The ones that stick in my head are the ones where I find myself drifting into what is probably an indefensible position -- all the threads I think of as Kotsko/religion threads are like that. Also one where I was claiming that anyone using 'energy' in a non-physical sense is either being metaphorical or silly.
d2 trolling all the academics about how little time teaching takes.
Some thread about language learning in which all sorts of people were claiming that the grammar and translation method was the way they best learned language. (I believe they think that, but they are wrong.)
Visible nipple outlines and their relationship to feminism.
Oh god, I remember D2 trolling about what a delightful comedic actress Paris Hilton was. One of the most fruitful goldmines of our generation. Why exactly did I get so worked up trying to get him to admit how stupid that was?
Why exactly did I get so worked up trying to get him to admit how stupid that was?
He's really very good at what he does. I wonder if high-end trolling skills bear any professional relationship to what he does for a living, or if it's a purely separate hobby?
I wonder if high-end trolling skills bear any professional relationship to what he does for a living
Given that he's a banking analyst, I would say that the congruence is almost 100%.
That thread where Emerson and I ganged up on analyticphilosopher kinda makes me cringe a bit.
Oh hey wait it might have been Emerson d^2 and I, come to think of it.
"and me". Great, now this thread will bug me forever.
Does the case change after "might have been"? It's a form of be, but the nominative does sound strange after it. But "It was X, Y, and I" is correct.
A vigorous and way too intense working through of argument about pointless topics is what makes this place so wonderful -- and any thread contains the possibility of a brawl! That's my story and I'm sticking to it, anyway. The best is when you are trapped in an argumentative corner but KEEP ON FIGHTING. Never give up.
Google doesn't seem to get anything for "It might have been he" and it gets plenty for "It might have been him."
It seems most apt to respond to 12 with silence.
I 100% honestly am still congratulating myself for the trollery that accidentally lead to success in the Yellowstone admissions controversy thread. I am wondering if this literally makes me the biggest loser/asshole in history.
I was completely thunderstruck to stumble upon that Yellowstone admissions thread, a day or two after the fact. Ho-ly cow. It was kind of beautiful.
Oh boy I thought it was stupid. But I have recently realized that discussing whether or not threads are stupid is itself stupid, so I have been trying not to do that. Which, oops.
For some reason trolling, a phenomenon which can also be described as "arguing for the sake of arguing" or "being able to jump into any debate and take any side", is actually taught in British universities and over there is considered a skill distinctive of the most cultured and erudite gentlemen.
And yet you love us all anyway. It's a mystery.
I 100% honestly am still congratulating myself for the trollery that accidentally lead to success in the Yellowstone admissions controversy thread. I am wondering if this literally makes me the biggest loser/asshole in history.
And I, in turn, am 100% honestly still super fucking pissed at you about that thread. So, yeah.
And yet you love us all anyway.
I wouldn't got that far.
||
I'm very happy -- I managed to not blow up the financial markets this morning, despite unusually being in a position to do so. But the dangerous period is over, the necessary injunctions are in place, and now I can go back to arguing with people about speeding tickets.
|>
23: Bob will be so disappointed with you.
The true stupidity lies in not recognizing that all of the threads are stupid, but also beautiful, much like a gorgeous model or an actor. Unfogged is like a gorgeous himbo that attracts lawyers and academics.
Teo, I'm trying to make you love me. First step is to get you thinking about me.
Pretty much any thread involving any two or more of the following: Obamacare, McMegan, high speed rail, the Weimar Republic, and mcmanus.
18: very true. See Parkinson's Law (which of course you've all read):
WE ARE ALL familiar with the basic difference between English and French parliamentary institutions; copied respectively by such other assemblies as derive from each. We all realize that this main difference has nothing to do with national temperament, but stems from their seating plans. The British, being brought up on team games, enter their House of Commons in the spirit of those who would rather be doing something else. If they cannot be playing golf or tennis, they can at least pretend that politics is a game with very similar rules. But for this device, Parliament would arouse even less interest than it does. So the British instinct is to form two opposing teams, with referee and linesmen, and let them debate until they exhaust themselves. The House of Commons is so arranged that the individual Member is practically compelled to take one side or the other before he knows what the arguments are, or even (in some cases) before he knows the subject of the dispute. His training from birth has been to play for his side, and this saves him from any undue mental effort. Sliding into a seat toward the end of a speech, he knows exactly how to take up the argument from the point it has reached. If the speaker is on his own side of the House, he will say "Hear, hear!" If he is on the opposite side, he can safely say "Shame!" or merely "Oh!" At some later stage he may have time to ask his neighbor what the debate is supposed to be about. Strictly speaking, however, there is no need for him to do this. He knows enough in any case not to kick into his own goal. The men who sit opposite are entirely wrong and all their arguments are so much drivel. The men on his own side are statesmanlike, by contrast, and their speeches a singular blend of wisdom, eloquence, and moderation. Nor does it make the slightest difference whether he learned his politics at Harrow or in following the fortunes of Aston Villa. In either school he will have learned when to cheer and when to groan. But the British system depends entirely on its seating plan. If the benches did not face each other, no one could tell truth from falsehood- wisdom from folly- unless indeed by listening to it all. But to listen to it all would be ridiculous, for half the speeches must of necessity be nonsense.
a phenomenon which can also be described as "arguing for the sake of arguing" or "being able to jump into any debate and take any side", is actually taught in British universities
Also supposedly the point of professional training in a certain profession over-represented here.
Early returns show "toxic" in first, with "grammar threadjack" making a strong bid for second.
23.con't: To be clear, I haven't done anything clever, I was just handed a ticking bomb which has now been defused. Defusing it wasn't hard or anything, it just would have been an awfully big bang if it had gone off while I was holding it.
I'm afraid I'm with Teo to an extent: it happens every couple of weeks, most recently with the actor and the model thread.
The analyticphilosopher thread was a different beast altogether.
18 is amazing.
Speaking of beautiful trollery, I give you this. I was kind of persuaded.
Also supposedly the point of professional training in a certain profession over-represented here. in the kinds of threads under discussion, that's for sure.
18. The unspoken assumption of the superiority of Gorgias over Socrates has underpinned the British political process since the 18th century. We like to call it "the practical approach" or "dealing in realities". Over there you call it the Obama administration.
Speaking of beautiful trollery, I give you this. I was kind of persuaded.
Uggh. I'm in an odd place as a former Seattle SuperSonics fan who's unequivocally embraced the Thunder. I don't know if I can defend this position but it's the one that I find myself in.
Personally I won't argue with anybody who still resents the way the Sonics left Seattle, Personally I've been willing to forgive, but that's just me.
That said, I find both the players and the OKC fanbase to be generally endearing, and that outweighs my dislike of the ownership (and Aubrey McClendon seems to be a pretty lousy guy). It's one of the challenges of being a sports fan in general, lots of owners are jerks and that shouldn't be ignored, but it's also just one part of what makes up a sports franchise.
