In case you wonder where the current trends come from.
“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.””
Also, Andreessen’s wife of two decades attended Stanford. Her billionaire father ensured that their surname (Arrillaga) is plastered all over the campus.
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)
> 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.”
Oh? He vowed what? To make them pay the price? Or did he just predict a cause and effect and The Nation (your source) is libeling him?
Bureaucracy and momentum can lead to rot. It’s not a bad idea to tear things down and rebuild in order to extirpate that rot and misdirection.
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.
Move fast and break things is, in fact, a bad philosophy to work by and govern by. Especially when the people in charge admit to not wanting to rebuild.
It's also all too easy to arbitrarily label something as "bureaucratic" and demand that it gets razed and rebuilt. I'm sure Palantir has some level of bureaucracy internally with all the new contracts it has won - perhaps we should also rip that apart?
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.
I summarily reject any notion that our "universities" are broken.
This claim has been parroted around for the better part of a decade now. IT is an obvious right wing think tank target. Sprinkle in some heritage foundation too.
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".
That's not at all what privatization does. It tears down a system built to benefit the public, and rebuilds a structure designed to profit a small number of individuals instead.
There certainly is a problem in universities and some of it might be a recent cultural development. It also isn't restricted to US universities either and some of it mirrors the a church that wanted to keep some knowledge under wraps. Publishing is also a perverted circus if you indeed are employed as a scientist and want to publish your work/findings.
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 problem is really one of supply and demand. Whatever SV talking heads say is a post-hoc rationalization on top of this basic fact.
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?
> 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.
Yes, but the degree itself used to be a signal. Of course the school mattered, but getting the degree was considered something. Now the only thing that matters is the school.
> Apple, Google, Intel... discussed no-poach as a way to keep salaries low. Has anything changed?
They wouldn't be able to do that if supply was low. In the 70s-80s, PhDs could incorporate themselves and consult to a very comfortable middle-class living. Nowadays, that's basically impossible for an average PhD. Supply really does matter.
This is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed.
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.
> This is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed.
This trope gets repeated every so often but it's just a trope. In 1900s people felt all physics was solved, then came relativity and the photoelectric effect.
In the 1940s, after the second world war, atomics was the ultimate of physics, then we developed transistors. Until 1950s, sand was basically a worthless resource, and now, good quality silica commands a high price in the global marketplace. Truth is, there are many low-hanging fruit, we cannot even guess what we don't know when we don't know it. I wager that we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.
Past performance is never a guarantee of future performance, that's a gambler's fallacy. Just because we found out more groundbreaking stuff before, doesn't mean we will continue to do so.
There are actually hard limits to things, too. For example, we basically can't make transistors any smaller. Like, physically it's not possible.
"physics being solved" feels like it backs the original refinement point - we still use the formulas of Newtonian physics in non-extreme cases, and while those extremes definitely matter in important areas (nuclear power generation, semiconductors), they feel more like exceptional circumstances.
In any case, I agree with the argument for funding more general research because we don't know where the next advance will happen, and even a discovery that only applies in exceptional/narrow cases can have a lot of value.
It still takes 3 - 5 years or more even for that incremental progress. It takes years to just catch up on the field! Do we expect PhD candidates to subsist on barely livable wages until they eventually publish a ground-breaking result? That kind of disincentive to even start a PhD would not be conducive at all to progress.
Yes, most PhD theses are scientific and commercial dead-ends (even more reason not to gate the degree on ground-breaking results!) but they do serve to cull the problem space, and that's exactly why we need more of them. In fact we should even provide some incentives to publish negative results in academia.
Most PhD topics are incremental, because you are supposed to do a PhD very early in your career. Because the American system won and the PhD become the terminal degree. Which you often do as a student rather than even a junior professional.
In my experience, academic researchers are more likely to do significant independent work in their 30s than in their 20s. Some academic cultures have higher doctorates, habilitations, or similar milestones to wrap up this period of peak productivity, but those remain national oddities.
This is a good point. Regrettably, most get pushed out of the current system before they have a chance to hone their skills. Society doesn't get to benefit from their best work.
Your comment about PhD topics incremental reminds me of what someone once told me about getting a PhD - you learn absolute everything about almost nothing.
That’s not a knock on PhDs, rather it’s a waste of great talent to be so hyperfocused on one deep incremental topic, then to hope someone has a job for you in that specialized topic upon graduation so you can add the most value.
