11 ms·

“This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

279 points by Fede_V 11y ago

plg 11y ago
"I found scientists to be more preoccupied by their own survival in a very competitive research environment than by the development of a true understanding of the world." I have found this as well. However it's important to remember that before one can do good work, one has to find funding for the good work. It's a complex problem.
- deleted 11y ago
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- cinquemb 11y ago
  "Of course, this does not mean that I will abandon all of my activities related to the search or dissemination of knowledge. I will still teach my courses in Biology and Artificial Intelligence at the University of the People, I will still publish my book, The Revolutionary Phenotype, which contains an important novel theory on the emergence of life. I will still publish the Season 2 of NEURO.tv, for which we have gathered amazing guests. I will still go talk science and have fun with the Drunken Peasants. In fact, my leave will likely give me more time to concentrate on these important activities. The reality is that throughout the years, my attention has drifted away from research academia, because I found other ways to satisfy my scientific curiosity that seemed more appealing and more genuine to me." "There is a general rejection of these alternative paths to knowledge dissemination in academia, but I have grown out of caring about it. Selling knowledge and prestige are the bread and butter of universities, so we should not be surprised to see the main recipients of the flow of money coming from well-wishing parents and governmental funding agencies dismiss the validity of other, less socially costly paths to knowledge dissemination." Seems like he's found other more effective ways for him and for others learning than to do more of the "good work"[0]. [0] "…produce multiple scientific articles per year, none of which having any significant impact on our understanding of the world, similarly to how a chicken who's head has been cut can still walk, but not toward any sort of goal. This issue reveals itself in a series of noxious conditions that are affecting me and my colleagues: a high number of scientific articles with fraudulent data due to the pressures of the "publish or perish" system makes it impossible to know if a recent discovery is true or not; a large portion of the time of a scientist is spent just writing grants so that they can be submitted to 5-10 agencies in the hope that one of them will accept; and a scientific publication system that has become so corrupted that it is almost impossible to get a scientific article published without talking one-on-one with the editor before submitting the article."
  - JesperRavn 11y ago
    It's not fair to twist people's words like that. If the poster meant churning out papers by "good work" then the whole post would not make sense. A much more reasonable interpretation would be "in order to produce good papers, or things that are less rewarded (e.g. books), one needs to play the academic game in the meantime and churn out mediocre/bad papers". The main issue as I see it is not that good papers are not rewarded, but rather that bad/mediocre papers are rewarded far more than they deserve. This means that the incentive to work hard on a breakthrough is diminished.
    - cinquemb 11y ago
      The focus on good papers vs bad papers as the problem seems silly to me in comparison to the multiple ways knowledge can be disseminated and built upon in ways that the author cites that proven for him to be more effective along the dimensions he and his audience values (satisfying intellectual curiosity, helping others learn who aren't involved with/or not interested [possibly because of the very low signal to noise] in the "good/bad papers system", lower social costs, etc…).
- nextos 11y ago
  People don't even understand how critical this problem is. I was previously working at a very good European medical lab. The environment was so weird most postdocs simply spent 95% of their time playing the ladder-climbing game. Some got incredible promotions, like getting all the way from postdoc -> assistant prof. -> asociate prof. in 3 years after ending their PhD with no decent publications at all. It's not even publishing crap. It's that these places develop into odd little societies that end up resembling Orwell's Animal Farm. Obviously, this very good lab is collapsing. I have moved to Oxbridge now and things are much better. Sad to see so many cancer research Euros wasted.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Its a simple problem; that three-sentence description was a pretty good start. The problem is made harder by the near-extinction of tenure-track positions. Colleges are using adjuct-profressors exclusively now, because they are cheap, plentiful and hungry. The search for knowledge has turned into a mill to train people and get a paycheck.
  - adminprof 11y ago
    The misinformation about adjuncts is pretty widespread. Adjuncts have indeed been hired way more at teaching colleges and for-profit colleges. But research universities haven't really changed their hiring tendencies much, if at all. It's just that there are a lot more non-R1 universities now that statistically, a higher % of new instructors are adjuncts. Nearly everyone I know that graduated with a PhD from an R1 universities, and was what I considered reasonably good (they were not complete goof-offs and were serious about their work) got good tenure-track positions 0-2 years after graduating.
    - nkurz 11y ago
      Nearly everyone I know that graduated with a PhD from an R1 universities Would these people perhaps be clustered in a particular field? I'd guess that things are very different depending on the percentage of PhD's in a field who go into academia versus industry. For example, the academic job market for Astronomy is very different than CS, because there are many more non-academic options for CS graduates. I think even an outstanding Astronomy PhD from a top tier university may find it difficult to get a tenure track position in their field. The same would probably be true for CS if all the graduates were to pursue academic positions, but since many go into industry, there is less competition for tenure track positions among those who want to teach.
      - mcguire 11y ago
        Not necessarily a good example. Astronomy has that weird, assassination-based promotion system.
- return0 11y ago
  They can go work elsewhere. Part of the problem is that academic pipelines are clogged with too many PhDs who are not motivated by scientific curiosity.
