The emperor has no clothes

Theory and practice are the same in theory. Not in practice.

Note : If you would like to complain, do send me a mail at aditya.gudimetla.medium@gmail.com.

Considering I’ve been writing posts for some time now, I thought it would be prudent for me to read some research papers and other articles about certain topics I wanted to write about. The importance of Sevastopol for Russian Ambitions in the Black Sea (I had to read about ports for that and wrote my last post on the same), The Indian State and its failures, about labor laws in India and an incredible number of topics I’m interested in.

And so I googled and googled, reading through certain papers, reading through articles, reading through blog posts and the like posted across the internet. And I think I’ve gained a certain distaste for research papers.

Don’t get me wrong. This opinion that a large quantity of research papers are ridiculous is something that I’ve had for some time now, even before I started looking them up for information. And it isn’t limited to me.

I’ve asked if I was an idiot for feeling this way to multiple people at multiple points in time, and the answer is almost always no. I had a friend who did psychology who told me that to write a research paper, all you had to do was take 2 variables and feed them into a neural net or ML model to show some correlation. I’ve personally seen (and heard) people in computer science snigger about similar stuff regarding ML models and Neural nets.

With other fields, it feels like I’m navigating through a graveyard filled with tombstones filled with ridiculous semantics and nonsensical phrasing that only a lifetime of study can convey what these people truly mean. It’s so ridiculous that in some places, that what can be conveyed in a few words is expanded to the point of saying absolutely nothing at all. These people would give Sir Humphrey a run for his money.

I once talked to a person who did research in a top research institute of India. One of the funnier things he said was that the institute liked to cite itself. The other thing he said was that quality of material is not accounted for (He did mention that it was among the best in the country, so go figure). While you could dismiss this as the opinion of an outsider who knows nothing, it does set off a few alarm bells in my head, especially given all the clout that people assign to these people who pump out papers like it’s a factory machine.

The only conclusion that I can make are that research papers are becoming a Ponzi scheme. They’ve become a way of accumulating clout and reputation using buzzwords to obtain grants and fellowships, along with promotions despite not actually being about anything. Whether they serve any purpose seems to be beside the point.

The greatest casualty of this is practicality and the fact that college doesn’t seem to prepare you for the outside world. I cannot tell you of how many people I know who did either Mechanical Engineering or Chemistry or anything else, who sat down and did a coding course for a few months and now are employed in CS companies. Far be it for a lowly citizen like me to question the job market and criticize the backbone of the Indian economy, but I do question its sustainability, especially in the long run.

What is the point of churning out millions of graduates with no practical knowledge but all the theoretical knowledge in the world if it’ll never be applied? It’s like those saints who proclaim to know how to live a good life after spending their entire life in a monastery. What wisdom can a man who has not lived a normal life give to other people besides empty platitudes and quotes that could fill a book?

This is especially true of our society, where clout is a social tool used for upwards mobility. It’s used to shut down arguments from the pesky peasantry, and it’s used to bolster one’s own credibility in almost any argument, irregardless of subject. Damn those uneducated peasants who know not what is good for them.

The ability to measure bullshit is something that I learned from being on the internet since 2012, an ability that often leads to bursts of frustration at the state of things. The 2nd ability I gained (the better word would be honed) was intuition. In recent years, I’ve started to rely a lot on my intuition for a lot of stuff. Let’s see how far that goes in this game of life.

P.S : I often wonder if this a result of a system that values things that look good over things that work.