Yeah, the Thunder are just too damn likeable (OK, not Westbrook), in addition to my usual default rule of rooting for the West over the East absent unusual circumstances.
I do find the villainization of the Heat to be way way way over the top.
Yeah, the Thunder are just too damn likeable (OK, not Westbrook)
Nick Collison really is one of the most likable guys in the NBA.
Which reminds me, you really should watch this clip of Collison in HS performing the, "Whitest. Dunk. Ever."
37: Lee's birthmother lives in OKC and the two of them have been actually calling each other excitedly and bonding over the Thunder's success, which is really sweet to see and probably the best-connected they've ever been. Lee has always refused to watch pro ball and is finally making an exception here. The city itself was fun when we visited. Plus they have a street named for the Flaming Lips! What's not to like?
Thorn, you might appreciate pictures of Nick Collison with his cute biracial daughter.
42: So would everyone else! Those are adorable! I've already forwarded the Whitest Dunk to Lee and now I'll have to add Emma. (And we can snark about how he can get away with letting her have adorable hair like that, but I got some bewigged woman at Trader Joe's accusing me of not knowing what to do with Mara's hair, which was in like 12 cornrows with the ends french braided into bun.)
I know there have been a lot of posts where I kept coming back and couldn't look away, but I think I let them go pretty easily and don't hold grudges. Maybe I should be more trolly.
Grudges and trollery are two separate things. I've definitely indulged in the latter but genuinely don't hold a grudge against anyone and love you all, although I do sometimes get the feeling that this is not reciprocal.
I just meant that I don't think I've inspired grudges either and that apparently trolling might help on that front. (yoyo doesn't like the way I write, I know.)
For more Thunder related good feelings, I'll add Kevin Durant's tweet reacting the the news that an agreement had been reached to end the lockout.
I was a fan before that, but that killed me.
Also, this video of Kevin Durant hugging his parents at the end of the last game of the Western Conference Finals (don't read that article, just watch the video).
Like dreams, I don't remember threads. Just snippets, either because they say something interesting about the commenter, at more or less random.
Yes, there was a nice piece on Durant and his Mom on ESPN last night, in which he kept repeating that he didn't think he was possibly good enough to make it to the NBA and she kept him going. It did not sound at all rehearsed or cliched. Dude you're like almost the best player in the league!
8, 9, 10, et possibly seq (I am one for hasty response): it's "I" except that it's "me," right? I really think English, as she is spoke, has--what're they called--tonic pronouns like French. (C'est moi, not c'est je.) It hardly feels like a matter of case.
In writing,
"Oh hey wait it might have been Emerson d^2 and I, come to think of it."
In speech, either.
Grudges follow from insults or pigheadedness, usually. It's really easy to avoid people developing grudges: just don't say anything controversial, be gay and lighthearted.
Gay and gloomy seems to work fairly well as well.
I have never heard that term, tonic pronouns. Useful! AKA "disjunctive pronouns," says the internet. Most of the mentions of it seem to be referring to French, but Wikipedia says that English uses them as well, since nouns are no longer inflected and word order does the work.
I'm a fan of "gay and reckless."
I think Durant has to be the most likable superstar in NBA history. And I'm from Cleveland, which leaves me predisposed to hate The Heat. Still, because of their ownership, I can't bring myself to root for The Thunder. I just can't. That said, I'd be very surprised if there's a more despicable group of Americans than the owners of professional sports franchises. Maybe the members of George H.W. Bush's cabinet.
54: how about "gay and cheekless?"
55: The most likeable HIV-negative superstar, anyway.
A piece of my desire for the (never gonna happen) USA/North American pro leagues to go to the promotion/delegation model is that it appreciably lessens the arena/stadium blackmail clout. Of course there are many other ways for asshole owners to be assholes.
I follow the wisdom of Apo: nothing that happens here or in the comments sections of other blogs should be taken seriously. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to embrace that wisdom until after I realized that I had made two enemies online. Having since mended fences with one of those people, I'm considering having the other killed.
I follow the wisdom of Apo: nothing that happens here or in the comments sections of other blogs should be taken seriously.
That's good advice that I should really figure out how to adopt. This place causes me way more anguish than it should.
60: I share your sense this would be a good idea. Another good idea would be for colleges/universities to get out of the business of providing free minor leagues for football and basketball.
62: I can't imagine that you've ever made a single enemy here or elsewhere online, so the road to enlightenment may be longer for you. Because honestly, that's what did it for me. "Wait, somebody actively dislikes me because of a comment I wrote at unfogged or elseblog? Well, that's not good."
I can't imagine that you've ever made a single enemy here or elsewhere online, so the road to enlightenment may be longer for you.
I suppose I probably haven't, although I'm not sure I would necessarily know if I had.
I despise teofilo and his knowledge-based approach to commenting.
Worse than Hitler fucking Stalin while riding in a T-24 driven by Mao.
I've definitely indulged in the latter but genuinely don't hold a grudge against anyone and love you all, although I do sometimes get the feeling that this is not reciprocal.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
In all seriousness, I don't think I hold any grudges, though I've been known to get het up about certain topics.
We don't hate Teo for any of the comments he's left here.
That's not why at all.
Here are more horrible people. Probably not as horrible as members of the Bush cabinet or NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL owners, but still horrible.
The reference to the T-24 is weirdly specific. Do we have a window into Moby's sexual fantasy life?
I think I actually mean the T-34. That's the common one.
72: Is upper six figures really insanely overpaid for a college president? Maybe overpaid, but insanely overpaid?
That's way less insanely overpaid than private sector CEOs, and I tend to be suspicious of efforts to put public sector spending under exaggerated salary scrutiny.
If you are arguing that college presidents, as a rule, are worthless twats, however, I have no strong opinion on that statement.
Upper six figures is insanely overpaid for anyone, in my view.
So a leader of a 70,000 person institution should make, what, $120K?
Right. And assistant professors should make $45 for the same reason. Because they love the Academy.
77: How should executive salary scale with the number of employees?
75: I assume VW would agree with Parsimon--I would, anyway--that upper six figures is just crazy, period. So why focus on college president salaries? I can think of a few decent reasons (though obviously, since 72 comes from that Pete Peter/son site, there are bad ones, too, e.g., "all public spending is bad"):
1. Universities, as entities visibly engaged in a social mission, ought to be able to attract talented folks for much less money than similarly-difficult jobs without any obvious social value; you don't need to pay extra to salve the person's conscience. (The same applies to, say, NGO CEOs.) Hence these salaries are particularly wasteful.
