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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

That happens less in academics - I was thinking more of administrative areas in corporations. For example, there are no shortages of stories of administrators in procurement adding in additional required paperwork when more efficient computerized systems make their stamp on documents less required.

Actually, this has happened in academics in a way too - consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews in PHD theses. These have come about because of the ease of access to academic documents through digitized journals making libraries and supervisors less valuable. The answer is to increase their value by increasing the amount of work required so that they will still be necessary to wade through it. I'm not sure how much this is sabotage and not just the result of electronic journals making this easier though, which is why the example in the paragraph above is far more relevant.

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I am a math professor. This phenomenon of lengthening literature reviews doesn't exist in math, nor indeed have I ever seen mathematicians assign pointless busywork to sabotage others, or to inflate our own importance, or for any other reason.

Indeed, we hate extraneous paperwork:

http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs

and are trying to change the library system:

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Now the intrinsic value of research math as a whole may be debated, especially that of the bottom 90% of researchers (and I would not say I'm in the top 10%).

But I have really not observed math professors to be guilty of what you claim. Quite frankly, math itself is hard enough; there's no point in setting additional hoops for students to jump through. It would just make us look foolish, and waste our own time (in addition to that of others).

I can't speak for other disciplines.

Well, pointless busywork was a staple of my high school and under days of math. Once I got to college, I had a professor for Calculus I that said our grade was the four tests + the final or just the final - whichever grade was higher. Having taken Cal in high school, I just showed up for the final and got a B+ (I reversed the damn derivatives of ln/e).

That was the best math class I never took. To be fair, my discipline wasn't anything scientific so needing math wasn't in my college curriculum (switched from business to psychology then to art and advertising). I took another class, Discrete Math, from the same teacher my senior year as an elective and absolutely loved it. I never skipped a day.

He was a great teacher, and the way his class was set up for grading and not really giving a shit about homework was perfect. If I were to ever teach math later, his format would be how I would do it.

"Math professor" probably means at the college or university level -- high school math is widely regarded as complete and utter BS.

I've taken... a rather significant pile of maths classes at this point (I'm majoring in it), and I've never felt like any of the college-level maths classes assigned busywork. I may not have liked the size of the workload (oh god, real analysis), but I've never felt it was unreasonable.

I think you're interpreting "math professor" as "school teacher", while others are talking about the tenured kind of professors. "Students" here are researchers, who do work potentially ostensibly for society, not just homework for their own education.

I worked at a government agency that circa 2005 was using paper timesheets. The timesheets were required to be printed on a specific shade of blue paper.

Hilarity ensued when some admin ordered "air force blue" paper instead of "power blue". The HR director decreed that only "power blue" would be accepted, and all other hues would be rejected. They probably spent 200 hours debating it.

Ok, I got to ask what exactly was HR's explanation for a particular shade of blue?

I've been part of something like this is a weird way. In the summer the humidity got too much for our HP4 printer and it would crinkle 20lb paper and get jammed. We found the 28 or 32 lb paper (long time ago / cannot remember exactly) would not jam and the printer worked fine.

So, in the summer, we changed to ordering the thicker paper. The gold paper was cheaper than the white paper at that weight. So, we order gold paper every summer.

Long after the building had air conditioning and the old printer was replaced, they still ordered gold paper every summer until the program closed.

" consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews in PHD theses. These have come about because of the ease of access to academic documents through digitized journals making libraries and supervisors less valuable."

I'm not sure I understand your conspiracy theory mumbo jumbo correctly, but I cannot help but take from this that you are saying that because finding literature has become faster due to electronic access to papers, the added value of the Phd supervisor has gone down. If this is so, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, a position for which I find additional evidence in your use of 'PHD' with all capitals which nobody in academia would do. Look, if you have something valuable to add to the discussion, please do; but if you're just going to make things up to fit your ideological predispositions, stay on Reddit.

I agree. If anything, the explosion of digital libraries and thus of available information would tend to make librarians and supervisors with deep domain knowledge even more essential to sort through all the noise.

If I had to guess, literature reviews are getting longer because us researchers are quickly going through the lower-hanging fruit and thus reaching discoveries that have more and more "dependencies".

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