  - lutorm 11y ago
    I think that is completely false. Why would you go into a career with little prospects for a permanent job that if you get it might pay half of what you could get elsewhere if not for scientific curiosity and the desire to make a difference in students' lives? The problem is, like this article alludes to, that the field does not reward scientific curiosity or even serious scientific advancement.
    - return0 11y ago
      Scientific curiosity in itself is not something that should be rewarded.
    - hugh4 11y ago
      For many students, the answer is "to get a visa to move to a first-world country". If you're a smart first-worlder, there's many careers more lucrative than scientific research, so you'd only go into it because of passion. But if you're a smart third-worlder, a scientific career is often your best shot at emigrating to a rich country, so it becomes rational to do it whether you're passionate or not.
  - aflyax 11y ago
    Not pursuing a project that’s too risky, is not using the latest tools, and might not get you published in Cell/Science/Nature is all about scientific curiosity. Please. Such b/s.
- aardvarks 11y ago
  That's a pretty good 3-sentence summary - reflects my experience as well. To expand a bit...it's not that nearly everyone doesn't start out super excited about their subjects and motivated by advancing human knowledge. It's that shortly post-PhD, you realize that in order to continue doing this work you find exciting and meaningful, you have to get money (for supplies, equipment, office space, not to mention your own salary), and the funding system is inherently kind of broken. It's not just the disappearance of tenure-track jobs. To caricature somewhat: 1. Funding is limited - grant success rates in my field are currently 10% to 15% - and in order to have a chance you need some history of having done interesting work, the more the better. 2. To carry out more of your ideas (to maximize the chances that some of them will turn out to be very interesting, as well as the overall amount and speed of work) you typically need more manpower than just yourself. You may also need equipment and people to operate it. Since you're probably a bit short of money, you hire trainees (students or postdocs), who cost less. Now you are really feeling the funding pressure since their livelihoods, not only your own, depend on your getting enough funds. 3. Eventually those trainees graduate, or become senior. Now they need to apply for their own grants and you need to find new trainees. In other words, the process of science today inherently increases the number of scientists competing for funding, and because each scientist during a single career typically requires many trainees, this number increases exponentially. There is no way the research funding budget can increase that fast over the long term. 4. The constantly increasing funding pressure means more and more people become preoccupied with their own survival above most any other professional concern. In addition to politics and ladder climbing, it hurts the science directly: if some project's not likely to get future funding, you might feel you don't have time for it, even if that's what interests you most about your area. It's a hard problem...my impression is the reforms needed would be so sweeping that I'm not sure anyone has a complete picture of what things to do instead, let alone implement them.
  - bshanks 11y ago
    I propose one simple reform. The grant-giving institutions are currently (in the aggregate) spending $X of money per year to pay the salary of various people. Some of these people are employed as tenured professors, some as non-yet-tenured tenure track professors, some as postdocs, some as students. The salary of the postdocs and students (if any) is coming entirely from the $X, the salary of the professors is coming partly from interest on the schools' endowments. The number of postdocs and students is (almost) directly proportional to $X. The proposal: the grant-giving institution instead earmark Z% of $X for endowing new tenured professor chairs at the schools. This reduces the ratio of (postdocs + students) per professor. In the extreme case, if all institutions set Z=100%, there would be only professors and no students or postdocs; the number of professors would be less than the number of professors+postdocs+students is today, but this number would be growing at a substantially faster rate (there will be some critical value of Z, large but <100%, such that the the number of students funded is roughly equal to or slightly greater than the replacement rate of retiring professors). Note that this is not all-or-nothing; you can incrementally convince one grant-giving institution at a time to implement this reform, with Z set at various levels, and see incremental benefits.
jordanpg 11y ago
Usually we only hear this from the disgruntled. It is valuable to hear this perspective from someone who perceives themselves as happy and successful. > because I know how they were obtained. This is similar to one of the reasons I left graduate school. I realized that everyone who plays ball and puts in the hours gets a PhD. And I saw incomprehensible postdoc hires. Lots of things didn't even look like significant accomplishments (or even all that hard, and I'm no rockstar).
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rch 11y ago
David Eagleman is a good one, and plays a mean harmonica too.
viach 11y ago
Looks like it's a good time to start automating scientific research...
chubot 11y ago
I feel the same thing in huge companies in which the employees are insulated from market forces. Aren't we supposed to be, like, building stuff that users want? Rather than just trying to get promoted and game the system? IQ and motivation are independent variables... it's a shame when people with high IQs exert tons of effort in small-minded directions, or just toward fighting each other.
- zo1 11y ago
  >"Aren't we supposed to be, like, building stuff that users want? Rather than just trying to get promoted and game the system?" That's the company's job, not yours. In fact, you are actually already doing it if you twist definitions a bit. The "user" is the company you work for, and you are the product. And you "gaming" the corporate-ladder system is you simply marketing the product (yourself) to your user/client so that they pay you more for it. The beauty of it is that the emergent behavior of those combined two agents yields a net positive for society. Do not be fooled into thinking that only "noble" academia is the way to advance humankind.
