When you buy a framework, you are not forced to buy the same component from framework. You are free to buy a new laptop like you would if your laptop from Dell failed.
He didn't make the opposite claim. You are the one that made the claim, meaning you have the burden of supporting it. If there are no studies then no credible claim can reasonably made.
I agree to a point. But it should be regulated as what it is, which is gambling. Prediction markets doing everything in their power to avoid regulation is just scummy.
Taking a longer time to graduate to become the “world expert” in their field is fine if grad students weren’t paid next to nothing for the 60+ hours a week that they are expected to work. As it is now it’s better to finish as quickly as possible so they can have a real life.
To make "next to nothing" concrete: MIT EECS PhD students are currently paid about $4700/mo. This is substantially less than they'd make in industry, but it's around the US median personal income across all working-age adults, and well above the average 24 year-old. They frequently make a substantial extra at summer internships, putting them well above US median in the years when they do.
Also: it is school, not just a job. They are developing deep expertise and specialized skills. As a result, among other things, their earning potential tends to be significantly higher coming out of the PhD than out of undergrad.
You're looking at students at a top tier university in a field that pays extremely well. The numbers are going to be at the high end for what a grad student can make. A quick search for PhD salaries suggests that $20-35k/year is more common.
The median wage number you cited is also for the total population. According to this graph the median wage for college graduates is around $7k/mo. I'm fortunate to make very good money but I'd still notice a $2k/mo pay cut.
That's MIT. At a state university my friends were making in the ballpark of ~30k.
And yes, that is "next to nothing" compared to the salaries they make now after quitting and just finding work. And their outlooks are in significantly better shape, whereas one friend was highly depressed before.
People can also develop "deep expertise and specialized skills" through their work, and network via conferences, generally paid by their employer. Well, if they can find a job as a junior nowadays.
As someone who graduated with a 7.5 year long PhD last month,
I feel like PhD stipends are not a major problem. Like I got $40K in a low CoL area, but accounting for tuition and overheads I cost my advisor closer to $150K/year.
Now why are tuition and overheads that high is a reasonable question and it ties into inefficiencies in broader American administrative processes, but I cost society and taxpayers $150K/year, and that I'm doing it for societal benefit is honestly only partly true. The first 6 years was just me building real skills and letting myself be frustrated, and maybe in the last 1.5 years I did things that justify the $1M bill and more.
Even if I did eventually do things that justified the $1M bill, I think most students don't. The larger value IMO lies in a workforce trained in the failures and frustrations of grad school. While I could rattle of plenty of limitations of academia/grad school, I'm not entirely convinced that me being shortchanged/underpaid was one of those things.
It's great that you recognize that the last 1.5 years were the period you feel like you did things to justify that bill. However, much like juniors everywhere, you justify all of your pay because we are not paying you for your skill at that moment, but for who you will become.
Even more so for PHD work because the expectation is that after the training you will produce many things that make the cost of training you essentially negligible.
I worked a ton in grad school, and it definitely sucked at the time.
But it’s crazy to complain about getting paid to go to school. A grad stipend is there to minimally support you so you don’t have to get another job and can focus on your research. It’s not supposed to be a career!
It’s not crazy… the wages are below food prep. What would be crazy is paying to help someone else’s career. That’s why a well known rule of thumb for graduate program evaluation is whether or not they pay their grad students.
If they pay their grad students, then at least the time the grad students spend creates enough value to offset the cost of paying them.
If not, stay far away from the program.
Also, regarding the career comment: If graduate school is not at least the first step in a given career (it should the second, undergrad being the first), how/why do you expect gifted intellectuals to spend their prime wage earning years doing it?
Most people do not have access to enough wealth to spend prime wage earning years toiling to help someone else’s career with no return on investment.
I was working retail in Eugene, Oregon during the 2014 University of Oregon grad student strike. I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder because I was working retail with a master's degree in physics (because I did not have the endurance to complete a PhD, but had not yet accepted that fact).
My then-partner was part of the strike. One of the strike demands was higher wages as teaching assistants. And while I worked 40 hours a week, for $11/hr, I made considerably more and worked fewer hours than her. She put in probably 30 hours a week just on her teaching load, plus an additional 30 hours split between explicit course work and dissertation work.
It's crazy that a job that requires excellent marks while completing a 4-year degree pays worse, has worse working conditions, and is considerably more competitive to get into than a job selling office supplies.
One of the other things the grad students were demanding (which they only sort of got) was paid parental leave, because they did not fail to notice that most of their professors were in their late 30s or early 40s before they could afford to stop work long enough to start a family. It was very rare for two academics to have children together, because of the heinous, career ending financial cost to having children when you were young enough that their high school graduation date was before your expected mortality.
It would be crazy if the university were getting nothing out of it, but your work as a PhD student benefits not only you but the university as a whole. I think it would be reasonable to give students a living wage. I don't think anyone is expecting to make 100k.
I think the key difference is that: "going to school", sure you need a living stipend, but the actual research phase has serious WLB and working condition issues
Most applicants know that that outcome is antithetical to pursuing a PhD. It's common knowledge that a PhD involves 5-7 years of academic work (read: low pay) in pursuit of becoming an expert in a specialized topic. You don't enter a PhD program expecting to immediately make money or to graduate as soon as possible. It's not a coding bootcamp.
I agree with you. It is definitely what the PhD student signed up for. But like I said in a sibling reply I think if we are worried about having fewer grad students (not saying that we should be), then we may need to change the incentive structure surrounding the PhD programs to make it more worthwhile for people to invest the time and energy. Because how it is currently going it seems to me like fewer and fewer people are going to consider it worth the investment just for the credential alone.
re: incentives, my proposal was always to let schools pay their football and basketball players, but require that grad research assistants are paid the same.
Football and other sports are marketing and their wages should be paid for by that department. Along with proof the marketing return on investment is there.
Grad students should be paid for their work as well.
Isn’t this sort of how all terminal degrees work? MDs, JDs, etc are all putting the candidates through the wringer, for relatively low wages, until they’re “experienced”. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s common knowledge it’s the way things work if you want to have those magic letters of a terminal degree next to your name in your email signature.
Don’t want to deal with the machinations required? Opt for the masters track or just get an Undergraduate degree and spend 20y working your way up.
In the US, phds and professional degrees are more or less geared toward students who are comfortable enough financially to stomach the opportunity cost of 6-10+ years of additional education, unpaid or underpaid residencies and internships, and long apprenticeship hours (which prevent backfilling financial gaps) before making “real” income.
Most of the other comments are basically saying this ("the pay is too low for too long for not enough reward").
Anecdotally: I'm teaching a course in "How To Be Successful In College" (not it's real name) at the US community college where I teach Computer Science. I've got more than 1 student who are going to get a credential for nursing because there's just no way they can spend 8-10 years in school to become a doctor.
Would they be good doctors? The question is moot because it's never gonna happen.
I don't know that people even care, at that. The way most are forced to interact with the healthcare system, a doctor is just a nurse in a white coat who's also a bit of an asshole (aloof and/or smarmy). Especially when they misdiagnose or miss a diagnoses.
>The way most are forced to interact with the healthcare system
If you have an advanced CS degree, and I come to you with a complex issue concerning my desktop, and you spend 15 minutes filling out a digital intake form, 2 minutes tapping the tower, and finally tell me to power cycle whenever it comes up, I have every right to call you no better than a Geek Squad agent.
Let's be less pompous and let conduct speak for itself. If you're a skilled and highly-trained professional, demonstrate it. No credit for phoning it in, no credit for limiting your level of consideration and attentiveness to what a nurse is capable of. You're not owed prestige.
JD isn't a terminal degree. There's two higher degrees I think.
MDs and JDs are professional professional qualifications, which makes their situation a bit different from purely academic degrees. For example the ABA acts kind of like a cartel.
I don't think I disagree with you, by the way. I'm just more unhappy about it. All of these sclerotic, even corrupt, institutions acting like aging vats for talented youth, all to exclude newcomers and to maintain hierarchies...they're not ideal.
Yes, but I think as time goes on, fewer and fewer people are going to consider those letters next to their name worth it for the years that they need to invest. So, I am just saying that if MIT or whoever else is worried about having fewer grad students (not saying that they/we should be), then maybe it's time to change how it works.
This is true, but who do you think knows better what to ask, or has better taste with regards to the open source project? The maintainer? Or the guy shooting a drive by LLM PR? I agree though that it still takes time and effort to make good code contributions with LLMs, but probably less time for the maintainer to do it than for a maintainer to review lots of bad LLM PRs to get the good ones.
I think it is more referring to the quality of craftsmanship of the violin compared to other violins. You can’t make a whole orchestra of Stradivarius violins and their equivalents for other instruments (though what the Stradivarius equivalent is for timpani I couldn’t tell you :)
If an OpenAI model helped someone create a cancer cure I guarantee that they would try to profit as much as possible from that fact. They have even talked in the past about having partial ownership over discoveries made with AI be part of the license. They would be all over that.
I'm sure if they could, they would, sure, as would any business. That's where competition enters the equation. They can't do it because their competitors would undercut them by requiring no such conditions.
I agree with that last part but the people watching the athlete are definitely the customer. The athlete gets paid because people watch them on tv (and in person). If no one watched them on tv, then they quite literally would not get paid. Their employer is selling their talent and abilities (the product) to the watchers (the customers). The watchers are literally paying the athlete and the athletes employer, if not through subscriptions or tickets, then just by watching the ads on tv.
1.) It is not even true that all athletes you watch on TV would be professionals. A lot of them are supposed amateurs, not getting actual salary at all.
2.) Like common, it is even fairly common for people to pay literally nothing to anyone and watch professional sports for free.
3.) Those who are paid are NOT paid by the watchers at all. Not even by the TV itself. Their actual employers are multiple steps away from broadcaster.
> if not through subscriptions or tickets, then just by watching the ads on tv.
That makes them products themselves. They are not paying by watching ads, their time is sold to the real customer who is whoever paid for ads.
I see what you mean, but the problem is that the LLM provider is trying to provide all the value from the book to the user without the user needing to look at the book at all. I agree if the LLM fails to do so then there is a market for the book. But the LLM provider is trying to minimize that as much as possible. And if the LLM succeeds at providing all the value of the book to the user, without providing any value to the book creator, then in the future there is no incentive to create the book at all, at which point the LLM has no value to provide, etc etc etc.
