throwawayarnty

It’s great but what if the small company gets outcompeted by a competitor? Or management changes and environment deteriorates? You lose your steady salary, and if you don’t push hard to achieve then when you try to look for new jobs you find you are outcompeted or your skills outdated.

If might sound dumb to work hard to achieve but those people at the top have very little trouble finding jobs, ie they are not as dependent on a specific company to make a living.

The days are long but the years are short.

It’s all about time scales.

Thanks for the clarification. I think the description “live like your last” needs to be tweaked.

Perhaps what is more productive is: live your days so that when you think back on them (let’s say at a time horizon of months), you feel satisfied in what you’ve done and how you’ve grown.

People think that hackernews is productive won’t admit it.

Hackernews is also a huge source of distraction, but some people here won’t admit it.

This seems to be true when one thinks beyond just science.

Greatest music composers tend to do their best work later in life.

Mathematicians tend to do their best work early in life.

Falcon Heavy is certain an impressive engineering feat, but it doesn’t compare to the Voyager 1 (40 years ago!) in terms of new science and new frontiers.

Industry is better than academia when it comes to getting to scale and reducing costs. But usually new frontiers and new science does not often have those constraints.

I think one fallacy I see when people critique academia vs industry is that they take an example like Amazon from industry and show how it is better than the average output of academia.

To do a proper comparison one should compare Amazon’s products with top products from science: eg ontogenetics, CRISPR, gravitational waves, large hadron collider, and solar voltaics.

An interesting corollary is that passion does not precede action. Action (and seeing positive results) leads to passion.

As much as I love content that critiques academia, this one was really cringe and inaccurate for most of academia.

> Academia is characterized by well-trodden problems, hashed over for decades, and negligible novel data for resolving them. Industry is by comparison a mass of green field areas of inquiry with large budgets, minimal bureaucracy, and ample data.

These two sentences neither describes academia (science) nor industry.

Science expands the realm of what’s possible, and industry focuses more on scale and bringing a specific service to the masses.

Therefore, science is the realm with novel data, while data from industry is larger in quantity but more focused towards a customer or service.

In general I hate to the “academia bad, industry better” types of articles. It’s a high dimensional comparison with lots of overlap. There are many places where academia is preferable to industry, and many places where industry is preferable to academia.

Does this mean that those who bought their cars before can resell in the used market for a better price ? Sounds great if you already own a Tesla.

I think the main issues with postdoc even if it’s enjoyable is that there is an expiry date to how long one can postdoc.

Even if you enjoy postdoc, some places won’t let you stay for more than 4 or 5 years.

If permanent postdoc positions existed, I am sure many people would view it favourably, especially if the lab is a good environment.

These are fine predictions, but how much money at what odds are you willing to bet that they will come true?

Just talking without any real substance is no different than pundits on TV spewing their daily nonsense. they are incentivised to make grand predictions because being wrong has no penalty.

This strategy essentially ensures that you will never have much capital ready for when stocks and other assets suddenly get cheap.

Your strategy means that the best time to buy assets correlates with when your net worth dips then lowest.

Academia beyond postdoc is so competitive that even being in top 5 school is not enough information to decide whether it is a good idea.

Even within Harvard, the percentage of postdocs getting faculty positions is low.

One needs to calculate essentially how likely you will get a top publication in that lab.

The arithmetic is something like for a research group, what is the average number of top publications per year per postdoc. Many top labs at Harvard don’t do well with this metric because they have like 20 postdocs and 1 top paper a year.

Another metric is what fraction of postdocs end up in good faculty jobs.

To think one would ever have three months savings in cash sounds insane to me.

In the USA unexpected expenses (beyond monthly savings) can completely wipe a three month savings in a heartbeat.

Add to that getting laid off during a recession and you’re in for real pain.

I guess it’s just been 12 years since people ever had to deal with a bad economy.

How is this not logical or financially wise ?

It is common advice to have an emergency fund equal to several months of expenses in cash.

What is the alternative ? Having no emergency fund?

Sorry to sound elitist, but no reasonable phd graduate that wants to pursue academia would ever want to do their PhD at Clemson university. Only possible exception would be that PI has done Nobel prize level work or the candidate has personal reasons to be in South Carolina.

For perspective postdocs, it’s not about money, job security, or job environment . It’s first and foremost potential to be a leader in their field.

Plenty of phd graduates are willing to postdoc at MIT or work with a Nobel laureate for starvation wages and intense work environments.

Clemson university just can’t compete.

Which Dutch universities? Just curious.

My perception was that phd students in Netherlands live quite comfortably.

Postdocs in Europe are pretty comfortable and labs often have more stable/core funding.

Work can be pretty good postdocing in some labs in Europe.

But the end of the road is still that after the postdoc you’re expected to either be a rockstar or a nobody. So anxiety is always there.

There is still a gender-skew in the bar scenario, but less extreme as in the app.

If bar scenario had same gender skew as app, one man would go home with all the women in the bar that night.

There are physical limits that prevent this from happening. When a man is paired up with a woman in the bar, the man must ditch potential opportunities from other women in the bar.

No. I am comparing matches on app with matches at a bar.

Both cases would be gender-skewed. But to have the bar scenario be as skewed as the app, one man would go home with all the women in the bar. This is not the case in reality.

There are physical limits that prevent skews from being as extreme as in apps.

It’s not natural because if you go to a bar or other in person event, the dynamics are much less gender-skewed.

This is a naive view of the world.

Most self-made billionaires in western countries exist because they have made something valuable that the public can’t stop buying or investing in. The public are just as selfish humans trying to do what is best for themselves, just like the billionaires.

Think of J.K. Rowling. She is a billionaire because parents are selfish and want to give their kids the best stories to read and watch.

Bill Gates made his wealth because people and companies wanted to use his software for PCs, and investors want a return on their stock investment.

Society can’t stop giving these modern billionaires money because what they have to offer is such a good deal.

The only way to make Bezos stop accumulating wealth is to have everyone stop using Amazon and sell Amazon stocks, which is impossible at this point.

As an anecdote, in some modern Asian cities, you can live your life entirely indoors.

You live in a small apartment above a large shopping mall and connected to the metro.

School is indoors, book learning is prioritised over outdoor physical activity.

Kids would spend their entire childhoods indoors.

No wonder myopia is so prevalent.

Attention has been commoditised even since the radio and television days.

Before that, through mass print media and newspapers.

In some countries, eg France, it’s common for kids to go home for lunch and then come back.

This made me think of science and academia. One of the things that seems to distinguish productive people in science is the balance between “doer” mentality and “thinker” mentality.

Too much “thinker” mentality and the project never goes anywhere. Too much “doer” mentally and the project moves but may go down an unproductive path.

Perhaps an analogy is that “thinker” and “doer” mentalities work together like a stochastic gradient descent algorithm.

The “thinker” mode tries to calculate accurate gradients, but never moves towards the goal.

The “doer” mode takes a step towards the next iteration, regardless of whether you have an accurate gradient already.

Balancing the two correctly can give beautiful momentum dynamics that steers towards your goal.

It has been pretty easy on our end. We live walking distance to work and daycare.

so it’s no problem to even have both of us pick the kids up, walk home to eat lunch, walk kids back to daycare, and go back to work.

Question: how does one stay competitive if a field mostly focuses on high impact factor journals (eg nature) and one makes trainees publish in lower impact factor journals as a matter of principle.

Won’t one be hurting the careers of students by not publishing in the venue with the broadest audience?