  - jqm 11y ago
    No. Absolutely no. A net positive is not being realized for humanity when you consider all the factors in this type of behavior. What this is a wasteful process of leaching excessive production into the bank accounts of people pretending to be productively engaged. I have to agree with OP. Far too many big companies are busy trying to figure out how to game the system and cheat the consumers and have become filled with ladder climbers who have long since lost sight of the original mandate assigned to them by the system. This probably won't last very long historically speaking and it might not end well either. It's unbalanced, unjust, corrupt and just plain wrong. Incidentally, the companies job is OP's job. Companies don't exist without people.
alexholehouse 11y ago
Posts like this (and there are many of them) scare me. I'm in the latter half of a PhD. I love it. I work insane hours entirely out of my own choice, because it is the most rewarding and enjoyable thing I've ever been a part of. The idea that I've found something that I love, that is challenging, that (I hope) I'm relatively good at, and that has a definite net positive good for us as a species/society, yet I may not be able to pursue this long term because of the immense challenges facing academia as a whole (catalyzed, I would argue, by tragic lack of funding) is really concerning, on both a personal and a societal level.
- javert 11y ago
  > catalyzed, I would argue, by tragic lack of funding No, you don't get it. There is tons of funding. But academia is a corrupt old-boys network. Those petty, conniving people rise to the top and ultimately control the system. - A grad student (who regrets going to grad school)
  - alexholehouse 11y ago
    Does that mean a lack of funding can't catalyze the issue? Edit: Just for transparency (topical!) I did not downvote you, and totally agree that cronyism is a major (and yeah maybe causative) issue, but I also think the decision on how to fund is basically an entirely separate problem which really doesn't have an obviously good solution (in my mind).
    - javert 11y ago
      Make the companies that profit from the research do the research themselves, in house, and pay for it and direct it themselves. That's the only way. You can't set up academia as a soviet-style bureaucracy and expect it to perform any differently from a soviet-style bureaucracy.
      - sanotehu 11y ago
        What, like the pharmaceutical industry? I would argue that much good knowledge is created that way but it, too, has its issues. See much of Ben Goldacre's work. http://www.badscience.net/ http://www.badscience.net/
w1ntermute 11y ago
Another possible (unspoken) reason why Gariépy is resigning is presumably that he's been a postdoc[0] for the last 3-4 years[1]. Unfortunately, the nature of modern biomedical research is such that you need an army of researchers to do the mechanical grunt work at the lab bench that leads to papers. This has led to a glut of postdocs, who are underpaid, overworked, and have little hope of ever obtaining a permanent academic position[2]. And even at top universities, industry positions are quite difficult to get without putting time and effort that you don't have to spare into extensive networking[3]. During his postdoc, Gariépy's had one second-author publication in Nature Neuroscience[4], which probably wasn't enough to get a tenure-track professorship. If, like the first author on that paper, he had gotten an assistant professorship at a prestigious university[5], he probably wouldn't be airing his dirty laundry. Also note that he is a YouTuber[6] and has a book coming out according to his Twitter profile[7], so he's probably trying to leverage any notoriety he gets from ragequitting his postdoc to jumpstart his career in science journalism. 0: http://today.duke.edu/node/132805 http://today.duke.edu/node/132805 1: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanfrancoisgariepy https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanfrancoisgariepy 2: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc-researchers-stirs-quiet-crisis-science/HWxyErx9RNIW17khv0MWTN/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc-re... 3: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/09/02/cambridge-planners-take-kendall-fat-chunkies/k9SuETiCJSVj5UveEUEoLK/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/09/02/cambridge-pl... 4: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v16/n2/abs/nn.3287.html http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v16/n2/abs/nn.3287.html 5: https://medicine.yale.edu/neuroscience/people/steve_chang.profile https://medicine.yale.edu/neuroscience/people/steve_chang.pr... 6: http://neuro.tv/ http://neuro.tv/ 7: https://twitter.com/JFGariepy https://twitter.com/JFGariepy
- javert 11y ago
  You can say that. But, he's still right.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Not the OP, but of course he's right. On the other hand, there is bit of a different between one of the princes of the kingdom abdicating his title while leaving the kingdom and a common person leaving the kingdom. Grant writing is a very painful form of writing and I have relatives that have made good money by being good at it[1]. I do believe it would be tough to do research and put the time in to be an acceptable grant writer. Something has got to give. 1) for those writing grant to certain government agencies, yeah, there is an old-boys/girls-club and using an "out" word in your grant is a killer (I've drank a lot of beer over the evolution of the word 'empowerment'). One tip my aunt told me is to volunteer to be a grant reader in DC. You see what everyone else is writing, know why things got accepted, and meet the people in charge.