Do you think the boundary of science isn't pushed forward incrementally? Not every person can be an Einstein, hell, not every generation has an Einstein. And Einstein couldn't have done what he did for science without the foundation of those "incremental and derivative" advancements.
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.
Anyone can cherry pick examples to support that science is incremental (or not). The current structure of academic science struggles to reward creative thinking, struggles to support eccentric thinking, and struggles to move outside of their ivory domain based towers. It’s both a bureaucratic issue and one of hierarchy and power within science itself. I have seen far too many physicists resist changing how they teach because they have already figured out how to educate how dare you question them. I have seen far too many seismologists refuse to use non acoustic data sets because why wouldnt seismic data be enough? These are often even young people who refuse to step outside of their domains point of view perhaps from fear that they will never secure a faculty position. Additionally it is often times driven by university politics and finances. For example, Most R1 universities large revenue source is grant overheads, and yet most faculty have little say on how those overheads are spent because university democracies and leadership have been replaced with administrators building bureaucracies. I say this as a scientist for 15 years whose published over 30 papers, won grants, advised phds and postdocs, etc. the system would do well to change if only to give more time back to scientists to do science they find interesting instead of what can be keyworded in to grant applications.
> Anyone can cherry pick examples to support that science is incremental
This is not a rebuttal of what I stated. You dismiss my data and provide no data of your own, just feelings. I appreciate what you're trying to say, but bring data or else we can't discuss it meaningfully.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”
Nietzsche argued that genius is more frequent than we think, but that something else is missing for its realization ("the five hundred hands"):
> 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]
This chestnut gets trodded out every so often but it's frankly absolute and total nonsense sold by anti-intellectuals and bought by people from all walks of life.
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.
VCs don't manage public money, and they also have their own filters to pick who gets to play the lottery. (And the VC ecosystem has its own set of impact metrics. the sacred KPIs! CLV, CAC, YoY! and of course just scientists know which grant organization wants which buzzwords, just as founders know which VC loves which overhyped contemporary meme.)
None of these spheres of life are, uhm, perfect, but this PR problem is completely the fault of academia, that they cannot sell this lottery model as well as the biz world. (Though I think maybe we should take a minute to consider how well loved investors and capitalists are nowadays!)
Honest question, not really related to the story: What makes someone "exploited"?
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.
Cost of living varies by locale and changes over time, so you won't find a single number to answer your question. But it shouldn't be hard to determine what is a comfortable standard of living and what is not for any given time/place.
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.
Employer (the capitalist) also takes the risks, blablabla.
Probably a better framework would be to look at the power imbalance in the respective labor market. Is the employer incentivized to hire people even at a relatively high wage, because there's competitive pressure from other employers? Do people have enough savings (and unemployment payments or other safety nets) to be able to find a good job? (Even relocate if necessary.)
Company towns were bad, and small rural towns with only one big employer also exhibit similar problems.
Where are scientists in this model? Do they have ample of opportunities? Are they simply settling for a low pay because they really really like their niche work?
> Is the employer incentivized to hire people even at a relatively high wage
That doesn't matter in that particular theory (I'm not a marxist, just explaining). The employees are always exploited like a natural resource.
> Company towns were bad, and small rural towns with only one big employer also exhibit similar problems.
Well the funny thing is Marx advocated for that in the Communist Manifesto. He might have been a good philosopher but the solutions he proposed weren't very successful.
To be fair economists don't agree on many things and even the most mainstream theories are regularly challenged as inadequate and ineffective at explaining past and current economic trends and bad at guiding policy changes and decisions.
There is a very broad consensus that labor theory of value is nonsense however.
And when it comes to a theory being “bad at guiding policy changes and decisions”, attempts to implement Marxism killed more people than the world wars, many through famine.
Well, my wife, a math teacher with an advanced math degree, has been seeing data classification/labeling jobs for people with advanced math degrees. They pay well (USD$60/hr), but are, of course, contract work. There are similar jobs for people with law degrees. So, yeah, STEM/white-collar is definitely getting a bit gig-ified.
I think it cuts both ways because these types of people are the ones who can wield this technology as a Swiss army knife to do really interesting things and in fact if they can build on top of their own peers' collective toil then they can avoid doing that toil themselves and potentially do greater things.. at least that's the theory.
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
Star Trek's warp-capable space ship is a fictional analogy for nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which are designed by geniuses to be used and maintained at sea by people who are not geniuses and who do not understand all the ins and outs of how atomic energy works.
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.
