Knowledge-based society, my ass
67 comments
·April 29, 2025abhisek
molteanu
Yes, fifteen years after the fact, during which time my mind constantly bombards me with, "Why did I happen? Did I do something wrong? It was not fair! I did my best!" and such, I can't help it but write in in a humorous manner, otherwise it's hard to put it behind you and forget about it.
On the second point, yes the total number of PhD graduates for a similar time period was 12.000 (official Government numbers) so this was a doubling of PhD's just like that, out of the blue. No wonder it was chaotic. There was also enormous political pressure regarding "the Government is incompetent as it cannot absorb what is basically free EU money". So, ok, they've absorbed it, sort of.
I think you are right. Reading the online articles and official documentation from that period, which is really scarce (there is no such program available on the EU official website, for example, or I wasn't able to find it), it feels like this was a big experiment, the success of which is not mentioned in the news either.
What I could find is that it was part of the Lisbon Strategy [1], also mentioned in the official documents published by the Government. From the linked wikipedia article: "Its aim was to make the EU the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, by 2010. It was set out by the European Council in Lisbon in March 2000. By 2010, most of its goals were not achieved. It was succeeded by the Europe 2020 strategy."
eadmund
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Strategy
Oh, that page is darkly funny itself. ‘[The Lisbon Strategy’s] aim was to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion,” by 2010.’ Yeah, that didn’t happen.
‘Spain's prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero pointed out that the non-binding character of the Lisbon Strategy contributed to the failure.’ Typical bureaucratic response: freedom is the problem.
There is definitely a role for government in fostering innovation and productivity, but it is very much a secondary role. Providing a predictable, stable, safe environment, and using government funds for things that the government actually needs to use seems to have worked for the U.S. for a long time, even before the two world wars.
intended
For what its, worth, given your situation, and given the circumstances, you did what could be done.
As a fun question, what would you do now, to do what you did, but better?
soco
They just continued the same way of working they had already before. I went through a similar stunt around the end of the 90s (yes also Romania) but I called it quits after half a year. Sometimes I regret it, but sometimes I'm aware that either I or the group would have exploded had I stayed more. I respect your resilience.
molteanu
Had I decided to call it quits, I would have probably asked myself, even to this day, questions like: did I make the right choice, what if things would have improved, what would have happened if I've tried harder, maybe there was just a misunderstanding, maybe it was my fault, maybe working at the University would have been the smart choice, etc.
I actually still have the emails asking for the project coordinator, the one responsible for scholarships for all of us (I've searched them out, out of curiosity while writing this article and their CV is 12 pages long and, naturally, this project is listed there as a success) for ways to abandon the whole thing. I didn't even get a reply. I was already 2 years in so I've would have had to return the whole sum back, money I didn't have. I was penniless, as all PhD candidate seem to be. So I did what I had and could do, which is summarized in the post.
firefoxd
Oh I thoroughly enjoyed this post.
We were the friends and family attending my cousin defending his thesis. He spent half his time title-ing, naming, and thanking Professors, chairs, heads, and what not. When it was all over, I asked him why did you name them all? He answered, "because they like the sound of their name."
_gmax0
While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic.
“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.
yMEyUyNE1
Albert Einstein: 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.'
null
mitthrowaway2
Which country was that?
nobodywillobsrv
Romania?
Duwensatzaj
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/ suggests it’s a made-up story based on an earlier explicitly fictional story.
bigomega
This was very painful to read. Thanks for sharing. It hits a nerve to hear someone say, "I start to develop a faint feeling that I sleep better at night when I play along and nod approvingly to things I don't actually agree with instead of being pigheaded."
Look what they've made us do.
20after4
It seems to me that instilling conformity and obedience to authority are the true purpose higher education.
(Also, tolerance and acceptance when faced with many arbitrary roadblocks.)
ggm
A friend who completed their PhD went from
"he is the best professor, I am so glad he is my supervisor"
"he is the worst supervisor, I am wondering how I can get the university to transfer me"
"he is the best professor, he helped me get a job after I graduated"
I never got my PhD, my first day as a lowly research assistant in a university in central london (which shall remain nameless) I was given a professorial suite to camp in, and I remained there for 3 months, imposing furniture and a giant oak table and all. Another staffer used to sleep on the floor and park his bicycle there. Eventually I was evicted and sent to the top floor, an ex-statistics research unit teaching room, like army Barracks, where I and a fellow research assistant opened a cupboard to find the 10 Brunsviga calculators left over from a mechanical actuarial risk calculation exercise the department did for money up until the advent of electronic computers. Their entire previous 5 years work was completed in under 1 days run of the machine code on the new University of London computer in the early 60s. Oh, the Joys.
praptak
My experience from the academia is that there just isn't enough research topics. It wasn't as bad as in this article but I can't imagine how bad it would be if somebody dumped hundreds of millions of EUR into it to mass produce PhDs.
prmph
Which country is this? I read the whole thing but can't find any context as to which country and university is involved
Freak_NL
Romania, if the author's current location is also where this ordeal took place.
I just looked that up to be sure; the article itself has a very strong eastern Europe vibe to it. I was figuring it would be Bulgaria, Slovakia, or Romania initially.
tiniuclx
Likely Romania based on the author's name & location.
bawana
How much of this account is realistic? If this is the writing of an educated young person. Imagine how despondent must the average young person be? And are we to presume this is the material that will help Ukraine?