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javert 11y ago
As a grad student, he's right and I'm glad he's saying it. (I'm in CS, though, not biology.)
qCOVET 11y ago
I absolutely agree with everything in this post. When I was a post doctoral fellow, my principal investigator would publish at least one paper a month. She was celebrated in the department. (a) The papers were published in journals like - Journal of Green Donkey Testicles, Journal of differentiation of dying mouse ... Journals that I had never heard of, had no impact and every tiny bit of an experiment that was conducted in the lab, would get published, without a full picture. (b) Much of the data was turned into data by turning everything into being 'statistically significant' . I would do experiments and I would see no freaking difference between control and experimental, yet, through the magic of statistics, she would find the difference. It was lame and depressing. (c) Above is an isolated example. There are countless smart, diligent and hard working professors who continue to push the boundaries of science (ex. my amazing PhD prof, whom I dearly love and admire). Unfortunately, their time is plagued by writing grants after grants, fighting inter-departmental politics, dealing with Chair of the department on regular basis ... basically stuff that distracts them from having the time to relax, think and innovate. (d) Commercialization of innovations in schools and universities are butchered by the IP policies, where by the University would take 1/3, the commercialization office would take 1/3 and the poor researcher is left with the rest. This kills innovation + tech commercialization and the desire of a researcher to be an entrepreneur.
- elliptic 11y ago
  Regarding d) - how much do you think the researcher, much of whose work was presumably funded by taxpayer dollars, should get?
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  - eloff 11y ago
    Since the income generated is taxed anyway, Some of the proceeds go back to where they came from. An investment of sorts. The university and commercialization office should probably get cuts more commensurate with their contributions, whatever that may be.
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Al-Khwarizmi 11y ago
The CS field gets a lot of bashing for gravitating a lot around conferences rather than journals. Because, you know, journals are supposed to be the serious venue for the grown-ups. But actually, CS conferences (at least the ones I've published in) have a double-blind review system that feels much fairer than the single-blind in the top journals. Of course it's far from perfect (more often than not the reviewers can guess the affiliation of the authors anyway) but things like almost needing to talk to the editor to publish papers, or the editor using author name as an important acceptance criterion, do not happen AFAIK. In general my experience with reviews has felt much fairer in conferences with double blind system than in the typical journals with editorial boards full of sacred cows. And I don't say that out of spite for rejection, because in fact I've had more rejections in conferences than in journals. A pity that in my country (Spain) the bureaucratic requirements for funding, tenure, etc. are one-size-fits-all and basically conferences count almost nothing and journals are everything, even if in my particular subfield no one cares about journals. So I end up playing a double game: publishing some papers where I know I should to find the right audience, and others where I am forced to to survive.
- sanotehu 11y ago
  Would you mind explaining the double-blind review in CS conferences? I'm a doctor by trade so am well acquainted with the way peer-review works but I've never heard of conferences being reviewed, either before-the-fact as an acceptance criterion or after-the-fact as a kind of rating.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 11y ago
    In the context of peer review (at least in CS), "single-blind" means that the authors don't know who the reviewers are, and "double-blind" means that additionally, the reviewers don't know who the authors are. Conferences with double-blind review require papers to be anonymized, avoiding any mentions of author names or affiliations in the PDF submitted for review, as well as other obvious elements that would reveal the identity of the authors (e.g. "As we showed in a previous paper [4], ...")
alexmuro 11y ago
I work as a researcher in a grant funded lab, I can see where this post is coming from. There is a lot of needless politics in academia, and often the right things are not rewarded. However no matter what set of actions you choose to reward, people will find a way to game that system. The criticism in this post, while at least partly true, is too cynical to make a difference in any way. Sure, there are a lot of poor and useless papers published and terrible labs in the US University research system, but the search for knowledge is moving undeniably forward under this system.
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luckydude 11y ago
Years ago, like 1999 or so, I chaired a Linux conference. The Usenix people wanted me to fold Linux into Usenix and thought (probably mistakenly) that I could bring those people to Usenix. I said sure on condition: all papers are blind reviewed going forward. No authors, nothing that could identify the authors in the papers until they are accepted. Usenix flat out refused. Which sort of backs up what this guy is saying. Sad state of affairs.
stefantalpalaru 11y ago
> The editor later proceeded to explain to us why he was inquiring about the reputation of these scientists: "I'm asking to make sure that I accept articles from reputable people. Because you see, at , we want to do real science, not Richard-Dawkins-type science." I remember discreetly crying for an hour that night at the conference's bar, not because that man was unjustifiably mean to one of the most intelligent scientists in the world, but because I had come to the realization that our system of scientific publication was governed by people who have no idea what knowledge is. It's not just the people governing it. It's the system itself: you are vetted by the only people who understand what you write - the other members of your own little tribe. The editor is not supposed to understand what he publishes, he just asks the opinion of your colleagues, anonymizes slightly the responses (you can still tell who's who by their style) and gives them to you so you can reply. Afterwards the music starts again, you switch chairs and it's your turn to review your peer's article. Is there any wonder why this lead to heaps of useless research and widespread enhanced interrogation of meaningless data? And no, Richard Dawkins is not "one of the most intelligent scientists in the world", he's just somebody you like and you extended your character judgment to every aspect of his work because you took the same shortcut as that editor: he's in your opinion one of the good ones. And your opinion is that of someone using Facebook as a blogging platform ;-)
- jessaustin 11y ago
  It does seem unlikely that any random group of scientists (or people in general, for that matter) are going to be of one mind with respect to Dawkins.