When you’re out in the infinite empty of space many light years from any livable environment, you damn well better know how your warp drive works to be able to fix it, and that is what Star Trek portrayed.
Ironic how a libertarian would impose his personal views on "the system". Doesn't work? Let it die. Too many PhDs? Perhaps, let them search for a job. If they're indeed too many, a generation of plumbers etc. will emerge naturally. No one is impeding their businesses, if anything governments worldwide are aiding big technology companies in any way possible.
> Ironic how a libertarian would impose his personal views on "the system". Doesn't work? Let it die. Too many PhDs? Perhaps, let them search for a job. If they're indeed too many, a generation of plumbers etc. will emerge naturally. No one is impeding their businesses, if anything governments worldwide are aiding big technology companies in any way possible.
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.
that's not true in my opinion. Being a libertarian means first recognizing what "liberty" is. So there are many different libertarians, one for each definition, and then one for each consequence that can be inferred from that definition. If you value liberty as the maximum liberty that doesn't constrain others more than you are constrained, that is, realizing that humanity is both freedom and society, it's a very different thing than using any mean necessary to obtain your own freedom.
I understand this isn't the perspective of many that call themselves "libertarian".
Andreesen and Thiel aren’t libertarians (at least, what libertarians claim to be). They advocate for a system of extreme top level control by CEO-kings.
It seems pretty obvious that GP wasn’t saying $10/hr to mean literally $10/hr, but were exaggerating to imply that people were getting chump change for this work. $30/hr is still chump change and not enough to buy oneself any reasonable quality of life for the majority of the population.
Well, it's something. PhD students have always been pretty poorly paid because there's a massive oversupply of them. At least they have an additional source of income available to them.
Math, physics, and chemistry RLHF freelancing is typically north of $40/hr. Even competence at simply reading & writing English prose earns at least $20/hr. I've never seen an offer for less than that, and I lived off of that kind of work for a month after a layoff in 2024.
That seems like a fair trade considering the freelancer takes on none of the risk and has very little required capital.
To be blunt, those freelancers wouldn't be doing this if they had better options
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
That shouldn't be viewed in isolation. A major root cause is essentially overproduction of academics downstream from the Cold War, and obviously the private sector is not to blame for that.
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.
Describing it as "overproduction of academics" is kind of begging the question, though: is it not at least as much "deprioritization of basic research and education"?
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).
PhD was always a fools errand. There are only so many possible professorships with tenure and the people there never seem to retire because obviously they like being paid that good money and being basically able to do what they want.
Yes, it’s much better to spend “$400,000 for a Research Project on Whether Ducks Enjoy Classical Music”, just to ensure not a single grant went unfulfilled.
We have a $1.78T deficit. The ducks and the mathematicians will need to take a cut at this point.
Money isn’t limited, as in we can just print more, but it comes at an inflationary cost: see the last 5 years. MMT doesn’t work.
Since money is limited, and we’re spending in a deficit, money shouldn’t be redistributed to another bad cause after something gets cut. Unfortunately, and all too often, it does.
One side cuts taxes to spend on blowing up the world’s energy market, another side raises taxes to buy votes among the people who pay 0 in taxes (or fund a study on if ducks like Mozart). They’re both wrong, and people are too blinded by the sports-team nature of politics to recognize this.
If the economy still has a pulse today it’s because of math. Literally linear algebra is what drives LLMs.
On the question on music and ducks, music seems something that humans universally get, but it is not clear if animals do so. Why we should not research it? What if music is the secret to human consciousness?
Cut the duck study and avoid blowing up the world’s energy markets for $1B a day. Nowhere in my comment did I argue for another trip to the sandbox.
The US had a balanced budget as little as 30 years ago. This current state of fiscal profligacy isn’t inevitable, except for the fact that both parties realized they could buy votes with your children’s financial wellbeing.
Academia already has a well-established structure of exploitation, with menial work falling down on grads and some undergrads, while credit for it being captured higher up in the tree.
Someone: it is bad that people are being treated poorly. We should effect changes such that they are no longer treated poorly.
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.
Also if they're solving problems to help LLM training in their domain, that's actually pretty useful contribution to science - and definitely more directly useful than the work that dominates actual research, i.e. chasing grants instead of researching.
"that's actually pretty useful contribution to science"
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.
LLMs are actively used in research all the time, they help with finding and processing existing knowledge, forming and testing hypotheses, analyzing data, writing software, brainstorming, and countless other tasks that form actual research work, as distinct from "grant chasing" and "publishing papers", in which they help, too.
