If receiving a high level education and having access to university resources is effectively a precondition for making significant new discoveries in physics today, you would not expect to see people who did not go through the regular procedures making significant new discoveries in physics, even if the negative selection of academia filters out most of the best candidates.
But remember that these universities are trying their very, very best to select the best candidates, and the people doing the selecting tend to have a lot of experience and to have done a lot of thinking about how to select the best candidates in their field. For every old fuddy duddy who only selects people his antiquated views allow for, there’s a vital young department head out there hunting for the radical new genius. Well funded departments often keep standing job positions open just for when that rare and exceptional person shows up. I don’t think we have any reason to believe that academic departments are bad at finding talented people.
And given how willing people are to throw money and time and resources at scientific and mathematical talents, it seems fair to say that if someone wants to contribute to math or physics (and are capable of doing so), being an autodidact is an almost always an extremely bad strategy. The hoop jumping isn’t really that hard or time consuming.
But remember that these universities are trying their very, very best to select the best candidates, and the people doing the selecting tend to have a lot of experience and to have done a lot of thinking about how to select the best candidates in their field.
I think this is simply false as a matter of fact. See this comment.
Do I personally think that the negative selection of academia filters out a lot of the best candidates? Not really; outstanding success in any discipline is heavily dependent on effort (which is not to say that it will not also require a lot of talent,) and I suspect that most people who’re capable of making really top level contributions are able to put in enough effort that they can get through the necessary selection barriers, even ones dependent on skills in which they have low aptitude. But this is a very different matter from supposing that schools are actually good at selecting the best students; with sufficient effort and conscientiousness after all, one could get through moderate strength filters completely orthogonal to the skills one intends to specialize in.
I think that the people that the current negative selection system impacts most are probably not people with remarkable singularly focused genius, but people who could be pretty good specialists, who lack the aptitude to pass some filter orthogonal to their specialty.
I think this is simply false as a matter of fact. See this comment.
Ah, I was speaking in terms of finding talented researchers at the graduate and faculty level, not lvy league undergrad admissions. Your comments seem reasonable on the subject of undergrad admissions, which I agree are almost wholly negative selection filters. Do you think this also goes for graduate admissions? What should we anticipate observing if schools were bad at this kind of selection? What would we see if they were good at it?
EDIT: I’m working largely on the observation that getting a PhD in any field is really very easy. The major barrier seems to be interest. This doesn’t go for all fields, of course. Law is a serious exception. But physics? Mathematics? I lack data here, but I’m skeptical that these are particularly closed academic fields.
I’m working largely on the observation that getting a PhD in any field is really very easy.
For some definition of easy… As most grad students know, phdcomics is a documentary. The majority of grad students have breakdowns and burnouts as a matter of course. Most (70-75%) still finish, only to never set foot in academia again.
Then perhaps there’s something about getting a PhD that you don’t understand? And, given that, maybe you shouldn’t make such sweeping statements about how easy it is?
Perhaps you’d like to enlighten me? Do you understand why PhD students so often burn out? I’m a PhD student, and I don’t get it. It’s stressful, but not as stressful as a lot of other jobs.
Hah, tru dat. But if that causes people to burn out, then why aren’t people burning out in all sorts of professions? Maybe they are, I suppose. And I think it’s worth mentioning that most PhD students I’ve known have never burned out (if by this we mean something practically serious, not just a bout of depression).
People studying to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and actuaries definitely do burn out from time to time. Very likely, other professions too.
The third and fourth items don’t apply so clearly to them, though. You’re held responsible for a number of things that you have limited control over, and moreover they are few in number so you can’t even use statistics to show how good you are at biasing them towards success with your control.
With a doctor, you see many patients. Some of them will get better. If you NEVER succeed, being a doctor isn’t for you. As a researcher, it’s quite possible that if your advisor has a risky research plan, then you simply won’t succeed just because the objective is unachievable due to unforeseen factors, or the hypothesis is true but it would take a much larger effort than you can pay for to conclusively demonstrate it (who wants to see a P-value of 0.2? It IS suggestive...).
In non-research professions, if you are good at what you do, you will succeed. In research, you must be at least decent to succeed, and being good makes it far more likely… but not certain, or even nearly certain. It takes being really really good to figure out you’re going to fail early, get out, and find something else to do.
EDIT: I’m working largely on the observation that getting a PhD in any field is really very easy. The major barrier seems to be interest.
I’d contradict that. The entry requirements and task is utterly trivial and the intellectual and academic challenge isn’t much of a big deal for anyone with average (or perhaps slightly above average) IQ but the motivational aspect is ridiculous.
