adminprof's comments

You can't think of any reason? What about retaliation for being the less enthusiastic reviewer? What about the opposite, that you become known for being an easy reviewer who missed some obvious flaws?

Please do. Would love to hear success stories for data security.

Sure I guess I didn't make that very clear. Just going down the line:

1) stop releasing before the bugs are fixed. Software and games are rushed out. Companies need to take their time to fix the bugs so the users don't have to encounter them.

- This is a tradeoff between shipping time and bugs. You will never fix all bugs, so it's unrealistic. And it's a business decision in many cases. Even the definition of a bug is tricky, like is a usability issue a bug? So it's just a naive idea.

2) no more technical debt. Programmers are sloppy and introduce technical debt because they are not incentivized to do high quality programs.

- No one wants to create technical debt. Obviously it slows down development later on. Again this could be a business decision. Some programs like one-off data science scripts don't need to fix all their technical debt. Technical debt also accrues naturally (like just changing environment, platform, standards) so it's not possible to aim to not have debt in the very beginning. Hindsight is 20-20 and all that. Saying programmers are not incentivized to do high quality programs is just a blanket naive statement, and depends on the definition of high quality programs.

3) cap team sizes. Everyone knows that large teams fail more spectacularly. Gmail and Napster and the original version of Google were made by a group of 4 people. Software teams need to be 4-5 people max.

- Depends on the type of software. Can't just generalize given a few token examples. Expectations also change over the course of the product.

4) programmers must use a transparency scorecard. Software companies like Oracle and IBM charge ridiculous amounts for their work. They hide costs and cut corners. Programmers should be transparent about the work they are doing each day, what data they access, and which functions they are writing.

- This uses one subsection of the software economy to make a point (as a fallacy). But also some of these measures don't make sense, like some programmers read a lot of code or delete lines, and so the metrics are not generalizable.

In summary, these are ideas that someone who has not done long-term software development would say, or someone who has only had experience with one type of software or company would say. They're not well defined, not generalizable, and don't account for the complex and varied sociotechnical process that software development is.

It'd be a process: participant in a community in a subfield, listen to ideas that have been tried and outcomes, come up with an idea using those lessons learned and success metrics, build consensus around a new idea, test in a single-instance (like one conference, grant review panel, tenure committee at one university), share lessons to the field, do this for a couple of years to show clear success, expand to multiple events in the field, become an exemplar field for that idea and "infect" other fields

Sounds slow but there's thousands of such experiments happening simultaneously right now. This is how a long of major field-sized changes have happened, like the transition to conferences from journals (which had many initial problems like during tenure review or a lack of quality in reviews), etc. Ideas will lose traction at various stages (for example, there was a movement some time ago to use alpha=0.001 instead of alpha=0.05 for null hypothesis testing, which has been limited to that field or subfield).

Yeah I have no idea how it got to -2, but maybe it was my tone. I was even trying to not call out any specific post or debate any single issue.

The thing about academia is it's full of people who love talking about ways to make it better, and rotate into positions of power where they can change things after a few years.

The solutions are complex, require convincing many different stakeholders (even if they're amenable to the change), nailing lots of detail to make it work right. Because peoples lives and careers are on the line. Reputations of entire fields, the way medical discoveries happen, billions of dollars of taxpayer money, major institutions, etc. are not things you want to hack and discover that whoops, you just incentivized the wrong thing and set back cancer research for a decade.

This entire thread is really frustrating for me to read. A lot of these ideas are one-liners from people who have had very little experience with different parts of academia, except maybe being a student. Every single idea here are debated to death by academics already (not just university academics, but funding agencies, academic societies, award panels, journal editors and conference organizers), with changes happening all the time.

If it was this simple that a random person here could come up with how to "solve" academia, we'd have already done it decades ago. The ideas also lack nuance and when you get into the definitions of things (for example, p-hacking), then things become a lot more grey; are you allowed to look at a dataset that you spent 2 years collecting if your first hypothesis does not pan out? The clear cut cases are obvious to everyone, it's the grey area that takes 99% of the time to figure out.

