re not advancing the cause of human learning; if you have taken effort to ensure it is not available, like what many patents aim for nowadays, I’d say you’re working against it.
yeh unfortunately most of the best professors spend the majority of their time applying for grants for their students, going to conference, doing admin etc rather than work in a lab
They are more likely to be able to recognize talented grad students and build an army of them to pump out good (great?) papers and hit up the conference circuit.
There aren't a lot of places where going into academia has significant opportunity cost (like for example, losing out on the prospect of a yacht paid for by reactjs work).
There's no need to "bring it back" because we never "got rid of it". It's just a natural part of some people being wealthy - they have more time/resources to spend on various pursuits, including art and science.
This is still true, although to a lesser degree, because everyone is much better off. 500 years ago, you could only pursue some things if you were born rich. Today, the field has greatly expanded, to everyone's benefit.
There are several SROs ("Scientific Research Organizations") funded by extremely wealthy folks (typically made their billions in tech). They can offer scientists a number of nice things that universities can't- for example, Arc Institute, created by Patrick Collison among others, has plenty of lab space and computing for its members, compared to the space and computing available on campuses like UCSF and Stanford.
Well at the moment the UK could really benefit from tax revenue from a certain prosperous former colony so that sounds good to me. Not sure about the benefit for the colony.
Musk and Bezos have their science/engineering experiments... and Gates through his investments. Hell, if we look at this broadly, many investments are being made in science - just through through (and to) institutions.
That never went away. We just have multiple avenues:
1. Government funded research
2. Private industrial research
3. Private personal research
Usually, those involved in #3 are made fun of constantly by the lumpenproles. Before someone in category #3 makes it they look like Bryan Johnson doing Blueprint. That's the defining characteristic, actually. If you were to look at Ms. Kariko before she was successful, the majority of HN users would have made fun of her.
Kariko had a PhD from Hungary, was a post-doc at Temple U. - not an elite pedigree. At Penn, an elite school:
"It was a low-level position, research assistant professor, and never meant to lead to a permanent tenured position."
and after that boss left,
"Dr. Kariko was left without a lab or financial support. She could stay at Penn only if she found another lab to take her on. “They expected I would quit,” she said.
Universities only support low-level Ph.D.s for a limited amount of time, Dr. Langer said: “If they don’t get a grant, they will let them go.” Dr. Kariko “was not a great grant writer,” ...
Kariko was slotted into the non-tenure / adjunct role, and it didn't matter what they did. It happens in private industry too. The problem is elitism overlooking talent and production. It's a brazen, obvious flaw.
The US long had the culture - imperfect, of course - of an active rejection of elitism, class, etc. 'All men are created equal', 'every man a king', meritocracy, hard work, you can accomplish anything if you work hard enough, the land of opportuity, the American Dream, etc. That equality, the respect for others, is the foundation of voting - you respect everyone's right to have input and its value.
The dominant fashion, a sort of neo-reactionaryism, is to reject that, deride it, rather than aggressively moving it forward. Many people look for ways to justify prejudice, to exclude, to embrace personal ego and greed and to mock public good. I think that's because if you embrace universal rights, opportunity, equality, etc., you can't avoid 'liberal' ideals too, and those are the target of reactionaryism.
"active rejection of elitism". Not really. In US 'elite' means money wealth, whereas in historical Europe 'elite' means martial nobility. Anecdata: the very concept of 'legacy admission' is overtly classist, and simply does not exist in continental Europe. US is very much elitist, it's just that its manifestation of elitism is less obvious to the unsuspecting eye.
Is there any non-elitist country out there? Humans tend to socially stratify even in relatively modest conditions (such as tribal life).
What really matters is if the elite is closed or relatively permeable, and how it treats the non-elite.
What the founding generation of America rejected, was inheritance of elite status, but I don't think they were completely egalitarian either. After all, people like Jefferson and Washington were highly regarded by their peers.
Again, it's not at all perfect, but it has certainly been a widely held value and objective. Think of the overt humility of Washington, Lincoln, and most American leaders until around seven years ago.
To be honest and in this context. Nobel prize committees doesn't do any better and have history of failing in recognizing great scientific achievements until long time passes [1] (and sometimes scientists die before that which disqualify them from the prize)
They only give one per year and there's probably more than one nobel prize worthy achievement every year on average, so they end up with a backlog. Unless something huge happens in a given year like the Higgs, they're probably going to reach back as far as they can for a worthy award to make sure people get the awards before they die.
