“Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have parlayed their extensive ties with the president into an unabashed assault on universities and institutional science. In private text messages leaked to The Washington Post last year, Andreessen wrote that “universities are at Ground Zero of the counterattack.” He characterized Stanford and MIT as “mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point” and vowed that universities would “pay the price” after “they declared war on 70% of the country.” Most troublingly, Andreessen called for the National Science Foundation to receive “the bureaucratic death penalty.””
Musk uses Twitter to keep up appearances and routinely posts UBI propaganda that will obviously never materialize. Why would the guy who slashes social security (except for his corporations) introduce UBI?
The genuine worry is that these people have too much money and do seem unhinged. Thiel promotes the Antichrist and the apocalypse, Musk reposts weird Grok pictures of women as dark angels with wings as well as constant pictures of his mother. Material for a Hitchcock movie.
Both should be under anti-constitutional observation in the EU just like Scientology, which was also inspired by SciFi junk.
He’s been nuts for a while. See naming one of his (many many many) children some keyboard smash nonsense (supposedly the name of some guardian angel because he believes in that)
Thiel went to Stanford, and Andreessen to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Companies tend to have restructurings and stack ranking. Obviously these have their downsides too. But they also serve to shake things up and reassess direction and needs. If you’re swimming in money often you can skip this till you hit the skids.
Regardless of whether it’s actually a bad idea or not, there’s been zero effort by this administration to rebuild what’s been destroyed.
That said, just razing everything down is probably not the solution, especially if there are indeed no ideas how to improve the current state.
The reality is, these universities were independent institutions that did their jobs to teach without bias.
Only when fox news and right wing media captured all the news sources did "universities" suddenly become "liberal thinktanks".
Our science and research institutions arent broken. It never was. It's under attack by right wing propaganda to "bring them in line".
Fact is that a university that must simultaneously handle education, research, publishing, estate management, legal stuff, media coverage, health and safety etc etc etc ends up being somewhat bureaucratic.
Most of us trade our time for money, so at what point does the money become too little and be considered exploitative? Are all gig workers exploited? Didn't they make a rational choice that this is the best opportunity for themselves?
It certainly feels wrong, the low wages. I'm just wondering where the threshold is.
According to Marx it's basically always you are selling your time/labor for money because you are paid less than the value of the labor. The employer keeps the surplus.
It's not ironic when you understand that libertarianism is really about maximizing personal liberty for an individual, and that often means constraining the liberty of others who would stand in their way.
It's the most libertarian thing for millions of people to have very constrained lives under the rule of some wealthy person who gets to do whatever he wants.
We have too many PhDs (I say this as one). It's never been easier to get one. Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking.
Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate. Soon people will complete two just to qualify for an academic position.
I would blame the monopolization of the economy. A few corporations purchasing big chunks of the industry control the job market create a bottleneck where supply of jobs is controlled by a few corporations. Once all jobs are controlled by a few decision makers the precarious work conditions, diminished salaries, abuses, etc. come naturally.
> Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate.
Even if everybody had high education, companies would still compete for the best employees. There is no competition for employees because large corporations have agreed to not do so.
Apple, Google, Intel... discussed no-poach as a way to keep salaries low. Has anything changed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
This nonsense falls apart at the barest inspection. Science IS BORING. And it should be.
Take for example a muscle building study that found that the biceps grew significantly more when tension was maximized in the stretched position. Science based lifting people hawked for years that the "stretch mediated growth" was king. All based on that one "seminal and groundbreaking" research. Years later when a "incremental and derivative" study was done on the hamstrings found no stretch mediated growth effect. Without the boring work, we wouldn't know that some muscles grow faster when tensioned under stress and some don't. And we still don't know exactly why. The current leading theory is it's something to do with the balance of fast vs slow switch fibers that make up the muscle, but we don't know without more derivative and incremental research.
Hell even under your criteria, if the stretch mediated effect wasn't found in the original study you'd probably classified it as incremental and derivative too.
Want another example? How about this one, a scientist was studying which tricep movement produced the most growth. It's obvious right? It's the one that lets you load the most weight onto the triceps, or at least the one that lets you load the most weight onto the most heads of the triceps. Boring. Derivative. Incremental. Except this study found that despite "common sense" it was actually the overhead tricep extension. You can't load it the heaviest, it's mainly targeting just one head of the tricep, it makes absolutely no sense. But science has proven it to be the case. Later "incremental and derivative" research has proposed a theory that since it's overhead, the muscles go slightly hypoxic during the lift and that triggers a stronger growth reaction, and in fact, applying a band for vasoconstriction around the arm and doing bicep curls was found to lead to more bicep growth than doing it without the vasoconstriction. All of this is incremental science. All of this advances our knowledge of how the body grows.
Science is slow. Science is advanced unpredictability. Science is boring.
> In the realm of genius, might the “Raphael without hands” — the term understood in its broadest sense — be not the exception, but the rule? — Genius is perhaps not so rare after all: but the five hundred hands it needs to tyrannize the καιρὁς, “the right time” — to seize chance by the scruff of the neck! [0]
[0] http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/JGB-274 (translated from German)
-Stephen Jay Gould
Science is and always was incremental. The breakthroughs come from truly unforeseeable places. It takes seemingly niche and unprofitable and incremental research like studying bacteria living in volcano vents, for us to have PCR.
