How would he not? Are you really arguing that someone with D.E. Shaw and Princeton on his resume would be in the same position as, in your words, a "typical minimum wage worker"?
Even ignoring the signaling value of D.E. Shaw and Princeton, are you arguing that the wealth he'd accumulated in his career up till that point is comparable to that of the "typical minimum wage worker"?
Then are you arguing that a hedge fund manager and a "typical minimum wage worker" face the same relative risk when they invest the same amount of money? In other words, are you saying that someone who has 110,000 dollars in savings and someone who has 11,000 dollars in savings face the same risk if they both invest 10,000 dollars?
Sure, but what do they do? Looking at Google Brain for example, "research scientists" are exclusively people with doctorates, while "engineers" only require an MS or BS/BA.
The work is totally different; they're not substitutes.
I am not sure about Google, but when I was at Facebook, any Software Engineer with PhD can opt to use title Research Scientist instead. The purpose is mostly to make Green Card application easier.
When some people FB Core Data Science came to campus, they made it pretty clear that they were looking for people with doctoral training for their research work (and not, for example, a Master's graduate who completed PhD-level coursework), so I guess it depends on the task/team.
I think it depends a lot on what it is that you want to do. For example, there are entire teams at companies like Facebook (Core Data Science) and Netflix that hire exclusively people with PhDs. Amazon especially is famous for hiring economists. Microsoft pours huge sums of money into Microsoft Research where the only goal is to fund research with relatively little (short-run) profit motive.
But if you're not on one of these research-oriented teams, then I think it's easy to look at PhDs on your own team and think of them as worthless when in fact they were trained for a pretty different set of things. There's the thing about judging a fish's ability to climb a tree. People seem relatively eager (see other comments) to rip into people with doctoral training for some reason.
But there's a difference. Microsoft Research indeed hires mostly PhDs as researchers. That makes sense since they do academic research and publish papers like they are in academia. People with PhDs spent years in grad school doing exactly that.
In other places it makes less sense. And it's good not to make generalizations. If we take ML as an example, there are many excellent people without a PhD and also many PhDs that are great engineers and can write code as good as the best engineers.
I meant the teams in those companies as opposed to the companies more broadly (e.g., Core Data Science at Facebook, not Facebook in general). I mention those companies together because they're well-known for investing a lot in research (e.g., by hiring PhDs). And in these cases, they're hiring PhDs for reasons that are totally different from the reasons for which they hire engineers (who may also have doctorates). For example, there is indeed a difference between the institution-level goals of Facebook and Microsoft Research, but that difference is less substantial between researchers at Core Data Science at Facebook and researchers on the Computational Social Science team at Microsoft Research.
I'm making the point that there is a difference in the value of a PhD depending on where in the company you work. For the research-oriented teams, the value of a PhD lies in the fact that you've ostensibly been trained to contribute to what we know, rather than just applying it.
Going along with your ML example, the difference would be like comparing Athey, Tibshirani, and Wager's work on generalizing random forests against building a random forest using scikit-learn. I'm not saying that someone without a PhD can't write the paper that they did, but it's for sure not at all just a matter of who's better at writing code.
I'm Chinese-American, and literally every Chinese person (from China) I've talked to knows about June 4, 1989. (So much so that it's colloquially referred to as 六四 or "six four".)
It may take some introspection, but please don't spread things that may not be well-informed.
Your anecdote says nothing about what happens in the large. In any case, do you deny that the Tiananmen Square massacre is censored in China? Do you deny that many people don't know about it?
It may take some introspection, but please try to understand that your experience is not universal.
1. It depends on what you mean by censored. If by "censored" you mean a simple search, then yes, I agree. But as far as I can tell (and I'm fairly certain albeit with no way of verifying that I have better information about this than you do), VPNs are commonplace enough in China that this isn't a issue.
2. I don't have any numbers, and I doubt you do either.
In any case, your cute platitude of "you can't learn from history if you don't have the opportunity to learn the history in the first place" is incorrect in implying that Chinese people have no way to access this information and general in such a way that it suggests that you are indeed uninformed (or else you would never make such a sweeping statement). While my anecdote is indeed not representative of what happens at large, I believe strongly that I have better information about this than you do, and would bet everything I have that I've discussed this issue with more Chinese people affected by this than you have.
