Having fun

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I spent most of the day doing exercises. 10 hours or so. Then an hour’s worth of reading on the side. I think perhaps I’d have found this stuff interesting 4-5 years ago.

Imagine how much fun it is to spend your Saturday doing this stuff while feeling guilty about not doing even more of it, even though you pretty much hate every second of your life you spend on it, all the while feeling that it’s futile anyway because you’ll probably just fail.

The funny thing is that if you add the total number of hours I’ve spent on this course (combined, remember that I’m retaking it this semester), I doubt anyone who got less than an A would be even close to that total time expenditure. I’ll consider myself very lucky if I get a C. I think he failed something like one-fourth/one-third of the class at the original exam in January.

Don’t expect answers to this post, I’ve been offline all day and I’m not sure I’ll go online again before the exam.

How people in science see each other

Perhaps somewhat inaccurate (you try to tell me that a math-phd sees a humanities-phd the same way he sees a fellow math-phd?), but funny:

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The word ‘probably’ is ‘probably’ not necessary…

Link. A few others to add to the list:

“The title of our paper changed three times because it was impossible to massage the data enough to prove what we set out to prove initially.”

“Our results are actually completely bogus under settings (X, Y and Z), all of which applies to the real world, but we know that pretty much no one who’ll read a paper like this actually cares anyway.” (one word: Macroeconomics)

Along the same lines: “This paper actually has no real-world applications…”

“I primarily wrote this paper in order to make my mother proud.”

“In five years, the results of this study will be completely (obsolete/useless/disproven).”

“We deliberately omitted the significant variables (X, Y and Z) from our model in order to be able to publish at least a dozen follow-up studies along the way.”

“We are very glad and grateful that (supposedly prestigious journal X) was willing to publish our results as we tried to publish them a lot of other places first without luck…”

“We consider this paper a great contribution to (relevant theory X), even though we know perfectly well that most sane people out there would rather get hit by a bus than being forced to read this crap.”

“I would never have sent this paper to publication if the paper’s conclusions regarding the importance of career path dependence in the labor market were incorrect…”

“Our models’ main problems are primarily a result of an effect closely related to our main finding that most editors are grossly underpaid, namely that it would be a lot easier to get a paper published by bribing the editor than it would be to do it by actually writing a decent paper.”

College degrees and gender

Since 1970, the gender ratio has flipped:

Only business, engineering and the physical sciences have more males than females enrolled. Via Mark Perry.