= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
IlyaShpitser comments on LessWrong 2.0 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (312)
Physics (and STEM more generally) is a terrible example of credentialism. Almost all original research in STEM is not done by amateurs (e.g. the uncredentialed), with good reason.
Yeah, I am sure enough about this not happening that I am willing to place bets. There is an enormous amount of intangibles Coursera can't give you (I agree it can be useful for a certain type of person for certain types of aims).
Agree that being inside academia is probably a lot bigger deal than people outside it really appreciate. We're about to see the first generation that grew up with a really ubiquitous internet come to grad school age though. Currently in addition to the assumption that generally clever people will want to go to university, we've treated it as obvious that the Nobel prize winning clever people will have an academic background. Which has been pretty much mandatory, since that used to be the only way you got to talk with other academicians and to access academic publications.
What I'm interested in now is whether in the next couple decades we're going to see a Grigori Perelman or Shinichi Mochizuki style extreme outlier produce some result that ends up widely acknowledged to be an equally big deal as what Perelman did, without ever having seen the inside of an university. You can read pretty much any textbook or article you want over an internet connection now, and it's probably not impossible to get professional mathematicians talking with you even when they have no idea who you are if it's evident from the start that you have some idea what their research is about. And an extreme outlier might be clever enough to figure things on their own, obsessive enough to keep working on them on their own for years, and somewhat eccentric so that they take a dim view on academia and decline to play along out of principle.
It'd basically be a fluke statistically, but it would put a brand new spin on the narrative about academia. Academia wouldn't be the obvious one source of higher learning anymore, it'd be the place where you go when you're pretty smart but not quite good and original enough to go it alone.
I only know about STEM, but I don't think it will make a ton of difference (will report back once I see a few graduate).
I am quite certain this is very unlikely to become any type of trend (it is certainly possible for outsiders to be great, Ramanujan was an outsider after all).
edit: I think a better example of "credentialism" is docs vs nurses. MDs know a lot more than nurses do, but there is a ton of routine healthcare stuff that needs a doc for no good reason, basically. In academia people ultimately just care if you are good or not. One of the smartest mathematical minds I know is an MD, not a PhD (and is an enormously influential academic doing mathy stuff). There is a famous mathematician at UCLA without a PhD, I think.
Not in the present circumstances, no. The interesting thing is if it would strike a match with the current disaffection with academia (perceptions of must-have-bachelor's-for-any-kind-of-job student loan rackets and stressed-out researchers who spend most of their energy gaming administrative systems and grinding out cookie-cutter research tailored to fit standardized bureaucratic metrics for acceptable tenure-track career path progress), cause more young people who think they are talented and exceptional to drop out, and what they will do once they have and if that trend might continue far enough to change the wider circumstances around academia.
The "traditional" answer :-/ is that they will do startups.
If we include the economics "nobel", do you find it unlikely that some quant in a bank who was never inside an university wins it?
Ain't no such thing. Banks are highly regulated conservative institutions and want credentials at least as much as any other employer.
In some exotic hedge fund, maybe, but I still don't know about a Nobel...
Quants are often STEM PhDs, actually. There is a very famous Pearl student who is a quant now (Thomas Verma). Thomas is famous enough to have a constraint named after him.
It is true that what is considered worthwhile academic work is somehow socially constructed in the end, even in STEM. But in STEM there is a rigorous footing for these things that helps a lot with not running off to lala land (e.g. the process by which these things are socially constructed does not result in nonsense or arbitrary things being rewarded just because credentialed people did them). If a quant outsider constructs a very influential model, I could see that ending up in a Nobel, especially if it goes through a conventional publication process. I think though quants are generally kept very busy with non-academic things. You need space and time to do good work, and people outside academia or places like Google labs just don't have either.
I think there are quants who make a lot of money and then find that money isn't everything and who wants to do more public work afterwards. Nassim Taleb sort of fits into that model, even through of cause he doesn't count since he has an academic degree.
Einstein was in neither academia nor Google labs in 1905. He simply had a day job that left him and his wife enough time.
In the area of medicine I consider it possible that someone without an academic background has a startup idea that turns out to change medicine. Given that I studied bioinformatics there a bit of a change that I overestimate people who never went to university to look at certain paths of thoughts but I did spent years thinking about certain ideas outside of a formal academic setting.
I'm not sure whether the academic physics community community really succeeds at this task these days. The Gender Science community even less.
I think there are multiple different ways of getting feedback that keeps you from going of into lala land that are different from academia. In the field of health QS partly has the property. It's not perfect but neither is academia.
For finance in particular, my impression is that quants that make good discoveries keep them to themselves, because that's how they make money! After a while, some academic notices the same thing, formalizes it, and then publishes, and then the opportunity is gone.
There is a saying: In finance, if you get results you trade and if you don't, you publish :-/
There are exceptions, of course -- Asness comes to mind.