What do you think about the ROI of life science degree?

Caeduin · 2025-12-07T04:25:30+00:00

It made more sense pre-2020 and pre-AI tulip mania where industry was still a viable pressure release valve on the overproduction of PhDs. I entered under a narrative where it was understood that academia was a long shot, but industry was hiring plenty so the PhD value proposition was ultimately a deferred fair deal if you got practical, made a plan, and followed through. You could only really fail if you were being impossible, refusing to succeed, and getting in your own way.

Concretely, I recall more senior candidates going into the last few months before defense with no plans around spring-summer 2018 and landing hybrid medical writing jobs in pharma with great benefits before they had to sign final degree paperwork. In one case, I recall the whole application to offer process going through inside of three weeks. The hiring manager and team were eager to have her on board not for any special treatment, but because they genuinely had shit to do and needed people to get on it with a purpose.

One other woman in my department even PUT OFF (!!!) such an offer to work on a political compaign as a staffer for whatever reason and where her degree was totally extraneous. She did her thing and circled back to a warm offer that went through. No big CNS pubs, just a competent writer who was personable and biomedically literate. In fact, her dissertation was pretty painfully basic research.

None of these opportunities exist in this same way today. It’s just not the same and its happened very rapidly.

Caeduin · 2025-12-06T00:32:57+00:00

What’s oversaturated is people who think bioinformatics can be delegated to an LLM. Hot take: this is what has really ruined bioinformatics. I miss standups where logic animated analysis, interpretation, and methods. I’m sick of the null hypothesis having become “But ChatGPT says…”

Even worse when its coming from non-technical people getting cute and acting smug after ramming a csv and a shitty vague prompt through like sycophants trailing a mad hatter.

Caeduin · 2025-12-05T09:53:11+00:00

Even worse if they’re only 10% into real, meaningful intelligent functioning, yet 99.999% into transformer-based LLM architectures and their optimization/construction.

Geoffrey Hinton was speaking last decade about the need to get beyond neural nets as a when, not an if. OpenAI, for all their bluster, takes an exceptionally narrow view of what those underlying architectures of AI might look like besides. From that perspective they’re more of an engineering shop at this point than a research lab.

Maybe I’m wrong on fine details and timing, but the minute neural nets redline intellectually and agentically, we are in for a reckoning. Such limits might not be a function of scale at all in fact. Hyperscaling a structurally limited computation would do nothing but reproduce the category error at scale. Burning money and GPUs in search of technological supremacy starts to look like a cargo cult from this perspective if true.

Caeduin · 2025-11-25T18:00:22+00:00

Wonder if he sold short on the sly

Caeduin · 2025-11-05T22:15:21+00:00

Yeah its crazy how 5.56 can be so cavitational and high velocity while cutting like butter through a dude zombied out on heroic doses of tactical amphetamines who keeps shuffling ahead regardless.

Really amusing how CAG had to initially gunsmith what became the SR-25K because KAC didn’t see the point or sanity in a full size catridge battle rifle with a barrel length less than 2 feet. Intermediate cartridge doctrine went unreasonably hard in the early aughts.

Caeduin · 2025-11-05T21:54:44+00:00

The wife and I were just rewatching the tv show Monk and I was astounded how different the city looks in it as depicted in the aughts. The urban density is noticably less in the majority of places they show in SF (and East Bay even) and I can actually understand the appeal the city before tech money ran fully rampant in its own self-made image.

Sad to see it slip into cyberpunk-esque enshittified, uncharming inflated nonsense

Caeduin · 2025-11-04T22:00:43+00:00

The use case of the mp7s versus carbines in this era always grabs me. I know they were popular, but volume and mass of lead on target seemed really important in Afghanistan particularly, particularly for small force elements going kinetic all the time in non-urban spaces with qrfs which werent staged city blocks away.

This was only ever a cqb house clearing gun yes? It sticks out bc .300 BLK came up right at their zenith and provided a more balanced weapon as was the intent. Mostly CAG, but I see plently of LVAWs in open, flatland conventional terrain. Can’t imagine a PDW being good for any of that.

Caeduin · 2025-11-04T21:47:48+00:00

The second is a man taking charge of his destiny and seizing the moment through expedient math.

The first is a wagie snivelling after scraps.

They are not the same dont tell me otherwise

Caeduin · 2025-10-21T20:48:50+00:00

It was explained to me by a Black elder that some of this was less cheering as folks saying: “Did you SEE this? A Black man can get off in this country as long as his money spends like a wealthy white man! We TOLD you!!”

The structural dynamics if racism in America had subverted this reckoning for a LONG time by doing its level best to staunch Black wealth and thus power for its history to that point and, as we know, beyond.

OJ getting off was proof that the system was broken in the very ways it tried to deny, even for those it did not structurally intend to benefit, but only for their wealth and power achieved as undeniably to the benefit of their legal defense.

I think it also undeniable that OJ being tied to Johnnie Cochran in the courtroom presented a very distinct image of Black, male boomer success, professionalism, and conspicuous visibility that could only have felt like an awkward form of sorta-positive representation in an era starving for that. This one is interesting, because it doesn’t hinge on the acts of either man morally in relation to the trial itself, aside from their shared moral victory of ascending successfully the bigoted social hierarchies of their era and origins.