VCs expect a sliver of their companies to become Unicorns, we understand it to be a numbers game. That grace is given to entrepreneurs but scientists need to grovel for cash and endlessly show that their research is "translatable" or sufficiently impactful.
Sorry, I've heard this one too many times before. Thanks for your contribution to our world's knowledge, I hope you value it as much as I do.
Why? Most science is incremental. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Complaining that "Why doesn't progress go fast like before?!" when the newest tool-side improvement is a slightly faster CPU or a new clanker model.
I think there's this group of folks who are like "Why don't we have flying cars?" and eventually realize the problem is physics, but have to somehow blame people instead.
In a PhD, you learn everything about nothing
If some of them want to temporarily participate in the toil, nothing wrong with that, after all that's what doing a PhD is anyway. Same goes with homework and problem sets earlier in the science trajectory.
The greater fear that we won't need these types of experts b/c in the future machines will have all the intelligence or the ratio of humans with expertise to the overall population will somehow drift is certainly a societal level concern as we offload intelligence to the machines but the flip side of it is that will not be able to learn how to higher level of abstraction or more quickly than ever before enabling more of us to actually develop expertise, or at least a new type of expertise.
Not that Star Trek is meant to be real but when I think about the crew of the Starship Enterprise I imagine few of them actually know all of the ins and outs of how the warp drive work but they're able to travel around with star system
There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people today using computers without understanding how transistors work or which register they're writing to at any given moment. Many of these people also drive cars without understanding how gears can shift or how the radial motion of the main drive shaft gets transferred in the transverse direction to the drive axle. I suppose a few of them wear clothes without having ever sheared a sheep and without knowledge of the best way to felt wool.
Even the guy pushing the button for the teleporter is some kind of technical genius.
I get approached by “recruiters” all the time about this.
That seems like a fair trade considering the freelancer takes on none of the risk and has very little required capital.
If you're talking about DataAnnotation, specialized stuff like that is $30/hour and up.
Every time one of these articles come up, you can recognize that silicon valley is treating these people badly, but you should remember that everyone else is treating them worse
But you can't ignore how much modern Big Tech has sucked away from academia compared to the tech companies of the Cold War era. Microsoft Research and Google Research have some impressive folks, but even combined they are a scientific pittance compared to the might of Bell Labs, and there is far more interference from the business side. This despite the fact that the executives of those companies are vastly wealthier than anyone from Bell Labs in the 20th century, even adjusting for inflation.
And of course it's not just the executives: every 7-figure Google software engineer should get a >$100k pay cut, and that money goes to a STEM PhD to pursue nonprofit research at Google Labs. Believe it or not, $100k is still pretty competitive for a young PhD mathematician (similar to assistant professor at a selective state school). Even if it's chump change for a guy who fine tunes AdSense.
It's not like the current demand for scientists is somehow a completely natural value, arrived at objectively and with no human biases involved.
And the private sector is heavily to blame for that. In ways that you even describe, as well as others (as another commenter noted, regulatory capture is one).
Correct, this is what the article points out.
Their options were squashed when SV was praising DOGE and the cuts to national research grants based on keywords like “inequalities”.
Nobody had the time to check that mathematicians also use the term.
We wrecked our research and the vultures got cheap labor to put lipstick on their slop machines.
We have a $1.78T deficit. The ducks and the mathematicians will need to take a cut at this point.
The fatal assumptions many people thinking about government spending from the outside make are that
a) money is limited
and
b) money is redistributed (~to a cause of their choice) after funding for something else gets cut
Resident libertarian moron: uuuuhhhhhh have you considered that they voluntarily consented to being treated poorly? Actually this is the least poorly they could possibly be treated.
I do wonder how minor this foundation has been laid w where graduate students may be conditioned exploited by colleges.
Why? Serious question. Surely the only people using the LLM for such specific STEM domains are the exact same people who are "chasing grants instead of researching." Certainly I can see how training an LLM on this stuff can help automate the process of grant-chasing, and maybe OpenAI can expand their homework cheating business to graduate schools. But I do not see how this stuff helps honest researchers, except a bit around the margins (e.g. perhaps Claude isn't so good at the Perl used in bioinformatics, that's a use case justifying some RLHF from a PhD).
It really seems like the main utility of this stuff is getting a higher score on Humanity's Last Exam and showing the customers/investors that actually Opus 4.9 is 2% smarter than GPT 5.5. Separately there are AlphaProof/etc-style LLMs for solving real research problems in math and CS, but those techniques don't even work for theoretical physics, let alone biology.
(I mean, OpenAI released GPT-Rosalind just yesterday, and - surprise - it's not meant for chasing grants.)
It's not 2023 anymore, it's 2026. LLMs are good enough to be useful. They have been for at least a year, and they keep getting better. You need to be living under a rock for the past few years to not notice that.
>A university that owns the IP output of PhD students is probably as bad a villain in this history
In the battle of Peter Thiel (or Marc Anddrressenn) vs Your Strawman, I'm putting my newly-minted rugpull coins on the guy who thinks he's Tech Jesus.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
We're being robbed. We need to actively shame people that spend massive amounts of money on college.