This is typical Yahoo bullshit. They hire a CEO not for the primary reason of effectiveness or experience, but instead for their perception of effectiveness in the media. Is she an improvement over Bartz? No doubt, because the first time I saw Bartz discussing Yahoo's future several years ago, it was immediately clear to me that they weren't getting out of their tailspin.
Is Mayer a genius? I'm sure of it. But from all the things I've heard from Google employees and their dealings with her, I suspect that a lot of the hype she receives in the media is due to the lack of female role models in the Valley. She damned sure doesn't sound like a good leader. Biting off heads, interrupting people mid sentence, forgetting what happened in the last meeting....... this is the epitome of somebody who has bitten off more than they can chew. The sad part is that there are so, so many women in the Valley that deserve the attention she gets.
Eh, I like Marissa, and I've worked on projects (the 2010 websearch visual redesign, and doodles) for which she was the executive sponsor. No, she's not a nice person, and most likely she does not give a shit about you as a person. But she is very often right about her design opinions, and when she's not, she'll listen to data.
I don't think Yahoo particularly needs a nice person as CEO right now. Their culture is dysfunctional enough that they probably need a Steve Jobs type, someone with clear opinions who's willing to ruffle a lot of feathers (and make a bunch of people quit). Steve Jobs wasn't really a nice person either.
I've worked at both Yahoo and Google. I've never worked with Marissa directly but I think your opinion of her is pretty much correct.
The biggest risk I see is that there is a huge difference in her role. At Google she stood atop a pyramid of other geniuses, with similar backgrounds and values, and was a filter for their ideas. At Yahoo she's dealing with a culture where engineering is not the highest value, and she's going to have to get off the top perch and descend into the ranks, clearing out the enemies of progress which exist at every level.
I disagreed with nearly everything I ever heard Marissa say related to design, especially her over reliance on A/B testing to inform design. I think she is one of the main reasons Google products tend to feel like they are designed by engineers.
Their products are usable and uncluttered. I have reservations about the new unified look (too much padding in horizontal stripes one can't scroll, trying to displace browser chrome), but I've been very happy with the previous, “designed by engineers” Google aesthetic.
There are so many UX problems with the current crop of Google core products, it's hard for me to agree that "usable and uncluttered" can refer to anything but the Google of the past.
What's wrong with relying on A/B testing to inform design? In my opinion, except for the whole Google+ unifying process going on most Google products are highly usable.
Most observers seem to agree that Yahoo's problem is cultural in nature. It's not a Nokia-esque situation, where the company was heavily damaged by competitive forces before Elop even showed up.
A big part -- a necessary part -- of the way Jobs changed the culture at Apple was by bringing in a lot of people who had been loyal to him for years at Next and elsewhere. I can't think of any cases where an outsider has parachuted into a large company, by invitation or otherwise, and turned it around by himself/herself.
Can/will Mayer do that? If so, where will the required team of revolutionaries and revanchists come from? If she doesn't (or can't) raid Google, then where will she get the people she will need?
There're lots of good people at Yahoo. I've heard from other Google engineers who do a lot of interviewing that their recent impression of a lot of ex-Yahooers has been "Hire this person NOW. How could the company let someone like this go?"
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if one of Marissa's first moves is to fire all the middle management and then promote a bunch of longtime individual contributors into their place.
From the description, her behavior reminds me a lot of how Steve Jobs behaved. If you read the biography, Jobs would often contradict himself, he was extremely rude, he would cry at meetings, he would hear an idea and say it was shit, and then the next week propose the exact same idea as his own, etc.
I'm not saying she is at all comparable to Steve Jobs, but it sounds like they both know what they want, and don't spend a lot of time with what they think is wrong.
I've said this often, but Jobs was about 50% right and 50% wrong. When Jobs was wrong, it was usually a small strikeout, but when he was right, they were monster home runs, which is why people tolerated Jobs' behavior. Mayer needs to be right a lot more than she is wrong, so I guess we'll have to see how that pans out.
Not a good comparison. Meyer famously tested 41 shades of blue on Gmail. Optimising local maxima is hardly innovation. Jobs was more of the Henry Ford mindset that if he asked people what they wanted they'd ask for a faster horse.
I guess you didn't read very carefully because I didn't compare Meyer and Jobs except in the similarities of how their temperament were described. One was from an official biography, and one from from an anonymous forum comment, so I take the forum comment with a grain of salt. To be clear, I don't think they are at all comparable in terms of success or as a visionary.