(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.
This doesn't even slightly answer my question. The incredibly frustrating thing about the AI discussion is the refusal to consider actual evidence because of shifting targets. In 2026 there is evidence that 2024 LLMs did enormous damage to scientific research in 2025: hallucinated citations, hallucinated experiements, an onslaught of unreadable prose, etc etc. But we can't talk about that, can we? That's old hat, everybody knows 2024 LLMs were stupid and useless. Instead we have to discuss our vibes about 2026 LLMs, and maybe in 2028 we'll be able to tell whether or not our vibes were correct.
LLMs couldn't do any damage with hallucinated citations - on the contrary, this is only ever a problem for people so clueless and uncaring that they didn't even bother reading what LLMs wrote for them. Hallucinated citations are evidence of fraud or level of uncaring unbecoming a scientist, or any professional on that matter.
"LLMs couldn't do any damage with hallucinated citations"
If you're saying stuff like this with a straight face then you are clearly not a scientist and you don't know what you're talking about. In 2021 there were maybe 10 papers with fictional citations. Even the publication mills at least linked to other junk papers. Now there are hundreds of thousands of papers with dishonest and useless bibliographies. This is because LLMs are an unbeatable force multiplier for dishonest and useless scientific work.
I am sure some legitimate academics are getting real use out of them. I am also sure that the net effect of LLMs on science is enormously negative, and it will take decades to fix the mess.
Unlike the industry, science has actual standards of conduct, which puts it in a unique position to fix it quickly - if only the journals were doing the one job they have.
Hallucinated citations == strong evidence of scientific fraud. Name and shame and don't publish.
Alas, what's happening only shows the emperor has no clothes. If anyone slept through the replication crisis, they surely can't ignore it now. Can't really blame LLMs for lighting up the structural corruption of scientific process for everyone to see.
If anything, it's doing us a favor - if the journal gatekeeping and peer review can't handle people putting literal, obvious bullshit in their papers today, think what else they aren't handling either, and for how long this has been the case.
Every time someone goes to a college or university and pays out of their own pocket to learn the skills necessary to work for a corporation, that's society subsidizing the costs of the corporation.
We're being robbed. We need to actively shame people that spend massive amounts of money on college.
I don't understand how we went from "corporations are stealing from us" to "we need to shame random people (who are just trying to improve their lives)"
We are being robbed, but not by the regular people trying to get educated, but by the politicians and wealthy capitalists that could change educational models to not require paying massive amounts to get educated. 99.5% of what people want or need to learn were discovered by people either retired or long dead, but access to many of those materials and knowledge is held behind a profit seeking toll booth.
In case you wonder where the current trends come from.
“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.””
Classic pulling up the ladder behind you.
Thiel went to Stanford, and Andreessen to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Not just that, but Andreessen got rich due to the work that came from CERN and he was working at NCSA developing Mosaic, which turned into Netscape.
That wealth was completely the result of work funded by the government, and the resulting initial wealth was his golden ticket into making even more.
Also, Andreessen’s wife of two decades attended Stanford. Her billionaire father ensured that their surname (Arrillaga) is plastered all over the campus.
Yes, Musk as well. DOGE did the firing.
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.
> Musk
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)
> 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.”
Oh? He vowed what? To make them pay the price? Or did he just predict a cause and effect and The Nation (your source) is libeling him?
Bureaucracy and momentum can lead to rot. It’s not a bad idea to tear things down and rebuild in order to extirpate that rot and misdirection.
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.
> It’s not a bad idea to tear things down and rebuild in order to extirpate that rot and misdirection.
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.
Move fast and break things is, in fact, a bad philosophy to work by and govern by. Especially when the people in charge admit to not wanting to rebuild.
It's also all too easy to arbitrarily label something as "bureaucratic" and demand that it gets razed and rebuilt. I'm sure Palantir has some level of bureaucracy internally with all the new contracts it has won - perhaps we should also rip that apart?
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.
https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-doge-firings-trump-federa...
I summarily reject any notion that our "universities" are broken. This claim has been parroted around for the better part of a decade now. IT is an obvious right wing think tank target. Sprinkle in some heritage foundation too.
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".
That's not at all what privatization does. It tears down a system built to benefit the public, and rebuilds a structure designed to profit a small number of individuals instead.
There certainly is a problem in universities and some of it might be a recent cultural development. It also isn't restricted to US universities either and some of it mirrors the a church that wanted to keep some knowledge under wraps. Publishing is also a perverted circus if you indeed are employed as a scientist and want to publish your work/findings.
