[JuniperMesos]

I'm not claiming that this is a step in the direction of fixing academia; I'm claiming that, because academia is currently broken, we shouldn't assume that the ~10k people who got PhDs under the current system are people doing actually-valuable work for the federal government and ultimately the American people.

[checker659]

Would you have said the same for folks doing NLP circa 2015?

[fsdfasdsfadfasd]

these folks were already associated with FAANG. Most of deep learning progress comes from industry funding, not academia

[prime_ursid]

And where did those people get their Masters degrees and PhDs from?

[rwyinuse]

Knowing current administration anti-science approach to things like climate and health, I wouldn't be all at surprised if many of those who left academia were ones producing quality work that just didn't align with Trump admin's ideology.

[fasbiner]

I suspect you're right, but what we are and are not surprised by is self-referential rather than evidentiary.

But are we supposed to be content with not being given enough information to make a meaningful differentiation between people with PhDs in human resources and $IDENTITY-studies vs PhDs in organic chemistry and climatology?

When there's hostility towards discernment, it makes me feel like the two political strains are working together to use a one-two punch of credentialism and anti-intellectualism to erode empirical investigation into reality.

[michelsedgh]

the unscientific stuff was actually past administrations which told us cheetos is more healthy than eggs and meat lol

[clutchdude]

Turns out, if we feed data in and query it in the right way, we can come to charts that allow bad conclusions just like any other.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/16/lucky-charms-healthie...

[yesb]

If anyone is curious, as I was, where this misinformation came from: it appears to be a criticism of the Food Compass rating system from Tufts University. The connection to "past administrations" seems to be added by the person I'm replying to. They've also swapped Cheerios with Cheetos.

>On social media, I have seen graphics showing certain breakfast cereals scoring higher than eggs, cheese, or meat. Did Tufts create these graphics?

>No. Food Compass works very well, on average, across thousands of food and beverage products. But, when this number and diversity of products are scored, there are always some exceptions. These graphs were created by others to show these exceptions, rather than to show the overall performance of Food Compass and the many other foods for which Food Compass works well. But, as objective scientists, we accept constructive criticism and are using this to further improve Food Compass. We are working on an updated version now – see our versions page for more information.

https://sites.tufts.edu/foodcompass/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00381-y.epdf

[throwaway2056]

> 'm not claiming that this is a step in the direction of fixing academia; I'm claiming that, because academia is currently broken, we shouldn't assume that the

Why?

If you go that far then

- senate

- scotus

- violence

- SV

- tech bros

- lies about AI

What is not broken.

The idea of academia is it is an investment. Look at internet, DoE, Genome, vaccines - a lot from academia. Companies barely do that.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Indeed. You're far more likely to get sensible policy opinions from a STEM PhD who knows what science is than from sleazy opportunist politicians, investors, and PR people.

You might even say that the opportunists dislike STEM because it gets in the way of their opportunism.