I was amazed by the interview in the NY Times of the so-called science advisor to the President. This person, a BA from Princeton in Poly Sci, not any apparent technical expertise, notes:
S.I. for science is going to be the biggest unlock for scientific discovery in the history of the world. It’s going to impact everything from material science to chemistry to math. In our plan, I think the belly button of it all is something called the Genesis Mission, the idea that we should build a scientific instrument in the federal government to be able to leverage S.I. for scientific discovery, and that’s what we’re building in our national labs. And we’ve opened it up, and now have access to it, from all of our agencies across the government. So if you’re doing very important health care work or biomedical work that requires superintelligence, you can access this instrument at the D.O.E., and the same goes for lots of other agencies. The core thing we want to do is provide S.I. as an enabling tool for whatever scientific discovery you want to make.
Great, just what we need, more Government Labs building stuff!
I had the good fortune to have known three Presidential Science Advisors: Vannevar Bush, Jerome Wiesner, and EE David. In my opinion this is not one of them. But I continue:
So right now, American Ph.D. programs are geared toward this, at a minimum, five-year Ph.D. But they’re also tailored to try to optimize the curriculums in order to train students to be academics, and the numbers don’t play out. About 60 percent of people who get Ph.D.s do not end up becoming academics. So we asked ourselves: In that environment, shouldn’t we be trying to do a better job of training these young technologists and scientists to go out and actually be prepared for what they’re ultimately going to do in industry? So we launched a four-year Ph.D. program in partnership with universities and with industry, so that during the last year of your Ph.D. program — at year four — you’re at an industry lab. You do work in industry, and your dissertation is written on the work that you do at that company.
This is a work study program, not a research training exercise. Now to be simple, my PhD took 18 months. I had an SM from MIT already and needed a few extra courses, but I stuffed it all in. I also was a junior faculty member as well as finishing my first book. Plus a few other things along with two children. I never could have done that in some work study program.
With my MIT PhD I ran the gamut of academic, Government Advisor, Movie and CATV business, COO of mobile phone business, venture investor and operator, etc. The PhD allowed versatility and MIT, at the time (and that was during the Viet Nam War folks) allowed me to explore.
The current so-called Science Advisor seems to follow the path of using neologisms to espouse new policies. PhDs are not "trained". They are educated and tested. You may "train" your poodle but please let's not insult the Academy, it already has a multitude of problems.
Would it not have been better to have an experienced PhD in this position, say in Science or worse case Engineering like the three I have known! Instead we get an apparently inexperienced political entity.
Posts