Imagine reading a thread where everyone is proposing "solutions" to software development. It'd go something like "software development is a cesspool and 80% of it fails (see voting systems, MySpace, electronic health records, Theranos. Here's what software companies need to do:" [yes I'm being intentionally stupid to demonstrate how annoying this is]

1) stop releasing before the bugs are fixed. Software and games are rushed out. Companies need to take their time to fix the bugs so the users don't have to encounter them.

2) no more technical debt. Programmers are sloppy and introduce technical debt because they are not incentivized to do high quality programs. [yes, see how triggering that is]

3) cap team sizes. Everyone knows that large teams fail more spectacularly. Gmail and Napster and the original version of Google were made by a group of 4 people. Software teams need to be 4-5 people max.

4) programmers must use a transparency scorecard. Software companies like Oracle and IBM charge ridiculous amounts for their work. They hide costs and cut corners. Programmers should be transparent about the work they are doing each day, what data they access, and which functions they are writing.

These changes need to happen. derp derp

You make the assumption here that this hack halted all research. It's unlikely to have even affected 10% of ongoing research. Plenty of things stored on cloud storage, in email, in personal computers, on computers not locked out, etc.

I think we just keep going back to the same issue -- people agree that administration is too big. But if you break it down to actual positions or administrative units, it's not clear there is any agreement. There is no such thing as "right cuts" because that implies it's clear which parts of administration should be cut.

Same with government. Government waste is bad? Of course! Trim unnecessary government spending and pork barrel? Yes!! And which branches and positions should we cut? The Right Ones!! [cue nothing actually happens]

I don't see what assurances you have of this guarantee you give. As so far it seems like when funding is cut, faculty (teaching and research) and academic departments are cut and financial aid is reduced, rather than major cuts in administration. So it's worth discussing what administrative units are cuttable, or come to the realization there is no free cuts to make to administration without sacrifices to some existing principles.

I totally agree with you there. But note that there are people who are 50% professors, 50% administrator, For example, we have a VP of Campus Planning, a rotational position, who is 50% professor and 50% administrator while they are in that role. Then they revert back to being a professor after 3 years.

I didn't frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion, that's just usually how the roles are defined. But you're missing my point completely (maybe intentionally?). I'm just saying that we should talk about specific administrators or administrative units, not "administration is too big". So let's talk about that, not whether your framing of my framing of the university's framing is accurate.

And you'll see that this is effective, because now when you ask those more specific questions, there are potentially good discussions.

Like "Why is there a Dean of the College of Athletics that isn't also handling athletics and the parts of title IX that are relevant" and someone might wonder if it makes sense (based on your proposed structure) for the Dean of Athletics to be handling rape cases, and whether they have the expertise to deal with the federal regulations that come with Title IX.

Or "Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college?" and someone might wonder why it makes sense for someone responsible for undergraduate education (which might not involve research in some universities) to handle grants, which is usually related to graduate education and research (and in many fields, don't involve students at all).

Or "administrators in admissions ought to be handling [diversity and inclusion]" and someone might wonder if there should not be someone also responsible for diversity and inclusion in faculty/staff/administrator hiring, or in campus policies around inclusion (like accessibility services), which are post-admissions.

While in general I agree that there are too many administrators at many universities, this type of argument is ineffective without pointing out exactly which administrators. And I find that once you try to do that, no one agrees which administrators should be cut. Do you want to cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion? Or the administrators responsible for tech transfer? Or the Dean of the College? Or administrators that manage grants? Or administrators of admissions, or athletics, title IX, or school of medicine?

Give us some specifics to discuss. Because while almost everyone agrees administration needs to be trimmed, if everyone just wants to keep the ones they think are important and there's not much overlap, then there's clearly no way to do this.

Same as when people say "government should stop spending on useless things, government should be smaller and trim the fat / pork barrel spending". Yeah of course when you put it that way, who wouldn't agree with that. But when you get specific, "government should reduce veteran's benefits, national parks, border security, obesity research, food stamps, etc." well that's when it's not so easy.

That's not what the parent post said, or inferred. Don't put words in others' mouths please.

