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Comment by alasdair_ | Hacker News Reader

>Summary: If you did well on the SAT or attended graduate school, you were more likely to become a professor or receive NSF grants.

This seems to measure people who have bought into "the system" in a particular way, rather than measuring exceptional people.

Paul Graham's essay today (http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html) seems especially apt. These people have learned to hack certain standardized tests.

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You can't just hack your way into being a STEM professor at a top institution. You actually have to do stuff, discover new things. It's analogous to actually building a good product if you're a startup founder.

"Hack" is a bad word, because it definitely involves work

But it's 30% research/academic work, 70% playing the system.

>You can't just hack your way into being a STEM professor at a top institution. You actually have to do stuff, discover new things. It's analogous to actually building a good product if you're a startup founder.

From my friends with PhDs, it seems like it's about 30% doing real stuff, 10% fucking around with grant funding paperwork and 60% trying to turn a single result into as many papers as possible in order to maximize impact scores and other metrics.

I'm getting a PhD and it's been 90% real stuff, with no regard towards impact metrics. It probably depends a lot on the subfield. My subfield is less "hot" than most, which some would take as a sign of unhealth, but it means we're spared all these other problems.

Statistically, most people who score low on standardised tests don’t do it because they’re too independent-minded to be part of the system, man!

Statistically most of them just aren’t that bright.

> Statistically, most people who score low on standardised tests don’t do it because they’re too independent-minded to be part of the system, man! Statistically most of them just aren’t that bright.

As measured by standardized tests?

No, just intrinsically.

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