2. Universities possess unusually strong collective governance structures; overpaid presidents, thus, stand out because the faculties/trustees really ought to be able to stop this sort of thing, or at least ought to be less stymied by the usual collective action problems afflicting stockholders (to say nothing of lower-ranked workers) in publicly-traded companies.
3. Universities aren't just one sort of business in a capitalist society: they're older than capitalism, and largely operate according to different logics. Allowing capitalist profit-maximization logic into the university threatens to unravel the broader set of non-maximizing values, expectations, and roles that actually carry out the project of the university. If the argument used to justify the 600k salary applies all the way down--"your value is precisely equal to your best outside offer"--it will hasten and complete the adjunctification and instrumentalization of the university. (The counter, here, is that we're about 20 years too late.)
77: I don't know about number of employees, but having it scale with the size of one's responsibility is reasonable.
Also, I think it significant that the list of 10 overpaid university presidents was a list of 10 overpaid public university presidents. What do private university presidents get paid? How can we really know anything about current salary trends in the market for university presidents without knowing how these people would get paid for the same jobs in the private sector?
Certainly higher than their equivalents over here, by something like 50% on average.
You won't convince me that anyone on earth is worth more than $200K p.a.
What do private university presidents get paid?
Fifty dollars a day plus expenses.
So a leader of a 70,000 person institution should make, what, $120K?
If the janitors make $20k, for example, I'm fine with the president making 400k. 20:1 sounds reasonable.
Obviously there are edge cases here--professional athletes, for example, are one of the few instances where multi-million dollar salaries are quite reasonable, both because (1) individual contribution to joint outcomes is much easier to measure, and (2) careers are incredibly short and risky; the vast majority won't have more than a couple years of that big payout.
If the argument used to justify the 600k salary applies all the way down--"your value is precisely equal to your best outside offer"--it will hasten and complete the adjunctification and instrumentalization of the university.
But what if the argument is "our state college can't hang on to any decent presidents at $120k because as soon as we get one that's good, they get poached by a private college willing to pay five times as much."
77: I don't know about number of employees, but having it scale with the size of one's responsibility is reasonable.
No, it's not, or at least not unboundedly, because that just incentivizes taking decisions to expand the scope of your responsibility purely to justify more salary--I'm thinking here of the finding that most mergers & acquisitions are bad ideas for the companies involved, but great for the senior management.
85: I find it implausible that the supply of people who can run a university is that small. It's a hard job, sure, but not hard enough that everyone competent could get poached by a rich private school.
If the janitors make $20k, for example, I'm fine with the president making 400k. 20:1 sounds reasonable.
Well, I think janitors should make at least $30k, so maybe $600k for the president isn't so unreasonable?
I tend to agree with 82.2. I might go to $250k, but that's just quibbling. The point is that nobody needs an exorbitant salary in order to live comfortably or do his or her job with diligence. What's the contrary thought, that someone paid (only) $250k will be a slacker, because it's just too hard?
85: to a certain extent there's a collective action problem here, sure, but (1) universities, due to both their internal structure and their relationships with one another (accrediting organizations, &c.), are better suited than almost any other industry to mitigate this; (2) even if we take my wild-eyed 20x-pay-of-worst-paid-FT-worker metric, we're still probably in the 400k range, and I simply refuse to believe that you can't find plenty of talented people for that money.
You won't convince me that anyone on earth is worth more than $200K p.a.
Maybe I'd argue around the edges, but in the main, I think this is right.
My 'grandfather' (dad's uncle who raised him) was CEO of a large well-known financial services company in the early 60s, and famously resisted efforts to raise his salary to $100k -- 'no man is worth that much money.' He was talked into it by cascading effect of salaries on mid and lower management.
I don't see any reason at all for paying a university president more than the secretary of defense.
What's the contrary thought, that someone paid (only) $250k will be a slacker, because it's just too hard?
Maybe not be a slacker, but they might be more inclined to take early retirement or, again - find some other job where they will get paid more. Somebody like that will have other options. You are paying that person not to take those options.
And if a flood of university administrators threatens to leave for Wall Street or whatever, let them go.
87: my experience suggests that the vast majority of people who hold such jobs perform somewhere on the spectrum between adequately and badly -- just the holders of every other job that I can think of -- and yet they're almost all paid like they're superstars. This is, I expect, a byproduct of the proliferation of the Cult of the CEO. I mean, really, if these people are going to make so much money, I at least want some cargo.
This is, I expect, a byproduct of the proliferation of the Cult of the CEO.
This, this, this.
I found myself arguing with a normally liberal friend about whether or not pensions should be slashed, and she was pointing to an article which claimed that whichever-department pensioners somewhere in California were earning $93K. Is that just trotted out to make the system look bloated? What's typical for pensions?
94 is 100% right and should be extended to every member of the university community. You want to work on Wall Street/at Big Law/at Big Pharma/in private practice as a superstar oncologist/at a huge engineering firm? Okay, you should absolutely do that.
If, say, Einstein* had a salary set by some committee based on his contributions to humanity, what would that be? Most people should get considerably less than that.
*I choose Einstein as an example because he seemed to be uniquely valuable as a thinker, and was not 'merely' at the crest of a wave of other thinkers. We would have calculus without Newton, or evolution without Darwin, but likely not relativity without Einstein, not anytime soon, anyway.
97: I have an old-style pension. If I work for the University of California for 40 years, I will be paid 100% of the average of my salary from my last three years on the job (for each year under 40 that I work, subtract 2.5%).
I would rather have an Olde-Style pension, of course.
Those old-style pensions are almost entirely a thing of the past for the vast majority of people; it's somewhat understandable that the rest are resentful about it.
102: it is. It's a vestige of a bygone era. Indeed, it no longer exists for new hires. But I'm granfathered in. That said, because I -- and my ilk -- didn't fight hard enough to keep it in place for new hires, the new people won't fight for me/us, and so it will almost certainly be slashed before I/we can ever begin to collect on it.
Mine before seeing parsimon's. But there you go.
Even among old-style pensions, that's extremely generous. Usually, it's closer to 50% of salary.
I don't know about VW's, but I was much more impressed by my mother's pension (public school teacher in MA, 80% of top 3 years or something--glancing at her town's pay scale, since she started very young, got a master's, and retired at the highest tier, probably ~70k, maybe a bit more) before I realized that she didn't get social security on top of it. I suspect this is a common feature of the generous public defined-benefits pensions, and suspect also that many outsiders don't know this.
In the long run, all our pensions will be used to bail out JPMorgan.
108: no SS for me, yes.
Also, I should note that my ilk has (mostly) stood idly by while the UC has raised tuition by 80% (with more to come!) during a recession, so it's not really going to be very surprising when this generation of students tells me to go fuck myself in my dotage.
My school got nearly half of eligible staff to take early retirement. I'd have done it, but they only offered it to the near-elderly.
