I agree with most of it, though the point about academia is a bit contrived.
True, there is a lot of negative selection before you get a cushy job the usual way, but you can certainly bypass quite a few obstacles if you are exceptionally good. For example, solve any of the open problems in math or physics, post a preprint on arxiv.org (well, you may need someone to vouch for you, but that’s not really an issue) and you are all set.
Unfortunately, I cannot recall a single discovery in physics in the last half a century that was not made by someone who jumped through the usual hoops. I have met, however, an occasional person who learned grad school-level stuff on their own, but they did not manage to go any farther. My suspicion is therefore that all that negative selection in science, while annoying, does not do a lot of harm compared to potential alternatives. While it filters out some good people, it probably does not reject the very best, otherwise we would see an occasional example of someone making a significant discovery outside academia.
While [negative selection] filters out some good people, it probably does not reject the very best, otherwise we would see an occasional example of someone making a significant discovery outside academia.
I predict that we will indeed see this before too long, now that we have the internet; and it will thus turn out that some of the best people were being filtered out. Access to information and social support/reinforcement is a huge limiting factor.
And of course, if you’re willing to look a century back instead of just a half-century, you find the salient example of Einstein—who didn’t even have the internet, but still managed to advance science from outside the “establishment” (which was a sizable apparatus in his time and place, just as it is in ours).
Access to information and social support/reinforcement is a huge limiting factor.
Access to labs, equipment, technicians, funding is an even greater factor. Only mathematicians can really afford to work from home. (And now, computer scientists and computational-xxx people have joined them.)
It’s not quite so dire. You can’t do experiments from home usually, but you can interpret experiments from home thanks to Internet publication of results. So a lot of theoretical work in almost every field can be done from outside academia.
Yes, but in most fields someone can’t participate by only interpreting experiments from home. It’s useful, but you can’t build a career from it. Normally you really want to also be able to influence experiments in the lab to get the new data you want.
I predict that we will indeed see this before too long
I am willing to bet that none of the high-profile open problems in physics, such as quantum measurement, high-temperature superconductivity, dark energy origins, extensions to the standard model etc., will receive a meaningful contribution from outside of people trained in academia, at least not in the next 10 years. The reason is that the cream-of-the-crop people who are able to advance the leading edge stand out enough to be recognized and integrated into the system.
And of course, if you’re willing to look a century back instead of just a half-century, you find the salient example of Einstein
This is a myth. While he had trouble fitting in, he certainly did jump through most of the usual hoops.
If a person is recognized and integrated into the system only after making a contribution, that counts as being “outside the system”. E.g. Einstein, who didn’t get his first academic position until 1908, three years after the annus mirabilis, which had occurred while he was a patent clerk. Indeed, he didn’t even get his Ph.D. until the annus itself—his thesis consisted of one of the famous papers!
He got his undergrad degree in 1900, so, inside the system. He was a lecturer (part time) between 1900 and 1902, though not at a high level. He did indeed develop his SR ideas while dealing with electromagnetic applications while working at the patent office (which paid the bills), though still in touch with other scientists, most notably Marcel Grossmann. His thesis was not related to relativity at all, not that it matters. All of his work on GR was inside the system. Not that he needed the system much by then.
So, the popular view of Einstein as an outsider is blown way out of proportion to reality.
Whatever the “popular” view, all that matters for my purposes is that Einstein was not employed by a university in 1905 when he developed SR, and thus was, by my definition, an outsider. Yes, of course he became an insider later—that’s the dream of of every outsider!
Having an undergrad degree—or a degree of any kind—does not make one an insider. What counts is employment: whether one is paid to do the work in question. If you’re not (as Einstein wasn’t in 1905), you’re an outsider.
Whatever the “popular” view, all that matters for my purposes is that Einstein was not employed by a university in 1905 when he developed SR, and thus was, by my definition, an outsider.
Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain all got PhDs, but invented the transistor while at Bell Labs, i.e. not while employed by universities. I think the “jump through the usual hoops” description shminux is using is a more useful one than the “outsider” description you’re using.
As I stated in the grandparent, the relevant distinction is whether or not you are paid to do the research, or whether you are forced to do it in your “spare time”.
But what about some of the other spectacular inventions of the last fifty years: the laser, the transistor, the fiber-optic cable, the communications satellite? Didn’t those come from the private sector? As it happens, they came from Bell Labs, which is interesting as the sort of mammoth exception that proves the rule. Because of AT&T’s government-sanctioned monopoly, for much of the 20th century Bell Labs was able to function like the world’s largest university, devoting billions of dollars to “irrelevant” research.
