Ask and answer stupid questions here! - Page 316

On July 24 2015 02:53 Thieving Magpie wrote:
It's mostly the problem of academics transitioning into industry. They all want perfect information with no deadlines when the truth is that we need to have a forcast in a weeks time using little to no information to decide on which direction to move from a business standpoint. Most of them are used to being given 4-10 years to make something of work and not have to prove it's importance every few months.

So what did we learn? We learned academics are crap at coding, are crap at database management, have no idea how to fund dynamic projects, have no idea what are the best ways to gather data in a short budgeted time frame. And who are only good at analyzing information already found for them.

This doesn't make them quacks, this makes them useless for our research team. (Atmospheric, Geologic, Genetic, and Statistical research specifically)

It is the reason that having a degree doesn't disqualify someone from being called a quack. That what I use to determine if someone is stupid is what they can actually give us more than what degree they have.

On July 24 2015 03:21 Acrofales wrote:

Okay, so being bad at your job = being a quack, in your mind?

Obviously having a degree doesn't disqualify someone from being a quack. Andrew Wakefield is quite obviously a quack, yet is (was) a fully qualified MD. There are quite a few MDs promoting homeopathy, and plenty of physicists with PhDs are trying to sell cold fusion devices or, more grievous, perpetuum mobiles.

Having a PhD does not make you a good and honest person. However, it DOES teach you how to do research. Whether you are then good at that within the various constraints that job X at company/institute Y imposes, is another story.

On July 24 2015 05:32 Thieving Magpie wrote:


I don't understand what you're upset about.

Someone suggested a quack was an uneducated person trying to publish theories, and I disagreed because to me a quack is someone with theories that have no observable evidence. I say that because a lot of people with PhDs are quacks. And a lot who aren't are shit at being a researcher. Having the PhD =\= researcher for much the same reason that electing a black president in America means racism is over.

Why are you so insulted by this statement? My company obviously loves PhDs because they're almost all we hire. But that also means we meet a lot of shit researchers who have PhDs.

On July 24 2015 06:38 ChaZzza wrote:
Can I just share my two pence, as a scientist who has worked in academia for over a decade and currently working in an engineering company.
Engineers need a spec. In business this often equates to goalposts which are regularly moved. In science, the 'truth' is sought, which means an undeniable fact or at the very least a theory on the observable existence. These two aren't mutually exclusive but they are totally fucking different. If you keep moving the goalposts or new evidence is constantly being aquired then the two roles look very similar. But if the time gap between objectives is large then the scientists look like prophets and the engineers look like dicks. And that is a huge generalisation but essentially, they're all people on the ground trying to work with what they're got.
When it comes to exploring the universe, do you really think that these guys think, "Well, he/she/it is a scientist so what the hell do they know?". Or do you think that unravelling the wonder of the universe is the common goal?

On July 23 2015 23:35 Thieving Magpie wrote:


Most atheists assume priest = uneducated. Its an honest mistake for the random TLer to make.

On July 23 2015 03:57 fruity. wrote:


Disk activity, how much data is being read from or written to, the HDD

On July 24 2015 07:43 Thieving Magpie wrote:


For clarification--PhDs are the best things ever and there's a reason we prefer them. What I'm talking about is that you don't realize how many bad ones there are until you're recruiting them.

My opinions on engineers are much lower... Trying to get them to follow security protocols is hard enough but add in "you're methodology is not right" and you get the classic drama of the whiny engineer. They make the final products which links them to money--but yeah, they're a handful.

Humanities majors know their place and don't start shit--but damn eng folks are rigid.

On July 24 2015 17:35 Cascade wrote:

Just regarding the entire discussion last page or so, not this post in particular: I think there are two misunderstandings:
1) I don't think anyone claimed that everyone with PhD is always right about anything. The statement was that if you DONT have one, AND have your own theory that go against the consensus of what (almost) every expert agrees on, then chances are very slim that you actually got it right. That does not imply in any way that everyone with degrees are automatically infallible, or even smart or competent. I don't think we disagree on any of that?

The discussion of applying academic experience in the industry is very interesting though, and very relevant for most in academia, as only a tiny fraction of graduating PhD actually stay their entire life in academia. It would be interesting to hear more about how you weed out the useful PhD from the less useful ones. I get the impression industry judges you on very different things than academia.

2) I used the word "quack" as someone fraudulent, ie on purpose misleading, which I felt was an unfair label for entire fileds of research, but I see on wiki that it can also mean incompetent, unknowingly misleading. So I got that wrong, sorry. I agree that there are plenty of incompetent PhDs (and a few fraudulent as well for that matter) that can be referred to as quacks I guess (a bit rude maybe, but whatever), and it tends to be the more incompetent ones that get kicked out of academia, looking for work in industry, so maybe you see an disproportionate amount of them.

I still don't think it makes sense to dismiss all of mathematics as incompetent or fraudulent just because they don't require empirical evidence for their theorems. You can argue whether maths is a part of science or not (there's material on wiki about that discussion), and it is definitely not an empirical science. Nonetheless, you can't deny that maths has made incredible contributions to essentially all sciences through providing them with tools that study their empirical data. I don't think you actually disagree with any of that, so I guess I just didn't understand what you meant. There are for sure incompetent mathematicians, and even good mathematicians may not be a good hire for your company due to their (on average) less empirical mindset.

This ended up as more words than I intended, sorry about that. :/