Here's some data. A list of base salaries for university presidents. (The list in the original link was thrown off because it includes stuff like one-time deferred compensation payouts, which helps to make salaries appear more bloated than they are.)
On that list, the top six are all private schools, and, by my count, only 3 of the top 20 are public.
So, public schools, as a rule, should just pay their presidents (and by extension, all employees) way less than private schools? I guess I don't see that as a great way to maintain public-sector competitiveness. If one university systematically pays its people less than another, over time its simply not going to be as good at retaining the best people.
There are some jobs that I would not accept at six figures, but would take for seven or eight figures. Because of the declining marginal utility of money, a 1% increase in the demands of the job may require more than a 1% increase in after-tax salary. (For example, I probably wouldn't accept any kind of hundred-hour-week job unless my expected salary were in the millions p.a.).
Of course, some jobs are enjoyable to some people, so they can attract people willing to dedicate their lives without outsized monetary rewards, but those are exceptions.
Now, you will usually find someone who will accept the paid position at just about any price. But some jobs it is worth paying a lot extra to find someone who will fuck up slightly less, or do slightly less work
OTOH it is not clear that competence is always available, even for huge sums of money. Especially if the people doing the searching are not very competent. HP would have been justified in paying a lot of money to get Tim Cook instead of Mark Hurd, but (a) money doesn't make you smart enough to understand that, and (b) it's not clear that any amount of money could have attracted a sufficiently competent CEO.
You might have noticed that none of my arguments (except the one explicitly labeled "bad") made any reference to the public/private distinction.
If one university systematically pays its people less than another, over time its simply not going to be as good at retaining the best people.
This assumes a straightforward, linear relationship between better pay and better performance which I suspect isn't true. In fact, lately I've started to suspect that beyond a certain point, higher pay correlates with poorer performance.
I'm pretty dubious about this contention that being a university president is such hard work. I bet you could probably throw a rock at any given university and have a better than even chance of it hitting someone who works harder than the president.
University presidents, nowadays, are hired to wheedle money out of legislators, bust unions, raise tuition & fees and cut humanities departments. They go to a lot of meetings and receptions and that kind of bullshit, but they don't do the hard work of crunching numbers or making sure grant applications are correct or choosing between promising grad program prospects. They sure don't clean the bathrooms or cook the cafeteria meals or mow the grass on the quad.
If I was running a University, the first thing I'd do is lay off half the administrators. You'd probably get a lot more accomplished that way, since they wouldn't constantly be wasting people's time with pointless meetings. Apparently, at the University here, there's some woman who creates a weekly 15-minute podcast for the IT people. Based on the number of people it reaches, if they all listened to it faithfully every week, it would be the equivalent of 4 FTE.
If one university systematically pays its people less than another, over time its simply not going to be as good at retaining the best people.
Again, this assumes that people functionally equivalent to the 'best' university presidents are scarce in the same way that NBA players are scarce. And I really don't think they are.
112: Whoa! The president of my alma mater makes a lot of money, especially considering the cost of living in Atlanta. Maybe I should use this list the next time they call me asking for money.
This assumes a straightforward, linear relationship between better pay and better performance which I suspect isn't true.
I think there is a relationship, but I don't at all think its linear. More likely marginal improvement per dollar approaches zero. I think you will see significantly better improvement in the quality of leadership if you pay for a $600k person rather than a $400k person, as compared to the difference you would see if you paid a $6 million person verses a $4 million person. And it indeed seems likely that if you are at the point where you are paying a $6 million person for anything, there is a pretty good chance you are getting scammed.
At some point in the recent past, there were 40 university administrators here who made more than the governor. I refuse to believe that being the VP for Physical Plant or whatever is so demanding that, to attract the best person for the job, you have to pay them more than the governor of the whole goddamn state.
I'm pretty dubious about this contention that being a university president is such hard work.... University presidents, nowadays, are hired to wheedle money out of legislators, bust unions, raise tuition & fees and cut humanities departments.
Regardless of how hard the work its, this is a pretty rare and valuable skill set, and its going to cost you.
If people were paid based on how hard they worked, migrant farm workers would live like kings.
116: The university president hobnobs with rich people and raises money for the university in exchange for sharing the university's prestige. They also go around raising the prestige of the university by associating it with other prestigious things. That's not necessarily a painful task, but it's definitely not an easy one. I can't do it, I'm not socially canny enough. (I could maybe learn, but neither I nor anyone I know has enough skills to do that job right now.)
Just because it's social rather than technical doesn't mean that anyone can do it, or that it doesn't require you to be unusually smart to do it well.
I think you will see significantly better improvement in the quality of leadership if you pay for a $600k person rather than a $400k person
I will bet you $10,000 of Mitt Romney's money that you have no evidence at all for this contention, at least in the field of higher education.
120: The governor receives more prestige, though. If the salaries were the same, few people with the right skillset would rather be VP for Physical Plant.
If one university systematically pays its people less than another, over time its simply not going to be as good at retaining the best people.
How many times have you heard this argument applied to adjuncts?
The quality of learning is very sensitive to differences in teacher quality. Getting the right teachers is significantly more important than getting the right administrators.
For the most part, teaching is done by contingent faculty--adjuncts, grad students, etc. The quality of the people you attract to these positions is a bigger determiner of university success than any other staffing decision.
But how often do people talk about raising pay to get better people in this area? Not half as often as you hear people talk about getting the best university president or head coach.
Regardless of how hard the work its, this is a pretty rare and valuable skill set, and its going to cost you.
No, it's not. And it doesn't have to.
Just because it's social rather than technical doesn't mean that anyone can do it, or that it doesn't require you to be unusually smart to do it well.
It doesn't have to be anyone. My point is that lots of people can do this job just as well as the lackluster lot that occupy the positions now.
The governor presumably has more opportunities to supplement his/her income via graft than a university president.
123 perhaps misread my point, which was that you see bigger per-dollar increases in productivity at the lower end than at the higher end. Do you not agree with this?
I mean, what does it take to be a top administrator at a large university? Obviously, you want people with some experience in similar positions, so they should have done the job just below the one they're hired for, or something very much like it. And they need to be conversant with academic administration in a general way, so an MA in Public Affairs and an exposure to different models of running colleges would be good. And you'd probably want them to be of a social class and background that they could deal with business and government leaders without making fools of themselves. And some actual business and government connections certainly wouldn't hurt. So yeah, you don't want someone who just fell off the turnip truck, but you're not exactly talking about a skill set or a demographic that's rare as hen's teeth either. I'm sure there are dozens of people who could operate at the 90th percentile or above for any given university administration job. Some of them, indeed, may be employed in private industry for large sums of money (although once you get below CEO/CTO/CFO level, the average executive salary drops off pretty sharply in my experience), but a lot of them are probably people who would be more than happy to work for a bit less in a more congenial environment.
