scottishcow

Well surely it's a matter of degree (and also chronological trends) we're talking about here. My writing may not be perfectly clear but other commenters seem to understand my point, nuanced discussions may be difficult but not impossible if we're engaging in good faith.

> Then I don't understand who this question is supposed to be directed at:

To the HN community of course.

> My answer would be that none of the activities you list (with the possible exception of the kind of wannabe entrepreneurship the paper is talking about) are conspicuous consumption.

That’s a valid response, although I don’t agree. Note that I’m not regarding these activities to be entirely about conspicuous consumption, just like the paper doesn’t claim all of entrepreneurship is veblenian. Fwiw the paper does cite another work that claims some internships can be viewed as a form of conspicuous consumption.

Never said it does, was it confusing? Maybe my English needs more work.

So universities are conspicuous consumption, internships are conspicuous consumption, entrepreneurship is conspicuous consumption.

Perhaps the simple fact is that most people are motivated by the need for social validation, and only a tiny tiny fraction of the population is driven instead by things like intellectual curiosity, desire to help others / solve societal problems, etc. So any class of activity that becomes open to a sufficient number of entrants will eventually turn into a form of conspicuous consumption.

Now scientific research is conspicuous consumption (MIT Media Lab?), book authorship is conspicuous consumption, and political candidacy is conspicuous consumption. Are there any activities left that doesn’t function as a form of conspicuous consumption?

My take is that GP simply doesn’t have any experience with engineering research.

You make it sound as if the author is some middling engineer building smartphones for Apple.

An EE professor at a well-regarded research university deals with the scientific method all the time. Whatever opinion you may have about the article, as far as I can tell the author is certainly not on "the sidelines" and more than qualified to write about the state of science.

Lots of great resources here, but as mentioned in the essay signaling based on external validation is still crucial. (OP seems to have won a Thiel Fellowship, I’d assume that has a stronger signaling value than your typical college degree.) As much as I hate it, the world runs on limited resources and people and organizations have no choice but to rely on some sort of signaling scheme as a filtering mechanism.

This is tangential to the author's argument but it's amusing to see how the word "kawaii" has taken a life of its own in the West.

In Japan we often make gratuitous use of English words (yokomoji, lit. "sideways-written characters") to make things sound more interesting than they really are, seems like it works the other way around too.

The legal drinking age in Japan is 20 (will be lowered to 18 in 2022), but attitudes toward teenagers drinking alcohol has historically been extremely lax here.

This is interesting! Seems we can make everything interactive these days with a simple mix of electronics and ML. Discoverability might be an issue though, I already have trouble remembering all the gesture combinations on the Macbook trackpad.

It’s also not clear if the ML-based classification scheme can handle the vast individual differences among the general public, in real-life scenarios. (Wasn't this why Motion Sense on Pixel 4 wasn’t as precise as initially expected?) Performance may take a further hit with wear and tear, if these are embedded in clothing like hoodie drawstrings.

Granted 16 isn't a lot, but that's actually a higher citation count than the vast majority of academic papers. Anyways, thinking of citations as a reliable proxy for paper quality is like ranking artists by how many followers they have on Twitter.

> Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time.

Is it? Some of my friends went on to start successful companies after getting their PhDs. I'm a bit envious of them actually, I didn't have that option as my research was on an obscure topic with zero commercial potential.

> The Ph.D. is a tremendous opportunity. You get to pick an advisor in any research area you like and then you get to do research in that area, receive mentoring, think deeply on problems, publish papers, become famous, while paying zero tuition for 6 years and receiving a salary.

Yes it is a great opportunity, but considering how universities benefit massively from the work generated by their PhD students they're grossly underpaid (at least in STEM).

Overall this seems like good practical advice, but it's firmly written from the perspective of a true believer in the PhD system (and academia in general). My take is a bit different, I really think academia is broken in some fundamental ways.

PageRank is a popularity contest, not sure why you’d put so much trust into it as a reliable proxy for content quality. Lots of crap can be popular. Perhaps Google is doing a decent job eliminating crap from their search results (debatable), but that’s not an outcome of a naive application of PageRank.

The public doesn’t owe anything to academics; whether or not they decide to pay attention to literature of a certain field, it is their choice. I was merely stating my observation that while many seem to consider it worthwhile to pay some level of respect to physics or mathematics, fewer appear to do so with regards to sociology or media studies. Are such attitudes justified? Perhaps so, perhaps not - but either way I find nothing perplexing that the public does not respect all fields of inquiry equally.