ke88y

I’m pretty damn sure you’re wrong about Europe on a relative basis. The percentages in most of Europe are MUCH higher. Eg Germany is closer to 80% than 50% gov funded.

(Earmarked gifts to an endowment with some level of direction/advice vs a foundation is a real cultural and tax policy difference, but the end effect is what matters and that’s not as simple as you’re suggesting.)

And not to be too flippant, but the question about the world outside of America applies also to the world outside the West ;)

Part of the meta-game of academia is that feedback timelines are long enough that you can play the “wrong” meta-game and still come out ahead. If you don’t want a professorship — or are willing to settle for a super cushy “professor of practice” as an early retirement non-profit thing to keep ya out of the house — then a PhD can be a good place to do hard tech pre-seed work.

Pedantic and profoundly wrong but always in some ridiculous lens always wiggling enough to never let truth get on the way of Being Smart And Right. Peak .edu and the reason it’s so damn hard to justify science spending to the actually hard working tax payers patronizing this stuff.

This won’t get you a Stanford professorship. That’s something you can cry about from your mountain chalet or beachfront vacation home.

That said, even if we accept the general premise of your post, which I don’t, you’re still drawing the wrong conclusion.

To wit: citing something does not imply that the cited thing is “foundational” to the work from which it is cited. One can cite work for any number of reasons. (Admittedly, citation behavior did change with the rise of bibliomaniacs, but of course that further bolsters my overall point, so I’m not sure the daylight on this point does you any favors.)

You identified some counter-examples that miss the point because they’re unrepresentative, unresponsive, and irrelevant.

Unrepresentative because we are discussing literature in aggregate and this behavior is common.

Unresponsive because, in aggregate, inessential academic writing is systematically over-cited in academic writing and essential inputs of other types are systematically under-cited in academic writing. This is true of all academic writing; it’s a bias of the medium and of the medium’s standard bearers.

And irrelevant because there is nothing a priori or essentially nefarious about the above, on its own!

Academics beat ideas and lines of inquiry deep into the ground. Crucially, they do so by pumping out ridiculous quantities of PDFs. For every little variation there is a paper. Outside of academia this isn’t done. Eg: you cite Package X, great! But do you cite the 17 different PRs most relevant to your work, many of which are at least a papers worth or work? No. That’s culturally off. But for the corresponding thinly sliced papers that’s what you have to do.

Conclusion: academic work dominates the citation list because of publication and citation culture, not because academic work dominates the set of enabling contributions.

I do trust that you genuinely do experience the world as you describe here, but I think you’re a fish in water and that Upton Sinclair quote about paychecks comes to mind.

It’s important to point out that US professors are sometimes able to go without public patronage, but that this is very much an anomaly.

The US private sector funds A LOT of R&D relative to other countries, and the US attracts an outsized amount of FDI targeted at R&D.

As a result, in the USA there are occasionally rare instances where professors can mostly fund labs without government patronage.

Scientists in other counties are even more desperate for public patronage (and its associated political games) than US scientists

And even then usually only because it’s expected, not because it was actually useful. (And no, it’s not because academics are more ethical about acknowledging the shoulders they stand on. Academics rarely cite the chip designs, software libraries, lab instruments, instruction documents, training materials, etc. What “counts” as something that deserves a citation mostly boils down to “did you publish it in a venue controlled by other academics”, not “how important was this to enabling your contributions?”)

The fortunate thing about the private sector is that you don’t have to spend years of your life shaping opinion on citation ethics, because people are using your stuff instead of half-interestedly saying that they may’ve skimmed the intro to a pdf describing your stuff. And if people use your stuff and get value from it you can usually extract some of the value that creates. Which means you don’t need vanity metrics to convince some government agency to throw you some coin.

In the private sector you can choose your patrons and your dissemination mechanism. Many, many scientists publish papers, publish code, give talks, write blogs, and otherwise distribute technical details about their work product.

In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron and you must disseminate in academic journals/conferences, which generally do a piss poor job of providing incentives for either doing good work or communicating well about that work.

Any time I hire a junior PhD I have to UNDO a ton of academic writing/provlem-solving propaganda and reteach both common sense and normal writing style.

The harsh truth is that private sector scientists tend to do better science and disseminate it in more useful and lasting ways. They are paid better for it.

The academic scientists who are up to private sector standards tend to have diverse funding mechanisms and therefore rely far less heavily on prestige publication for their labs revenue stream. But most professors must publish papers because they are unable to do good work and/or communicate the value of that work to anyone other than their inner circle of friends (who sit on the grant review panels or take stints at federal agencies).

> Leave Pittsburgh once in awhile.

1. These sorts of presumptive comments are presumptive and serve no purpose in the conversation. Believe it or not, you aren't the only person on the internet with your background.

2. Western PA is an enormous region, and it's not just Allegheny County that is doing well relative to West Virginia.

3. Having some base of economic activity outside of coal is still better than nothing, even if resulting employment is concentrated in metro areas.

Why subsidize job training with valuable shareholder capital when you can have universities teach the fundamentals AND teach real world skills?! /s

But given that they are also cutting Mining and Ag programs, I'm not sure what exactly they expect the future of the stat's economy to look like.

Seems desolate in any case.

This is the end-point of WV mentality.

The problem is that, in practice, tiny majors use of very few resources for non-service courses. As a result, the savings from cutting the major are much lower than expected and realizing those savings requires gutting the departments service capacity as well.

Plus you lose all your half decent faculty — and especially the ones who aren’t already senile and/or retired in place.

Usually, if you really do need the service courses, it is better to keep the major but adjust compensation and resource allocation for under-subscribed upper division courses. See math departments as a case study.

More to your point though: who in their right mind wants tenure after doing a useful PhD in math?

Math phds can be extremely remunerative if you focus on studying useful topics, avoid abstract nonsense, pick up domain knowledge, and stay the heck away from low paying teaching jobs like “professor” and “instructor”. Finance, biotech, and tech all pay good math phds comparable to or better than big tech pays mediocre CS phds. Mid six to low seven.

It’s a surprisingly low bar, since most math phds are incredibly romantic about choice of research area.

WV could have taken the path of western PA. Not perfect, still some deep scars, but a flourishing new economy that can help pay for long term recovery and provided youth with some sort of future.

WV chose victimhood over adaptation, for decades, and here we are. The article isn’t just about cutting humanities departments. WV is so thoroughly hollowed out that it can’t even afford to keep its flagship Computer Science department fully staffed. It’ll be left out of the great onshoring because there is not sufficient human capital or infrastructure.

It’s the state government version of a private equity “strip mine the assets and wind it down” operation.

Constant victimhood is a self fulfilling prophecy. Opportunities were there. WV was too busy being obstinate to take them.