Jeremy Bos

there is doom is in my groundwater

[doomer @uncledoomer]

if theres one thing we know from all of human history, its that when there is a surplus of young able bodied men that feel they have no purpose or future, that only very cool and good things can possibly happen

[maya benowitz 🕰️ @cosmicfibretion]

This is especially true in fundamental physics where the problems have become exceptionally difficult and require very long periods of deep thinking that are unsustainable in the modern production factory era of the academy. Knowledge production has become a hypercapitalist publication venture where small, quick, and risk-averse projects are valued over longterm high-risk ones that publish much less frequently.

Peers are in a constant state of extreme competition for increasingly limited resources to produce as much as they can as fast as possible and with dwindling time for research among a myriad of other responsibilities. Meanwhile the career hierarchy has bloated with so many rungs before tenure that by the time a young person gets there their most creative years are behind them.

[CoffeeWithTheClassics @CoffeewClassics]

“What staggers me is how any man can prefer the galley-slave labour of transcription to the freeman’s work of attempting an essay on his own…”

[UK HE News @HigherEd_UK]

Unis are not focused on education anymore. They are focused on income generation and, ultimately, managers' careers.

Corrupt and incompetent VCs took away the intrinsic purpose of universities.

This contributed to killing the instrumental purpose they once had for students.

[Associate Deans @ass_deans]

You aren’t principled, you’re obstinate. And you don’t know the difference.

[Jeremy Bos @jpbos]

@pannapacker Not a small number of faculty are not hired until almost forty and then not tenured until 6 years later. I know faculty who are nearly 70 with children still in college and others that will be. Without a pension retiring is not an option for many.

[Anand Sanwal @asanwal]

"Unless it's a top university, go to the cheapest one that you like."

This is the right advice for those deciding on which college to attend when thinking about future employment

Going to Boston University or Oberlin just won't matter

h/t @auren

[Tyler Austin Harper @Tyler_A_Harper]

If you are a college professor it is extremely important for you to understand that you are at war with your senior administration. They are not your friends even if one of the deans used to teach in your department. They want to club to death everything you care about, and will.

[Tyler Austin Harper @Tyler_A_Harper]

“We embrace AI as not something we simply do…AI is part of who and how we are.”

I’m going to say it for the thousandth time: the problem is not the cheating students. They are a symptom of a problem. The problem is that academic administrators are at war with education itself.

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

C. S. Lewis with maybe the most important paragraph ever written for people with creative ambitions

[Matt Dowell @dowellml]

What if we stopped to consider that so much of the bad stuff in academia is due to ever worsening material and workplace conditions and ever-worsening bosses who contribute to and exacerbate all the other worsening(s)?

[RodeoProfessor @RodeoProfessor]

@JoshDaws They’re not booing because they don’t want to work with AI, undergrads are basically already natives to AI, they’re booing because he glibly mentions things that will replace them and make an already challenging labor market more challenging (imported labor and AI).

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

Ironically, one of the best use-cases for AI in scientific writing is to act as a second set of eyes to catch errors in your manuscript that you have missed because of over-familiarity from reading it too many times.

[J. Whitebread @JWhitebread1]

At my doctoral defense one of the members of my committee was outraged that I quoted a scholar they had a personal beef with. It was a single citation for a minor establishment of fact not in question. I quoted nothing else by this author. Still, they refused to approve my dissertation until I agreed to remove it. I replaced it with a citation of the committee member instead. That was the only requested change by anyone on the committee for the entire dissertation.

[UK HE News @HigherEd_UK]

Also, senior managers actually do not want assessments that require learning because that interferes with degree sales.

[Matt Dowell @dowellml]

There’s a bias when within the presence of management people grant that the management in whatever form it is occurring is helping in some way because said bias prevents the subjects of said management from acknowledging the utter waste if not harm of most managerial forms.

[Christopher Severen @ChrisSeveren]

This is applied micro now: Editor gives you path to publication (Rej & Resub). You spend 9mo revising paper. 2 refs say accept, 1 says R&R. But, there's a new editor. They find a new ref that says reject. So, paper rejected. Everyone's time wasted.

[Ash Jogalekar @curiouswavefn]

Ludwig Wittgenstein died #OTD 1951.

Freeman Dyson: “I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, "WITTGENSTEIN." To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible.”

[kache @yacineMTB]

you can outsource your thinking
but you cannot outsource your understanding

[Bernard T. Joy @bernardtjoy]

Many of us never experience "peak". We progress from a youth rich in resources but during which we're too dumb to utilise them to age rich in knowledge of how to utilise them but with diminishing resources.