ke88y (u/ke88y) - Readit News

ke88y commented on Getting a paper accepted maxwellforbes.com/posts/h... · Posted by u/stefanpie

jltsiren · 3 months ago

I think it's actually the opposite. American universities receive less research funding from external private sources than universities in the European countries I'm familiar with. The difference is probably due to the culture of charitable donations. Europe has a tradition of private foundations funding arts and sciences, while Americans make donations to universities.

In 2021, academic R&D spending in the US was ~$90 billion (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202326/funding-sources-of-acad...). Out of that, 55% came from the federal government, 25% from the institutions themselves, 6% from nonprofits, 6% from businesses, 5% from state and local governments, and 3% from other sources. The share of businesses looks normal, while the share of nonprofits seems low.

ke88y · 3 months ago

You’re making a comparison then quoting only one side of that comparison, which is deeply confusing.

I’m pretty damn sure you’re wrong about Europe on a relative basis. The percentages in most of Europe are MUCH higher. Eg Germany is closer to 80% than 50% gov funded.

(Earmarked gifts to an endowment with some level of direction/advice vs a foundation is a real cultural and tax policy difference, but the end effect is what matters and that’s not as simple as you’re suggesting.)

And not to be too flippant, but the question about the world outside of America applies also to the world outside the West ;)

ke88y commented on Getting a paper accepted maxwellforbes.com/posts/h... · Posted by u/stefanpie

bonoboTP · 3 months ago

Sure, but many people who go for a PhD aren't the entrepreneur type. And in a corporation there are also "games", where building things that actually work may not be your best strategy. You need to work on visible, flashy, new things that looks good in a performance review and can get you a promotion. You have to deliver legible value.

ke88y · 3 months ago

Yes, that’s all correct. There’s always a meta-game.

Part of the meta-game of academia is that feedback timelines are long enough that you can play the “wrong” meta-game and still come out ahead. If you don’t want a professorship — or are willing to settle for a super cushy “professor of practice” as an early retirement non-profit thing to keep ya out of the house — then a PhD can be a good place to do hard tech pre-seed work.

ke88y commented on Getting a paper accepted maxwellforbes.com/posts/h... · Posted by u/stefanpie

ModernMech · 3 months ago

> citing something does not imply that the cited thing is “foundational” to the work from which it is cited.

I neither wrote nor implied that. Sure there are many reasons to cite papers, but in saying "citing the research as foundational", meaning that their foundation is the reason for their citation. You were so eager to write all those words you didn't stop to actually read mine. Therefore, I think that's all I have to say to you, I'll leave the rest unread.

ke88y · 3 months ago

Yes. My original post is about what people choose to cite, some small subset of which is ever cited as “foundational”. Why would you make this distinction then back track on it? Right: because it’s irrelevant point.

Pedantic and profoundly wrong but always in some ridiculous lens always wiggling enough to never let truth get on the way of Being Smart And Right. Peak .edu and the reason it’s so damn hard to justify science spending to the actually hard working tax payers patronizing this stuff.

ke88y commented on Getting a paper accepted maxwellforbes.com/posts/h... · Posted by u/stefanpie

bonoboTP · 3 months ago

The author has many other posts with solid advice, like "Don't Make Things Actually Work" https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/dont-make-things-actually-wo...

It seems to go 180 degrees against what a smart starry-eyed junior grad student would believe. Surely, it's all about actually making things work, right? We are in the hard sciences, we don't just craft narratives about our ideas, we make cold hard useful things that are objectively and measurably better and can be used by others, building on top of it, standing on our shoulders, and what could be more satisfying than seeing the fruits of our research being applied and used.

However, for an academic career you want to cultivate the profile of a guru, a thought leader, a visionary, a grand ideas person. Fiddling with the details to put a working system together is lowly and kinda dirty work, like fixing clogged toilets or something. Not like the glorious intellectual work of thinking up great noble thoughts about the big picture.

If you want to pivot to industry, it could help you to build a track record of having created working systems, sure. But I've often seen grad students get stuck on developing bepoke internal systems that are not even really visible to potential future employers. Like improving the internal compute cluster tooling, automating the generations of figures in Latex, building a course management system to keep track of assignment submissions and exam grading and so on. Especially when you're at a phase where your research project is getting rejections and you feel stuck, you are most prone to dive into these invisible, career-killing types of work. In academia, what counts is your published research, your networking opportunities obtained through going to conferences where you have papers, getting cold emailed because someone saw your paper etc. I've seen very smart PhD students get stuck in engineering rabbit holes and it's sad. It happens less if your parents were already in academia, and you kinda get the gist of how things work via osmosis. But outsiders don't really grok what actually makes a difference and what is totally invisible (and a waste from a career perspective). Another such trap is pouring insane amounts of hours into teaching assistance and improving the materials, slides, handouts and so on. The careerists will know to spend just as much on this sort of stuff as they absolutely have to. Satisficing, not optimizing. Do enough to meet the bar, and not one minute more. It is absolutely invisible to the wider academic research community whether your tutorial session on Tuesday to those 20 students was stellar or just OK. Winners of the metagame ruthlessly optimize for visible impact and offload everything else to someone else or just not do them. A publication is visible. A research semester at a prestigious university is visible. Getting a grant is visible. Being the organizer of a workshop is visible. Meticulously grading written exams is invisible. Giving a good tutorial session is invisible. Improving the compute infrastructure of the lab is invisible. Being the goto person regarding Linux issues is invisible.

