Whole-known-network
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling" class="u-url mention">@<span>jonmsterling</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@wilbowma" class="u-url mention">@<span>wilbowma</span></a></span> I mean, this is exactly why aligning the two is an improvement, and why csrankings, for all its serious flaws, is better than "harvard is probably really good at CS".</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling" class="u-url mention">@<span>jonmsterling</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@wilbowma" class="u-url mention">@<span>wilbowma</span></a></span> Yes, of course I have those conversations. But lots of people apply to graduate school without having such a conversation.</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@samth" class="u-url mention">@<span>samth</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@wilbowma" class="u-url mention">@<span>wilbowma</span></a></span> Maybe 'evil' is too strong, but yeah lol, I do think that caring too much about the 'prestige' of your department is pretty dumb. I also don't see how this could be a controversial point.</p><p>And I can tell you from experience that an environment where people are focused on the prestige of their department to the detriment of .... doing the business of scholarship is not a good thing.</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@samth" class="u-url mention">@<span>samth</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@wilbowma" class="u-url mention">@<span>wilbowma</span></a></span> Interested in doing a PhD maybe, but when I talk with those people I say things like, "Go ahead and read some papers and get a feel for what this is about; then let's discuss it." </p><p>I think it is totally normal to have an expectation that someone has .... read something and thought about it and got an idea of who is working in an area. Obviously we should help students get there, esp. because many won't have connections already — but, like, this is the kind of conversation I have with people who write to me about doing a PhD. Don't you have these kind of conversations? Or do you prefer they just "raw-dog" it and hope for the best?</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling" class="u-url mention">@<span>jonmsterling</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@wilbowma" class="u-url mention">@<span>wilbowma</span></a></span> No, because I don't think (a) deans are evil or that (b) caring about the prestige of departments is evil.</p>
<p>Still hanging in there on my project. Pretty proud of myself for cranking out about 400 lines of Rust (so far) under "the rules." Got it reading files, tokenizing, parsing, and interpreting along with nested environments. Now at a stage where I mainly need to flesh out some more details. I think if I can get functions and lexical scoping working (and I don't know why I wouldn't), I'll call the experiment a success.</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling" class="u-url mention">@<span>jonmsterling</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@wilbowma" class="u-url mention">@<span>wilbowma</span></a></span> I think this is just totally false. Lots of people are interested in doing a PhD with very limited exposure to the field.</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@samth" class="u-url mention">@<span>samth</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@wilbowma" class="u-url mention">@<span>wilbowma</span></a></span> So your point is, "Evil people need this information in order to do evil, and if the information is inaccurate, the evil they do will be more evil?" I think I get the point, but I am not sure this is a very compelling argument for me.</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@samth" class="u-url mention">@<span>samth</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@wilbowma" class="u-url mention">@<span>wilbowma</span></a></span> I understand there could be outliers, but it is hard to imagine someone being ready to do a PhD on a topic where they don't know who and where the major players are already (e.g. by having read papers in that area).</p>