But since you brought up the testing of 41 shades of blue, I guess you didn't hear this story about Steve Jobs obsessing over the yellow gradient on Google's icon on the iPhone.
I didn't say Jobs didn't obsess over details. Clearly he did. The difference is that he knew what he wanted up front rather than testing market reaction to make decisions. The latter is commonly perceived as the "Google Way" and it's more about meeting expectations than setting higher ones.
I was wondering if there are any public and published research reports/papers that were written by her? At least something from her time at Stanford? So far the only thing I could find were some Google patents where she appears as a co-inventor.
Edit: Oddly enough I can not reply to the comment below. My statement wasn't meant to be critical but more on the curious side. The "41 shades of blue" story sounded always intriguing, so I was wondering if there are any other traces of her research activities.
Even if she has, what of it? Academic success does not imply the ability to lead and vice verse. Steve jobs, bill gates, Zuckerberg all built businesses worth hundreds of billions of dollars without any degree at all.
Yes. There's a big difference between a genius who's also a jackass, and someone who thinks they have to be a jackass to be a genius. Jobs was solidly in the first category.
I read the biography too and this seems only remotely similar. Anyway, if someone shares some of Steve Jobs' bad traits, that means nothing at all. It's not an indication of a good CEO.
CEOs in general tend to be hard to work with. There are also anecdotes about Gates being rude.
Further, I would say the people who want to judge a character by a few anecdotes are being lazy, small minded, and short sighted. Jobs, Gates, and Mayer are all different people with their own styles. I'm not sure if Mayer's style will be what Yahoo needs, but I wish her the best of luck.
A lot of people are assholes. That doesn't mean they are like Steve Jobs.
That description of her didn't include a single word saying anything positive about how she did her job. No description of Jobs of similar length, regardless of how much the writer hated him, would have failed to mention that Jobs also had many positive qualities.
In fairness, when Jobs was Meyer's age he was mostly regarded as a wild eyed dreamer who lost the computer wars. He was fortunate to get a second act at Apple (which looked very seriously at Be instead of Next).
Anybody read 'I'm feeling Lucky' by Douglas Edwards? He came across as a good judge of people to me, just based on my reading of the book. And he is not negative on many people in his book.
But he was critical of her, and there were lots of hints of bad blood between them in his book. Although he always remains very subtle in whatever he says.
Reading that comment, you share, reminded me of some sections of the book.
Interesting. So that reply was ages old, but in the event that you're dealing with a manager like that today - what is the best thing to do outside of leaving the organization?
If the organization is large enough, try to make an amicable break and move internally. This is the simplest way if you do not have a conscience about the company or your work (not always a bad thing to be conscience-less about these things). If you can't move internally, pursue two threads of action simultaneously:
(1) In most situations, you will have a smart, rational person you might be aware of in the layer that he/she reports into (though preferable, not necessarily her direct boss). Talk to them about what you see as problems.
Be prepared to back up your claims with documented, solid evidence of the behavior. Keep emotional, hyperbolic, prejudicial expressions or assertions to yourself - they will only work against you in such situations.
Be as paranoid as you can be about who you can trust to back you up in your peer group in case there has to be a discussion. Knowing people who're discontent like you helps only if you know they won't stab you in the back.
Avoid ultimatums. Express faith in the system and the ability for the person to change. Express willingness to change yourself. In other words, come off as the bigger person right from the beginning and at all times.
(2) Have an exit strategy if the situation turns on you. This could include escalation to several layers (CEO/Board) above the layers you're dealing with and looking out for a new job.
"Be prepared to back up your claims with documented, solid evidence of the behavior. Keep emotional, hyperbolic, prejudicial expressions or assertions to yourself - they will only work against you in such situations. Avoid ultimatums. Express faith in the system and the ability for the person to change. Express willingness to change yourself. In other words, come off as the bigger person right from the beginning and at all times."
Based on past bitter experience I've boiled this down to, "Don't be easy to dismiss."
I think leaving is your only option, actually, outside of going to HR and asking to be moved to a different team... and I'd never go to HR to ask that.
It looks like this whole story was manually pushed off the HN front page for some reason (or it was flagged and the sorting algorithm takes this into account?), but I just wanted to say while I'm here that I was really glad to read this particular subthread.
> the idiots who made that movie used very similar language to the OP
> immediately assume assume the OP was one
Come on. This is an obvious case of unwarranted guilt by association. For the record, I've never seen Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and from briefly looking up what the film is about, I don't think I'd agree with it at all.
All of the above were unnecessary. I'll address the rest of your comment now.