127: I suspect that this is wrong. Current and former university presidents end up on the same boards of directors that former governors do, and that's where the real money is.
But how often do people talk about raising pay to get better people in this area? Not half as often as you hear people talk about getting the best university president or head coach.
On the other hand, you can bet that when they are attacking the pay that the public university president gets, their interest is in cutting salaries all the way down the line. The president of the university makes a big, juicy target in a way that the adjunct faculty does not - but they will be coming for the adjunct's pay just the same.
128: if you can explain to me how you're not moving the goalposts, I'll try to answer. That sounds dickish, but I'm serious: I don't see how what you're saying isn't just shifting the terms of the discussion.
130: but a lot of them are probably people who would be more than happy to work for a bit less in a more congenial environment.
For a more congenial environment, sure, but we're talking about today's Big Academia.
Yes, the contingent faculty and the university presidents should make common cause! Man the barricades!
The problem isn't the compensation alone, but the proliferation of upper-tier administrators at the same time that the faculty are being told that they'll get a 1.2% merit increase if they're really really good, and that we can't afford that tenure line because of the economy.
Same thing with the facilities. Two of the campus buildings are structurally unsound, and so the millions spent on the gym on a non-residential campus irk more than they would if, say, the chemistry department had working hoods.
121: Regardless of how hard the work its, this is a pretty rare and valuable skill set, and its going to cost you.
So then why do so many fuck-ups continue to get hired for these huge salaries? Y'all know about the Penn State thing, of course, but what about the Troubled Waters fiasco">http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/news/2010/09/15/who-pulled-plug-university-minnesotas-troubled-waters">fiasco here? And there's stuff like this ALL THE GODDAMN TIME. The specific things I mentioned above -- the union busting and cutting programs and shit -- how "difficult" is that, really? You have your underlings write a hypocritical memo about "tough choices" and "remaining competitive" and then go out and play golf with some businessmen. I think A LOT of people could manage that just as well.
I bet most university presidents couldn't even post an html link properly in a blog comment!
This produced a thought experiment: what if we passed a law saying that, for any company (say, of over 100 people) the highest-paid executive could not earn more in total compensation (including the value of contingent compensation, like stock options) more than 20x the total compensation paid to the lowest paid employee. What would be the possible negative consequences, if any? The only ones I can see are:
1) You'd have to allow owners to continue to own equity shares of businesses, otherwise no one would start a business with the 20x lowest paid employee cap. So maybe compensation would just shift to granting large equity shares (as opposed to options) to senior executives?
2) An incentive to replace lower-paid employees with automation, since low-paid employees bring down the top executive's salary.
I think I could live with both (1) and (2) and the world would benefit. What am I missing?
I guess I'm missing that companies would immediately all relocate their operations to Asia.
129: Thanks, its good to be lurved.
133 - I made a statement about the decreasing marginal utility of salary in response to Real ffeJ annaH saying I was assuming a linear relationship between salary and quality, to illustrate that I didn't think there is a linear relationship. My intention was to do so at a layer of abstraction removed from the specific argument about what university presidents are payed (e.g. I would make the same argument about CEOs). Maybe you see that as shifting the terms of the discussion, rather than broadening it, but I don't feel that any goalposts were moved.
Have the courage of your convictions, Halford! Slap a 100% tariff on any product produced by an overseas company that violates the 20X rule. Suddenly it works again.
The 'I got mine' approach is an especially bad idea when one doesn't actually 'got' it.
This might be a delightful stroll down memory lane, or it could be the most toxic thread ever.
Hmm...
Hmm, Vive la France, where the dream is becoming reality.
" what if we passed a law saying that, for any company (say, of over 100 people) the highest-paid executive could not earn more in total compensation (including the value of contingent compensation, like stock options) more than 20x the total compensation paid to the lowest paid employee. "
Hey, I've had that idea too. A rightwinger might say a negative consequence would be rampant wage inflation.
I'm getting more enamored of this idea. Why isn't this the progressive's silver bullet? It's so simple.
When you say 'why', you're looking for an answer other than 'the people whose incomes would be lowered by it control almost literally everything', right?
2) An incentive to replace lower-paid employees with automation, since low-paid employees bring down the top executive's salary.
It's also an incentive to out-source and use contractors rather than employees which is a bit of a problem.
Even among old-style pensions, that's extremely generous. Usually, it's closer to 50% of salary.
Yeah, I'm in the old style here but it's 50 percent at 20 years and maxes out at 30 years at 70 percent. And that's without SS and the salary tops out at 63K in patrol.
Don't try to patent your idea, Halford, as you may run into trouble.
Only read as far as comment 18, but 18 is genuinely true.
Your homies are even in on the action.
149 -- sure, obviously, but I don't remember hearing it from people in the left who are into relatively utopian proposals (eg single payer in the US).
2) An incentive to replace lower-paid employees with automationcontract workers and part-timers, since low-paid employees bring down the top executive's salary.
McDonald's Corp. will set up an contractual relationship with BigMac Employees, Inc., the industry-leading fast food staffing firm that was spun out from McDonalds on the day your proposal was signed into law.
A lot of businesses are already trending in this direction, of course.
Well, ok, but 156 seems solvable with an easy statutory fix.
155: I've heard it -- couldn't give you a source, but it's rattling around my head as something that's on the standard lefty wish list. Maybe it doesn't get much airtime because there's not much to say about it? It's either self-evidently a good idea (this is what I think) or completely oppressive depending on your preconceptions, and there's not much in the way of argument to be had.
The contractor thing isn't as easy as you'd think -- if you're subcontracting to a company with employees, at least that company bound by the 20X rule. And calling people independent contractors when they really aren't is already pretty firmly controlled.
Ben and Jerry's was run on the principal where the highest paid employee could make no more than seven times the salary of the lowest, but they dropped that when they couldn't find a new CEO who would do the job for $150k.
I'm all for the 20x limit, but folks would weasel out of it using stock options, and the like.
And calling people independent contractors when they really aren't is already pretty firmly controlled.
Controlled by whom? Is this something different from "regulated"? There are entire industries where almost every employee is called an independent contractor but really isn't.
OT: here's a master list of free courses available online. It should be noted that because these people are not being paid for this work, their courses suck. (This is not true at all. In my field, for example, the people whose courses are listed are almost all outstanding. Plus, you can take J. Bradford DeLong's course on economic history, so there's that.)
Sure. There are some rules-based ones that would work, but you could also have a standards based one (eg, "any attempt to circumvent this rule by recourse to independent contractors will be deemed a violation of law, and the administrative office of CEO compensation is hereby authorized to establish standards, to be exercised at it's discretion, as to what constitutes improper circumvention. In the event an improper circumvention attempt is established, the highest level of executive compensation shall be capped at the wage level of the lowest paid independent contractor, and the firm shall be liable for a penalty not to exceed 1 billion dollars.". Not perfect, of course, but a standards based regime like the antitrust laws. I mean as long as we're dreaming.
