deviationblue
deviationblue on Hacker News
Yes, all PhDs are equal. But some are more equal than others.
Posted by
deviationblue on Saturday August 25, 2018 @12:08PM
from the ask-hn dept.
My question is simple: why are we robbing academics and research of PhDs? There is a thread that's actively encouraging that people should get PhDs (which is fine), but then the take-away for most commenters is that you're going to get a PhD and go into industry, not research or academics.Maybe I am an old fool, and like to romanticize things, but I cannot believe that we encourage people to...
Yeah, you're probably just biased against someone you know who has a CS degree, or is getting one. It's how humans work.
Exactly this. The whole point of these exercises is putting the inferior races in their place.
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, become product managers.
The day 'discrimination' happens to you, you'll sing a different tune.
It's telling that the profound statements are inherently prosaic. So are they really 'profound' or categorized so because they can be tied to some kind of natural or observable or relatable phenomena. I guess that doesn't matter since we are tying this to prosocial behavior, the idea here is to identify what can induce the feeling of 'birds of a feather' (at least, that's my take of it).
The bullshit statements were easy to pick out because they're too abstract or require lateral thinking.
Agreed. And can't we just employ humans to do this? Give them a job and such?
This cannot be overstated. Also, we are treating this planet like we've got options elsewhere. This is setting people up for a rude awakening, whenever that may be down the line.
> Women, of course work as doctors for more that a single year, but on average they do work less over their lifetimes than male physicians.
What data supports this statement, or is it good old fashion common sense and gut instinct?
Or, if it's from someone I don't like anyways or want others to dislike/disregard: manipulative.
I am not sure how viable this hiring model is for companies that want to develop bleeding edge IP. Speaking only about development jobs: contractors are nomadic, they're not tied or married to your success or failure. From a developer POV, that's not a bad thing. You can just come in, do your thing, and move on to the next great adventure. From the employer side, each time you are training someone new to become familiar with your code base, your company intricacies and peculiarities, etc. which takes time and effort, and learning from failure, time for which may not be available. And the end result is that you may end up with a mish mash that doesn't work well together because the people who made it are gone or moved on. Also, developing is mentally exhausting. Not sure what dev, unless they're really desperate, will want to indulge this and expand that kind of mental effort for less payout or benefits. Or maybe the company only hires these for less innovative stuff or CRUD jobs.
Well, if you're thinking sentient, AI beings, then no-- they are still a long way off. Unless we can give any meaning behind why a robot should do something, for example, have and use this kind of dexterity, it's all mechanical tricks. Cool tricks, nonetheless.
> you could get the 1984 or black mirror dystopian society
We already have that, let's stop pretending we're not already living in a dystopian society.
> I'm not sure how "we should treat others better" can be implemented in practice?
This is an honest question from you, but to some it might seem like a no-brainer. I think a lot of it has to with personality types.
It's not dangerous and unethical if humans are there to pass final judgment on the answers. I was saying we can get to point where we might not even need that. This technology is in development, it has a lot of potential it can, will possibly, reach. Stories like these are good for caution, but doesn't mean we shouldn't use these tool there.
I suggest holding on to the knee jerk reaction till you read the whole post..? I never said these tools will never be worthy of trust and performance at the levels we attribute to humans, but at their current point, there are some tasks that they're not good at because either the tool is limited by design or hardware, or we just haven't found the right solution yet.
We're putting a lot of faith in tools that can best be described as immature. I don't think it's out of the question to get A.I. (not speaking of Watson, which is A.I. adjacent) to the point where it can perform perfectly at human intelligence tasks. The point is to have these systems perform better than their human counterparts (at least, I think that should be aim for something like Watson for Health). The people who built these things are learning themselves. As we make more progress in technology and AI, I don't doubt that we could break that barrier. There may be an upper limit because maybe the human brain is incapable of solving some problems, but even there I think it's not difficult to imagine workarounds. Simply put, I don't think the answer is to think these problems could never be solved.
Additionally, human-assisted A.I. is not the solution, it's a non-answer to the problem of creating systems that can think and perform at human levels of intelligence. It's okay to admit if we don't have the ability to make these things, but its disingenuous to believe that human involvement in helping computers get to the right answer is the right answer. Though yes, we need this right now to move things along where they otherwise might stand still.
Interesting choice, Wizard of Oz. One question I've always wondered, what to do about narcissists who think someone else is the narcissist? Also, funny thing I've seen happen at work: there was someone this one (but influential) person didn't like because of office politics, and wanted to have that person be dismissed in social circles in the office. Easy job for them- label them as a narcissist. Honestly, everyone is a little selfish, so it's not hard to pick and choose behavior from any one person, and make it fit into that narcissism box.
> marine biology or some shit
Highly ignorant comment, makes everything else you're saying less credible. I'd say instead that STEM subjects are more conducive to instilling a certain style of thinking that's helpful for certain careers.
Should we start holding food chemists accountable for weight gain and obesity?
Rhetorical question aside, there's a lot of stimuli competing for our attention in any given day. Since we've created this brave new world, I think it makes sense to educate people growing in this society to combat that. If you're into that sort of thing. I'd liken measures against this to soda taxes and cancer photos on cigarettes.
I think education is fine, but anything that impedes on personal agency is annoying. I understand addiction ruins lives. But imposing blanket measures, like soda taxes or whatever, seems like punishing others because of someone else.
This article exists with the value judgement that being not miserable is some kind of boon or "positive" or "good thing". Anything that starts with that kind of implied value judgement w/o anything substantive can be disregarded.
Edit to add: Seriously though, a healthy amount of cynicism is required for critical thinking. If you try too hard to be something, whether that's happy or positive or whatever, you're depriving yourself from thinking of everything that might comprise a reality, and thus looking at just half of it. But yeah, too much of anything is bad.
[Also, I get sarcasm, you should too, hopefully].
Cynical me all the while thinking this is an ad for Facebook.
Ill-defined though it may be, there's still an understandable difference between data science and data engineering.
Pay me for my information. That's how the world works- no free lunches. But apparently there are.
Similarly, rule #4: Google candidate. What happens if candidate doesn't have Google presence? Or if there are other people with the same name as the candidate who have weird websites or videos posted somewhere. Give me a break, let's not get paranoid about hiring. You can always let someone go.
It may not be something covered by the article, but this is not false. And those who don't do it, are not virtuous paragons or whatever- they either haven't done it, didn't think of it, or got caught.