Post date: Aug 03, 2020 6:40:26 AM
--[begin meta]--
it's been a little while since my last post;
honestly, i stopped keeping count of the days ..
.. but i meant to do that.
whether it's clear from the content or not, i happen to be a university-employed academic.
in other words, it means that the spring semester ends in mid-may, the residual cleanup committee tasks are sorted out (ideally) by june, and that july is a month of academic freedom.
i suppose that some allege that we just "slack-off" during that time and that academics are overpaid.
i, for one, was trying to work out the technical details of an abstract construction that works as well in 11 dimenesions as 26, or say, 3. you know; "useless work."
honestly, i didn't get very far:
a month isn't much time.
that, and the sheer number of emails with subject lines tantamount to "yes, it's the summer, but can you review these dozen applications for [insert program here]" ...?
---[end meta]---
as a disclaimer, i clicked on this article and it upset me. maybe the author meant for it to do that, to people like me. maybe that was not the author's intention and that the article was a mirror version of what i'm writing now.
[this is the aforementioned article.]
since i get to say what i want on this website, i'm going to pick out excerpts and react to them, from my context, so that i feel better about myself and to make someone else feel bad about themselves.
i could say it another way, but this way is the most honest way.
i feel maligned and reading what i read made me feel like sh-t.
anyway .. cue the excerpts!
...
there's always first one, which happens to agree with chronology:
"most experience a twinge of excitement when, months later, they open a letter informing them that their article has been accepted for publication, and will therefore be read by… an average of ten people."
i blinked at this statement, and then realised:
you know, there may be a grain of truth to this.
i also want to add to the nature of such a number.
i've written a few [1] research articles where probably at most a dozen people would read about those main results and maybe even past the introduction ..
.. because there are that few people qualified to read it and give scientifically rigorous criticism.
yes, this sounds like an opening to the illuminati or some other cabal that takes care of themselves (and only themselves). i suppose that it's a smaller scale version of persons who are professionally qualified to assess risk for insurance and other applications.
they happen to be called actuaries, which comprise 70,000 persons ... or 0.0009% of humanity. [2]
now imagine a niche area of research that is far less applicable than insurance (and therefore make less income doing) but want to do it. just because. [e]
so this is unpopular work and pays less than the private sector, yet is capable of creating innovations .. just like how a university lab created a COVID-19 drug that a pharmaceutical is claiming full credit for, like how watson and crick did not acknowledge the contributions of a female colleague.
so i will run the existential gambit:
it happened once that a young man wrote a few of his peers about this one idea he had, because he trusted only them to understand what he meant.
he happened to be issac newton, writing about gravity, and he wrote the luminaries of his time: leibniz, the bernoullis, and every calculus student's savior, l'hospital [3].
it happens that he was escaping an outbreak of plague and finally had time to think about an idea. [4]
this is an edge case, obviously, but not dissimilar to how companies buy startups: for possibility of growth. not all theories stand the test of time, but imagine if someone was able to get proprietary rights to gravity?
we'd have never gotten to the moon unless one of us paid a million dollars for a seat on shuttle v3.0, once it was done and those fvckwits who died on the beta version were cremated and the ones-not-fired-from-the-company figured out what went wrong, for the experience. (i, for one, would have insta'ed the fvck out of it and made money off it .. for selfish purposes, mind you, and maybe a fraction for charities, until they sued me and the money all went to lawyers.)
anyway, next excerpt:
"The goal of all professors is to get tenure, and right now, tenure continues to be awarded based in part on how many peer-reviewed publications they have. Tenure committees treat these publications as evidence that the professor is able to conduct mature research.
Sadly, however, many academic articles today are merely exercises in what one professor I knew called “creative plagiarism”: rearrangements of previous research with a new thesis appended on to them."
i don't know of this straw-man prof that this author alleges .. but actually , this is fair to say. in that sense, tenure behaves like capitalism until it becomes a microcosm of oligarchy, until the complicit realises that tenure just means that you don't get fired and you still have to put up with the same old shit from higher ups. [5]
in other words, the academic pyramid scheme. actually, i don't know if it's shaped in the fashion of a pyramid. i just meant that for job security, you're in for the long haul.
so: also explain to me how the notion of fin.tech (i.e. make rich people richer by skirting existing law) is doing the same thing but costing taxpayers billions of tax revenue that could have pay for their childcare, work-injury compensation, and general try-to-get-by money? [6]
in medicine, there is supposedly an oath of "first do no harm." so, explain to me why studying in as many dimensions as i want is hurting people, compared to others?
next?