peterwwillis 11y ago
As a lay person, it was pretty ridiculous and slightly horrifying to learn how much time and effort my scientist friends have to put into fulfilling irrelevant academic criteria just to be allowed to work on the research they are incredibly passionate about. In 'Scientific Progress Goes "Boink!"', Calvin and Hobbes build a duplicator machine out of a cardboard box. If they were researchers, they'd first have to go to school for X years, graduate, apply for a position at a research institution that kind-of does research into duplicators, get accepted, and then spend years working research around how cardboard boxes work, spend more time writing grants and trying to publish their cardboard box research, and maybe one day a board will green-light them for actually being able to research how to duplicate something. How can we tell the people with money to stop funding this stupid system?
- cma 11y ago
  I think any funding system we come up with that gives out funds to uncredentialed children and stuffed animals is probably going to turn out to be a disaster. If systems have to pass that as a litmus test, I think many good systems would fail.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    Very funny, but we're talking about a situation where they were fully capable of designing and building the device.
    - cma 11y ago
      A system that needs to have no filtering so that kids don't get filtered out is unnecessarily broad. If it hits this one comic book false negative, too bad.
      - Dylan16807 11y ago
        In a world where children are as competent as they think they are, the system should let confident children have a shot (they don't need much funding anyway). More seriously you're taking the analogy a bit too literally. It's about time spent using competency vs. time spent signalling competency. The latter should be nowhere near a majority.
krick 11y ago
I don't really see, what people mean when they "agree" or "disagree" with this article and the likes of it. Aside of expressing his own disappointment the author points out what is wrong with the academic research, that's true. But point out what is wrong, though isn't useless, is a lot easier than suggest (even pretty lousy) better alternative. It's easy to imagine how everyone should be free to explore whatever he wants in his own free time, with his own money, at his own home lab (although even this isn't true, because currently even the most basic stuff needed for research in chemistry or biology is illegal to freely buy and sell, as it can be used to produce drugs or bombs or because of some other "national security" bullshit). But what the author is talking about isn't his own time and money — it's expecting to be provided with all stuff he needs for research and for him to live and prosper. And if someone is about to give you all that, your promise that you'll discover something great eventually isn't really enough for him. Quite understandably so. So ideally he would like to make sure that you, both: won't use all money and lab equipment that's given to you to smoke crack and do nothing; and that you are actually able to discover something great. Which, I guess, even you yourself won't promise, because you don't know. So, in fact, even with all that bureaucracy we cannot have any guarantees. And author wants for the system not only to work, but to work without putting too much pressure on him and his colleagues. How he imagines that? He doesn't explain clearly enough.
- rwallace 11y ago
  The problem is that excessive competition in a system originally designed to ensure research money was spent well, is now actually causing the money to be spent badly. Asking for concrete suggestions for improvement is perfectly fair. Here are two things that could be done that would help. First, ideally, flood the system with money, fund science the way it should be funded, as though it actually mattered as much as entertainment or killing people. Again, providing ten times as much money would produce more and better science per dollar not just in total. Second, failing that, filter PhD applicants by random lottery; discard a randomly selected 80% or however many it takes, before moving forward as currently.
akhilcacharya 11y ago
I'm assuming that he'll be recruited by Google next.
noelsusman 11y ago
Something like 90% of people working in academia have pretty much the same opinion. This isn't anything that hasn't been said a thousand times over already. The real question is how do we solve it? I've seen tons of people complain about the state of academia (myself included), but I have yet to see a workable solution to the problem.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  There are quite a few options that have been proposed, the real problem is we are not applying science to solving it. We need to do the studies to find out what maximises quality scientific output and then scale out. The reason this is not done is the people at the top think the current system is working well, for them.
hyperion2010 11y ago
I met and worked with JF for 6 months. I learned an enormous amount working with him. His creativity in experimental design and his approach to answering questions was inspiring. Sadly, the fact that he is leaving academia does not surprise me. People who care more about doing good science than about publishing (those are absolutely NOT the same things) rarely make it in academia. Funding for true basic research has contracted significantly and scientific communities have become incredibly risk averse with regard to who and what they give grants to. The peer review system reviews based on social norms within that field, not on what is actually good science. Finally, training and education are still based on the guild system. People who actually want to advance the state of human knowledge, not just have an academic position, find this environment toxic. Best of luck to JF in his future endeavours. Academia is the true looser here.
sundarurfriend 11y ago
Non-facebook mirror: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=rz261piT http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=rz261piT
svisser 11y ago
Relevant one-page article: "On “Write-Only” Conferences" - http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/IEEE-IS_letter2007.pdf http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/IEEE-IS_letter2007.pdf (conferences in exotic locations for which you only need to submit an article to attend)
- mcguire 11y ago
  I don't quite get that letter. The IEEE has plenty of write-only conferences that are not in scenic locales; anyone who actually goes doesn't even get a good vacation, so no one actually attends. But it's still a publication.