The entry requirements and task is utterly trivial and the intellectual and academic challenge isn’t much of a big deal for anyone with average (or perhaps slightly above average) IQ but the motivational aspect is ridiculous.
No, you said it was “really very easy”, which implies that the motivation aspect is trivial. Something can be difficult FROM a motivational standpoint.
Do you think this also goes for graduate admissions? What should we anticipate observing if schools were bad at this kind of selection? What would we see if they were good at it?
On the face of it, this strikes me as tough to judge, because if they’re bad at it we should expect to see e. g., people whose abilities within their field are highly apparent to their professors and peers failing to get into programs which people who make a lesser impression on those who know them do get into, but it’s hard to aggregate anecdotes like this to make strong generalizations.
If you could run two academic environments alongside each other, one of which was good at selecting for high aptitude and one of which wasn’t, I expect it would be pretty easy to differentiate between them, but it’s much harder without a basis for comparison.
I’m working largely on the observation that getting a PhD in any field is really very easy. The major barrier seems to be interest. This doesn’t go for all fields, of course. Law is a serious exception. But physics? Mathematics? I lack data here, but I’m skeptical that these are particularly closed academic fields.
I’ve never gotten into a PhD program for either (I’ve never entered a PhD program period, for that matter,) but I don’t share this impression and am curious as to how you formed it.
Even getting into a PhD program in things that we’re inclined to regard as “soft” subjects, such as English, can be quite difficult, since there’s so much competition. “Good enough” means “better than a whole lot of other people who’re also sufficiently invested to apply to the same program.”
Of course, “very easy” is relative, but I think most people would not agree with the assertion that getting a PhD is easy.
I’ve never gotten into a PhD program for either (I’ve never entered a PhD program period, for that matter,) but I don’t share this impression and am curious as to how you formed it.
It’s not based on very much, I admit, beyond talking to some physics and math people I know about graduate school. It is a selection procedure, and it does take some significant work and talent to get in (as well as some luck), but it doesn’t strike me as unreasonably difficult. All the physics and math PhD’s I know seem genuinely (but not off the charts) talented. Many of them have problems finishing their work on time and writing well. Once you’re in the program, getting out the door with a PhD isn’t that hard, since literally everyone making the decision to graduate you wants you to graduate.
What I’m trying to say is that getting a PhD is hard in the way building a nine foot brick wall is hard. There are some basic skills involved, and then it’s mostly just a lot of time and work. It’s not hard like discovering a new proof in geometry is hard. And if you can do the latter kind of work, people are pretty inclined to cut you some slack on the former. My school recently hired a mathematician who earned her PhD at 24, six months after her BA.
Even getting into a PhD program in things that we’re inclined to regard as “soft” subjects, such as English, can be quite difficult,
I’d say these are much, much more difficult to get into. Firstly because there are way more candidates (the negative selection pressures are a lot lower in these fields) and secondly, because it’s not at all clear what talent in these fields looks like, so things are a lot more random.
I’m working largely on the observation that getting a PhD in any field is really very easy. The major barrier seems to be interest. This doesn’t go for all fields, of course. Law is a serious exception. But physics? Mathematics? I lack data here, but I’m skeptical that these are particularly closed academic fields.
Yes, I think you’re mistaken about this. Relatively speaking, you’re correct—fields like mathematics have less “academic snobbery” than law, humanities, and the like. The problem is that relatively isn’t enough. There is still enough snobbery present that people with “blotches on their record” need a significant amount of good luck in order not to be filtered out.
There is still enough snobbery present that people with “blotches on their record” need a significant amount of good luck in order not to be filtered out.
Well, the question is whether or not academic programs are good at selecting for talent (and, for the purposes of my point, I mean at the graduate level and above). So you may be right that it’s hard for people with blotches on their record to do well, but does this make the selection process a bad one, considered on the basis of costs to benefits?
Yes: there are excessive numbers of both false negatives (talented people with blotches) and false positives (untalented people without blotches).
I’ll make up an example (loosely based on some real cases I know about) to illustrate what I mean. Suppose a graduate admissions committee in a math or physics department is looking at two candidates. Candidate A is applying to transfer from another graduate program at another institution, where for some reason he was a total disaster, flunking courses left and right. On the other hand, his undergraduate record is near-perfect, and itself consists mostly of graduate-level courses. Candidate B, by contrast, is applying directly from undergraduate school, and has a reasonably good record, but with standard undergraduate coursework in the subject, nothing particularly beyond “grade level”.
