^Did you really confuse two Black guys or did I miss a tweet?
Utych personally offended when other people do good research
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This is all fine. What I would like someone to explain is why the inequality that allowed this experiment — a powerful design that delivers vastly more knowledge than what Utych cited — is bad for the field or for knowledge accumulation. I get why disgruntled lower tier faculty think it’s bad for them. But the purpose of research is not for Steve Utych to alleviate his jealousy.
It can be simultaneously true that K&B do good research and that there are obscene inequalities in how an average TT professor gets funds and how K&B get funds. The problem is we can't have a real discussion about it because a certain subset of people want to keep their funding exclusive, and the other subset of people are way jealous. If you look at who likes the SU tweets as opposed to something like Jake G's defense of K&B, there is a very obvious divide in between the haves and have-nots.
I'm still trying to decide whether this is a big deal or not, but it does strike me as strange that K&B's biggest funders are ones that the average political scientist would have no chance at even "applying" for. I'm not even sure these groups do applications. K&B have these industry connections that are basically self-reinforcing, they go from one interest group to the next, running big expensive experiments. Of course, they are politically aligned with the missions of these interest groups. K&B have made their name initially through uncovering fraud, so I doubt they'd ever do something sketchy in the name of results. But if this "funding model" were expanded and became the norm, honestly I don't trust most political scientists to do political research with political groups and come out with non-sketchy results. -
.It can be simultaneously true that K&B do good research and that there are obscene inequalities in how an average TT professor gets funds and how K&B get funds. The problem is we can't have a real discussion about it because a certain subset of people want to keep their funding exclusive, and the other subset of people are way jealous. If you look at who likes the SU tweets as opposed to something like Jake G's defense of K&B, there is a very obvious divide in between the haves and have-nots.
I'm still trying to decide whether this is a big deal or not, but it does strike me as strange that K&B's biggest funders are ones that the average political scientist would have no chance at even "applying" for. I'm not even sure these groups do applications. K&B have these industry connections that are basically self-reinforcing, they go from one interest group to the next, running big expensive experiments. Of course, they are politically aligned with the missions of these interest groups. K&B have made their name initially through uncovering fraud, so I doubt they'd ever do something sketchy in the name of results. But if this "funding model" were expanded and became the norm, honestly I don't trust most political scientists to do political research with political groups and come out with non-sketchy results.Agreed here. Just adding that many other fields are highly reliant on industry funding for research, and is often the norm. Poli Sci is perhaps just behind here. But the normative implications are ... distur.bing.
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SU is just a bitter person. These people are not enjoyable to be around.
He keeps complaining about his ‘bad job’ yet from a holistic position, there’s nothing ‘bad’ about it considering the current state of academia.He makes $64k a year according to someone in this thread. That's Panda Express manager money
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And Broockman is a bit of a weird one to talk about "institutional selection effects" too.
He turned down an offer from Harvard to go to Berkeley.
Not that Berkeley is not an elite institution either, but he clearly took a more unconventional path than he had to.I genuinely don't understand what "DB chose one top-5 program over another" has to do with the price of tea in China here. What's the alleged relevance, exactly?
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I genuinely don't understand what "DB chose one top-5 program over another" has to do with the price of tea in China here. What's the alleged relevance, exactly?
Because if your claim is that Broockman is just a product of an elite institution, then wouldn't he just go to Harvard and get showered with a bunch of grant money as a grad student?
Instead he went to Berkeley, which has substantially less grant money sitting around for grad students so that he could continue to work with interest groups in the Bay Area.
He cultivated those relationships based on his own personal decisions - not because he was simply at an elite institution.
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I genuinely don't understand what "DB chose one top-5 program over another" has to do with the price of tea in China here. What's the alleged relevance, exactly?
Because if your claim is that Broockman is just a product of an elite institution, then wouldn't he just go to Harvard and get showered with a bunch of grant money as a grad student?
Instead he went to Berkeley, which has substantially less grant money sitting around for grad students so that he could continue to work with interest groups in the Bay Area.
He cultivated those relationships based on his own personal decisions - not because he was simply at an elite institution.Berkley probably gave him a ton of money. Berkley has a lot of money for grad students but it's competitive - obviously he was one of the stronger students, if not the strongest student, there.
The dude also went to Yale. Chances are high he comes from a well off family that helped him with all this anyway.
BTW I think he's amazing at what he does and deserves funding/prestige. But let's not pretend his success has been based solely on merit here - he had help along the way that others don't have.
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Even if you are one to think 64K is some kind of travesty, maybe if SU wasn't such a bitter SOB and could get outside offers, he could negotiate better pay.
But no one wants to hire a guy like that - it instantly puts a dark cloud over your department.Do you know him? I know him vaguely well, and while he definitely is a complainer, he isn't putting a "dark cloud" over anything. He's generally pretty upbeat. Twitter isn't real life.
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Do you know him? I know him vaguely well, and while he definitely is a complainer, he isn't putting a "dark cloud" over anything. He's generally pretty upbeat. Twitter isn't real life.
Yes, I'm sure whining about your department every week publicly sure makes your work environment super upbeat!!!!!!