"One unfortunate effect of this specialization is that the subject matter of most articles make them inaccessible to the public, and even to the overwhelming majority of professors."
so: explain to me why, as say a professor of linguistics, you want the technical details of why one particular bridge is safe, due to the exceptional wind effects in that geographical region ano not the neighboring one? are you going to look at the bar graphs comparing number of projected deaths vs. mesh wire span? should we do this in linear scale, or in logarithmic? wait, why the fvck don't you know what a logarithm is?
separately: explain to me why, as a prof of literature, you want to know, exactly, why the universe is better explained in at least 10 dimensions?
let's just say .. it gets technical, possibly beyond your patience. did you bother to look up 'university" in the dictionary? or were you focused on being right (like i am now)?
this is why there are a minority of people in this work who are academics and whose work gets published in academic journals. honestly, the purported author would make it in the most predatory of journals. not knowing the author's field, i can't say more than that.
simply put:
i write so that any colleagues of mine about a good idea, who care to read it, can tell me that it's half-baked, or that, huh, about that .. or more likely, yeah .. meh, but there is something new here that's worth the code that is worth generating a PDF .. i don't know about paper to be printed.
there is also the culture of academia.
colleagues .. friends? .. of mine, if i had a good idea and they think so too .. previous practice [8] would have one of us invite the other to the first one's institution, depending on funding, give a seminar talk to cut through the article-ese and get to the real ideas, human-to-human, and afterwards we'd spend days riffing on a good idea, spewing new ideas, until the visiting one had to get to the airport.
i always look forward to welcoming visiting colleagues, but a part of me knows how much i have to think and work and just-keep-up while the visit is going. another part of me thinks:
game on!
let's get to work!
i love this life!.. creating cool sh-t!
anyway, as always, thanks for putting up with me.
and if you are the author of the article i linked, then you know how i felt when reading your article. thanks. it's not like i haven't felt rage and anger in a while, yeah?
...
[1] it wouldn't be right to say "many," because i have colleagues who are incredibly prolific and they write many articles and really further the field, at least from a jargon-y technical perspective.
[2] the first number in this computation is self-reported and i cannot confirm it. as for the second, i ran a search on "world population on earth" and got 7,800,000,000 and thought it was good enough for a computation to share. also, if you hate paying auto insurance, then yes: this probably only fuels your conspiracy theories, doesn't it? (in other words, you're reading this post for spite and probably for evidence to prove yourself right .. right?)
[e] not because it might help humanity, which would be really! cool, but because this is the logical end to an idea.
[3] not exactly. it was a related problem to gravity, of which one version states: "find the planar curve on which a body subjected only to the force of gravity will slide (without friction) between two points in the least possible time." also, allegedly l'Hospital gave a wrong answer, which is a little more evidence for why you should avoid using l'Hospital's rule unless you know what. the. fvck! you are actually doing.
[4] in that same article to which i am referring: "This is the popular fairy tale of genius: great ideas don’t require the tedious work of sustained attention and hard thinking; they arrive in lightning bolts of inspiration, which in turn come only in the right circumstances, like enforced isolation during an epidemic." in other words, yes; aim high, but we are in a fvcking epidemic, people!... the likes that are rarely seen and recorded in history.
[5] well, by definition, technology is:
"the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area"
... so if your job is to make rich humans richer, then it is an application .. to those few who pay the salary of a fintech worker who aspires to be those few.
[6] i allege that tenured faculty are like the shrinking middle class. nobody goes for a university job and thinks, "now i'm going to make the big bucks!!!" just paying off your student loans and helping our your kids? not bad, i'd say.
[7] to go along with the usual way of blogging and of-course-i'm-always-right, here is an article that reads:
"Storing money, getting loans, sending cash to family members, investing over a phone app. All provide flexibility, convenience, and immediacy never before available to many. One of the advantages, as I've heard from various people pitching ideas and products, is that those in need will suddenly have the attention they deserve.
Except, it doesn't quite work that way. Fintech companies typically have the same motivation as any financial services firm. They want to make money from others. Not to be overly disparaging, but it can be a pure rent-taking experience, in the economics definition of the term."
[8] as oft disclaimed, before COVID-19 and when it was safe to travel .. we settle for video-chat meeting now, but it is not. the. fvcking. same. imagine writing a song over zoom. it's like that. ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
[9] it depends on whether you believe united states census numbers .. considering how underfunded they are, now, they might have gotten it wrong.