That said, just razing everything down is probably not the solution, especially if there are indeed no ideas how to improve the current state.
For that to work you need someone with good intentions doing the rebuilding. Fascists like thiel and andreesen don’t have good intentions.
The problem is really one of supply and demand. Whatever SV talking heads say is a post-hoc rationalization on top of this basic fact.
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.
> The problem is really one of supply and demand.
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...
> 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.
Yes, but the degree itself used to be a signal. Of course the school mattered, but getting the degree was considered something. Now the only thing that matters is the school.
> Apple, Google, Intel... discussed no-poach as a way to keep salaries low. Has anything changed?
They wouldn't be able to do that if supply was low. In the 70s-80s, PhDs could incorporate themselves and consult to a very comfortable middle-class living. Nowadays, that's basically impossible for an average PhD. Supply really does matter.
> Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking.
Why? Most science is incremental. And there's nothing wrong with that.
This is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed.
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.
> This is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed.
This trope gets repeated every so often but it's just a trope. In 1900s people felt all physics was solved, then came relativity and the photoelectric effect. In the 1940s, after the second world war, atomics was the ultimate of physics, then we developed transistors. Until 1950s, sand was basically a worthless resource, and now, good quality silica commands a high price in the global marketplace. Truth is, there are many low-hanging fruit, we cannot even guess what we don't know when we don't know it. I wager that we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.
It's still possible to make ground-breaking innovations. In fact, they come with regularity, along with all the pulp that qualifies as research nowadays. Here's an example from my field: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/hits09/gentry-homomorphic-e...
Past performance is never a guarantee of future performance, that's a gambler's fallacy. Just because we found out more groundbreaking stuff before, doesn't mean we will continue to do so.
There are actually hard limits to things, too. For example, we basically can't make transistors any smaller. Like, physically it's not possible.
"physics being solved" feels like it backs the original refinement point - we still use the formulas of Newtonian physics in non-extreme cases, and while those extremes definitely matter in important areas (nuclear power generation, semiconductors), they feel more like exceptional circumstances.
In any case, I agree with the argument for funding more general research because we don't know where the next advance will happen, and even a discovery that only applies in exceptional/narrow cases can have a lot of value.
Then a PhD should not be given until a series of increments amount to something ground-breaking.
It still takes 3 - 5 years or more even for that incremental progress. It takes years to just catch up on the field! Do we expect PhD candidates to subsist on barely livable wages until they eventually publish a ground-breaking result? That kind of disincentive to even start a PhD would not be conducive at all to progress.
Yes, most PhD theses are scientific and commercial dead-ends (even more reason not to gate the degree on ground-breaking results!) but they do serve to cull the problem space, and that's exactly why we need more of them. In fact we should even provide some incentives to publish negative results in academia.
Most PhD topics are incremental, because you are supposed to do a PhD very early in your career. Because the American system won and the PhD become the terminal degree. Which you often do as a student rather than even a junior professional.
In my experience, academic researchers are more likely to do significant independent work in their 30s than in their 20s. Some academic cultures have higher doctorates, habilitations, or similar milestones to wrap up this period of peak productivity, but those remain national oddities.
This is a good point. Regrettably, most get pushed out of the current system before they have a chance to hone their skills. Society doesn't get to benefit from their best work.
Your comment about PhD topics incremental reminds me of what someone once told me about getting a PhD - you learn absolute everything about almost nothing.
That’s not a knock on PhDs, rather it’s a waste of great talent to be so hyperfocused on one deep incremental topic, then to hope someone has a job for you in that specialized topic upon graduation so you can add the most value.
Do you think the boundary of science isn't pushed forward incrementally? Not every person can be an Einstein, hell, not every generation has an Einstein. And Einstein couldn't have done what he did for science without the foundation of those "incremental and derivative" advancements.
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.
Anyone can cherry pick examples to support that science is incremental (or not). The current structure of academic science struggles to reward creative thinking, struggles to support eccentric thinking, and struggles to move outside of their ivory domain based towers. It’s both a bureaucratic issue and one of hierarchy and power within science itself. I have seen far too many physicists resist changing how they teach because they have already figured out how to educate how dare you question them. I have seen far too many seismologists refuse to use non acoustic data sets because why wouldnt seismic data be enough? These are often even young people who refuse to step outside of their domains point of view perhaps from fear that they will never secure a faculty position. Additionally it is often times driven by university politics and finances. For example, Most R1 universities large revenue source is grant overheads, and yet most faculty have little say on how those overheads are spent because university democracies and leadership have been replaced with administrators building bureaucracies. I say this as a scientist for 15 years whose published over 30 papers, won grants, advised phds and postdocs, etc. the system would do well to change if only to give more time back to scientists to do science they find interesting instead of what can be keyworded in to grant applications.