But I supposed this is a pointless argument (since you/I have no way of verifying any of this). I only ask that you think a little next time before irresponsibly spreading misinformation about a group of people that I suspect you've probably never meaningfully interacted with, as this particular post gives the impression that Chinese people are helpless enough in the face of censorship that they don't know their own history.
Again, my whole argument is predicated on the assumption that I have better information than you do based on my experiences, but if you have better information, please show me as I'm pretty curious about this myself.
Unless you think VPNs don't exist in China, then of course your use of the word "censored" needs to be qualified.
Did you read these links yourself? One of the your links only mentions that it's not taught in school, others are also based on anecdotal evidence (some of which express that it's sometimes taught in schools and that some people know but don't care). The one statistic that I found in your articles asked about the tank man and not the event itself, and even then their number was 15/100, which is low but not zero.
I don't disagree with what's expressed in these links. I disagree with your characterization of people in China having zero access to this information. If you find my opinions/suspicions/admonitions irrelevant, that's a personal issue. I'm good as long as it's been communicated to you (apparently it has).
That NPR link doesn't contradict anything I said. Tedious sure, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't qualify the words you use. But good to know that you read what I wrote! How you choose to process it is up to you.
Replying to the thing below: I claimed that your insinuation that no one in China knows about June 4 because of censorship is false. The small-sample survey cited by the Vox and NPR links that you sent support my claim.
You should re-read what you've written. No qualifications for generalizing statements, so it sounds like you're insinuating what I'm saying you're insinuating.
After some of the initial pain of setting it up (which was educational for me anyway), it's exactly the sort of lightweight thing I was looking for after Google Reader shuttered.
Economics and linguistics also publish their own journals which costs some money but significantly less than Elsevier's subscriptions (I believe linguistics' is 300 USD per year). There's probably enough momentum behind middlemen-run journals that prevents this from happening more en masse.
At least in the social sciences, journal editors delegate papers to reviewers. Your first sentence also suggests that you don't know what peer review is.
Peer review is not the same thing as replication, which is replicating the results of a paper after it's been published (e.g., confirming some groundbreaking finding). Peer review happens at the stage before publication of the original paper. Researcher(s) submit the paper to the journal. The journal editor sends the paper out to some reviewers, who review the paper (this is the "peer review" stage). Pending reviewer feedback and editor approval, the paper is published.
Edit: also the "benefit" that rsa4046 refers to probably doesn't mean networking. AFAIK, reviewers are always anonymous to the authors (which can generate its own problems e.g., if the reviewer gets a paper authored by someone he/she doesn't get along with). The benefit being referred to, I believe, is that of learning to write better reviews, and having reviewed other's work, learning how to improve your own.
Well, yeah, but learning to review is less difficult than learning how to communicate clearly, crisply, and forcefully. So in a well administered review, most benefits accrue to the authors even if the reviews are poorly done, so long as they are ethical. (Editors can step in when reviewers are being unreasonable or ignoring explicit instructions; unfortunately professional editors at glam journals can also step in to push exciting or politically expedient work into press before there is time to adequately vet it, which sucks and gives everyone a bad name).
Well, yeah, there are other irrelevant things about reviewing that I also have the ability to bring up but my point is that to say that the "benefit" of reviewing is for the purpose of networking is misinformed.
I sometimes agree to review out of a sense of obligation, where I know damned well that the authors recommended me, but you’re right, that’s not networking per se. There’s no reasonable expectation of benefit and it would be unethical as hell to request any.
The authors most likely won’t (can’t) ever know that I agreed to review their paper; it’s more of a good citizen affair. Sometimes, afterwards, it will become apparent that a particular referee was someone familiar. I would like to think that the original poster was imagining something along those lines, but your take is probably closer to the truth. Oh well.
I've only worked with professors in economics and political science but I'm under the impression that this is true more generally of academia. Some people do it to help advance the state of the field. Career incentives and standing in the field also come into play. As the poster above mentioned, a professor would be able to say more.
To respond succinctly to your comments: money isn't the only incentive in life, so it seems weird to not see "any incentive" as soon as money is taken out of the picture.
