ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
Surely people are Goodhart'ing it, but either they're not very good at it yet or they're not trying very hard.
They are, though. The insanely skewed citation distribution is exactly what you'd expect from people figuring the optimal way to game the system. You're not getting anywhere by autistically focusing on your own reaserch, and hoping others will find it interesting enough to cite. You band together, and boost each other up. There's little individual glory in it for most people, which is why it looks like "they're not very good at it yet, or they're not trying very hard", but that's the best way for them to keep a stable job until they get their big break.
You see this on literally every social network, academia is no different, and the original statement about how much citations which kind of scientist will get, implicitly assumes people won't figure out how these systems work.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
You could, if you were able to point out where it happened.
I'm not sure you can. The whole point of goverent grants is fund what the market will not, and thus be distortionary, from a libertarian point of view.
And any libertarian-lite attemot at salvaging this by saying "well, as long as we have government grants, they should be assigned neutrally" runs into the problem of them not having been neutral for decades, and said libertarian not uttering a peep about it, as well as "neutrality" being hard to define in the he context.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
Hirsch's original suggestion was that a "successful scientist" after 20 years would be around 1 annualized, an "outstanding scientist" around 2, and a "truly unique" one around 3.
I'm going to venture a wild guess and say this was before Goodhart's Law had it's way with that measure.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
Yeah, I think most people complaining about this now were either directly participating in the censorship, approving of it, or at most not all that bothered by it.
Sure, there were some pro-free speech groups, I think FIRE is the most prominent. Libertarians are non-entities though, and it would be an odd one if they complained about government grants being cut.
If the main observable action when in power is to further the downward trend against academic freedom, why should anyone trust the claims being made? Actions speak louder than words after all.
Yes, exactly. This is why current complaints about the lack of academic freedom cannot be taken seriously.
If we want academic freedom we should make moves towards academic freedom, not be indistinguishable from the censors.
If Ukraine wants peace, they should make moves towards peace, not shoot missiles into Russian territory.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
But there is a point when:
- This is not what happened here
- This is what happened in the past at the hands of the woke
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
Partially I think I must have communicated very poorly, as most of this is way off track to what I was saying, and partially I disagree with some of the inferences you're making.
- I wasn't making a grand, universal, iron-law of anything-and-everything that can be vaguely described as Blue Tribe. While I am under the impression that western people with ideas belonging in the Blue Tribe cluster seem to be uniquely susceptible to the idea of "we cannot allow other people to suffer under the way of life we don't approve of" I explicitly said #NotAll.
- I don't understand how you're making the leap from "Commies" to "literally every communist that has ever existed, including (especially) the Soviets". I was thinking of a particular type of western marxist, please don't tell me you don't know the exact type I'm talking about.
- I disagree with the statement "If the actual (historical) Commies count as Blue, then surely their Yankee rivals should count as Red". If we consider American commies / marxists, as well as American liberals, "Blue", there's no contradiction in saying the USA was "Blue" during the Cold War as well.
- In any case I would generally be cautious about slapping a Blue/Red label on an entire country, especially ones as big as the USA or the USSR. Both had factions in power with quite different cultures. I'm not sure if the Blue/Red labels, the way we talk about them today, would fit into the USSR, but whatever I can bite that bullet for the sake of argument - yes, there were Soviet Blues, and Soviet Reds.
- Therefore by the time you're asking me "but then how do you disprove the same statement about the Commies?" all I can say is "but why should I?!".
- I don't know much about the American occupation of Japan, so can't comment, sorry.
- The way I remember it, for the Red Tribe, the invasion of Iraq was a war of revenge. "Muh democracy and freedom" was a neocon justification, and I don't particularly care about whether they were being utopian or cynical, as I don't recognize them as Red.
- If you wanted to throw a curve-ball at me, I'd pick radical Muslims. Hard to describe them as "Blue" and they have the same burning desire to bring the entire world under their way of life.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
It would be nice if you answered his question before asking a follow-up. Particularly when it has nothing to do with the case we're discussing.
To some extent you're right, and it's just human nature, but I also think that the Blues have some universalist drive that the Reds don't.
The most obvious case is Commies insisting that you can't just implement their system in one country, and show the world how obviously superior it is, because something something capitalism ia a global system. But even basic libs have the same instinct, everytime I saw someone propose "why don't you do your thing in your jurisdiction, we do ours in our, and we leave each other alone" someone would show up saying "this would be too cruel for people under your jurisdiction". I don't think all Blues believe this, but 100% of the time the person saying it would be Blue, and other Blues would never give them any pushback.
Most who choose to leave will move to Europe
Are you saying we might actually get doctors and engineers this time?
European academics doing a stint in the US could come back, sure. Could American academics come here? I'm a bit dubious on that. I'm not that plugged into the university system, but don't exactly have the impression that they're awash in cash, and kicking off a rat race between foreign and domestic academics might be just what we need to get the local libs to start seeing the issues with immigration.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
If you want to be a social climber act like a normal sociopath and become a politician or a corporate executive.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
Only temporarily.