Packaging your research in a way that works well out of the box is in the middle on this spectrum. It may be appreciated by another stressed PhD student somewhere in some other university, and it may save them some time in setting things up. But that other PhD student won't sit on your grant committee or promotion board. So it might as well be invisible. Unless your work is so stellar and above and beyond other things that it goes viral and you become known to the community through it. But it's a double edged sword, because being known for having packaged your work in an easy to use manner will get you pigeonholed into the "software engineer technician" category, and not the "ideas person" category. Execution is useful but not prestigious. Like the loser classmate whose homework gets copied but isn't invited to parties.

The metagame winner recognizes that their work is transient. Any time spent on packaging up the research software for ease of use or ease of reproducibility once the publication is accepted is simply time stolen from the next project that could get you another publication. Since you'll likely improve the performance in the next slice of the salami anyway, there would be no use in releasing that outdated software so nicely. The primary research output is the paper itself, and the talks and posts you can make to market it to boost its citations, as well as the networking opportunities that happen around the poster and the conference. Extras beyond that are nice, but optional.

While you're working on making something "really" work, you're either delaying the publication, making it risky to get scooped (if done before publication), or you're dumping time into a dead project (dead in the sense that the paper is already published and won't be published-er by pouring more time into it post-publication).

ke88y · 3 months ago

Or, you’re building a thing you can sell to others for a reasonable price, because it actually works.

This won’t get you a Stanford professorship. That’s something you can cry about from your mountain chalet or beachfront vacation home.

ke88y commented on Getting a paper accepted maxwellforbes.com/posts/h... · Posted by u/stefanpie

ModernMech · 3 months ago

I don't find this true at all in my experience, you and I apparently have very different perspectives when it comes to the research we consume. The things which you say are not cited absolutely should be, and if they are not that's a problem. In the papers I read, I'm often encountering citations to specific versions of libraries, specific industry created operating systems, industry created programming languages of which there are many, specific commercial lab equipment which were used. My friend in grad school used to do research on x86 machine instructions and he had a giant instruction manual on his desk at all times, which was cited thoroughly in his work. This is all part of doing good research.

Either way my point stands. Since they are citing the research as foundational in their papers, then we should take them at their word. The idea you put forth that they're only doing so as a matter of show puts a terrible light on them if true. They shouldn't be citing research as foundational if it really isn't. So I will choose not to believe your characterization, because I think very highly of the industry researchers I know, and that doesn't seem like something they would do.

ke88y · 3 months ago

First of all: we’re pretty far off topic now and I don’t think this particular point is at all relevant to the main thesis of this thread.

That said, even if we accept the general premise of your post, which I don’t, you’re still drawing the wrong conclusion.

To wit: citing something does not imply that the cited thing is “foundational” to the work from which it is cited. One can cite work for any number of reasons. (Admittedly, citation behavior did change with the rise of bibliomaniacs, but of course that further bolsters my overall point, so I’m not sure the daylight on this point does you any favors.)

You identified some counter-examples that miss the point because they’re unrepresentative, unresponsive, and irrelevant.

Unrepresentative because we are discussing literature in aggregate and this behavior is common.

Unresponsive because, in aggregate, inessential academic writing is systematically over-cited in academic writing and essential inputs of other types are systematically under-cited in academic writing. This is true of all academic writing; it’s a bias of the medium and of the medium’s standard bearers.

And irrelevant because there is nothing a priori or essentially nefarious about the above, on its own!

Academics beat ideas and lines of inquiry deep into the ground. Crucially, they do so by pumping out ridiculous quantities of PDFs. For every little variation there is a paper. Outside of academia this isn’t done. Eg: you cite Package X, great! But do you cite the 17 different PRs most relevant to your work, many of which are at least a papers worth or work? No. That’s culturally off. But for the corresponding thinly sliced papers that’s what you have to do.

Conclusion: academic work dominates the citation list because of publication and citation culture, not because academic work dominates the set of enabling contributions.

