Patrick, ENTJ: "You can paste this in and say it's my reply, if I make a forum account I'll waste my life on it."
*shrug*
Yes, exactly...and so we have a specialized class of thinkers that we pay. We call them teachers and professors. Their job is to innovate and to hand down their knowledge to future innovators.
"What he doesn't recognize is that professors aren't the blessed group of people from whom all innovation and knowledge flows. Most of the technological growth we've experienced has been the result of capitalistic selection, and while professors sometimes 'hand down their knowledge to future innovators', usually they hand down a deadline to their TAs who in turn tell the students to read the book."
The professors are given a lot of leeway to pursue their interests...it's not just driven by a capitalistic/corporate money demand machine.
"HAHAHAHAHA
I'm not sure what utopian school this guy went to, but most if not all professors do exactly what their grant tells them to do and sometimes sacrifice academic integrity to pinch out a little more cash."
Mathematicians proving Fermat's Theorum or other such things are not exactly doing "profitable" or "public interest" research, yet they are given full privilege to do such because it is of academic interest.
"That professor is also more than likely holding a position either out of tenure or because he's good enough at math to hire as a lecturer. Students pay to be lectured (and then forget it and binge drink and oh god oh god there's an exam I'd better cram so I can forget everything I learned immediately after I set down my pencil) and are paying his wages, and oh by the way he doesn't make much. It's not really a privilege, it's a job, and also Fermat's (Last) Theorem is of arguable value to future generations. So is the Riemann Hypothesis. So is the Poincare Conjecture (oh wait, a professor didn't solve that one, whoops). Solving any of those problems is like winning the Tour de France seven times. You're cool, but you haven't actually improved humanity all that much"
Yet someone has to direct the research. Graduate students are not certified to do research yet. You need people with the PhDs in the universities to direct research.
"I'm going to stop laughing egregiously because it'll get old.
So yeah, you need people to direct grad students' research. Those people are other grad students, access to closed-source scientific literature, and massive amounts of stimulants. A grad student to a professor is combination cheap labor and terrified underling. I'm being cynical, I'm sure there are some awesome professors who really motivate their grad students, but in any case the funding from that professor's grant is motivating them way more. Also grading his papers and getting free tuition/housing helps.
Burger-flippers don't go through 12 years of paying school dues.
"No, those are baristas. Burger King is for minority underclass workers, Starbucks is for failed intellectuals--get your franchises straight. Also don't sell yourself short. You probably make more money than the majority of professors (you're letting selection bias influence your image of the average professor--not even close to many professors are Stephan Hawking or Carl Sagan)."
Oh, have I mentioned the papers, books, etc that professors are often working on?
"A group of folks in the hard sciences once did an experiment to test the value of papers on English literature (an English PhD is about the only thing more useless than a Philosophy PhD). They took a whole bunch of technical words from the field, wrote a completely meaningless paper using them, and submitted it for peer review. It passed. You're forgetting the degree to which people in academia are allowed to self-regulate--sure this paper makes sense! After all /I/ bullshitted my way through a paper and tried to obfuscate it to prevent legitimate criticisms from being leveled at it too, didn't I? (thinks the peer reviewer)"
It is precisely because we produce excess that we can have this class of people, and it is because of this class of people that we ultimately can create the techniques that give us excess.
"You're right that it's because of excess that we have this class of people. And remember I'm talking about the majority of professors here, not the minority who produce useful scientific knowledge and actually inspire students to put down the Bud Light for a minute, uncross their eyes, and wonder what that dude at the front of the room was talking about. But most of them are the result of a bunch of wealthy baby boomers going off and having kids, remembering that college==higher wages when it was the 70s, and paying for their kids to go to four more years of what amounts to slightly harder high school for most degrees (including, but not limited to, everything in Fine Arts and most modern Computer Science curriculums. Basically any degree that doesn't require hard math, really). But then Jr. kids to pound on his liver for four more years, suck his thumb a little while before learning to do something useful, and gee whiz why sure I'll let you pay me to not fail your kid for being a failure. Why shouldn't colleges lower their standards and pass everyone? No one realizes yet that the majority of their degrees have no market value, and hey now the government is getting in on subsidizing this action. Fuck yes! We'll teach your kids how to do a keg stand and get summers off to boot!
And like I said earlier*, that's why degrees are being watered down to the point that they're not worth the paper they're written on. And they're ESPECIALLY not worth the opportunity cost of spending four years and something like $40k (sometimes subsidized) starting a business and learning how to actually provide value to the economy. Then again considering that high school suffers the same problem (teachers water down their classes so students all feel brilliant, hence fewer student complaints and more time to get their foot in the door long enough to become IMPOSSIBLE to fire because of the union they're required to join--and then they can just kick back and not give a shit about the kids).
* BenW: "Why is academia so against single focus education?"
Patrick: "Because academia is inflated and propped up by the tuition of idiots who demand that they lower their standards so they can get a college degree and water down everyone else's."
So really what you're saying is more or less true, except these days it's high school teachers, not professors, that fill the roll that SHOULD be educating kids for free, but because they have terrible pay and an anti-competitive atmosphere, they're fucking shitty and kids just get High School 2.0 because they weren't taught properly in the first place and everyone feels bad just pushing them out the door and telling them to deal.
Now trade schools are frequently valuable as long as they aren't IT or crappy computer science. Actually learning how to do something that society demands will usually land you a job and maybe some sort of apprenticeship. Also university degrees in hard sciences that you ACTUALLY busted your balls to learn will definitely provide you with value, although really you could have busted your balls in a library instead of wasting $40k to be motivated by not wanting that $40k to have been a waste. In the end, if you produce something impressive, no corporation looking to hire you is going to give a shit what's written on that paper, all they're going to see is a dollar sign on your forehead that says "Get this guy before someone else does, he's valuable
Oh yeah, and becoming a doctor is always a fine choice. Can't go wrong there, and that's because they'll actually fail your ass if you don't suck it up and work like a real person."
Where in the world does a theoretical mathematician get a research grant besides a university?
"If you're a pure math mathematician with competence, you'll fucking SPANK anyone interviewing for a high paying computer science job, cryptanalysis, hedge fund management, pretty much ANYTHING. It's one of the highest market value degrees in the world.
Which is why I got a Pure Math degree."
What company should an experimentalist in psychology go to to study emotion?
"Any company that makes money off of marketing, and they'll get paid better money too."
Companies rarely hire theoreticians of any field...that work is done in universities, and then the same work is passed on to the students in the applied sector...so they can go put it to use.
"I think what you're actually observing is that companies rarely hire crappy theoreticians, but professors don't actually need to produce results so it's a perfect fit for a crappy theoretician. All you have to do is summarize a book of well-understood concepts and hire a TA to grade the tests. Oh, and pretend to do research, or do mediocre research in something uninspired. On the other hand if you want to see companies hiring pure theoreticians who want to do experiments, look no further than IBM, Microsoft, any big pharma, Intel, Apple (if you're into marketing, not if you actually understand computers), GM, and other market leaders in high volume industries.
Even the greatest created methodology in our history: the scientific method, was not a philosopher's doing, it was an astronomer's doing"
"Actually I'd give it to Des Cartes. And he was a mathematician (among other things)."
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