I've mentored hundreds of people. As someone who does not think of themselves as a creep, I've had many scenarios where a misinterpretation could make the mentee/employee/student think I was a creep even if I had good intentions. For many of those people, it was the first time they met me so it was probably not clear to them immediately whether I was being creepy or just had an awkward moment. So I think real life is not so straightforward sometimes.

Maybe some specific examples would help. Somebody came in to ask for advice about whether they should be more aggressive in some work situation. I thought about it and remember some advice that a colleague had applied effectively. The advice was widely praised. I said the same advice word-by-word, but after saying it, realized that this advice only works when said by a woman to another woman (the advice itself was something about being empowered as a woman). It sounded a bit awkward / patronizing when coming from me. This person then later complained to another person that I gave a sexist suggestion. Nothing happened of it, but it was really uncomfortable and had they spread it on social media in a bad light, that would have hurt my reputation.

In another case, a subordinate and I were already at slightly adversarial terms (a bit of loss in trust, but nothing too serious at that time). I could tell they were attentively looking to find what I was saying to be erroneous. I had to be particularly careful in those meetings, and had to constantly respond to accusations like "why did you agree with [male]'s idea when I had proposed the same idea a month ago and you rejected it" (when it was obviously a more complex situation and the context for the proposed idea were different). But had I been a bit more casual in our meetings, I am pretty sure she would have found something to complain about loudly.

Basically, "don't be a creep" is not enough and oversimplifies things. You can not be a creep, yet still get into a bad situation if someone else interprets you as a creep, especially in a situation where the relationship is not a strong trusted one. You often have to meet and advise people who don't know your intentions, and an awkward mis-step can be problematic. That's just the unfortunate reality.

I've heard this a lot but don't see much in terms of numbers about this. For private universities, the sticker price is high, but the effective tuition that students are paying has actually stayed the same or decreased [e.g. http://time.com/money/4777909/private-college-scholarships-2...]

For public universities, they were substantially cheaper than private universities due to state subsidies. The tuition has almost doubled over the past 15 years for the few places I checked, but that's only a bit over inflation. Public state universities are still a great deal.

So I think the stats are using a lot of for-profit colleges which skew the numbers up. They are expensive and don't offer a lot. Anyways, I would love to see some actual data and the breakdown of what schools are increasing tuition.

I agree with your main point here, but I think you're trying to paint and overly broad claim about PhD programs, which are extremely different between institutions. It's like saying "working at a company is like this... you learn this but not that."

Specifically,

1. Senior PhD students in many research groups can become de facto managers of the group, especially when the professor is on sabbatical. PhD students are often involved in the funding, presentations, recruitment, and represent the group. Some PIs/professors empower their PhD students to run a mini research group within their group.

2. I've seen some PhD programs have a strong emphasis on teaching undergraduates, both as in teaching undergraduate courses directly (which many PhD students in the humanities and social science already do), serving as teaching assistants with a substantive educational role (not just grading), and mentoring them in research or more general advising. For example, Brown University and Princeton are known to have a good research-teaching balance for PhD students. Brown has a large number of programs that help PhD students get more involved in undergraduate teaching [https://www.brown.edu/sheridan/programs-services/certificate...]

I'll bet that .txt files (which is what I currently use to store notes) will outlast .doc

It's never like that. They'll be very explicit about your porn viewing. "webkike is addicted to asian milf porn. last saturday, he spent 4 hours during the day on 238 videos. at night, he switches to videos of teens being choked. look at this image of a girl in tears, that we cropped from one of the videos on webkike's hard drive. who knows if they're under 18 or not? is this the kind of person you want near your children?"

Okay, fair enough. Sorry for being a bit antagonistic. I guess I'm just a lot less pessimistic about academia, having worked in industry before as well. The financial part isn't as good as it could be for what we think we do, but I feel that it's a nice institution in many ways. A lot of lifetime academics don't appreciate the flexibility they get in terms of what they spend their time on, how they do their work, who they work with, etc.

Totally agree the comparison isn't equal. But what I'm saying is that the 9-month salary is already way higher than an industry salary. If they worked the 3 summer months funded by a grant, it's like getting a 33% bonus on top of their 9-month salary.