> First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class".
Typically, when cuts are being made, people across the political spectrum prefer to cut services for the middle class before cutting services for the poor. Most people agree that cutting services for the poor is a last resort. I am not arguing here that this is necessarily correct or that you have to agree, but that is the reason for the emphasis on "serving the poor" when discussing cuts to government programs.
> Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money?
Administration costs, questionable research, credentialing, etc. That huge increase in tuition costs is going somewhere, isn't it?
> And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US.
They are part of the same system. The connection between the increase in student loan limits and the increase in student tuition has been noted many times. See elsewhere in this thread.
> Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".
In addition to what monochrome and yummyfajitas have said, anywhere you look, you can find job listings for relatively simple, entry-level positions that unnecessarily require university degrees. Ever since we started pushing the idea that everyone should go to college, we've seen a signaling arms race where you'd better get a college degree or face being passed over for someone else who did -- whether or not the job really needed someone with a degree. This is the unnecessary barrier. Now you have to spend money and time to get a degree just to keep up. If you can't do that, you're worse off.
Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point.
> Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.
Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already.
> would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades
You're suggesting the only possible way to do this kind of research is through the university system as currently structured. This is an outlandish, unsupported claim, and you denigrate the people who performed this research by claiming they could only have done it within the modern university system.
Hmm. I think is a poor article because it lacks depth and simply makes a bunch of assertions many of which don't even follow from the premises in the article itself. I might have refrained from saying so explicitly had I thought you were actually interested in exploring the question and were gathering information, but it seemed to me that you've made up your mind and are working backwards from your conclusion.
You haven't really addressed my first point. What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities? I was trying to point out that we can make all the assertions we want, but none of them might be true, so we need to guided by data not opinions or anecdotes. You seem to have missed this point.
Administration costs, questionable research, credentialing, etc. That huge increase in tuition costs is going somewhere, isn't it?
My understanding is that tuition is rising because of university funding being cut. In fact, some of the first few articles when you google for this are [1, 2, 3] which clearly couple tuition increases with budget cuts. Are you not aware of this?
Are you seriously claiming that university tuition is being increased simply to fund "questionable research" etc.?
This is the unnecessary barrier. Now you have to spend money and time to get a degree just to keep up. If you can't do that, you're worse off.
This is a product of the economic system we live and I fail to see how reducing university funding will solve this problem.
Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point.
No, I don't think it proves your point. You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree and the existence of people who have done things of value without a degree disproves your point.
Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already.
yummyfajita's claim, if valid, is a much weaker one than yours.
You're suggesting the only possible way to do this kind of research is through the university system as currently structured. This is an outlandish, unsupported claim, and you denigrate the people who performed this research by claiming they could only have done it within the modern university system.
That's not what I'm claiming. What I said was that given that this happened, that research has already more than paid for itself.
If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting (which you haven't specified), that might or might not be true depending on what you're proposing.
I'm skeptical though that a system that eschews public funding of research will work better than the current one. I think it's not a coincidence that the US is the pre-eminent leader in high-technology research and also houses some of the best graduate schools in the world.
> What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities?
I take it you've agreed universities are skewed towards the middle class and higher in terms of direct enrollment (and this is easily verifiable). To counter this, you talked about indirect effects:
> Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries.
How can you prove this? I don't think it's possible, but if you can I'm all ears.
> Are you seriously claiming that university tuition is being increased simply to fund "questionable research" etc.?
I'm claiming one of the reasons university tuition is being increased is that we're in an environment where degrees are seen as being necessary, whether or not they are. In other words, degrees are being treated as an inelastic good. Therefore students are willing to pay whatever they can afford. As student loan limits increase, what students can afford to pay increases, so tuition increases as well. If even part of the tuition increases come from this, and your college president is making $1 million/year, I think it's fair to call that waste.
> This is a product of the economic system we live and I fail to see how reducing university funding will solve this problem.
It's a product of the system we live in because we created and subsidized that system. Lowering the subsidy is the first step to solving the problem. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3608680
> You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree
This is completely false. I did not say anything of the kind. In fact, I'm making the exact opposite point, so now I'm wondering if you understood what I was saying at all. I said universities are "fostering an environment where people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value".
> yummyfajita's claim, if valid, is a much weaker one than yours.
yummyfajitas directly counters the same claim I was referring to.
> That's not what I'm claiming.
No, that is exactly what you claimed. You said, word-for-word, that it "would've been impossible [for me to publish the article] without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades".