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- dang 11y ago
  That's deeply unfair in the case of a non-native speaker: almost no one reaches foreign language proficiency at the level you're implicitly demanding, which is basically perfection. I don't know if this author is a native speaker but his name suggests he may not be. On HN, you should err on the side of charitability about this—especially since grammar peeves, though we all have them, are the quintessence of off-topic.
ching_wow_ka 11y ago
I am somewhat ignorant. What significant achievements does Dawkins hold in his field? All I know is that he's known for trying to convince others of his beliefs.
- stefantalpalaru 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins#Work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins#Work
  - jleyank 11y ago
    Here's his CV: http://www.fontem.com/archivos/usuarios/cv_521.pdf http://www.fontem.com/archivos/usuarios/cv_521.pdf
CSDude 11y ago
I will give an example how the system is broken. I am a masters student, and my advisor assigns me full reviews without even asking, in the fields that I do not even understand anything a little bit, not even in my area. I review them for him. Some dude's approval to a conference is at my hands. I do not feel in any position to review most of the papers I have been given and talking to my advisor does not help. So, I just accept them all if they do not have major style issues, and that's it.
- mcguire 11y ago
  Do what I did (unintentionally): suggest that they reject a major, name, researcher's paper because it's an unintelligible mess with no real results. I never had to review a paper again. Which is kind of a pity. I liked doing that, including learning enough about the topic to make something like intelligent comments.
fit2rule 11y ago
This article speaks to me of the most destructive force in our human world: the social collective. It seems that the majority of his ills are sourced directly from the dire circumstances of the mass collective operating on itself in a negative way - that there is something broken in the peer-acceptance process; perhaps it is indeed impossible to advance science without disassociation from the collective reality of all scientists, who - psycho-socially - desire to attain a social goal as an imperative before any kind of natural observation or 'progress' otherwise; i.e. the complaints of the author would be best addressed to nobody in particular; it is the fact of the anonymous-crowd-mass which produces the conditions degrading science, today. There are simply too many social machinations in play. The desire for acceptance at a banal level (grant money), the desire for acclaim at a banal level (peer review), the desire to be heard above the din of the masses, at a most banal level (publication requirements) - all of these banal instincts have accrued much caché in the zeitgeist as reasons for doing things. tl;dr sometimes you have to shake the sheets if you want to get a good sail on. No great explorer, adventurer, discoverer, scientist, engineer .. ever .. got that way because they followed the processes of the status quo. The fact that many of us must discover, and learn to stomach: life is not special for a majority of people. That includes scientists. It includes people who think they deserve otherwise. If you want to exceed and excel, propel the species forward: beware the collective. It will eat you.
bobwaycott 11y ago
This echoes closely (for me) what I experienced as a grad student before ultimately abandoning it. In 2005, I was pursuing my then-dream of joining the ranks of academia. I was a history & philosophy grad, and my field was 20th-century intellectual and cultural history (so, you know, a whole lot easier than and not at all like the real sciences). I'd grown somewhat tired of the expected vulture-like hovering about what had been the standard historiographical approaches of the past 30 years. Not because I did not find them valuable, insightful, meaningful, or worth continuing. I absolutely did. I continue to find them incredibly insightful. However, it just wasn't quite what I was looking for. I thought I had something better, something nobody was doing at all at that time in the field. For an entire year, I found myself locked in an endless struggle of presenting my case, arguing my thesis and its philosophical framework and merit, with every member of the department. I couldn't succeed in convincing a single prof to head my committee. Not one. There were long and impassioned debates. They asked a ton of questions, really forced me to dig further into proving the merits and value of the idea, constantly put me on the spot to really flesh out how I was going to support this idea. At first, I thought I was simply failing to make my case. I could accept that. It drove me to work harder to make my case. I slowly began realizing something else was up when, without fail, every prof hit a point of being no longer interested in hearing my arguments. This was signified--every single time--when they suggested they'd be willing to lead my committee if I would choose a topic that matched their research. They offered to take me on as their RA because I had so thoroughly proven my ability to quickly gain depth and breadth of understanding in a given topic. They even granted me a TA position by the end of the year to sweeten the pot (I'd been attending with no financial assistance at that point, paying the bill myself). After this happened with the last remaining prof, I finished the semester out, then emailed them all a thanks-but-no-thanks letter. I left the program. A month later, I received an email from one of the professors. It was a personal heads-up and invitation to attend an upcoming conference the university would be hosting. The keynote speaker just happened to be an expert on a philosopher who featured prominently in inspiring and underpinning my proposed work. The keynote topic was a talk about that philosopher's work, and a musing on how it needed to be included in historiography alongside the analytic categories employed for so long in modern historical scholarship. There was even a light-hearted mention by this prof of how much it sounded exactly like everything I'd been arguing in the department for a year, and how she thought I wouldn't want to miss hearing what an expert had to say on the topic. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ EDIT: couple word choices; formatting.