I do trust that you genuinely do experience the world as you describe here, but I think you’re a fish in water and that Upton Sinclair quote about paychecks comes to mind.

ke88y commented on Getting a paper accepted maxwellforbes.com/posts/h... · Posted by u/stefanpie

rcxdude · 3 months ago

Without permission, yeah. But many companies do publish scientific papers. In both worlds, there's usually a game of publishing enough to give people confidence that the results are good, without actually giving away enough details to actually lose any competitive advantage (this is perhaps even more so in academia). In basically every field there will be things that everyone talks about and things that no-one talks about, and the latter is often even more important (but usually more boring know-how type things).

ke88y · 3 months ago

Also, to state the ultra-obvious given our venue: you can find patrons outside of mega companies that require NDAs.

ke88y commented on Getting a paper accepted maxwellforbes.com/posts/h... · Posted by u/stefanpie

GJim · 3 months ago

> In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron

Are you are aware there is a world outside the USA?

ke88y · 3 months ago

Sorry, you’re totally correct!

It’s important to point out that US professors are sometimes able to go without public patronage, but that this is very much an anomaly.

The US private sector funds A LOT of R&D relative to other countries, and the US attracts an outsized amount of FDI targeted at R&D.

As a result, in the USA there are occasionally rare instances where professors can mostly fund labs without government patronage.

Scientists in other counties are even more desperate for public patronage (and its associated political games) than US scientists

ke88y commented on Getting a paper accepted maxwellforbes.com/posts/h... · Posted by u/stefanpie

ModernMech · 3 months ago

And yet, show me any private sector funded research and most of the citations will be academic research funded by public dollars.

ke88y · 3 months ago

Only when they are disseminating in an academic venue. Most non-university research dissemination happens outside of academic venues.

And even then usually only because it’s expected, not because it was actually useful. (And no, it’s not because academics are more ethical about acknowledging the shoulders they stand on. Academics rarely cite the chip designs, software libraries, lab instruments, instruction documents, training materials, etc. What “counts” as something that deserves a citation mostly boils down to “did you publish it in a venue controlled by other academics”, not “how important was this to enabling your contributions?”)

The fortunate thing about the private sector is that you don’t have to spend years of your life shaping opinion on citation ethics, because people are using your stuff instead of half-interestedly saying that they may’ve skimmed the intro to a pdf describing your stuff. And if people use your stuff and get value from it you can usually extract some of the value that creates. Which means you don’t need vanity metrics to convince some government agency to throw you some coin.

ke88y commented on Getting a paper accepted maxwellforbes.com/posts/h... · Posted by u/stefanpie

keiferski · 3 months ago

A secondary and less visible consequence of this is that many people don’t go into academia in the first place because they are put off by the publishing system. And so many people that would otherwise be contributing to human knowledge are working in an office somewhere helping a random company sell more widgets.

ke88y · 3 months ago

Contributing to humanity’s knowledge is MUCH easier in the private sector than in academia.

In the private sector you can choose your patrons and your dissemination mechanism. Many, many scientists publish papers, publish code, give talks, write blogs, and otherwise distribute technical details about their work product.

In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron and you must disseminate in academic journals/conferences, which generally do a piss poor job of providing incentives for either doing good work or communicating well about that work.

Any time I hire a junior PhD I have to UNDO a ton of academic writing/provlem-solving propaganda and reteach both common sense and normal writing style.

The harsh truth is that private sector scientists tend to do better science and disseminate it in more useful and lasting ways. They are paid better for it.

The academic scientists who are up to private sector standards tend to have diverse funding mechanisms and therefore rely far less heavily on prestige publication for their labs revenue stream. But most professors must publish papers because they are unable to do good work and/or communicate the value of that work to anyone other than their inner circle of friends (who sit on the grant review panels or take stints at federal agencies).

ke88y commented on West Virginia University to drop 32 majors including all world language programs wvgazettemail.com/news/ed... · Posted by u/joe5150

RhysU · 2 years ago

Heh, this family is in Western PA which I left in the early 2000's for greener pastures outside of PA entirely. I love the area and the people, but pretending things are economically rosy in Western PA in the extraction areas undercuts your credibility. Leave Pittsburgh once in awhile.

ke88y · 2 years ago

My comment notes there are still deep scars.

> Leave Pittsburgh once in awhile.

1. These sorts of presumptive comments are presumptive and serve no purpose in the conversation. Believe it or not, you aren't the only person on the internet with your background.

2. Western PA is an enormous region, and it's not just Allegheny County that is doing well relative to West Virginia.

3. Having some base of economic activity outside of coal is still better than nothing, even if resulting employment is concentrated in metro areas.