[extropy-chat] it's all understandable, except

[Brent Neal]

On Nov 7, 2006, at 5:11, Samantha Atkins wrote:

>
> On Nov 6, 2006, at 3:15 AM, Lee Corbin wrote:
>
>> Eugen wrote
>>
>>
>>> Not only does demographics limit the quantity, the quality has been
>>> going down monotonously since middle last century, or even before.
>>
>> What do you mean by this?  IQ has been going up (cf. Flynn effect).
>>
>
> You could fool me by what I see of people around me in multiple walks
> of life.  Maybe they started scoring IQ on the curve.

IQ is, as others have pointed out, an incomplete measurement. Someone  
here, perhaps Eugen, suggested a concept of 'effectiveness' as a  
complement to IQ.  I think that what Samantha is observing is not so  
much a dumbing down of society as a 'motivating down' of society.


>
>>> The job market does the rest to discourage entering technical  
>>> fields.
>>> The message is certainly loud and clear enough, and it's being  
>>> heard.
>>
>> How does the job market discourage entering technical field?
>> I'm not following you.
>>
>
> If you want to do cutting edge R&D the well-renumerated opportunities
> are thin on the ground.


Oh, and its even worse than that! :)  Remuneration is the least of  
your worries.  No matter where you do R&D, you're becoming  
increasingly constrained in how you do it and what you do it on.  I  
am a researcher in the central R&D facility in a medium-sized private  
company.  Any research I do has a less than 1% chance of ever being  
published - patents and trade secrets only, please! - and I am  
financially incentivized to only focus on short-term product-focused  
development.  The fact that I'm working on a long-term research  
project is because of sheer cussedness and a belief that ultimately,  
my research will pay off big for the company - but that's my and my  
colleagues' choice to gamble with our careers. Add to that the  
disparity in pay even between an experienced, successful inventor/ 
researcher and a entry-level "profitable-growth strategist,"  and the  
result is a huge flight in manpower and talent out of R&D and into  
more lucrative positions.  That, to me, is a clear example of how the  
job market discourages entry into a technical field - although, more  
properly, it discourages remaining in a technical field.

You also see a lot of bachelor's level engineers and scientists  
opting for law and business schools these days, without any  
intervening stint working in a technical field.  This trend has been  
commented on in C&E News as well as in Physics Today.

All little off topic for this -

I'm also one of the folks at my company who have a responsibility for  
licensing and acquiring intellectual property. What I observe is that  
universities are increasingly pressuring professors to focus on  
patentable research, in order to generate revenue for the  
university.  The anarchocapitalist take would be that this is a good  
thing, since these institutions should be self-funding, but I argue,  
with ample evidence, that investments in basic and fundamental  
research have been necessary to drive these more applications focused  
advances.  With the universities biasing themselves this way, I have  
become quite concerned with future progress in science and technology




--
Brent Neal
Geek of all Trades
http://brentn.freeshell.org

"Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein