Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

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I almost stopped reading the article after the sentence, "A self-esteem expert offers a way out of the conundrum." I should have. This is psychobabble rubbish, written by people who have not done science, and who do not know the life histories of people who have studied science to any degree. The main encouragement I had from my parents was to visit the library. They definitely discouraged me from taking apart the blender and refrigerator when I was in the 3rd grade. They did eventually buy me and my sisters a radio shack computer; there was no special encouragement for me to hack assembler as a kid, but I did, and my sisters used it to play video games. Curiosity comes from within. The blank slate theory is as rubbish as the theory of reincarnation.

I share your two hypotheses to the point I consider them ansatzes. Most of my peers have Ph.D.'s in hard sciences or engineering as I do. Most of them wasted their time on their thesis research; it's just a certificate meaning "certifiably smart, persistent, and able to do self guided study." I don't particularly regret getting my underwear drawer liner autograph from the governator. It was a poor financial decision, but I had fun playing with big toys, and it provided enough meaning to my life I avoided ending up a glue sniffer or drunkard.

Attempting to convince more people to do this is a fool's errand: we can't even employ the ones we have. I've been lucky in that I have mostly worked on interesting things and been reasonably well paid for it, but doubling or tripling the number of science people in the world is foolish unless you give them something useful to do. My last job hunt, I ended up talking to an awful lot of people who thought a good use of my time would be building data pipelines to some Hadoop atrocity. You don't need a Ph.D. in physics or machine learning to do that. Yet a lot of Ph.D. types are doing this sort of plumbing for a living, because there are not enough jobs doing actual science.

Carol Dweck hasn't done science? Why would you say that? Do you say that because you don't feel that psychology is a science or is it because of something about her work in particular?

In any case my impression is that the article was about different strategies for improving achievement. I'm not a psychologist, but I've seen some pretty convincing articles that show that praise for how smart a kid is versus praise for how hard they work affects how they handle failure. Increasing perseverance would be a good way to be more successful in academia, I would imagine.

Agreed. It's a shame to write off Dweck's research because of poor phrasing on the part of the writer of the article. Her work is massively important. If you're not willing to understand the psychological underpinnings of motivation, then you're leaving out a big part of the puzzle.

It doesn't sound like you know the first thing about Carol Dweck's work. You heard the term "self esteem expert", which incidentally is about as misleading as possible, and went off on what you imagine that to be.

Nowhere in the article does it say anything about PhDs. A Bachelor's degree is more than sufficient to do the sort of "plumbing" you mention. And it is exactly that sort of thing where the employers are chronically complaining that they can't find any qualified candidates without getting more H1B visas.

Someone may not need a PhD to do this sort of thing, but they DO need more than the remedial Algebra II class that qualified as a math prerequisite for their Communications degree, which they went into because they were told in 2nd grade that they're "not a math person".

I don't know the first thing about phrenology or scientology either: but I know bullshit when I see it. Psychology is rarely even vaguely scientific: I sit in a cafe near the psychology building at Cal, and bite my lip while nitwits with tenure discuss creative ways to falsify their data, and otherwise get the 'right' answer.

You don't even need a high school diploma to do data plumbing. You don't need H1Bs to do it either: you simply need to train and pay people adequately.

I used this as an example of what working scientists (you know, the article is about encouraging people to study STEM) are confronted with on the job market thanks to nincompoops who believe we are short of STEM degreed individuals. I'd rather drive a bus. Fortunately, I don't have to.

I am not a practicing scientist, but I'll venture the hypothesis that your difficulties in the job market may be partly a function of your personality.

Somehow the irony seems to have escaped you that you've based your opinion on a entire field of study on an anecdote about overhearing one conversation while you're deriding them for not being "scientific" enough.

Obviously his methodology is unsound, but that doesn't mean he's wrong. A tiny minority of published results in the field can be replicated.

When these "scientists" spend most of their time massaging data to get that golden 0.049 p-value, I think a bit of derision might be deserved.

At this point, I suspect that the majority of published results in any field cannot be replicated. A certain number of the ones that get a great deal of publicity[1] don't seem to pass a sniff test.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143630 [2]

[2] Before you go all "grr, journanists, grr", I first heard about that one on both the Science and Nature podcasts.

I have sat in this cafe for years, and have listened to some large fraction of the psychology department (and part of the economics department, as well as Robert Reich) discussing "how to get the 'right answer.'" That is a statistically significant sample, particularly considering ... Cal ain't exactly a cow college. Psychology as a field is baloney, as worthy of respect as the astrology column. What the "self esteem expert" in this article was discussing is even more execrable baloney than the usual.

I can't believe that I have to explain to an allegedly working scientist that a sample of professors who happen to frequent one cafe, at one university, is not statistically significant.

What is your position then? That nothing can be learned about human behavior by applying the scientific method? That there's no inherent patterns or cause and effect behind how humans act? Or just that not one single psychologist in the history of the field has yet successfully performed an experiment that has demonstrated such, or even made an attempt in good faith to do so?

Certainly, it's much harder to remove all confounding variables from psychological experiments. That doesn't mean that there's nothing to be learned about human behavior by applying the scientific method.

I can't agree more. One thing I noticed is that, when dealing with large entities like university education, your apartment, home, job etc., the risk is optimized out of the system, and placed on the individual. Take a close look at the contracts you sign on, next time, if you don't believe me.

Now, as some one poorly paid and pursuing science you would be particularly vulnerable to this risk. The bad thing is you have worked yourself into a corner, and there is nothing that you can immediately do, to improve your situation, should you fall into bad times. If you are working for a contractor for a big IT company, you can work long hours for increased pay. You, as a scientist, will not find a similar outlet.

Personally, I think the whole thing sucks. It is not that we need more people in science, rather, we need more investment in science; People/Institutions with big money taking big risks. Like Elon Musk.

> I almost stopped reading the article after the sentence, "A self-esteem expert offers a way out of the conundrum." I should have. This is psychobabble rubbish, written by people who have not done science, and who do not know the life histories of people who have studied science to any degree.

If you want to back up this claim, back it up. The entire rest of your comment is totally orthogonal.

The claim being made by the self-esteem expert is not "psychobabble." It's simple enough for you to think about directly. It's not a langauge you can't understand, written in abstract terms you can't understand.

Having experienced firsthand what happens when people treat intelligence as an "innate talent," I actually know that what he is saying is correct, from personal experience.

My last job hunt, I ended up talking to an awful lot of people who thought a good use of my time would be building data pipelines to some Hadoop atrocity.

What would you rather be doing with your higher education credentials? What is the hiring process for doing that?

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