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DrNuke 11y ago
That's why in 2015 clusters like YC, if they achieve criticality, self-awareness and overall sustainability, have the chance to outgrow both unis and corps for meaningful and productive innovation.
- mcguire 11y ago
  On a small scale. There's no way that model will support decades-long, large collaboration work.
hosh 11y ago
The headless-chicken researchers sounds replaceable by AI. If survival is the main goal, then it is a short-sighted strategy.
bane 11y ago
I keep hearing about how miserable things are in academia and have come to perhaps a surprising conclusion: research and education need to be broken up. I know that there's arguments that the two should stay entangled, and that new research feeds quickly into education blah blah blah. But I personally think that the world is far better off with large, dedicated, quasi-commercial R&D labs and institutions like Xerox-Parc, Bell Labs, Howard Hughes Medical, Battelle, Microsoft Research etc. and that those research labs operate off of a "licensed innovation" model. It feels like these places are struggling (I might be wrong), but I'd argue for a vast expansion of this system on par with the university system, but without either being burdened by the needs of either one. Offer competitive industry pay and work on demand for commercial and public interest. A kind of kernel of this already exists, either big National Labs that try to spin out mature research paths into companies (giving the researches a shot at making it big as CEO or CTO of these new companies) or as dedicated commercial R&D firms that get hired to produce product ideas for commercialization. But I think it should be institutionalized in the same way universities are rather than running as independent as they do now. And then universities should get out of the research game altogether. I don't have real concrete ideas on how this should be done, but it would provide a better career track for smart people.
- jleyank 11y ago
  This might be useful for postdocs, but remember that the PhD degree is a research degree. Therefore, academia has to have some kind of research available for people to do. Assuming that the typical PhD in Chemistry anyway takes 4-6 years based on topic and level of support. The first two years are coursework and other prep work for entering the actual research process. Semester #5 is the prelim, which is the entry exam. The next 2-3 semesters are the golden time when other interests fall away, work progresses and the material that justifies the PhD gets done. After that comes writing up and doing whatever odds and ends the boss wants done or wants done to expand/round-out the dissertation or whatever. It's possible that lab-based PhD's take longer because the reactions have to work and yield the desired product. Also, a lot will depend on how often the student's in the lab (reactions have to be worked up, machine time has to be found, etc). Run 2x vs 1x daily has a direct impact on time-in-process. Fortunately, the non-lab PhD's can work pretty much anywhere as modern laptops are either sufficient or work well as front-ends to compute resources. The end result of this is 3-7 papers, which will be "stapled together" to make the dissertation. The work has to be "novel", and some people are lucky/good enough to produce something that's a win. Note that some of the best ideas in the field (possibly any field) come from 2-4th year grad students who don't know or care they're wrong... Oh, they might produce some code throughout this process, or some groups maintain a code base that pretty much every student contributes to (such as QM groups). Coming out of this process, the newly-minted PhD is now capable of doing an academic postdoc to either round out their training or start the path towards an academic position. Or, they can do an industrial postdoc or go directly into pharma or biotech (or the various support companies doing chemistry, software or whatever supporting these two areas). Think of the PhD as a union card, certifying the holder as being (vaguely?) capable of independent, organized work. Lab PhD's typically post-doc with the "other half" of their discipline: come out as a synthetic PhD, go work for a natural product group, etc. Once in pharma, they face a 3-6 year period where they're to learn various aspects of the medicinal chemistry process. They start as pairs of hands and end up, hopefully, as somebody who can run with at least part of a drug design or development project. Academia, for the most part, lacks the money or interest for this part of the training process - it's applied research with an eye towards the big return, and IP issues prevent publishing until projects die or go into the market. I suspect physics PhD's might have similar timelines, possibly delayed if they have to build their apparatus (or wait for time at CERN). I've heard that UK PhD's get through quicker, and it's possible European PhD's get through a little slower than North American due to a better funding environment? I've no understand of the schedule for things like Biology or Medical-related PhD's as that's totally outside my experience (personal and professional). Might be slower as the mice/cells/whatever can up and die on them. To close this spiel, while research labs have always provided a place for PhD's to go work (and still do), there's always problems due to security, funding, etc. If there was more money available, we'd end up with a better crop of postdocs and probably young professors with better home lives but that doesn't seem to be the trend of things right now. Given all the uncertainty over funding, finding a position, avoiding layoff/outsoucing/offshoring, ... I can see why people aren't interested in going this route. Those that do either have a "cause" they wish to follow/fulfill or they're really interested in the subject matter and want to take it farther than one can do with courses. If people want the $$, they'll do far better managing or funding people like I've described than being one.
vonklaus 11y ago
This is something thar is echoed all the time and it does not seem to be something limited or confined to academia, whoch makes it all the more unfortunate.
kaonashi 11y ago
Seems like the inevitable result of forcing scientists to be competitive in an activity which is inherently cooperative.