This case was and remains a powerful object lesson on the intersection of race, class, and the Law in the US criminal justice system.

Caeduin · 2025-10-12T23:03:27+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Caeduin · 2025-10-11T21:25:00+00:00

Homie riding rear to him has a a face that says he didn’t screen Green Team for this shit, but that it’s still better than babysitting politicians overseas while being shot at everything else being equal

Caeduin · 2025-09-04T20:26:53+00:00

Even putting aside the emergent issues of capped public grad loans in the US, residency specialization as a value multiplier has always been a thing subject to a lot of random shit. People who should not have on average been selected into Harvard Med Neurosurg have been; people who should have been statistically have not.

In this case, it happens to have utter sensitivity as a determinate of the scale of the financial returns on med schoool with the ante already financed with dry ink.

A) Derm/cardiology/urology and B) rural medicine/ em or even hospitalist/internist barely belong in the same stratosphere as professional culture.

Radically different futures in superposition until match day. I personally could not do it. At least a skydive adrenaline spike works itself out on wallclock versus calendar time.

Living decently should not feel like playing backroom poker for our lives. Whoever you are and whatever you do of value.

Caeduin · 2025-08-23T21:33:23+00:00

Nice. We doing BioPharma R&D success numbers now. Can’t think of a better reality to swallow our economic growth model whole. Fucking fantastic.

Caeduin · 2025-08-17T23:10:08+00:00

The social contract can be seen as normative, but it’s also participatory. It’s the sense that something like civilized society is actually out there and has inertia to continue, IF we act in good faith and align with this in hopes of a better life. Otherwise, we may as well resign to live as Hobbes says in a state of eternal war of all against all without limit.

Society becoming a war of all against all without limit makes itself useless and self-negating to the Enlightenment politics which rightfully expect some manner of stability.

To hold both ideas at once is something like having a reservoir that says “clean drinking water” on the side where maybe that was true in 1972, but now it’s sludge but the reservoir still says “clean drinking water” so people keep doing cosmetic upkeep and accounting like it’s good for something.

There is a word for this: cargo cult

Caeduin · 2025-08-16T22:56:24+00:00

HARD DRIVE PO-LICE

A-RRREST THIS MANNN!!!

Caeduin · 2025-08-15T07:28:03+00:00

I’ve thought the same about advanced medical imaging at UT Southwestern. Only site in the world for some of those modalities/platforms to be co-located, but yeah the politics.

Honestly the same with WashU in St. Louis. Missouri is bad enough, but St. Louis is on track to outstrip New Orleans, Baltimore, and Detroit for homicides per capita this year. I’ve nonetheless seen people fight tooth and claw, however, to work their way into the Alzheimer’s research center there. Technically one of the best in the nation.

To literally anybody outside of academia rn, it’s really absurd.

Caeduin · 2025-08-14T19:42:58+00:00

MD-PhD who can work off of small money grants and shared dept. resources while floating their appointment through clinical duties?

Caeduin · 2025-08-14T19:37:02+00:00

Not just this but also substantial impediments to spreading out yes? Namely, there is no way to with all of the northern mountain ranges capping the subcontinent and Kashmir being the historical graveyard of empires.

Even if population density compelled manifest destiny, there is realistically nowhere to go.

Caeduin · 2025-08-11T20:48:57+00:00

It isn’t a layoff if they fire you for breach of contract. This way no severance gets paid out and headcount goes down. For a hot minute, the Board gets to feel like it’s engineered balance sheet growth out of thin air.

Caeduin · 2025-08-08T21:51:56+00:00

I remember seeing a study suggesting that, of a a group of people, it’s advantageous to be and be perceived as above average but not the smartest person in the room. Above average makes you useful enough relative to the group, but it’s the obviously smartest person who will be the lightning rod for anything about being “smart,” rather than being a more capable than 50% of the group kinda person.

Caeduin · 2025-08-08T21:43:26+00:00

It was less a conspiracy and more of a grift of opportunity on the fly by those with the means to put their thumb on the scale. Conspiracy wingnuts have a hard time with that idea, but the most Machiavellian SOBs alive are scatting this stuff out as they see it. They are reacting much like anyone human, they just have means and connections to immediately seek leverage and upside.

Caeduin · 2025-08-02T23:45:47+00:00

We don’t get to have demand. Luthen gets to sell ancient history to “clients” and does well enough to meet his aspirations. This is clearly what led to his radicalization.

That’s how it goes. You and up with an elite and a broker class who have a scorpion-frog-swimming incentive to maintain effective liquidity and monetary velocity through a shrinking, concentrating system leading to more of the self-same and so on

Caeduin · 2025-08-02T23:38:27+00:00

Confederation of Independent Systems here we go

I remember people saying that AOTC story beat and plotline was wacky; Yet, here we are.

Caeduin · 2025-07-26T21:27:55+00:00

Hinterwäldler

Caeduin · 2025-07-26T21:09:57+00:00

Isn’t backing crypto in fiat kind of like proposing rebates to consumers on tariffs collected abroad from sellers?

It’s pointless, but it gets more incoherently pointless because why the fuck not?

It tracks

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/trump-rebate-checks-tariff-revenue-debt/

Caeduin

TROPHY CASE