160: It's not really that hard. You'll end up with companies contracting out all low-salary work. The contracting company is likely to have an owner who gets most of his or her income from profits of the contracting business, not from salary, so the rule wouldn't bite.
Btw, if you're exempting 'owners' of the business, I assume you'd also be exempting the partners of a partnership or members of a limited liability company?
164: Awesome. I love listening to college classes.
As long as we're all dreaming, is there any way at all this hugely complicated and very difficult to enforce scheme is preferable to just a blanket cap on earned income? "No one can make more than $500,000 per year." Done. Clean, elegent and easily enforceable.
elegent
This has to have been used as the name of a clothing line at some point, right?
My friend used to have a lounge band called the "Elegents". They would play while sipping on Tiki drinks and so on. Boy, the lounge revival was a strange time.
168: there's a bunch of fantastic stuff on there. Man, I'd love to go get another degree, but I guess that's not happening.
Lots of people in my lab are using free online courses to pick up new knowledge. It makes me feel sort of old fashioned to be picking out actual courses to take in the fall.
Catching up: this is the thread where we all post our salaries, right?
169: Confiscatory income taxes, no capital gains exemption. Done and done.
I'm not sure we should concern ourselves overly with economic justice for millionaires, but ISTM that you could come up with a workaround for athletes and the like*, such as creating a type of tax shelter that itself is subject to confiscatory taxation - you can put $7M in tax-free, but if you take out more than $250k in a year, it gets heavily taxed.
* basically entertainment types who A. legitimately drive huge revenues through personal talent that they should benefit from, and B. tend to have short/limited careers, such that their lifetime earnings will be similar to people taxed at non-confiscatory rates
I just finished what I think was the last assignment in the online machine learning course at coursera. The class was a little too trivial and I'm pretty sure it was severely watered down from what's actually taught at Stanford. On the other hand, I learned a few things and the structure of it meant I persisted when I would have gotten distracted and wandered off to do something else if I was just reading a book. So... I guess it's a net good thing? I think I'm going to do the new one on cryptography now.
176: only relative to the janitor in your building.
I'd offer mine, but determining that would raise a lot of sticky gender equity issues.
On the topic of the OP, a few of the threads where I got into arguments with dsquared really got under my skin. I'm surprisingly touchy about quantum mechanics, I guess, among other things.
I'm in a mildly grouchy mood today, probably because of sleep deprivation, but also because I was up until 4 in the morning working on something new that I thought was exciting and yet everyone I talked to today was cynical and dismissive of it. ("If it's worth doing, so-and-so would already have done it," etc.) Sigh.
I would not shed a too large a tear if even our professional athletes, clearly the most worthy of all high-income-earners, were subject to the maximum income threshhold. Some might say the fame and goodwill associated with being a professional athlete is its own reward.
The title of your post scared me, Heebie. I think about bedbugs too much as it is.
The maximum income does seem to create disincentives to labor at the top end in a way that the multiple of salaries within an organization does not. Also, it seems almost as easy to work around -- do you count unrealized capital gains as income? If not, why not? I mean, the points you are making are clever lawyerly points, Urple, but it's also not that hard to come up with a fairly administrable scheme through lawyering. A standards-based system and an enforcement administrative agency would be sufficient, and there are probably ways to do it just as well with a rules based system that I haven't thought of in the 1 hour since I had this idea.
I'm not sure it's worth arguing about the details of competing visions for hypothetical utopian compensation limits, but the IMO the word 'almost' in 'almost as easy to work around' in your 183 is being asked to carry more weight than can be fairly asked of it.
And the only top-end labor being disincentivized in my scheme vs. yours is labor aimed at finding some way to dump low-salary employees from the payroll. If you're saying that people in your scheme will be able to end up earning much more than $500,000 a year, you're admitting up front that your scheme will fail in its basic purpose. And I think you're seriously underestimating the regulatory burden you're creating. 'Will this apply to partners in partnerships and members of LLCs?' wasn't intended to be a clever lawyerly point; it was a basic question (to which I think either answer you give would be clearly problematic).
If you want to go the 20x route, the proper way to do it would be to measure societally: we'll have a guaranteed annual income of [x], and no one in the country may earn more than [20x]. Hell, if that were on the table, I'd probably even be willing to bump the top-end multiple up to [30x], just to get the bill through congress.
And the only top-end labor being disincentivized in my scheme vs. yours is labor aimed at finding some way to dump low-salary employees from the payroll.
No, I think that you would have a problem (depending on how you define "earn more than $500,000 per year) in capital investment. If capital gains are subject to the limit, what do you do -- no one at all can take out more than $500,000 per year from any capital investment? If unrealized capital gains are subject to the limit, I don't understand how it would work at all. I just can't see how you could have that scheme work without discouraging private investment completely (or, more histrionically, "ending capitalism"). Maybe I'm missing something, but that's why the difference in the two schemes seems at least interesting to me.
The cap on relatively excessive employment compensation has a more modest goal -- not ending capitalism, but increasing the wages of lower end labor while decreasing pay to the top end of managers. You're right that you'd need to build in protections against simply outsourcing everything to an independent contractor, but that doesn't seem like a very difficult technocratic problem, at least to achieve generally.
The fuck you clown thread. I hated that one the worst.
And the one...fuck it. Heat Index went over 100 today and I am in third month of road work (ok 1st two were replacing the sewers) on my street with fucking jackhammers and I am not in the trolling mood.
Thank the Lord Seth Edenbaum has found this place. With ToS gone the pressure was getting to me.
185: you can include non-compensation income, or you can exclude it. I would prefer to include it, because I think it would have less of an effect of discouraging private investment than you're suggesting (although I'll grant there would be some effect), while having other egalitarian effects. But, if you want to exclude it, fine. A flat cap of $500,000 on compensation is preferable to your idea of limiting compensation to 20x the compensation of the lowest paid employee. It's vastly simpler and easier and more effective. It's basically exactly the intended result of your proposal, assuming your proposal worked as intended, which there's good reason to think it wouldn't.
we'll have a guaranteed annual income of [x], and no one in the country may earn more than [20x].
The slightly more modest (but still totally utopian) vesrion of this would be to limit compensation to 20x (or [whatever]x) the minimum wage.
(Again, I'd prefer to limit income to that amount, but certainly starting with compensation would be a step in the right direction.)
OK. I'm on board with a $500,000/yr cap on compensation, or better yet a scheme that moves with a multiple of the minimum wage.
Great! Now we just have to win over the swing votes in Congress.
I'm surprised that people are going with a 20x salary cap rule. That actually seems excessive to me: I'd go with 10x. The median income in the US is $40k, maybe $45k depending on where you look: does anyone need to earn more than $400k?