Now, of these two candidates, which do you think has a higher chance of admission? Neither of them is ideal, of course; but let us stipulate that exactly one of them is in fact admitted. Who do you think it was?
If you were trying to select for talent, it would be Candidate A every time. And sure enough, there are people in math/physics academia who would indeed pick Candidate A. (This is an improvement over high school, or humanities academia, where no one would.) However, a disturbingly large number will pick Candidate B. They will see Candidate A as “damaged goods”, as “unworthy”—as if a spot in a graduate program were a reward for “good citizenship”, rather than a resource to be used for getting research problems solved.
Yes: there are excessive numbers of both false negatives (talented people with blotches) and false positives (untalented people without blotches).
Why do you think this?
Who do you think it was?
So I haven’t read your last paragraph yet. I guess if I were making the decision, I’d pick the undergraduate, unless the graduate transfer had some kind of story about what happened (a divorce, a death, something that would explain the failures). I think that’s probably how most admissions committees would go too: talent isn’t worth much if you need to be dragged to work every day. Now, on to your last paragraph...
(This is an improvement over high school, or humanities academia, where no one would.)
About humanities academia, this isn’t at all true.
I guess if I were making the decision, I’d pick the undergraduate, unless the graduate transfer had some kind of story about what happened (a divorce, a death, something that would explain the failures).
Well, of course there’s some kind of story that explains the failures, other than “he just wasn’t good enough”; by assumption the guy wasn’t let into the first graduate school off the street—he had been a brilliant undergraduate. So something went wrong. The question is whether you should filter out a clearly capable person because something went wrong once. If you do, you’re simply not optimizing for the right thing.
A rational deliberation on Candidate A would look like this: “This person obviously has issues, and he might not succeed here. But if he does, there’s a good chance he’ll succeed spectacularly -- at least, at a level above that of many students we’re happy to call ‘successful’. If he doesn’t, well, some percentage of the blemish-free students we admit are going to fail anyway, so what’s the difference?”
It is a fact of life that sometimes multiple iterations are required for something to work; but the school system does a poor job of accommodating this. Repeating a course as many times as necessary until you get an A is not something that the system encourages; if it were optimizing for the right things, it would be.
About humanities academia, this isn’t at all true
Yes, that was a flippant, stereotyped exaggeration—especially since “humanities” includes philosophy and linguistics, where the mentality is often very similar to math. Still, like any good caricature, it has some basis in reality. Generally speaking, the “softer” the subject -- the fewer objective measures of competence—the greater the reliance on pure status games, i.e. academic snobbery. And of course my whole point here is that this snobbery is present even in “hard” fields.
The question is whether you should filter out a clearly capable person because something went wrong once. If you do, you’re simply not optimizing for the right thing.
What I mean is that I’d want to hear the story. If the guy’s wife died, that’s one thing. If he got addicted to heroin, that’s another. If I’m given no story, then I’ll go with the undergrad. But I don’t disagree with the rest of your assessment.
Generally speaking, the “softer” the subject—the fewer objective measures of competence—the greater the reliance on pure status games, i.e. academic snobbery.
But remember that these universities are trying their very, very best to select the best candidates, and the people doing the selecting tend to have a lot of experience and to have done a lot of thinking about how to select the best candidates in their field. For every old fuddy duddy who only selects people his antiquated views allow for, there’s a vital young department head out there hunting for the radical new genius. Well funded departments often keep standing job positions open just for when that rare and exceptional person shows up. I don’t think we have any reason to believe that academic departments are bad at finding talented people.
And given how willing people are to throw money and time and resources at scientific and mathematical talents, it seems fair to say that if someone wants to contribute to math or physics (and are capable of doing so), being an autodidact is an almost always an extremely bad strategy. The hoop jumping isn’t really that hard or time consuming.
I think this is simply false as a matter of fact. See this comment.
Do I personally think that the negative selection of academia filters out a lot of the best candidates? Not really; outstanding success in any discipline is heavily dependent on effort (which is not to say that it will not also require a lot of talent,) and I suspect that most people who’re capable of making really top level contributions are able to put in enough effort that they can get through the necessary selection barriers, even ones dependent on skills in which they have low aptitude. But this is a very different matter from supposing that schools are actually good at selecting the best students; with sufficient effort and conscientiousness after all, one could get through moderate strength filters completely orthogonal to the skills one intends to specialize in.
