Random Fashion Thoughts (Part 3: Style farmer strikes back) - our general discussion thread

[clee1982]

and you definitely see lots of amazing people who are just smart and work hard or just ridiculous smart and work more than reasonable hard...

 

[dieworkwear]

Really, we don't. And furthermore, I don't think it's healthy to perpetuate this myth because it can destroy younger scholars who think they have to break themselves to get on. There is certainly no necessary relationship between how much time someone spends 'working' (or at least giving the appearance of working) and how insightful and interesting they are, how well they teach or how much of an impact they make in their field. And, intelligence is also very unevenly distributed in academic. Academics are certainly highly educated, but while some are incredibly smart, but there is a whole spectrum through to the very dull, intellectually incurious and not very well read - and many of the latter are unfortunately running the show.

Not sure what you mean by "we don't." We don't feel guilty when we take time off? That hasn't been my experience. Academia has no real clock-in, clock-out time, so its easy to get sucked into your research and feel like you constantly have to keep working. It's not that different from being a student. It's true that some people are better at managing their time, and they're probably better off for it, but IME most academics share the feeling that they should always be working.

Not that this is any gauge, but that guilty feeling is even a running theme in the popular PhD Comics series.

http://phdcomics.com/

 

[LA Guy]

Not sure what you mean by "we don't." We don't feel guilty when we take time off? That hasn't been my experience. Academia has no real clock-in, clock-out time, so its easy to get sucked into your research and feel like you constantly have to keep working. It's not that different from being a student. It's true that some people are better at managing their time, and they're probably better off for it, but IME most academics share the feeling that they should always be working.

Not that this is any gauge, but that guilty feeling is even a running theme in the popular PhD Comics series.

http://phdcomics.com/

I agree with you, but fwiw, that is from the experience of a Stanford grad student, and Stanford has a reputation for having a grueling graduate program. I have two friends from college (university, for fellow Canadians) both a year younger than me, from the same undergraduate program that I was in, who went onto the analogous program that I was in at Caltech. And a head-to-head comparison of the programs was that while my graduate classes were considerably more difficult conceptually, their schedule was much more of a grind than mine, and their research structure much more designed to (in my opinion) unnecessarily induce stress.

As @the shah said, the intellectual capacity spans the gamut. However, I think that at least in graduate school at least, in engineering and the hard sciences at the top programs, you find out pretty quickly whether you have that grind in you.

At second and third tier schools, or anything outside about the top 50 or even 25, the mode of the distribution of both intelligence and work ethic is definitely well to the left. And I think because the outliers tend to be in the top tier institutions, it's easier in the second and third tier schools, especially as a student (faculty have much more contact outside of the institution), to have an inflated assessment of one's own abilities.

When I was at Harvard as a postdoc, my wife (then girlfriend and then fiancee) was finishing her doctorate, and she followed her advisor to Harvard for his sabbatical. Because the Math and science buildings are wll pretty much adjacent to the Law School, I was regular at the gym with Noam Elkies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Elkies), and still run into him from time to time when I accompany my wife to conferences. My wife also knew Maryam Mirzakhani (RIP), the first woman to win a Fields Medal, aby all accounts a brilliant mathematician, and super nice to boot. When you talk to people like this about pretty much any intellectual subject, unless you are invincibly stupid, you realize that (or at least I realized that) there are levels to this game, and you will never be there.

 

[LA Guy]

This is true but only until tenure , after which 90% just revert to loafing around (or use grad students and funding to further their side hustles). While tenure was meant to free academics to pursue riskier trajectories, it's gone round full circle to tribalism--if you deviate too much then good luck...take string theory , for example , the bastion of a scientifically untestable pursuit of mathematical beauty. It should really be for a limited time, or at least make grant reviews anonymous so it's not reputation-based or tit for tat system

Incidentally, we hired an italian mathematician from a university in Rio who apparears to understand every branch of maths, to the point where I can open a random Wikipedia page and he can at a whim give a seminar on the topic. How is it possible that at one point he's implementing optimisations based on algebraic topology that give us a 100X boost; explaining my cousin's dissertation that I didn't understand at all on number theory to me over lunch; and then afternoon coffee going over a graph theoretical algorithm to circumvent NP-completeness

But then his code has logging output like this

View attachment 1093715

That is brilliant output. Would hire.

 

[oulipien]

Very, very, very few of the tenured professors in my department (also Stanford, but philosophy) or in the other departments I interacted with (several other humanistic depts and a few social sciences) were remotely lazy, certainly not noticeably more so than the untenured profs. Certainly some whose output I didn't think was quite as top-notch as they expected from potential hires or tenure files, but lazy? No.

 

[LA Guy]

it me

You are in good/bad company.

 

[oulipien]

Anyway I just popped back in to this thread to see if anyone was talking about the Raf Simons ouster.

 

[LA Guy]

Very, very, very few of the tenured professors in my department (also Stanford, but philosophy) or in the other departments I interacted with (several other humanistic depts and a few social sciences) were remotely lazy, certainly not noticeably more so than the untenured profs. Certainly some whose output I didn't think was quite as top-notch as they expected from potential hires or tenure files, but lazy? No.

Frankly, the top 25 schools are so are exceptions.

 

[LA Guy]

Anyway I just popped back in to this thread to see if anyone was talking about the Raf Simons ouster.

That he got dropped by Calvin Klein? Unsurprising, I think. I think that Calvin Klein was looking for Hedi Slimane level impact, and Raf just never brought that (nor was there a track record of him doing so). I mean, who is talking about or buying Calvin Klein whatever that string of characters means line? To me, someone like Marc Jacobs would have made a lot more sense.

 

[dieworkwear]

I agree with you, but fwiw, that is from the experience of a Stanford grad student, and Stanford has a reputation for having a grueling graduate program.

Isn't Stanford a junior college? Its full name is Stanford Leland Junior University.

 

[oulipien]

Anyone who's ever been affiliated with Berkeley in any capacity is legally obligated to make that joke whenever someone refers to Stanford.

 

[LA Guy]

Isn't Stanford a junior college? Its full name is Stanford Leland Junior University.

To be even more pedantic, Leland Stanford Junior University. Come to think of it, I don't know what the degree diplomas say. Must phone a friend.

 

[sinnedk]

idk what convo i walked in on but anyone know when the mr porter sale starts?

 

[dieworkwear]

To be even more pedantic, Leland Stanford Junior University. Come to think of it, I don't know what the degree diplomas say. Must phone a friend.

Cucked again.

Anyway, I sorta feel like this is mostly about top schools cause I assume when we talk about academia, we're talking about research careers. Teaching is likewise grueling, stressful, and underpaid, but I think teaching and research are two different career trajectories.

If you go to a "lower tier" school, you can still get a good job, but it tends to lead you towards teaching. It's harder to get a research job if you come out of one of those schools.

I think few people today have the sort of 9-to-5 work routine people enjoyed a generation or two ago. Most people I know feel work pressure all day long, so this isn't unique to academics. But I do feel academia can feel like a monastery sometimes. It's very totalizing, especially if you're on a research path.

 

[oulipien]

idk what convo i walked in on but anyone know when the mr porter sale starts?

Yeah, someone in the sales alerts thread just posted it.