Academia? Are you... Are you OK?
by Richard in23 Feb 2024
Last year, the tech job market was very weak, so I took the opportunity to do a one-year position in academia, providing statistical support for some research projects in the health sector. It was a pretty interesting experience overall. The best thing about being back in academia was the opportunity to attend many seminars in different fields, and also a very interesting local conference. To explain the worst thing about being back in academia, let me give a few examples.
Yesterday I attended a seminar about Evgeny Onegin. In case you are not familiar with this work, it’s a novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin and is considered to be one of the greatest works of Russian literature. From the point of view of a statistician, the poem is particularly interesting because it was actually the first ever source of training data for a large language model! In 1913, Andrei Markov decided to compile the first 20000 characters of the poem and count, by hand, the number of times a consonant was followed by a vowel, a consonant by a consonant, a vowel by a vowel, and a vowel by a consonant. He found that the vowels and consonants are not independent, but tend to alternate. This study is often cited as the first observation of mathematical patterns in language.
Anyway, the speaker was a poet and the seminar wasn’t really about large language models. It was more about the structure of the poem. The speaker had read 12 different English translations of Onegin (he pronounced it “on-again”, although the Russian pronunciation is something more like “an-yeah-gin”) and he was comparing them and saying which one was the best.
At the end of the seminar, someone naturally asked him whether he had read the poem in Russian. His answer was quite striking.
No, I’m not interested in doing that. I’m not interested at all.
It seemed odd to me that someone who was prepared to read 12 different translations of a famous poem would not be interested in the original at all. Not even a little tiny bit curious about why the poem became so famous? Not even willing to listen to a single line? It’s the closest I’ve ever come across to a real-life equivalent of “Shakespeare sounds better in the original Klingon”.
I was reminded of the response I received when I tried to organise an interdisciplinary project. These are things which university people always say they are very interested in, right up until someone comes up with a realistic idea for one, and then they get extremely defensive. I had an idea for a way to apply copulas to mortality modelling. The response from the health people was:
I always avoid discussing theories of mathematics or statistics.
and from the copula people:
Interesting, but then conceptually not new.
In 2018, shortly before leaving New Zealand, I met an academic who had just been hired from Princeton as a Professor of Philosophy. I had been reading a little philosophy, and I asked her whether she could explain Spinoza to me, because I didn’t really understand what he was all about. She replied with great pride:
I haven’t read anything published before 1970.
At the time, I thought being proud of not knowing something was an exclusively New Zealand thing. After all, we’re traditionally a very egalitarian country, and people are wary of being seen as too pretentious. But I don’t think that anymore. I think that it’s a global problem. I think that academics, the people who are supposed to spend their lives learning and knowing things, have reached the point where they will openly boast about not knowing things. And I think that’s very dangerous!
Obviously, the news from academia has been bad for some time. Most recently, there’s the shocking revival of campus antisemitism, which led to the resignation of the presidents of Harvard and UPenn. But this was my first chance to see how things are up close. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like seeing students being yelled at for being two minutes late to a meeting. I didn’t like finding an error in the code for a published paper, and then being told:
Oh yeah, there might be some mistakes. I wrote that paper in two weeks.
I didn’t like to witness a student getting feedback which contradicted earlier feedback from the same person and being told:
You can’t expect me to remember everything I said!
I didn’t like that the people who were doing all this were the same people who thought it was a good idea to make everybody stay indoors for two years, wrecking the economy (and, incidentally, the tech job market). Before I witnessed how these people behaved, I really believed that this decision had been debated at length by wise experts. Now I know that it was probably taken by a single person at the top of some demented academic pecking order who wanted to maximise the number of Quality-adjusted life years on their Excel sheet. Debate doesn’t really seem to be a thing in academia any more. Which makes me sad.
And, frankly, a bit angry.