I think that the people that the current negative selection system impacts most are probably not people with remarkable singularly focused genius, but people who could be pretty good specialists, who lack the aptitude to pass some filter orthogonal to their specialty.
Ah, I was speaking in terms of finding talented researchers at the graduate and faculty level, not lvy league undergrad admissions. Your comments seem reasonable on the subject of undergrad admissions, which I agree are almost wholly negative selection filters. Do you think this also goes for graduate admissions? What should we anticipate observing if schools were bad at this kind of selection? What would we see if they were good at it?
EDIT: I’m working largely on the observation that getting a PhD in any field is really very easy. The major barrier seems to be interest. This doesn’t go for all fields, of course. Law is a serious exception. But physics? Mathematics? I lack data here, but I’m skeptical that these are particularly closed academic fields.
For some definition of easy… As most grad students know, phdcomics is a documentary. The majority of grad students have breakdowns and burnouts as a matter of course. Most (70-75%) still finish, only to never set foot in academia again.
I’ve never understood this, but I cannot deny that it’s true.
Then perhaps there’s something about getting a PhD that you don’t understand? And, given that, maybe you shouldn’t make such sweeping statements about how easy it is?
Perhaps you’d like to enlighten me? Do you understand why PhD students so often burn out? I’m a PhD student, and I don’t get it. It’s stressful, but not as stressful as a lot of other jobs.
Some things off the top of my head.
Having to be far more independent a researcher than you ever had before.
The standards for your performance have risen similarly.
Projects that don’t work, no matter what you do.
Projects that would have worked if you had done them right.
Having to deal with stupid university-political things.
Low pay, with long hours
… while you’re listening to the biological clock ticking
… and it’s very likely you’ll have to move in a few years, so settling down will make things very tricky later on. The ‘2-body problem’ is rough.
Possibility of having your result ‘scooped’ by someone
… who read your paper in review, held it up with BS, did a quick measurement to reproduce it, then got it published first.
Hah, tru dat. But if that causes people to burn out, then why aren’t people burning out in all sorts of professions? Maybe they are, I suppose. And I think it’s worth mentioning that most PhD students I’ve known have never burned out (if by this we mean something practically serious, not just a bout of depression).
People studying to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and actuaries definitely do burn out from time to time. Very likely, other professions too.
The third and fourth items don’t apply so clearly to them, though. You’re held responsible for a number of things that you have limited control over, and moreover they are few in number so you can’t even use statistics to show how good you are at biasing them towards success with your control.
With a doctor, you see many patients. Some of them will get better. If you NEVER succeed, being a doctor isn’t for you. As a researcher, it’s quite possible that if your advisor has a risky research plan, then you simply won’t succeed just because the objective is unachievable due to unforeseen factors, or the hypothesis is true but it would take a much larger effort than you can pay for to conclusively demonstrate it (who wants to see a P-value of 0.2? It IS suggestive...).
In non-research professions, if you are good at what you do, you will succeed. In research, you must be at least decent to succeed, and being good makes it far more likely… but not certain, or even nearly certain. It takes being really really good to figure out you’re going to fail early, get out, and find something else to do.
I’d contradict that. The entry requirements and task is utterly trivial and the intellectual and academic challenge isn’t much of a big deal for anyone with average (or perhaps slightly above average) IQ but the motivational aspect is ridiculous.
Isn’t that what I said?
No, you said it was “really very easy”, which implies that the motivation aspect is trivial. Something can be difficult FROM a motivational standpoint.
On the face of it, this strikes me as tough to judge, because if they’re bad at it we should expect to see e. g., people whose abilities within their field are highly apparent to their professors and peers failing to get into programs which people who make a lesser impression on those who know them do get into, but it’s hard to aggregate anecdotes like this to make strong generalizations.
If you could run two academic environments alongside each other, one of which was good at selecting for high aptitude and one of which wasn’t, I expect it would be pretty easy to differentiate between them, but it’s much harder without a basis for comparison.
I’ve never gotten into a PhD program for either (I’ve never entered a PhD program period, for that matter,) but I don’t share this impression and am curious as to how you formed it.
Even getting into a PhD program in things that we’re inclined to regard as “soft” subjects, such as English, can be quite difficult, since there’s so much competition. “Good enough” means “better than a whole lot of other people who’re also sufficiently invested to apply to the same program.”
Of course, “very easy” is relative, but I think most people would not agree with the assertion that getting a PhD is easy.