> Anyone can cherry pick examples to support that science is incremental
This is not a rebuttal of what I stated. You dismiss my data and provide no data of your own, just feelings. I appreciate what you're trying to say, but bring data or else we can't discuss it meaningfully.
I suspect every generation has multiple Einsteins, but they're probably getting killed in war zones or crushed under oligarchy.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”
-Stephen Jay Gould
Nietzsche argued that genius is more frequent than we think, but that something else is missing for its realization ("the five hundred hands"):
> 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)
Or being told on hacker news that PhDs are too easy to get and they shouldn't do science.
This chestnut gets trodded out every so often but it's frankly absolute and total nonsense sold by anti-intellectuals and bought by people from all walks of life.
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.
VCs don't manage public money, and they also have their own filters to pick who gets to play the lottery. (And the VC ecosystem has its own set of impact metrics. the sacred KPIs! CLV, CAC, YoY! and of course just scientists know which grant organization wants which buzzwords, just as founders know which VC loves which overhyped contemporary meme.)
None of these spheres of life are, uhm, perfect, but this PR problem is completely the fault of academia, that they cannot sell this lottery model as well as the biz world. (Though I think maybe we should take a minute to consider how well loved investors and capitalists are nowadays!)
In a master’s, you learn a lot about a little
In a PhD, you learn everything about nothing
Poor comment. Is it true on hackernews you get people who learned nothing about anything?
Honest question, not really related to the story: What makes someone "exploited"?
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.
Cost of living varies by locale and changes over time, so you won't find a single number to answer your question. But it shouldn't be hard to determine what is a comfortable standard of living and what is not for any given time/place.
> What makes someone "exploited"?
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.
Employer (the capitalist) also takes the risks, blablabla.
Probably a better framework would be to look at the power imbalance in the respective labor market. Is the employer incentivized to hire people even at a relatively high wage, because there's competitive pressure from other employers? Do people have enough savings (and unemployment payments or other safety nets) to be able to find a good job? (Even relocate if necessary.)
Company towns were bad, and small rural towns with only one big employer also exhibit similar problems.
Where are scientists in this model? Do they have ample of opportunities? Are they simply settling for a low pay because they really really like their niche work?
> Is the employer incentivized to hire people even at a relatively high wage
That doesn't matter in that particular theory (I'm not a marxist, just explaining). The employees are always exploited like a natural resource.
> Company towns were bad, and small rural towns with only one big employer also exhibit similar problems.
Well the funny thing is Marx advocated for that in the Communist Manifesto. He might have been a good philosopher but the solutions he proposed weren't very successful.
Marx is the last person people should listen to when it comes to economics.
It's probably worth mentioning that Marx's labor theory of value is not taken seriously by mainstream economists.
To be fair economists don't agree on many things and even the most mainstream theories are regularly challenged as inadequate and ineffective at explaining past and current economic trends and bad at guiding policy changes and decisions.
There is a very broad consensus that labor theory of value is nonsense however.
And when it comes to a theory being “bad at guiding policy changes and decisions”, attempts to implement Marxism killed more people than the world wars, many through famine.
Well, my wife, a math teacher with an advanced math degree, has been seeing data classification/labeling jobs for people with advanced math degrees. They pay well (USD$60/hr), but are, of course, contract work. There are similar jobs for people with law degrees. So, yeah, STEM/white-collar is definitely getting a bit gig-ified.
I think it cuts both ways because these types of people are the ones who can wield this technology as a Swiss army knife to do really interesting things and in fact if they can build on top of their own peers' collective toil then they can avoid doing that toil themselves and potentially do greater things.. at least that's the theory.
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
Star Trek's warp-capable space ship is a fictional analogy for nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which are designed by geniuses to be used and maintained at sea by people who are not geniuses and who do not understand all the ins and outs of how atomic energy works.
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.
When you’re out in the infinite empty of space many light years from any livable environment, you damn well better know how your warp drive works to be able to fix it, and that is what Star Trek portrayed.
