Comment by ramraj07
2 years ago
I did my PhD under possibly the most narcissistic, ruthless, and petty professors anyone around me had ever heard of, so I might be able to comment on this.
I and the few people who managed to actually graduate with our sanity intact (out of like 50) learned to play this game you suggested where we have to play to their egos, and try and salvage their shitty, shitty ideas into workable projects that will end with us publishing. Every week they will suggest experiments that are nonsensical, and we will huddle and discuss how to do some preliminary work and present it in a way such that they will think it’s their idea to change it in a more productive direction.
When smart people are forced to work with egotistical pricks like this, I think it’s inevitable such a system comes in place.
The interesting thing is my professor kinda knew we do this, he just acknowledged it as part of the dance of their system. For Better or worse this shitty lab actually put out a drug that helps patients (I constantly think about how and why that happened). Could this lab have been more productive? Absolutely. Would this lab have existed without these people though? Probably not though.
The question here is whether Elon is aware this is why spacex and Tesla succeeded or he’s too deranged now to remember it. Looks like it’s the latter and that just sucks. My professors too have gotten unhinged (they’ve been literally pushed out of two universities and an entire country, though they always find another sucker, which at this point is the wellcome institute lol). When you’ve been doing this shitty shtick for too long I suppose it gets to you.
> The interesting thing is my professor kinda knew we do this, he just acknowledged it as part of the dance of their system.
Professor's diary: It's so tiring coming up with broken experiments that still have some possible merit, but the system works, and my role is clear. If only the benefits of working under constraints weren't so clear with regard to innovation, they they are what they are and this farce continues for all of us. Maybe I'll finally feel like the private sector is the way to go next yet. Probably not, but who knows.
Also, this sounds like I've heard the military described at times, expecially in war, where the upper echelons come out with wile ideas that make no sense on the ground and mid-level officers pull wild solutions out of their asses and whatever works ends up being copied.
I could see something like this possibly developing as a natural solution when all you look at is the output and not the process, and provide a rigid framework within which different behavior can be iterated until it stabilizes on something that works. That, unsurprisingly to me, has similarities in how ML works, given given these are basically institutions that act as machines.
Honestly sounds kind of like my job. Corporate executives suggesting nonsensical solutions to technical problems they created and insisting they are right. You just need to let them think they won and work around them to get things done. You learn this after a few years working corporate. No point butting heads with people in power. They won’t back down because they will look silly to everyone else in the meeting. They always have to be right to save their own face.
Achieving a PhD in dealing with narcissistic assholes is a valuable career skill, that will benefit you in any field, no matter the topic of your thesis.
The most important skill I learned getting a BS in CS was how to BS.
You’re absolutely right about that. I switched over to tech, and pretty much feel like Will Ferrell in the final season of office, “this job is a joke” and all this politics is so silly and petty and so easy to game and overcome! Life is literally in easy mode now. I highly recommend a PhD to anyone who wants to just become wiser about life in general not just to do research.
> try and salvage their shitty, shitty ideas into workable projects that will end with us publishing.
Maybe the university publish or perish system is the real problem, with the egojerks being symptoms?
no; the pathology is independent of social system.
Do you mean that the system is not the problem, but the pathological people running the system are the problem?
Why does USA bother with the trope of invading countries "to spread democracy" if USA could just install one chosen person who rules as we want?
If the pathology is adaptive in the social system, I doubt they’re independent.
How is that related?
Why can't a PI push his team to publish a lot, even callously work them to the bone (common in chemistry) without being and egotistical psychopath?
Is it because the egotistical psychopathy is the excuse the PI hides behind when stealing credit/authorship from their team members?