It’s not based on very much, I admit, beyond talking to some physics and math people I know about graduate school. It is a selection procedure, and it does take some significant work and talent to get in (as well as some luck), but it doesn’t strike me as unreasonably difficult. All the physics and math PhD’s I know seem genuinely (but not off the charts) talented. Many of them have problems finishing their work on time and writing well. Once you’re in the program, getting out the door with a PhD isn’t that hard, since literally everyone making the decision to graduate you wants you to graduate.
What I’m trying to say is that getting a PhD is hard in the way building a nine foot brick wall is hard. There are some basic skills involved, and then it’s mostly just a lot of time and work. It’s not hard like discovering a new proof in geometry is hard. And if you can do the latter kind of work, people are pretty inclined to cut you some slack on the former. My school recently hired a mathematician who earned her PhD at 24, six months after her BA.
I’d say these are much, much more difficult to get into. Firstly because there are way more candidates (the negative selection pressures are a lot lower in these fields) and secondly, because it’s not at all clear what talent in these fields looks like, so things are a lot more random.
Yes, I think you’re mistaken about this. Relatively speaking, you’re correct—fields like mathematics have less “academic snobbery” than law, humanities, and the like. The problem is that relatively isn’t enough. There is still enough snobbery present that people with “blotches on their record” need a significant amount of good luck in order not to be filtered out.
Well, the question is whether or not academic programs are good at selecting for talent (and, for the purposes of my point, I mean at the graduate level and above). So you may be right that it’s hard for people with blotches on their record to do well, but does this make the selection process a bad one, considered on the basis of costs to benefits?
Yes: there are excessive numbers of both false negatives (talented people with blotches) and false positives (untalented people without blotches).
I’ll make up an example (loosely based on some real cases I know about) to illustrate what I mean. Suppose a graduate admissions committee in a math or physics department is looking at two candidates. Candidate A is applying to transfer from another graduate program at another institution, where for some reason he was a total disaster, flunking courses left and right. On the other hand, his undergraduate record is near-perfect, and itself consists mostly of graduate-level courses. Candidate B, by contrast, is applying directly from undergraduate school, and has a reasonably good record, but with standard undergraduate coursework in the subject, nothing particularly beyond “grade level”.
Now, of these two candidates, which do you think has a higher chance of admission? Neither of them is ideal, of course; but let us stipulate that exactly one of them is in fact admitted. Who do you think it was?
If you were trying to select for talent, it would be Candidate A every time. And sure enough, there are people in math/physics academia who would indeed pick Candidate A. (This is an improvement over high school, or humanities academia, where no one would.) However, a disturbingly large number will pick Candidate B. They will see Candidate A as “damaged goods”, as “unworthy”—as if a spot in a graduate program were a reward for “good citizenship”, rather than a resource to be used for getting research problems solved.
Why do you think this?
So I haven’t read your last paragraph yet. I guess if I were making the decision, I’d pick the undergraduate, unless the graduate transfer had some kind of story about what happened (a divorce, a death, something that would explain the failures). I think that’s probably how most admissions committees would go too: talent isn’t worth much if you need to be dragged to work every day. Now, on to your last paragraph...
About humanities academia, this isn’t at all true.
Well, of course there’s some kind of story that explains the failures, other than “he just wasn’t good enough”; by assumption the guy wasn’t let into the first graduate school off the street—he had been a brilliant undergraduate. So something went wrong. The question is whether you should filter out a clearly capable person because something went wrong once. If you do, you’re simply not optimizing for the right thing.
A rational deliberation on Candidate A would look like this: “This person obviously has issues, and he might not succeed here. But if he does, there’s a good chance he’ll succeed spectacularly -- at least, at a level above that of many students we’re happy to call ‘successful’. If he doesn’t, well, some percentage of the blemish-free students we admit are going to fail anyway, so what’s the difference?”
It is a fact of life that sometimes multiple iterations are required for something to work; but the school system does a poor job of accommodating this. Repeating a course as many times as necessary until you get an A is not something that the system encourages; if it were optimizing for the right things, it would be.
Yes, that was a flippant, stereotyped exaggeration—especially since “humanities” includes philosophy and linguistics, where the mentality is often very similar to math. Still, like any good caricature, it has some basis in reality. Generally speaking, the “softer” the subject -- the fewer objective measures of competence—the greater the reliance on pure status games, i.e. academic snobbery. And of course my whole point here is that this snobbery is present even in “hard” fields.
What I mean is that I’d want to hear the story. If the guy’s wife died, that’s one thing. If he got addicted to heroin, that’s another. If I’m given no story, then I’ll go with the undergrad. But I don’t disagree with the rest of your assessment.
Fair enough.