That's already a few years of personell changes and shifting the balance of power within the university system. It can be rolled back, but can't be undone at the snap of the fingers, and is therefore superior the solution you are proposing, that doesn't change anything except for the packaging.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
while the net effects on DEI would be the same as in my proposal.
Again, how?
If UCLA gets their funding cut for woke recruitment practices, but other universities bend the knee, you don't think that creates an incentive for UCLA to clean up house, or doesn't boost the relative position of universities that aren't insane?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
How?
The diversity statements didn't appear there out of the ether, they are heing pushed forward by people with inatitutional power. Demanding that they merely stop requiring these statements, and change the names of "women's scholarships" to "totally not women's scholarships" will result in no substantial change other than the people who set up this system being marginally more quiet until the next Dem administration.
Even if your portrayal of what he said was accurate, that is not "a whole nother level", it's "more of the same", and perhaps even "way more mild". But it's not accurate. He wasn't punished for his political views, his university was for their discriminatory practices. Tao was portraying himselfnas politically neutral, and the above comment was pointing out he's lying.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
If the dude was able to write diversity statements, or whatever was the requirement for his old grants, without becoming a different person, why would they speaking up to say "this is retarded and needs to stop" suddenly change their core personality traits?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
I feel like it is worth noting here that the results of any valid scientific investigation don't depend on patriotism?
Do they depend on Diversity Equity and Inclusion? If not, how is it that none of the people complaining about Trump's cuts seemed tobhave an issue with their funding being dependant on that supposed "box checking"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
Mostly monitoring the situation and fixing the odd bug that pops up. Things are pretty stable, so I've been plotting my next move.
Not gonna lie, the main reason this project got as far as it did is using the old nitter+miniflux setup daily, the thought of returning to Twitter, or even just plain old Nitter is unfathomable to me at this point, and it's been driving me to power through until I got something usable. While there's a whole bunch of basic features I should add to make it reasonably usable to anyone who isn't me, the thought of working on them instantly sends me into a comma. OTOH, I've found myself more and more frustrated with Substack, and thinking that it sure would be nice to be able to follow all the people from there on the same app I use to keep track of Twitter. Importing articles would be easy enough, but I think I'm more interested in the "Notes", but the prospect of integrating them was daunting. Cursory searches revealed no alternative Substack readers that I could raid for code, so I thought it would take forever to figure out how to deal with their API... until I actually looked at it. Turns out you can literally just fetch Notes with curl, so I won't have to worry about reverse-engineering their authentication process, unless I'll want to implement fetching paid content.
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
I am willing to entertain claims that official statistics are distorted, but nevertheless someone should make the point: real GDP per capita has more than doubled since 1980s and typewriters.
Distorted doesn't begin to describe it. It's not like someone made an oopsie when refording data in their excel spreadsheet.
Citing these statistics is makes no sense until we establish we're even using the same definitions. If the bureaucratic sector expands to match the gains brought by technology, that's still "P" for the GDP god, and does little to argue against someone who says they're not seeing much productivity gains over their lifetime.
Personal anecdote, we had an order from the higher ups that we must use LLMs, and that they will be tracking how often we use them.
In Europe the push for AI is absolutely bonkers. On top of stories like yours, I've seen academics shill like they were sales reps for their field to adopt it, the public sector incentivizing it's workers to dip their toe in the water and start using them, etc. There was an entire infrastructure of workshop providers ready to go within weeks of when GPT-3 was announced, and it was aimed at some of the most calcified sectors of society.
The mundane theory I have is that this is (another one of) Europe's ill-conceived attempt(s) at overtaking the US in terms of innovation. The conspiracy theory is that they really really want to automate surveillance ASAP. Quite possibly it's both, but either way someone high up had a bright idea, and they'll be damned if they don't see it through.
since the mantra of most owners is to buy and hold.
That's not necessarily it. I used to know a guy that donated 1000 BTC to a minor-mid influencer, back when the price was in single digits. It later came out that the recipient lost his wallet key, without selling a single coin.
Either way, I don't really is see the problem. The pathologization of savings always struck me as economist cope.
I mean, Kulak had that bit about us having flying cars since the Fokker Dr.I. Either way that's not quite how the future was advertised to me. And the moon base isn't going to happen in that time frame, unless the Chinese have some surprises up their sleeves.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
It's nice living in the future*,
I don't know about you, but when I was a kid I used to dream about flying cars and moon bases, not digital panopticons and simulacra.
Ok, I'm imagining it. It looks no different than the husband in his scenario striking first.
Tell you what why don't you show us how we should wrestle with our biases, by leading by example. How do you that everything you're saying isn't the result of bias? What steps have you taken to counteract it?
Why do you keep saying some principle was broken, and then ignoring any response indicating that this did nit take place, or questioning you about it?
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