Thus, the people you mention were, I assume, doing their actual jobs when they invented the transistor, which makes them analogous to academics, and not analogous to Einstein in the patent office.
The modern analogue of Einstein would be someone dropping out of grad school, becoming a software developer (or something), and within a few years posting groundbreaking papers on the arXiv that they wrote for the fun of it. You can call such a person an “insider” if you like because of their (unfinished) education, but I guarantee you they sure as hell won’t feel like one in the years before their paper comes out. (They won’t have library privileges, won’t get invited to physicist parties, and generally won’t be taken seriously because...they’re not a physicist, they’re a software developer.)
I think the “jump through the usual hoops” description shminux is using is a more useful one than the “outsider” description you’re using.
As I stated in the grandparent, the relevant distinction is whether or not you are paid to do the research, or whether you are forced to do it in your “spare time”.
I apologize, it appears I didn’t read the post in question carefully enough; the criterion of if you’re paid to research is a useful one.
But although Einstein is salient, I can’t think of too many other examples. The two that leap to mind are Green (working in the early 1800s) and Lavoisier (working in the late 1700s), but from that I would expect “household name scientist who was an outsider” to be something that shows up once or twice a century. (I’m counting Lavoisier because he was funded by his tax farming, but he was definitely part of the ‘establishment’ of the day.)
(And you do see contemporary outsider contributions if you know where to look, like Gary Cola or Jack Andraka, but not at the household name level- probably because there aren’t that many household name scientists!)
Better examples of outsider-scientists from around then include Oliver Heaviside and Ramanujan. I’m having trouble thinking of anyone recent; the closest to come to mind are some computer scientists who didn’t get PhD’s until relatively late. (Did Oleg Kiselyov ever get one?)
Better examples of outsider-scientists from around then include Oliver Heaviside and Ramanujan
Again, I don’t care whether the person remained an outsider for their entire life; all they need to have done is to have made a contribution while outside. Thus Einstein in the patent office fully counts.
Moreover, it is worth noting that Ramanujan was brought to England by the ultra-established G.H. Hardy, and even Heaviside was ultimately made a Fellow of the Royal Society. So even they became “insiders” eventually, at least in important senses.
In Einstein’s first years in the patent office he was working on his PhD thesis, which when completed in 1905 was still one of his first publications. I’ve read Pais’s biography and it left me with the impression that his career up to that point was unusually independent, with some trouble jumping through the hoops of his day, but not extraordinarily so. They didn’t have the NSF back then funding all the science grad students.
I agree that all the people we’re discussing were brought into the system (the others less so than Einstein) and that Einstein had to overcome negative selection even while some professors thought he showed promise of doing great things. (Becoming an insider then isn’t guaranteed—in the previous century there was Hermann Grassman trying to get out of teaching high school all his life.)
Heaviside and Ramanujan accomplished less than Einstein, but they started way further outside.
Unfortunately, I cannot recall a single discovery in physics in the last half a century that was not made by someone who jumped through the usual hoops. I have met, however, an occasional person who learned grad school-level stuff on their own, but they did not manage to go any farther. My suspicion is therefore that all that negative selection in science, while annoying, does not do a lot of harm compared to potential alternatives.
But you don’t get to observe any of the discoveries in physics that haven’t been made. If a good university education is markedly better for learning physics than autodidactism, then the people who don’t jump through the usual hoops will be inhibited by an inferior education and won’t be in the position to make discoveries that a person who did jump through those hoops is.
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.
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.
If a good university education is markedly better for learning physics than autodidactism
This may be somewhat helped by having university education available online. (Although having the patience to see the online courses and do the exercises is also kind of a hoop. But at least it does not say you when you must do it.)
While it filters out some good people, it probably does not reject the very best, otherwise we would see an occasional example of someone making a significant discovery outside academia.
If you still mean physics: why this confidence about the existence of low-hanging fruit? My grad student friend had to go to the LHC to work on (I think) his thesis. I assume they don’t let people in off the street.
If you mean academia in general: have you forgotten where you are? ^_^
If you still mean physics: why this confidence about the existence of low-hanging fruit?
Maybe there is some misunderstanding here. I’m sure there is plenty of low-hanging fruit still undiscovered. But you have to first get to that hard-to-reach orchard where it grows.
My grad student friend had to go to the LHC to work on (I think) his thesis. I assume they don’t let people in off the street.
Indeed they don’t, though I’m not sure how it is related to my point that negative selection is not a total disaster.
If you mean academia in general: have you forgotten where you are? ^_^
If so, this is rather irrational, given that probably every high-profile/high-status contributor to this forum, with the notable exception of EY, either works in academia or is being/has been trained in academia.