You've ever seen a star trek episode? (The real ones, not the modern crap).
Even the guy pushing the button for the teleporter is some kind of technical genius.
Ironic how a libertarian would impose his personal views on "the system". Doesn't work? Let it die. Too many PhDs? Perhaps, let them search for a job. If they're indeed too many, a generation of plumbers etc. will emerge naturally. No one is impeding their businesses, if anything governments worldwide are aiding big technology companies in any way possible.
> Ironic how a libertarian would impose his personal views on "the system". Doesn't work? Let it die. Too many PhDs? Perhaps, let them search for a job. If they're indeed too many, a generation of plumbers etc. will emerge naturally. No one is impeding their businesses, if anything governments worldwide are aiding big technology companies in any way possible.
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.
that's not true in my opinion. Being a libertarian means first recognizing what "liberty" is. So there are many different libertarians, one for each definition, and then one for each consequence that can be inferred from that definition. If you value liberty as the maximum liberty that doesn't constrain others more than you are constrained, that is, realizing that humanity is both freedom and society, it's a very different thing than using any mean necessary to obtain your own freedom.
I understand this isn't the perspective of many that call themselves "libertarian".
Andreesen and Thiel aren’t libertarians (at least, what libertarians claim to be). They advocate for a system of extreme top level control by CEO-kings.
Archive link:
https://archive.ph/IbdD4
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This is about the $10/hour that they give to freelancers to solve math/physics/chemistry problems so that they can train the LLMs on them.
I get approached by “recruiters” all the time about this.
> This is about the $10/hour that they give to freelancers to solve math/physics/chemistry problems so that they can train the LLMs on them.
If you're talking about DataAnnotation, specialized stuff like that is $30/hour and up.
It seems pretty obvious that GP wasn’t saying $10/hr to mean literally $10/hr, but were exaggerating to imply that people were getting chump change for this work. $30/hr is still chump change and not enough to buy oneself any reasonable quality of life for the majority of the population.
Well, it's something. PhD students have always been pretty poorly paid because there's a massive oversupply of them. At least they have an additional source of income available to them.
Math, physics, and chemistry RLHF freelancing is typically north of $40/hr. Even competence at simply reading & writing English prose earns at least $20/hr. I've never seen an offer for less than that, and I lived off of that kind of work for a month after a layoff in 2024.
That seems like a fair trade considering the freelancer takes on none of the risk and has very little required capital.
To be blunt, those freelancers wouldn't be doing this if they had better options
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
That shouldn't be viewed in isolation. A major root cause is essentially overproduction of academics downstream from the Cold War, and obviously the private sector is not to blame for that.
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.
Describing it as "overproduction of academics" is kind of begging the question, though: is it not at least as much "deprioritization of basic research and education"?
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).
Peter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction” suggests this is a cause for social instability and revolutions
> To be blunt, those freelancers wouldn't be doing this if they had better options
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.
PhD was always a fools errand. There are only so many possible professorships with tenure and the people there never seem to retire because obviously they like being paid that good money and being basically able to do what they want.
The problem is much older than that. Academia didn’t start overproducing PhD’s and exploiting grad students and adjuncts in 2025.
Yes, it’s much better to spend “$400,000 for a Research Project on Whether Ducks Enjoy Classical Music”, just to ensure not a single grant went unfulfilled.
We have a $1.78T deficit. The ducks and the mathematicians will need to take a cut at this point.
> We have a $1.78T deficit
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
Money isn’t limited, as in we can just print more, but it comes at an inflationary cost: see the last 5 years. MMT doesn’t work.
Since money is limited, and we’re spending in a deficit, money shouldn’t be redistributed to another bad cause after something gets cut. Unfortunately, and all too often, it does.
One side cuts taxes to spend on blowing up the world’s energy market, another side raises taxes to buy votes among the people who pay 0 in taxes (or fund a study on if ducks like Mozart). They’re both wrong, and people are too blinded by the sports-team nature of politics to recognize this.
If the economy still has a pulse today it’s because of math. Literally linear algebra is what drives LLMs.
On the question on music and ducks, music seems something that humans universally get, but it is not clear if animals do so. Why we should not research it? What if music is the secret to human consciousness?
Yes, let’s pay down the deficit by cutting funding to the sciences. While the latest war is running at ~1 billion a day (we’re in day 48 btw).
https://iran-cost-ticker.com/
Cut the duck study and avoid blowing up the world’s energy markets for $1B a day. Nowhere in my comment did I argue for another trip to the sandbox.