20x minimum wage, parsi. Median income is quite a bit higher than minimum wage.
Parsi is helping push out the left flank of our overton window.
Parsi is helping push out the left flank of our overton window.
.... annnnd we're back to the OP.
I don't think I'd support high-end tax rates above about 80% or so. I think the Laffer Curve might actually start to kick in somewhere in that neighborhood.
192: Oh, so sorry. I thought it was 20x the salary of the lowest-paid employee in the company/organization. I seem to have gotten this from 88.
194: Hah. I thought of that when I read the following in Francis Spufford's Red Plenty response at CT:
[The Soviet Union] had also served, it turned out when it was gone, as a sort of massive concrete tentpeg, keeping the Overton Window (not that it was called that, yet) tethered at its lefthand edge in a way that maintained the legitimacy, in western discussion, of all kinds of non-market thinking.
A more elegant way of addressing inequality would be to explicitly set tax rates to achieve a desired distribution (likely including negative rates at the low end). Gini-coefficient targeting.
This would have the benefit of turning the wealthy against each other, because at a certain point they would be playing a zero-sum game over their salaries.
I don't think that even a satisfactorily Europeanized US that enthusiastically enacted single-payer health care would go for a maximum income. We're still going to want to be able to know that people who do a lot (Steve Jobs being the inveterate example) can make a pile, even after we've corralled the finance industry and defined "a lot" way down.
Has any social democracy even implemented a maximum income?
Also, in implementation terms, a highly progressive income tax is a much better tool for equity than evaluating each business case-by-case. Fix things after they've made it to the person.
BTW, Halford, I will be dissapointed if you don't have anything to say about the Nick Collison dunk in 40. It's uh, . . ., something awesome, definitely.
It is glorious. I only wish there was evidence of Mark Madsen doing the same thing somewhere.
The previous post caused me to look up Mark Madsen's website to find out what he's up to these days. I found the following, which should make Megan as happy as it does me:
California State Lawmakers have decided that they will close up to 70 State Parks beginning in 2012. Many are against the action and Mark Madsen is currently conducting research on this proposal by CA state to the close the parks.
I'm tempted to argue that the highest-paid employee should make no more than 5x the income of the lowest-paid one: $25k is barely a living wage, and if people are being paid that, then $125k is quite enough for the higher-up. But I doubt this argument would go over at all well.
Further: does it really make sense to assume that the maximum appropriate salary is a function of the lowest, case by case, company by company? It would predictably lead to inequities due to industrial structure, employment structure, and lots of unpredictably silly things. Boutique consulting shops would be advantaged over manufacturers and most other large service providers. A company small enough to rely on building custodial staff to do the cleaning, bundled into the rent, could have higher-paid CEOs than a company just large enough to have to have a single full-time custodian (assuming contracting-based loopholes are eliminated). It could even encourage structures in which all surplus is systematically drained out of companies in the form of dividends and "consulting fees", and employees are predated on by design, like Bain squared, denuding the country further of actual economic infrastructure.
Progressive taxation is much simpler, easier, and less fraught with unintended consequences. It allows equity across the entire population rather than horizontal equity firm-by-firm, which makes more sense as a goal. You want an income cap? Make a 100% top marginal rate. But do it through the rates.
Oh yes, and progressive taxation (with negative rates at the bottom) doesn't require you to have a job to share in the benefits.
You're probably right, but I'm not just interested in equalizing income after the fact, or sending it to the state. I want to boost wages and increase the power of labor v management within organizations.
207: I think it takes a more fundamental re-conceptualization of the notion of ownership to get there in a truly sustainable way. Not that I have a plan ...
more fundamental re-conceptualization of the notion of ownership to get there in a truly sustainable way. Not that I have a plan ...
The Japanese had a plan that worked for decades, a production economy rather than a profit or consumption economy. Neither socialism or neo-marginalist capitalism, nationalistic but not quite fascist post-war. Ownership and profits were utterly devalued, and shareholders, such as they were, often other companies and banks, were the last priority. The Company Unions usually included white collar workers and lower or even middle management, and the people at the top, directors, were simply very well compensated salaried employees.
Of course, that was the large-corps in the "dual economy."
Very complicated, with much else going on.
Red Plenty and the CT fans aside, we are going to need a planned economy, probably a production economy, very soon to survive global warming.
125
The quality of learning is very sensitive to differences in teacher quality. Getting the right teachers is significantly more important than getting the right administrators.
Actually the quality of learning is quite insensitive to differences to teacher quality. In any case the quality of the education provied has little to do with university success. What is important is attracting good students and raising money.
113
... HP would have been justified in paying a lot of money to get Tim Cook instead of Mark Hurd, ...
This is 20-20 hindsight, I don't see any way HP could have known in advance that Cook would have been better. For that matter if you switched their jobs maybe Hurd would now have the better reputation.
99
... We would have calculus without Newton, or evolution without Darwin, but likely not relativity without Einstein, not anytime soon, anyway.
I don't think this is true.
Halford had a good run at trolling this thread, but now Shearer's here to show him how it's really done.
105
... Indeed, it no longer exists for new hires. ...
What do they get?
... That said, because I -- and my ilk -- didn't fight hard enough to keep it in place for new hires, the new people won't fight for me/us, and so it will almost certainly be slashed before I/we can ever begin to collect on it.
As a matter of pure self-interest I expect this is wrong. Fewer people receiving exorbitant pensions makes it more feasible for the state to pay them in full.
117
Again, this assumes that people functionally equivalent to the 'best' university presidents are scarce in the same way that NBA players are scarce. And I really don't think they are.
I not sure what this means. Possibly that the difference between the best and 1000th best university prsident is less than the distance between the best and 1000th best NBA player. This may be true but it isn't totally clear to me.
There are a couple of differences. It is a lot harder to predict how well someone will do as university president than as a NBA player. And importantly there is a lot less agreement about what a university president should be trying to do so a big part of the job is convincing all the stakeholders (with their wildly difference preferences for university direction) that you are in your heart of hearts actually on their side.
99 is utterly false by the way. Lots of people were converging on special relativity. Poincaré, Lorentz and others were very close pre-1905. So much so that , iirc, Poincaré never really accepted that Einstein's special relativity should be credited to Einstein rather than Lorentz (or rather Lorentz plus Poincaré).* Much of what people think is specifically Einsteinian about special relativity is in Poincaré/Lorentz.
* as far as I know, the consensus among historians of the science of the period is that Poincaré was wrong to think so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory#Principles_and_conventions
217-8: I stand corrected. I really ought to know better than to make general statements outside my area of expertise in this forum. But then, if everyone did that, few threads would break 3-digits.
Dude, we live to correct people. You provided a service. I was all excited that you gave me the chance to correct you, but then ttaM bogarted all of the correction.