> If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting
Yes, I'm claiming there is more than one way to do research. Your claim, that what was done was the only possible way to do it, is extraordinary to me. And again, that is what you're claiming when you say it "would've been impossible" for me to publish an article on the internet.
I agree hands-on learning in a lab is important. I'm not suggesting everyone should stop this and only read books instead. But learning in a lab doesn't need to be tied to a $100,000-$200,000 four-year university degree program. As a society, we should be able to make this much more accessible. (I don't mean we have to literally put labs in libraries. I mean everyone should be able to learn this way cheaply, in the same spirit that a library makes information accessible for free.)
CS students are very lucky. We have mailing lists, IRC, HN/proggit, stackoverflow, good tools, documentation and tutorials freely accessible. These resources aren't as plentiful or accessible for other STEM majors.
You're right, and we should fix that. People interested in other STEM fields shouldn't be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars and four years to gain access to this knowledge.
People interested in other STEM fields shouldn't be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars and four years to gain access to this knowledge.
They don't. The vast majority of my physics knowledge was gained for a few hundred bucks, most of it going to whoever publishes $MAJOR_PHYSICS_TOPIC, by Landau and Lifshitz.
What I paid $30-40k for was certification that I had this knowledge.
We really need to separate certification/credentialing from education. This is the main thing that will allow innovation in education - people need to buy the credential, and since it's bundled with education, they have no choice but to buy unnecessary education.
We really need to separate certification/credentialing from education.
Agreed. I was giving possibilistic the benefit of the doubt. If some need access to a lab to fully learn a subject, that's something that should be addressed. If not, great.
I got a degree in Biochemistry from UCLA. I've had good professors and bad professors, but it is not all about learning theory or even all about getting hands on in a lab. Technique should not be what everything should be centered on, if you are good, you can usually get technique down very quickly. There is so much more that you learn that is kind of intangible. If you take a lab course and just follow the procedure and don't take anything away then you missed out on a lot because anyone can follow a procedure, it is much more about learning to think critically.
Also, it is not only about learning, but having access to cutting edge research in the same building that you are learning in. If all you did in college was go to class and then went back home, then you missed out on one of the biggest opportunities you have in life. A lot of your time should also be spent trying to learn as much as possible from some of the top researchers in their field by volunteering time in their labs.
Respectfully, I don't think I've done what you say I've done. I say "they're not the same thing" because, as I said in the post, a lot of people lump them together as "investing in knowledge for society" or the like.
I didn't set out to identify a library's strengths. I believe many of the university's supposed strengths are actually better applicable to libraries.
It's all about one's point of view. I'm assuming you're out of college and don't care about the cost of tuition. A college student couldn't care less about public libraries because...
1. Colleges have their own libraries
2. Cost of tuition is way more important to him/her
From my point of view, it looks like this:
How much information is in a library that can't be found elsewhere online? Now what about the other way around, though. How well can advanced college topics be taught with a book from a library?
I'm not sure if universities should have their funding cut but libraries seem very foolish to keep funding. Wouldn't it be better to invest all the money currently spent on libraries in to an online library? Imagine the amount of information we could have easy access to?
The top story on Hacker News right now, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3607217 (also the link I start the post with), explains one of the problems with doing that. As many important functions move online, the library is one place someone without a computer and computer skills can use to gain access to the online world.
Libraries also provide a meeting place for the community, access to librarians, and many free classes.
I do agree it makes less sense now for libraries to have large physical collections. The shift to an online library seems inevitable there. But access to this from local libraries is still important.
While this post focuses on universities and libraries, and I'm serious about preferring university cuts to library cuts, obviously there are plenty of other things that could probably be cut first.
If there are plenty of other things to cut first, why are we comparing the two? Why not complain that they should cut something else instead of universities?
I know the answer to this, and it makes me a bit sad. It's easy for Americans to resent their university system because, at least in CS, it is arguable that they don't actually need it. In some cases, it even hurts American kids. But before we all jump on this bandwagon (again) let's consider that we are perhaps being a bit myopic.
In the first place, libraries are a great repository of knowledge. But knowledge does not equal production, and whether you or I or anyone else here wants to admit it, a tremendous amount of stuff has been invented, either totally, or almost totally, as a component of university research. What would the world be without transactional databases, A* search, quicksort, cryptography, the idea of programming languages and so on ad infinatum. I could probably fill up literally a whole book listing the things in CS that were invented at Universities. There are more for other fields. You might contend that they all would have been invented eventually, but the question still remains: what would the world look like if universities had not been around to foster these ideas? New ideas need friends, and Bell labs can't employ all the geniuses.