It isn’t so. It’s more a relative thing—”not quite as extremely biased towards academia as the average group of this level of intellectual orientation can be expected to be”.
given that probably every high-profile/high-status contributor to this forum, with the notable exception of EY, either works in academia or is being/has been trained in academia.
Luke has minimal official academic training too. Mind you he is more academic in practice than most people (probably most academics too, come to think of it.)
It’s more a relative thing—”not quite as extremely biased towards academia as the average group of this level of intellectual orientation can be expected to be”.
If so, then we’re actually more rational right? Because we’re not biased against academia as most people are, and aren’t biased toward academia as most academics are.
He repeatedly mentioned that his skill is in formulating theorems, not proving them, and he has not formulated even one after some 5 years of working on the same problem, so the chances are not good.
I agree with most of it, though the point about academia is a bit contrived.
True, there is a lot of negative selection before you get a cushy job the usual way, but you can certainly bypass quite a few obstacles if you are exceptionally good. For example, solve any of the open problems in math or physics, post a preprint on arxiv.org (well, you may need someone to vouch for you, but that’s not really an issue) and you are all set.
Unfortunately, I cannot recall a single discovery in physics in the last half a century that was not made by someone who jumped through the usual hoops. I have met, however, an occasional person who learned grad school-level stuff on their own, but they did not manage to go any farther. My suspicion is therefore that all that negative selection in science, while annoying, does not do a lot of harm compared to potential alternatives. While it filters out some good people, it probably does not reject the very best, otherwise we would see an occasional example of someone making a significant discovery outside academia.
I predict that we will indeed see this before too long, now that we have the internet; and it will thus turn out that some of the best people were being filtered out. Access to information and social support/reinforcement is a huge limiting factor.
And of course, if you’re willing to look a century back instead of just a half-century, you find the salient example of Einstein—who didn’t even have the internet, but still managed to advance science from outside the “establishment” (which was a sizable apparatus in his time and place, just as it is in ours).
Access to labs, equipment, technicians, funding is an even greater factor. Only mathematicians can really afford to work from home. (And now, computer scientists and computational-xxx people have joined them.)
Yes, all my predictions about people working at home should be interpreted to refer to fields in which that is physically possible.
(In fact, in these discussions I am pretty much always thinking specifically of mathematics, and possibly the most theoretical kinds of physics.)
It’s not quite so dire. You can’t do experiments from home usually, but you can interpret experiments from home thanks to Internet publication of results. So a lot of theoretical work in almost every field can be done from outside academia.
Yes, but in most fields someone can’t participate by only interpreting experiments from home. It’s useful, but you can’t build a career from it. Normally you really want to also be able to influence experiments in the lab to get the new data you want.
I am willing to bet that none of the high-profile open problems in physics, such as quantum measurement, high-temperature superconductivity, dark energy origins, extensions to the standard model etc., will receive a meaningful contribution from outside of people trained in academia, at least not in the next 10 years. The reason is that the cream-of-the-crop people who are able to advance the leading edge stand out enough to be recognized and integrated into the system.
This is a myth. While he had trouble fitting in, he certainly did jump through most of the usual hoops.
If a person is recognized and integrated into the system only after making a contribution, that counts as being “outside the system”. E.g. Einstein, who didn’t get his first academic position until 1908, three years after the annus mirabilis, which had occurred while he was a patent clerk. Indeed, he didn’t even get his Ph.D. until the annus itself—his thesis consisted of one of the famous papers!
He got his undergrad degree in 1900, so, inside the system. He was a lecturer (part time) between 1900 and 1902, though not at a high level. He did indeed develop his SR ideas while dealing with electromagnetic applications while working at the patent office (which paid the bills), though still in touch with other scientists, most notably Marcel Grossmann. His thesis was not related to relativity at all, not that it matters. All of his work on GR was inside the system. Not that he needed the system much by then.
So, the popular view of Einstein as an outsider is blown way out of proportion to reality.
Whatever the “popular” view, all that matters for my purposes is that Einstein was not employed by a university in 1905 when he developed SR, and thus was, by my definition, an outsider. Yes, of course he became an insider later—that’s the dream of of every outsider!
Having an undergrad degree—or a degree of any kind—does not make one an insider. What counts is employment: whether one is paid to do the work in question. If you’re not (as Einstein wasn’t in 1905), you’re an outsider.
Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain all got PhDs, but invented the transistor while at Bell Labs, i.e. not while employed by universities. I think the “jump through the usual hoops” description shminux is using is a more useful one than the “outsider” description you’re using.
As I stated in the grandparent, the relevant distinction is whether or not you are paid to do the research, or whether you are forced to do it in your “spare time”.