Wait, I can correct ttaM's correction! General relativity is much more the work of Einstein alone, though Hilbert may have thought of it independently.
Re 219
No problem. The history of science isn't really replete with sui generis 'great men'. There's usually a bunch of people converging on similar stuff; although popular science writing sometimes loves a bit of a 'Horatio Alger' story.
Sorry, no time to read all the comments on university salary. But the salaries for Michigan, Illinois, Texas seem about right to me. Ohio State at nearly $2m looks like a crazy outlier and right at a time of huge cuts for the school.
Well known business school faculty can earn several hundred thousand - my last (private) school had several over $400k. The chronicle of higher ed puts average full prof salary at $113 across all disciplines at 1,251 universities. And coaches at these schools will earn over a million and have a lot of hidden sources of additional income, like subsidized summer camps and loaner cars etc.
Plus, I think the pool of acceptable and reasonable candidates for these jobs really is pretty small. Leaders with the political skills to handle state funding politics plus internal governance of academics? The last two presidents of Illinois were hounded out over trivial bullshit - it's a complex, demanding, and rather unrewarding job. I've been on a search committee for a Dean and the list of candidates who would be good and pass muster with internal and external groups really is small.
So, I think it's silly to call those salaries a scandal.
212: I agree. It's extremely difficult to tell in advance, and that makes paying for quality very difficult.
224
I agree. It's extremely difficult to tell in advance, and that makes paying for quality very difficult.
Which means you can save a lot of money and not give up much by not trying. Like buying index funds.
I took the intro to comp sci course at Udacity since I've never had a formal course in programming or computer science. It helped organize my understanding a bit and filled in a few gaps. Overall it was a good experience and I'll likely take a few more courses just for chuckles. I was surprised at how much I missed having homework to do. So much more rewarding than veging in front of the TV.
221 General relativity is much more the work of Einstein alone, though Hilbert may have thought of it independently.
Is that hypothetical-alternate-universe Hilbert, or are you making a historical assertion? My understanding is that Einstein was in close correspondence with Hilbert for quite a while as he was getting near figuring out GR, and gave a series of talks at Göttingen, and had already been tinkering with geometric versions of gravity for years, so what Hilbert did (may have done?) was just to write down the Einstein equation before Einstein did, given almost all of the clues that led to it. I don't think he came up with the general principles on his own.
Hilbert didn't even have an elevator being pulled through space.
I was going to make a joke about essear collapsing the Hilbert function but of course there is a Hilbert function and of course I have no fucking idea what it does.
Doesn't Bogdwin have a theory about how quickly someone brings up Hilbert?
My New Yorker pointed out to me this morning on the train that Christine Lagarde makes about $500K tax free and I thought of this thread since I wasn't very busy understanding the economic collapse of Greece.
229: enjoy. (I say this as someone who has never gotten the point of algebraic geometry.)
Hilbert didn't even have an elevator being pulled through space.
But Cantor had an infinite chocolate factory.
I think I took a class that explained Hilbert functions my last quarter of college, but I was barely aware of what the class was about at the time and now my memories of it are like some kind of dream where people keep saying things that are supposed to be important but the words never quite resolve into sounds I understand.
I've given lectures like that.
My calculator doesn't even have a "circle evenly bisected by two perpendicular lines" button.
234, 233: I gave just such a lecture first thing this morning and have been slightly frustrated and guilty about it all day. Knew I was fucking it up as it was happening but couldn't pull out of the tailspin. Bleh.
like some kind of dream where people keep saying things that are supposed to be important but the words never quite resolve into sounds I understand.
I have such vivid memories of fighting sleep during class, and all the math symbols would start to take on emotions and human characteristics. All of a sudden this subgroup was jealous of that subgroup for being normal in the mother group, and they're being acted on by a bully who is bumping everyone around, etc. It was surreal.
There was something about how Grothendieck explained the right way to think about negative integers that seemed very profound as I was falling asleep once.
I had a class the semester I was dropping out of MIT that was really over my head that put me to sleep like I'd been hit with a hammer. It was midmorning, so there was really no excuse, but I'd make it five or ten minutes and then pass out. I think it was some sort of defense mechanism against having to think about things I didn't understand at all.
I have such vivid memories of fighting sleep during class, and all the math symbols would start to take on emotions and human characteristics. All of a sudden this subgroup was jealous of that subgroup for being normal in the mother group
(turns page in notebook, looks over top of spectacles)
Please, go on, fraulein Geebie. Zis is most enlightening.
Speaking of Hilbert and lectures, an almost surely apocryphal anecdote. Hilbert is flying somewhere to give a lecture in the early days of flying. The topic he sent ahead was "The Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem". He arrives and gives a lecture on something completely different. Questioned after the lecture, he replied, "That was just in case the airplane crashed."
I assume it has been told about others as well.
238: A friend of mine, while working on his master's in math, vividly described to me a dream in which he was trying to keep numbers in a bowl, but they kept crawling out, and there was a leopard lying in wait behind a somehow-math-related screen.
a leopard lying in wait behind a somehow-math-related screen.
Maybe it was a membrane permeable only to lions?
http://www.gksoft.com/a/fun/catch-lion.html
Once I had a temp job which involved cross-referencing a lot of spreadsheets by country telephone code, so much so that I had most of the country codes memorized. And one afternoon in an overheated dorm room I had this nightmare nap in which all the objects in my room had their own unique codes that I needed to master, and was failing to master, and they started to swarm around me and smother me, 29, 28, 42 41 18. My boyfriend tried to wake me up but I was just getting more freaked out, unable to remember what his code was.
238 et seq.: purest geek dream I've ever had was of crawling around on a enormous ball-and-stick model of tryptophan looking desperately for the sulfur atom (there is none). Just me and the molecule, floating in an empty white space.
If you tell that to a Freudian analyst, report back what they say.
||
Hey ursyne not sure if you regularly check the email address you have previously used to correspond with me but if not you should.
|>
I've had a dream in 4D (spatial!), which was excellent, but I couldn't keep it for long when I woke up.
249: but I couldn't keep it for long when I woke up.
That often happens with morning wood.
Ooh, I remember a thread that drove me nuts - if the woman who artificially inseminated herself years after she was widowed could get survivor benefits for the kid. All those nutty hypotheticals about a guy who dies right at the moment of conception.
Dies from a heart attacked induced by exertion.
If you tell that to a Freudian analyst, report back what they say.
Well that won't take long.
251
... if the woman who artificially inseminated herself years after she was widowed could get survivor benefits for the kid. ...
This case has been decided btw. An unanimous Supreme Court came to the correct conclusion .
Late to this, but Blume, I still feel bad about this one:
Visible nipple outlines and their relationship to feminism.
because I was a jerk to you. I apologize.