I know, I know, you might contend that most research in universities is either pointless or close to pointless. Unfortunately, you'd be right. But remember, that's the Zipf curve. The ideas that are big are really, really big. Not just in universities, either: ideas produced by universities (for example, the ones I listed above) have changed the way that the world operates at a fundamental level, and they continue to do this. And when people come to universities and engage in work related to it, they carry it home, they carry it to their job, and they carry it out of the country. This is the way the world works. I know HN hates this opinion, but it is true.
The other thing I want to mention is that the vast majority of these life-changing ideas come out of American universities. This is a truly global system now. People come from all over the world to study here, and when they do, they sometimes stay here. Do people come to America to study at libraries? The simple and fact of the matter is that not all talented people are born in the US, and American universities are a very important gateway to get talented people into the US. In contrast, the library system is a purely domestic product for the public that happens to be inside US. I know that you think that universities don't "help the poor", but consider that this is really only true for the domestic poor. They are an irreplaceable resource for the poor outside. I'm not pitting "our" poor against "their" poor, but it's just something to think about.
The last thing I wanted to point out is that the fact that libraries are a useful repository of knowledge does not mean that it will make people productive. Universities are not good at this either, but the consistent usership of public libraries is pitifully small. The fact that they exist does not mean that people will use them, since they do exist, and people clearly mostly do not.
The bottom line is this: your points all have some grain of truth to them, or they are true outright. But when you don't bother to examine why this system exists to begin with before you state that another systems should be preferred, you are undermining your own point in a huge way. In particular, to say that we should toss an incredibly important and global system for some domestic system that people don't use is utterly wrong. That all said, the correct answer is: cut neither, and instead cut part of the military.
To be perfectly clear, I'd love to cut military spending, bailouts, drug war spending, etc. This article was about a state funding issue, but I'm fine leaving that aside, since ultimately it's all government spending.
In the first place, libraries are a great repository of knowledge. But knowledge does not equal production, and whether you or I or anyone else here wants to admit it, a tremendous amount of stuff has been invented, either totally, or almost totally, as a component of university research.
I don't mind admitting some useful things have come out of universities. But this doesn't mean we need to continue propping up the university system as it exists today. You admit it has many flaws. There are plenty of ways to bring smart people together to learn and do research. They could be nonprofit; they could be separate from teaching or integrated with it. You could even call them "universities" if you like. But there's no reason they have to resemble the current monster.
True, most research in universities is either pointless or close to pointless, but that's the Zipf curve. The ideas that are big are really, really big.
Sure, but the university system isn't sold that way. We're meant to believe the research done in universities is all useful.
People come from all over the world to study here, and when they do, they sometimes stay here. Do people come to America to study at libraries?
Universities have special privileges when it comes to fostering immigration. If America had world-class research centers with the same privileges, people would still love to come here and they'd be able to do so.
The last thing I wanted to point out is that the fact that libraries are a useful repository of knowledge does not mean that it will make people productive. Universities are not good at this either, but the consistent usership of public libraries is pitifully small. The fact that they exist does not mean that people will use them.
As you point out, universities aren't very good at this. Maybe a lot of people won't use libraries, and many who do won't be very productive. But as you suggested in one of your other points, the instances that pay off really pay off. And libraries do this much more efficiently than universities, in terms of money spent. There are a lot of university students burning tens of thousands of dollars without learning very much.
> There are plenty of ways to bring smart people together to learn and do research.
> They could be nonprofit; they could be separate from teaching or integrated
> with it. You could even call them "universities" if you like. But there's no
> reason they have to resemble the current monster.
Can you name some ways to actually do this? I'd love to hear about them, but have never actually seen a system like that. Even if there was though, before you go yanking money out of the system, you should actually try to replace it. And that will take time and money, and you will have to convince great scientists to make the switch, in spite of the fact that they will probably have less money, less resources, and spend more time doing something other than interesting research in order to build said system. That's all really hard.
Recently a lot of academics have been pushing for open journals, even going so far as to boycott closed ones. Even this is fairly controversial. :(
> Sure, but the university system isn't sold that way. We're meant to believe
> the research done in universities is all useful.
Sold by whom? Guidance counselors? Other students? I don't believe I've ever met a professor who thought that all, or even most research, is life-changing, or even very interesting. I just don't buy that you heard that from a reliable source.
> Universities have special privileges when it comes to fostering immigration.
