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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

This reflects a lot of what goes on in Academia as well.

Also, if you think you can counter a "that's not possible" with a working proof of said thing working, think again, most people don't like to be shown they're wrong, particularly tenured professors. That's one of the fastest ways to sabotage your own developing career.

"Yes men" climb the ladder much easier, but then work doesn't do itself so that's the catch. Cue exploitation of interns and other newcomers and you almost have the whole picture on how things get actually done. Hence why "science advances one funeral at a time". Once someone reaches its own Peter level [1], it stops being a productive force and becomes a plug that jams everything behind it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

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Some professors are humble though.

I had a Physics 101 professor who gave a test that had a problem involving blowing a fan into a sailboat sail. The answer to the question was supposed to be that the sailboat doesn't move anywhere because of Newton's 3rd law, but one guy in the class spent close to the entire exam on that one problem showing that it would slowly move forward using a conservation-of-momentum-based approach instead of a Newton's 3rd law approach. The TAs marked it wrong and he got a low score on the test because he spent so much time on that one problem. He tried to argue about it to the professor in lecture but the professor shut him down saying to come discuss it during office hours. So he made a demo using a pinewood derby car with a hand fan glued to it and brought it to office hours and proved that it would move forward. The professor was super humble about it and brought the demo to lecture the next day and publicly gave kudos to the student for challenging the status quo.

Interesting story :-)

I wonder if they sorted out the differences between the maths approaches, so the professor could agree also math theory wise

>"Yes men" climb the ladder much easier, but then work doesn't do itself so that's the catch.

The harder the work, the lower the pay.

I would really be surprised if any tenured professor would shut down a solution to a well known hard problem just based on his ego. More likely the solution is not as well presented, researched or thought through as it seems (I'm assuming we're not talking about astrophysics here).

> I would really be surprised

I wouldn't.

It really depends on the person, but yes you have to get to know them to know how they will react. I find that this is more of a problem in the US, where tenured professors often develop these vast impenetrable egos, while in other countries, such as in the UK or Germany, they are more pragmatic. That said it is still entirely individual, and I knew who to avoid when I had certain ideas in my PhD.

Also, our German group leader asked me to take a feature from my software package because he was worried that the Americans would get upset at an early PhD student showing them up.

Actually I add something extra: I actually know an Indian professor who has become quite senior in the US, and is a more "famous" member of our collaboration, and he actually enjoys a "Guru figure" like perception when he returns to India. He says that literally people treat him like he is a lord or guru. Very strange

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