I'm a professor (in mathematics), and there are some reasons why I personally might say "yes" to review a paper. (1) If the paper is so interesting that when I see it I think "I really, really want to read this paper!", then I am likely to peer review it because as a reviewer when I read it, I get to ask any question and the author will take my questions and concerns very seriously. (2) I owe the editor who is asking me to peer review the paper (or maybe even the author of the paper), e.g., if the editor put a lot of work into ensuring a paper I once wrote got properly reviewed. (3) Even if I say "no" to fully reviewing a paper, as an expert in the area I can often provide quick valuable feedback about the relative value of the claimed contribution, and who is most likely to be suited to review it; I'll do a quick informal review like that in some cases.
From the outside, it is easy to forgot the extreme extent to which academics are motivated by (or view themselves as motivated by) principles of "good citizenship". This is selection -- the people who aren't this way, often do not get hired or promoted. Also, many academics (at least in pure math) view motivation for money as a "lower order term". It's a good thing for them, because for much of your long career in academia there is little you can do to impact your salary, besides applying for a job somewhere else. For me it's always been: each year you get some maximum possible merit raise of between 0% and 4%, depending on external economics that the department has no control over. Academic book royalties might also raise your yearly salary by 2%. Being highly money-motivated in some parts of academia would end up being very frustrating indeed. E.g., even when I've got a big NFS grant, that doesn't change my salary one bit; instead, it changes how many students and/or postdocs I could support.
Well, yeah, but without students & postdocs it is very difficult to make a material impact on your field of endeavor.
There’s also an ulterior motive for some lines of work, where sending a paper to be critically reviewed by rivals is a mechanism to torture test the work & conclusions.
This can be taken too far (especially in biology, the glam fluffing and $million additional irrelevant experiments are legendary), but in principle, if even your most motivated critics can’t find a fatal flaw in your work, it’s a reasonable bet that the work is sound. At least, that’s the principle. Editorial overrides sometimes break this safeguard, though (lord knows I’ve seen a few).
Well, yeah, but if you submit a paper to "torture test" and it gets rejected, that cuts off a journal to be able to submit to.
Well, yeah, but I think what he's saying is it's probably the case that a large number if not majority of academic make the decision to go through the grueling PhD process and give up years of earnings in their prime for things other than monetary gain. But of course people can become disillusioned later down the road.
I claim that it’s better to request major revisions than recommend rejection, but that’s mostly due to my lack of faith in authors.
Too many examples of “oh well, let’s try the next journal” and not enough of “gee maybe we should fix these glaring flaws”. It’s not because I’m a nice person; it’s because I would prefer the literature not to be a toxic waste dump. Nobody is entitled to be published anywhere. In an ideal world, doubly blinded review would become a part of the published record. At some journals it already does.
The reviews offer valuable context, which is often sorely lacking in high profile venues. (The canonical examples of STAP and arseniclife come to mind, but also much more subtle details where an overall sound paper somehow only gets cited for the one shaky assertion in the results)
My primary motivation in trying to do a good job as a referee is that if I write a paper, I also want a referee who tries to do a good job. This can improve the quality of a paper tremendously.
> To respond succinctly to your comments: money isn't the only incentive in life, so it seems weird to not see "any incentive" as soon as money is taken out of the picture.
Especially for a group of people where many of them have taken a pass on more monetarily lucrative careers.
In my experience, academia is largely driven by money. Professors at my university were recognized for the money they brought to the university first and foremost it seemed, rather than for any discoveries/innovations in a particular field.
Ah, I know a former engineering professor who left a large flagship university in the Midwest for exactly that reason. Based on what he told me that's more a phenomenon specific to institutions without a lot of money than a general truth about academia.
This resonates with me, as my alma mater definitely doesn't have much (compared to the top endowments out there). It's not amount to sneeze at, but still, there are others ahead of us.
That's obviously not what he's suggesting? He's just saying (and correct me if I'm wrong) that, for a company whose business is based in no small part on trust, it's a bit weird to not have any information about any of the people involved in the project.
Even ignoring the signaling value of D.E. Shaw and Princeton, are you arguing that the wealth he'd accumulated in his career up till that point is comparable to that of the "typical minimum wage worker"?
Then are you arguing that a hedge fund manager and a "typical minimum wage worker" face the same relative risk when they invest the same amount of money? In other words, are you saying that someone who has 110,000 dollars in savings and someone who has 11,000 dollars in savings face the same risk if they both invest 10,000 dollars?