[foonamefoo]

I would say that you have much more creative freedom as a tenured professor (if getting to that point hasn't completely destroyed your spirit) than as a startup founder. Look at some of the stuff Noam Chomsky has been able to devote almost all of his time to--it sure isn't linguistics.

[gruseom]

You probably shouldn't use Chomsky as an example. Chomsky is the ultimate outlier. He's got a superhuman intellect and it's actually exceeded by his superhuman patience.

I will tell you a Chomsky story. One night in grad school I was wandering the library stacks looking for anything other than what I was supposed to be working on. I found myself in front of Emerson's complete works, picked out, let's say, Volume 18, and stumbled on Emerson's critique of the Mexican-American war. I noticed that he was saying exactly what Chomsky was to say about the Vietnam war 120 years later. I thought hey maybe Chomsky hasn't seen this, so I wrote him a letter: Dear Chomsky, you don't know me and I'm just a grad student in an unrelated field, but I thought you might enjoy this quote from Emerson. Love, me.

A couple weeks later, I was surprised to find that Chomsky had written me back: Dear Daniel, I wasn't aware of that quote and found it very interesting. Thanks for writing. Love, Chomsky. Well, that was nice of him. End of story.

Not quite. Two years later, I got another letter: Dear Daniel, I was at your university last week and had been looking forward to giving you a call and meeting you. Unfortunately, blah blah blah came up and there was just no way. Hopefully next time. Chomsky.

This one flabbergasted me. By that time I had learned enough about academia to realize that in the star professor system, star professors never do that. They talk to students maybe after class or if they sign up for an appointment. Other than that, they avoid you because they don't want to lose star power. One guards one's fraternizations very carefully, and there are quite fine and quite strict lines demarking the various equivalence classes. Probably most celebrity systems work that way. It's the same reason Hollywood actors date each other.

Anyway, the fact that Chomsky would write a letter like that to a nobody of a grad student, the lowliest of the low, really touched me. It also convinced me that, among star academics at least, the man really is a mutant. A decent mutant. Who would remember something like that after two years?

[cperciva]

Who would remember something like that after two years?

I think most academics do.

My own story: When I was an undergraduate student, I wrote a paper which gave sharp bounds on the round-off errors resulting from computing FFTs using floating-point arithmetic; and I noticed that my bound was much better than the bound given by Higham in his Numerical Analysis textbook (which is, by quite a wide margin, the most widely used textbook in the field). I sent him an email -- "Dear sir, I noticed that in section X.Y of this book, you prove a bound of N sqrt(N) log(N) instead of N log(N); if you change foo to bar in your argument, you'll get the stronger bound which I prove in my paper (see attachment)" -- and he wrote back to thank me and tell me that he would make sure the improved bound was in the next edition of the textbook.

A year later, a copy of said textbook arrived in the mail, "compliments of the author".

Two years after that, when I was a graduate student at a different university, I went to a talk by Higham; and at the end when we were asked for questions, I introduced myself (by name, no mention of FFTs) and asked a question. Higham answered my question, and then went on -- in front of most of the department -- to announce that I had found an error in the first edition of his textbook, and that when I wrote to him he had assumed that I was a professor rather than an undergraduate student.

I think "star professors" are actually more likely to remember things like this, simply because someone pointing out something they didn't know, or a mistake they made, is so unusual. It's people like Chomsky, Higham, and Knuth who remember such contributions and can afford to send out free books -- or $2.56 cheques -- to those who provide them.

[gruseom]

But the thing Higham remembered was orders of magnitude more significant than thing I was talking about, which was genuinely trivial.

Still, I take your point that among true star professors this kind of brilliant decency isn't as uncommon as I made out. I was using the term "star professor" a little more ironically than that.

I definitely disagree with what you said about most academics, though!

[startingup]

My research advisor was a star professor in a big name school. Also very arrogant. He considered me one of his best students (so no personal axe to grind), but I was turned off by his arrogance. Moral of the story: you can't generalize!

[gruseom]

While I agree about the perils of generalization, the problem in this case is not that - it's that we're using the term "star professor" ambiguously. My fault for not being clearer in the first place.

[rms]

Maybe your item of trivia wasn't trivial to Chomsky... that's actually a pretty cool find and I'm sure he found it very interesting.

[foonamefoo]

Doesn't that completely validate the way in which I used Chomsky? I wasn't being negative.

[nostrademons]

Yeah, but it's not really an equal comparison. You can start a startup with a bachelor's degree (or less...) and a couple years of work experience. You need about 6 years of grad school, 2-3 years of postdoccing, and 6 years as a tenure-track professor to become a tenured professor. Assuming you aren't weeded out at any one of those stages. Your chances of getting tenure at the end of this are quite a bit lower than the chance that your startup will succeed, given equal intelligence and effort.

A better comparison would be startup founder <=> grad student, cashed-out entrepreneur <=> tenured professor. Startup founders tend to have more freedom than grad students, and multimillionaires tend to have more freedom than tenured professors.

[pixcavator]

"Your chances of getting tenure at the end of this are quite a bit lower than the chance that your startup will succeed, given equal intelligence and effort."

You are way off! Just count the number of multimillionaire founders vs. tenured professors.

[nostrademons]

Count the number of people who attempt to start a (tech) startup and compare with the number of people who go to grad school. You've gotta apply Bayes's rule: P(success) = P(good outcome) / P(trying), not just P(good outcome).

Unfortunately, I can't use my personal experience as a reliable count, since I went to college and live in the educational capital of the world (Massachusetts). It also happens to be a startup hub, and I hang around with lots of startup founders. So both my count of tenured professors and my count of successful entrepreneurs are likely to be distorted.

Anyone have actual numbers we could use to perform the computation? We need the number of students entering grad school, the number of new technology firms started, the number of tenured professors in the U.S, and the number of multi-million-$ acquisitions and IPOs.