On Bell Labs specifically, see Scott Aaronson:
Thus, the people you mention were, I assume, doing their actual jobs when they invented the transistor, which makes them analogous to academics, and not analogous to Einstein in the patent office.
The modern analogue of Einstein would be someone dropping out of grad school, becoming a software developer (or something), and within a few years posting groundbreaking papers on the arXiv that they wrote for the fun of it. You can call such a person an “insider” if you like because of their (unfinished) education, but I guarantee you they sure as hell won’t feel like one in the years before their paper comes out. (They won’t have library privileges, won’t get invited to physicist parties, and generally won’t be taken seriously because...they’re not a physicist, they’re a software developer.)
More useful for what, exactly?
I apologize, it appears I didn’t read the post in question carefully enough; the criterion of if you’re paid to research is a useful one.
But although Einstein is salient, I can’t think of too many other examples. The two that leap to mind are Green (working in the early 1800s) and Lavoisier (working in the late 1700s), but from that I would expect “household name scientist who was an outsider” to be something that shows up once or twice a century. (I’m counting Lavoisier because he was funded by his tax farming, but he was definitely part of the ‘establishment’ of the day.)
(And you do see contemporary outsider contributions if you know where to look, like Gary Cola or Jack Andraka, but not at the household name level- probably because there aren’t that many household name scientists!)
Better examples of outsider-scientists from around then include Oliver Heaviside and Ramanujan. I’m having trouble thinking of anyone recent; the closest to come to mind are some computer scientists who didn’t get PhD’s until relatively late. (Did Oleg Kiselyov ever get one?)
Again, I don’t care whether the person remained an outsider for their entire life; all they need to have done is to have made a contribution while outside. Thus Einstein in the patent office fully counts.
Moreover, it is worth noting that Ramanujan was brought to England by the ultra-established G.H. Hardy, and even Heaviside was ultimately made a Fellow of the Royal Society. So even they became “insiders” eventually, at least in important senses.
In Einstein’s first years in the patent office he was working on his PhD thesis, which when completed in 1905 was still one of his first publications. I’ve read Pais’s biography and it left me with the impression that his career up to that point was unusually independent, with some trouble jumping through the hoops of his day, but not extraordinarily so. They didn’t have the NSF back then funding all the science grad students.
I agree that all the people we’re discussing were brought into the system (the others less so than Einstein) and that Einstein had to overcome negative selection even while some professors thought he showed promise of doing great things. (Becoming an insider then isn’t guaranteed—in the previous century there was Hermann Grassman trying to get out of teaching high school all his life.)
Heaviside and Ramanujan accomplished less than Einstein, but they started way further outside.
But you don’t get to observe any of the discoveries in physics that haven’t been made. If a good university education is markedly better for learning physics than autodidactism, then the people who don’t jump through the usual hoops will be inhibited by an inferior education and won’t be in the position to make discoveries that a person who did jump through those hoops is.
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.
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.
This may be somewhat helped by having university education available online. (Although having the patience to see the online courses and do the exercises is also kind of a hoop. But at least it does not say you when you must do it.)
If you still mean physics: why this confidence about the existence of low-hanging fruit? My grad student friend had to go to the LHC to work on (I think) his thesis. I assume they don’t let people in off the street.
If you mean academia in general: have you forgotten where you are? ^_^
Maybe there is some misunderstanding here. I’m sure there is plenty of low-hanging fruit still undiscovered. But you have to first get to that hard-to-reach orchard where it grows.
Indeed they don’t, though I’m not sure how it is related to my point that negative selection is not a total disaster.
Where am I?
What would look different if it were? (Aside from, say, the reduced chance of someone finding the Higgs.)
Then I would expect that once in a while some filtered out genius discovers something really exciting, against all odds, as I mentioned already.
On Less Wrong, which has an anti-academia bias.
Why do you call it a bias? Maybe it’s being less wrong than others who have a pro-academia bias.
If so, this is rather irrational, given that probably every high-profile/high-status contributor to this forum, with the notable exception of EY, either works in academia or is being/has been trained in academia.
It isn’t so. It’s more a relative thing—”not quite as extremely biased towards academia as the average group of this level of intellectual orientation can be expected to be”.
Luke has minimal official academic training too. Mind you he is more academic in practice than most people (probably most academics too, come to think of it.)
If so, then we’re actually more rational right? Because we’re not biased against academia as most people are, and aren’t biased toward academia as most academics are.
Should we all place bets now that it will be Eliezer?
He repeatedly mentioned that his skill is in formulating theorems, not proving them, and he has not formulated even one after some 5 years of working on the same problem, so the chances are not good.