The US had a balanced budget as little as 30 years ago. This current state of fiscal profligacy isn’t inevitable, except for the fact that both parties realized they could buy votes with your children’s financial wellbeing.
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This assumes regulatory capture is not a thing.
Doesn’t make it ok.
I do wonder how minor this foundation has been laid w where graduate students may be conditioned exploited by colleges.
Academia already has a well-established structure of exploitation, with menial work falling down on grads and some undergrads, while credit for it being captured higher up in the tree.
Some institutions after all were created, for establishment and preservation of a privileged class.
Someone: it is bad that people are being treated poorly. We should effect changes such that they are no longer treated poorly.
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’m curious what you are proposing exactly. I see articles even from year 2000 about PhD lifestyles being terrible during and after school.
Also if they're solving problems to help LLM training in their domain, that's actually pretty useful contribution to science - and definitely more directly useful than the work that dominates actual research, i.e. chasing grants instead of researching.
"that's actually pretty useful contribution to science"
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.
LLMs are actively used in research all the time, they help with finding and processing existing knowledge, forming and testing hypotheses, analyzing data, writing software, brainstorming, and countless other tasks that form actual research work, as distinct from "grant chasing" and "publishing papers", in which they help, too.
(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.
This doesn't even slightly answer my question. The incredibly frustrating thing about the AI discussion is the refusal to consider actual evidence because of shifting targets. In 2026 there is evidence that 2024 LLMs did enormous damage to scientific research in 2025: hallucinated citations, hallucinated experiements, an onslaught of unreadable prose, etc etc. But we can't talk about that, can we? That's old hat, everybody knows 2024 LLMs were stupid and useless. Instead we have to discuss our vibes about 2026 LLMs, and maybe in 2028 we'll be able to tell whether or not our vibes were correct.
LLMs couldn't do any damage with hallucinated citations - on the contrary, this is only ever a problem for people so clueless and uncaring that they didn't even bother reading what LLMs wrote for them. Hallucinated citations are evidence of fraud or level of uncaring unbecoming a scientist, or any professional on that matter.
"LLMs couldn't do any damage with hallucinated citations"
If you're saying stuff like this with a straight face then you are clearly not a scientist and you don't know what you're talking about. In 2021 there were maybe 10 papers with fictional citations. Even the publication mills at least linked to other junk papers. Now there are hundreds of thousands of papers with dishonest and useless bibliographies. This is because LLMs are an unbeatable force multiplier for dishonest and useless scientific work.
I am sure some legitimate academics are getting real use out of them. I am also sure that the net effect of LLMs on science is enormously negative, and it will take decades to fix the mess.
Unlike the industry, science has actual standards of conduct, which puts it in a unique position to fix it quickly - if only the journals were doing the one job they have.
Hallucinated citations == strong evidence of scientific fraud. Name and shame and don't publish.
Alas, what's happening only shows the emperor has no clothes. If anyone slept through the replication crisis, they surely can't ignore it now. Can't really blame LLMs for lighting up the structural corruption of scientific process for everyone to see.
If anything, it's doing us a favor - if the journal gatekeeping and peer review can't handle people putting literal, obvious bullshit in their papers today, think what else they aren't handling either, and for how long this has been the case.
Still bad for the scientists. They get little money and zero recognition.
Right. They get to contribute something useful and be paid for it, which is better than nothing, but it's sad that their talent is being wasted.
They already didn’t get money or recognition.
How does that compare to adjunct pay?
How many people do you think you are describing?
>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.
Too many ads, did not read
Invest in an ad blocker or Firefox with 'reader view'.
Or both. uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Or Safari with 'reader view'.
Every time someone goes to a college or university and pays out of their own pocket to learn the skills necessary to work for a corporation, that's society subsidizing the costs of the corporation.
We're being robbed. We need to actively shame people that spend massive amounts of money on college.
I'm sorry, we should shame the people who are following the only tattered script left for trying to make a better life for themselves?
More education is actually a good thing. We need to shame corporations and the rich for hoarding wealth and not making education cheaper.
I don't understand how we went from "corporations are stealing from us" to "we need to shame random people (who are just trying to improve their lives)"
We are being robbed, but not by the regular people trying to get educated, but by the politicians and wealthy capitalists that could change educational models to not require paying massive amounts to get educated. 99.5% of what people want or need to learn were discovered by people either retired or long dead, but access to many of those materials and knowledge is held behind a profit seeking toll booth.