Also Higgs probably falls in that category too. His original research was almost 50 years old... Only receiving award after it was confirmed with testing.
I know it's a dumb cultural cite, but I keep thinking of the "12th man" scene from the movie (book too?) "World War Z". The Israeli is explaining that his job is to disagree with the consensus. Just in case. Who is then given charter and resources to plan accordingly. Just in case.
I hope there's many buckets of research funds. With a modest bucket for long shots. And perhaps a smaller bucket for loonie tunes. Where by formalizing that model would preempt all the reactionary "omgherd golden fleece!?" outbursts.
As a taxpayer, I'd be thrilled if researchers, artists, journalists, musicians, and misc crazies got some kind of UBI, to do their work without starving. Considering the scale of all the usual waste and pork, genius grants wouldn't be more than a round-off error.
With a payout of 1:1000, it'd be a bargain for society. Smartest investments ever.
Survivor bias. This is what often mentioned in any thread about business success, yet nobody has mentioned it here.
Institutions also often don't recognize researches that end up going nowhere. What we can say is that finding a gem is hard because of abundance of noise.
The perspective from the inside is pretty different from the outside. High-functioning families see their achievements as “normal” while the rest of the community looks around in awe.
I know a family of a nobel prize winner, and everyone in it is just insanely talented -- like, if you were to caricature the experience of a super genius family you'd actually probably get pretty close to them. And, your point is spot on. For them, the sheer creativity and output (in writing, science, and music) of the whole family was kind of seen as table stakes and something rather unremarkable. Whenever I was over for dinner I felt like a kid in class who hadn't done the reading haha (just in terms of how hard it was to keep up... they were all super gracious and I have many many cherished memories from the time we hung out)
Yes. That's because "high-functioning families" compare themselves with those who are better, not those who are worse. They go "sure I got 2 olympic medals, but bob and suse also got 2 each. It's not a big deal". They never dwell in thoughts like "I got 2 olympic medals, and look at the billions of people who got zero."
It's just what happens whenever you rise in the ranks of any domain.
People in the 99th percentile aren't super happy and satisfied that they've outcompeted 99% of the participating population who look at them with awe and envy. They're comparing themselves to the 99.9th percentile who leave them in awe and envy.
I think it's important for any high performer to occasionally step out of their narrow perception of the world and really grok how far ahead they are compared to everyone else. This is definitely something a lot of my high income tech friends could learn to appreciate when they get caught up feeling like a loser for only making $250k total comp.
> I think it's important for any high performer to occasionally step out of their narrow perception of the world and really grok how far ahead they are compared to everyone else.
A (pre-Putin) Russian proverb goes it’s better to be first in the village, than it is to be last in the city.
Absolutely. Becoming world class at anything, especially anything competitive, also involves failing about a million times on the way up. In coaching chess one of the first things one tends to ask is what the student wants to achieve. And the typical response has something to do with winning. But they don't need you for that. If they just want to win, then they but need to never play anybody better than themselves!
Improving involves blood, sweat, tears, and defeat. Only to come back ever stronger.
You can fail or have success on many dimensions. There is probably some skill you are good innately, or better than a large chunk of population. On that dimension you will have probably have built a pretty good self-esteem over the years, but you know that you can still improve (hence comparing yourself with who got 4 medals if you have 2) but fear of failing will not completely block you, only stress you more to raise the bar.
On the other hand, in domains where you are not so good by default, if you are a perfectionist you can totally risk being paralyzed until you think you are "good enough for it".
I don't think there is a "good by default" dimension. Maybe a "learning easier" dimension. I'd argue that in such advanced spheres comparison becomes secondary. First an foremost it's about the activity. Like friends competing in a game of cards. It's about having fun with friends. Winning is for having a purpose to play.
> (1) this is, by the way, something that Musk did to that diver he didn't like.
It also should be noted that Musk __won__ that libel case. So that's "acceptable speech" according to our laws and courts.
So no. Libel laws are _NOT_ the answer. Its too difficult to actually sue someone for libel today. You can apparently call someone a pedophile, advertised to dozens-of-millions of followers, and not be considered "libel" or "defamation".
If there's one thing I learned from that event, its that our libel laws / defamation laws are not strict enough. Its not worth going to the courts on this kind of thing because you'll lose.