It seems the pendulum of the world has reached its opposite climax. There was a time when young students fought communism, sacrificed theiir lives for ideals (egged on by unfullfilled promises from the west - remember Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 50s?). Now the enemy is not ideological but generational. The old guard seeing the base of the pyramid's numbers eroded, realize they dont have enough meat to do the work. So the old prey on the young - even making them dance for entertainment.
But do not despair my Romanian friend, you are not alone. Millions of PhDs in America and the west are also in your shoes. Spending the best years of our lives in the service of our masters, publishing papers and writing grants, we were hoping for a 'career' of even a job. But now we see the world turned inside out. The budgets of the NSF and the NIH are being sacrificed and burned on the altar of a new 'reich'.
There is a saying - 'idle hands are the devil's workshop'. Payback is a bitch.
YuriNiyazov
Ex-iron curtain, amirite?
fuzz_junket
Funny, I was just thinking how much this reminded me of Stanisław Lem's "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub". Must have been one hell of a vibe in Iron Curtain bureaucracies.
nice_byte
Romania, judging from the blog URL. But this type of PhD experience feels like the norm in most of eastern-european/ex-soviet countries. In mine, getting a PhD was one of the ways to get out of compulsory military service. Both profs and students knew that, of course. So real research is very scarce. Other small details, like worshipping titles and putting out a spread for the PhD commission also feel familiar.
Ironically, the only one of my university friends who I'd regard as "actual PhD material" ended up _not_ finishing their PhD in 3yrs time (I surmise because they picked a topic they _actually_ thought worthy) and went to serve in the army.
GrayShade
Yes, Warsaw pact country.
jiggawatts
> "You know C++?" I ask enthusiastically, as I am looking to become a software engineer myself at this point. "I don't," she informs me, "but there's enough time until Monday to learn it."
Suddenly, everything about my professor's bizarre lack of development skills in my computer science course makes sense.
donatj
My dad got a job laying out circuit boards for Control Data in the 1980s on a Friday, knowing nothing about it. Spent the weekend in the library and started Monday morning.
emorning3
People that belong in the job can do that. Others, not so much.
pama
People that belong in the job, even the creator of C++ himself, take decades to mature to the point of daring to use the language properly and then teach it. C++ is not meant to be learned in a week.
thot_experiment
idk, if you have a decent grasp of the fundamentals you can get up to speed these days in pretty much whatever language/sub discipline with a couple days of hard study with LLMs
i made the transition from embedded C to low level tensor wrangling in about a week, it takes some work but it's definitely doable, of course i'm not an expert but it's enough time to go pretty deep, i went from "yeah i've run ollama" to optimizing inference code to get research papers to run on consumer hardware
if the task is to get up to speed on C++ enough to teach undergrads and you're a reasonably competent academic programmer who gives at least half a shit about the task at hand a weekend is plenty
sofixa
If you have very good C knowledge, maybe a weekend is enough to have decent C++. Maybe not to teach it, but decent.
However, assuming no C knowledge, there's no way in hell you'll be a good teacher of C++ in a weekend, even with LLMs.
benrbray
I'm sorry, but your reply suggests an incredible disdain for both technical expertise and for educators. There is value in depth&breadth of knowledge, and it takes great skill to craft a good curriculum.
From a US perspective, students paying $50,000+ per year in tuition deserve better than an overworked PI who has crammed C++ over the weekend.
thot_experiment
Interesting, I feel the opposite, I agree that an excellent teacher who knows the material back to front is invaluable.
My general model for how "being good at programming works" is that it's just mostly a stacking buff based on how much you've touched, I'm choosing to give the person in the anecdote the benefit of the doubt and believe in both their technical expertise and skill as an educator. Most technical things are kind of like other technical things, and if you've been around for a while everything is kind of like something you've done before, it makes it very easy to pick up new tools/domains. I fully believe that someone can open up a VAST gulf of knowledge of C++ between themselves and intro to C++ folks in a weekend if they're already a seasoned practitioner.
barry-cotter
As an educator I disagree. In my field of expertise I am so far in advance of my students’ skills that I can be three standard deviations in skill better than the average student in my class in any cognate field in two days and further ahead than that in a week or a month. That’s what “technical expertise” is.
I won’t speak to crafting a good curriculum, God knows I’ve seen plenty of bad ones but it’s just not hard for me to be vastly better at any topic in English or History than any student I’m likely to see in a high school in two days because I’m that much better than them at what I do. I presume the same yawning gulf in capability exists between the average freshly minted PhD and undergraduates, or professors teaching graduate courses and PhD students.
Expertise exists, which is why I can be teaching a course that’s supposed to take 300 hours of instruction to cover in 15 hours, reasonably comfortably.
isaacremuant
Wtf is this take. You are the worst candidate for a teacher if you have no experience with the language and have rushed to teach it.
The article talks about a literal "learn c++ in 48hs".
Give me a break. You'd be absolutely mediocre and those of us who know our shit do notice. Source: I've been that student that worked and studied the topic he worked with and found some of the TAs absolutely wanting.
Havoc
That prof sounds like a real asshole
Most of the ones I encountered generally treated students who actually tried reasonably well
csours
I wonder what the ratio of good:bad professors is.
Someone should write a list of "Power Gradients Considered Harmful", eg Crew/Cockpit Resource Management
Kudos to you for writing such a long ordeal in a humorous manner or at least that’s what I felt while reading it.
On topic, it’s probably another example of why scaling a system is so hard. Especially when it comes to tasks that require deep thinking. I can’t help but notice the government policy of sponsoring mass PhDs in the hope of raising a knowledge based society is itself changing the definition of knowledge here.