A very central issue right now is the severe ‘god-making’ culture in universities. For example, stories about entire dorms getting into graduate school, or students copying code by hand, and more fundamentally, yet another undergraduate publishing in a top conference or journal. The age around 20 is also a time for creating myths and idols, followed by the most formative decade of one’s life. This fosters an overall atmosphere where it feels like if you don’t get into a top grad school, pursue a PhD, or join a big tech company, your life is over.
We don’t typically encourage the Kantian spirit of “dare to know.” In some ways, the pursuit of knowledge has become a sin. Everything is about seniority, experience, and titles. Schools also don’t encourage the Socratic method of dialogue and questioning that “guides people to discover the knowledge within themselves.” Instead, the supervisor is the subject of education, and the student is the object of reception and indoctrination. What’s more, those in STEM, while accustomed to what is quantifiable and falsifiable, often don’t give a second thought to the meaning behind it all.
The most critical problem is that we all know about the supply and demand in talent recruitment. With an oversupply of graduates and master’s programs being extended, the number of available positions is the more decisive factor. In the current macro environment, demand determines the price of your labor. A very typical supply-side line of thinking is to increase the scarcity of one’s academic qualifications, or for some, to think a bit further and increase the scarcity of their skills.
Here, the benefit of thinking from first principles becomes apparent. In fact, one can think much deeper: are the only needs the job positions at big tech companies? Or research and faculty positions? Ultimately, these are all obvious needs. What about the non-obvious ones? We are accustomed to the narrative of obtaining degrees, polishing skills, and then going to work, but we rarely stop to think: in an era driven by demand rather than technology, why is the scarcity of knowledge, skills, and even symbolic credentials like degrees, valued more than a taste for discovering needs? Just as academic taste needs to be honed, there is a wealth of tacit knowledge involved in finding needs, and this also requires practice. This is precisely what the narrative propping up universities refuses to provide, because it teaches you how to “solve problems,” but not how to “find problems.” And the ability to “find problems”—to discover and define valuable questions—will be far more precious in the future than the ability to solve them. This also explains the root of “a degree doesn’t equal ability”—your price is no longer dictated by your scarcity, but by the needs of the employer.
An attendee of Adventure X lamented in their blog that universities are lifeless. This is true. In an environment of indoctrination over discussion, reproduction over creation, and publishing papers over implementation, you can’t expect anything truly innovative to emerge. Even the practical value of many papers in top conferences and journals is highly questionable. Now is also a time when AI is constantly rising and squeezing the value of human proficiency—when you can’t outperform AI on algorithm problems and basic code is abundant, this rigid system seems even more anachronistic.