> If America had world-class research centers with the same privileges,
> people would still love to come here and they'd be able to do so.
It's not only about privilege: schools are known by foreigners as a system that allows them to get to the US. In order for this transition to be effective, you'd have to supplant the educational system, then get everyone to know about your alternative system.
And besides that, the institutions that do the hiring are incredibly biased towards American schools. I work for a reasonably prestigious lab, and the people in charge are (charitably put) deeply suspicious of research from Chinese and Indian schools. When given a choice, they will hire a PhD from an American school almost always. Exceptions include University College at London, Oxford, Cambridge, Utrecht, etc., but it is a vanishingly small list, and even they I would say are much less likely to be hired.
> As you point out, universities aren't very good at this. Maybe a lot of people
> won't use libraries, and many who do won't be very productive. But
> as you suggested in one of your other points, the instances that pay
> off really pay off. And libraries do this much more efficiently than universities, in terms of money spent. There are a lot of
> university students burning tens of thousands of dollars without learning
> very much.
Oh man, I'd really love to believe that, but I just don't see it. Science is still pretty much a communal affair, and the mere availability of knowledge does not make science happen. You need a robust social framework to evolve it. I just don't see that in libraries.
> Can you name some ways to actually do this? I'd love to hear about them, but have never actually seen a system like that.
> Even if there was though, before you go yanking money out of the system, you should actually try to replace it.
All I'm getting at here is that today we have a single university system that generally operates a certain way (a policy that everyone out of high school should enter one of them, and at each university, students attend four years of classes graded A-F, then potentially attend grad school, and the university also houses researchers/professors), and there's nothing intrinsic to learning or doing research that requires all of these things. In other words, there could conceivably be a variety of different institutions that lacked one or more of the characteristics I mentioned, but it's hard for that to happen when the current system is so fully entrenched and subsidized. We could see more research-only labs, more teaching-focused institutions that have their own unique approaches (a la charter schools, Montessori, etc. in K-12), more institutions that integrate learning and research in a different way, or other arrangements I haven't thought of.
One example of something like this is simply universities 100+ years ago, when not everyone was encouraged to attend university. We all know about places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. I see no reason more variety is not possible.
And you're right, replacing it would be hard, but one reason for that is all the money going into the system. What you're asking me to do is sort of like starting a car company while General Motors is being bailed out by the government. Still possible, I suppose, but more difficult when the other guy is being subsidized.
> Recently a lot of academics have been pushing for open journals, even going so far as to boycott closed ones. Even this is fairly controversial. :(
Yes, this just shouldn't be controversial at all. In the context of a library, where the whole point is that everything is open, it certainly wouldn't make sense.
> Sold by whom? Guidance counselors? Other students? I don't believe I've ever met a professor who thought that all, or even most research, is life-changing, or even very interesting. I just don't buy that you heard that from a reliable source.
I'm sure most professors are aware that not all university research is useful. But in principle, every Ph.D. thesis is supposed to be original and worthy of publication. We know most of them aren't really so great, but in theory they meet a certain standard. When you hear people push for more govt. funding for university research, you won't often hear them say most of it won't be useful. And anecdotally, I've seen a lot of people who are urged to get a Ph.D. without regard to the usefulness of what the student would be doing.
> It's not only about privilege: schools are known by foreigners as a system that allows them to get to the US. In order for this transition to be effective, you'd have to supplant the educational system, then get everyone to know about your alternative system.
> And besides that, the institutions that do the hiring are incredibly biased towards American schools.
What I mean is that if we had, for example, plenty of world-class research labs that were able to "hire" people into the country as easily as universities can admit foreign students, they'd still want to come. The bias you mention is understandable, but someone who'd worked in an American research lab wouldn't be affected by the "foreign school research" problem.
> Oh man, I'd really love to believe that, but I just don't see it. Science is still pretty much a communal affair, and the mere availability of knowledge does not make science happen. You need a robust social framework to evolve it. I just don't see that in libraries.
You're right that it's often important for people to do research together. I'm just saying there are other ways to bring people together for science. Will your average local library suddenly become a major scientific center? Probably not, but I can envision something like a modern-day Library of Alexandria where great research happens, and I could see something like that being better than today's universities. Why not?
Yeah, it's hard to attack libraries. They're one of the best examples of a truly equitable program I can think of. I'd much rather cut even university funding: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3608264
I'm not trying to be pedantic here. If this actually did get blown up the way I describe, it'd be indicative of some serious problems in journalism today.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028615
This is a hilarious situation.