JesperRavn 11y ago
As someone who completed a PhD and knows many people who went on to academic positions, there tend to be three stages for people who come to accept the status quo. 1. A desire to make big breakthroughs in the field. 2. A frustration with the slow progress being made in the field, the apparent inability of the field to produce big breakthroughs, and the proliferation of papers whose net contribution to knowledge is small or zero. 3. An acceptance that the stagnation in the field is (1) partly an artifact of it being hard to recognize progress when it is happening and (2) a consequence of the fundamental nature of the discipline, e.g. all the simple elegant theories have been explored already. It's not that there are not problems in academia, but most academics (at least in my field) don't consider these to be a major barrier to progress. I was particularly wary of the claim: I will still publish my book, The Revolutionary Phenotype, which contains an important novel theory on the emergence of life. Surely a novel theory on the emergence of life would be of great interest in the field? At worst I imagine you would have to dress it up in some mathematical model. EDIT: I found a chapter from a previous version of the book in progress here: http://themoralsignal.com/TheMoralSignal%20-%20Chapter%201.pdf http://themoralsignal.com/TheMoralSignal%20-%20Chapter%201.p... readers can judge for themselves, but it didn't strike me as work that academia would be foolish for ignoring.
tete 11y ago
I hear that a lot. It kind of made me certain that I don't want to go for a PhD. I also frequently hear that it was a great time and that people should do it (very shortly summed up) "if they love science". But to be honest, there is a lot of people who are researchers and scientists without ever getting any kind of degree. Okay, not a lot as in the majority, but enough to be aware that it is valid to write papers, etc. and be accepted in research communities. I am not saying it is easy and it probably is way, way more unlikely, but then this sounds a lot like "if you really love science". I also agree that the utility part will probably be harder, so it may depend a lot on what you study. Those are all my assumptions, based on the things I heard. They are not really statements. I really want to hear what others think about that and especially where I am awfully wrong.
timtas 11y ago
Science is in trouble. Before long we'll owe an apology to medieval astrologers and barbers. What’s wrong with Science (http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21591549-and-nature-and-cell-nobel-prize-winner-attacks-elite-journals-whats-wrong http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2159154...) How science goes wrong (http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-re...) I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss Here's How. (http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800 http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-hel...) How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/feb/26/how-computer-generated-fake-papers-flooding-academia http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/feb/26/...) Bad Science – Study on Gay Marriage Was Fake, Gets Retracted (http://www.zmescience.com/science/bad-science-michael-lacour-26052015/ http://www.zmescience.com/science/bad-science-michael-lacour...) Some Online Journals Will Publish Fake Science, For A Fee (http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/10/03/228859954/some-online-journals-will-publish-fake-science-for-a-fee http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/10/03/22885995...) The Mind of a Con Man (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-...) Why Biomedical Research Has A Reproducibility Problem (http://footnote1.com/why-biomedical-research-has-a-reproducibility-problem/ http://footnote1.com/why-biomedical-research-has-a-reproduci...) I could go on but...you know...Google.
xjlin0 11y ago
Cannot agree with him more, on every words from this post. Using just the publication score as the measurement on the scientific research is actually killing the entire field.
freshhawk 11y ago
This is a sentiment I've heard from a lot of my friends in academia. I hope the author isn't also similar to those friends of mine in another way: assuming that the marketing job that private industry has done when comparing themselves to academia is true. That things are more rational and productive outside academia. That they won't just enter another game played by chickens with no heads that has slightly different rules. That they won't spend most of their time doing useless bullshit that the system demands they produce even though it does nothing to further the goals they are supposed to be advancing. I liked the piece, so I do hope the author ends up preferring the different kind of pointless make-work the alternatives provide him.
aflyax 11y ago
Every single Ph.D. on my data science team has pretty much said the same thing (independently). The way I put it: Academic science is a branch of the entertainment industry in a socialist sub-economy.
pfooti 11y ago
FWIW, I have a PhD and spent five years as an assistant professor. I then went on to take a different job as a lecturer for a few years before leaving academia completely. The general complaint JF raised rings true. In my field (learning sciences), there was a TON of jank publications. The majority of the published work still is stuff that exists solely to increment the author's publication count. The term "least publishable unit" was used unironically. The focus is flawed. There is still a lot of good work being done in the system, but that work is really only 10% of the work that is done. I had to choose between artificially inflating my pub count and not making tenure. In the end, I decided to walk away - I personally don't have the kind of perseverance necessary for that. Of course, I now make significantly more money and am actually appreciated by my colleagues (rather than viewed as competition), and still get to contribute real work in the field in a private sector nonprofit instead. And I get to program too (in LS at least it was all publications, the software you created didnt count for anything.)
mangamadaiyan 11y ago
I almost did a Ph.D. Luckily, my prof and I didn't get along too well, and I escaped with just a Master's degree. To this day, my prof doesn't list me in his page (all other students before and after me are listed, and the lone publication I have with him is listed too).
akulbe 11y ago
My biggest concern with this is that it devalues education even further. Many potential/current/former students are questioning the value of higher education. If you cannot trust the researchers, then how can anything be trusted? If it's just one big good-old-boy system, what's the point?

279 points by Fede_V 11y ago

plg 11y ago

"I found scientists to be more preoccupied by their own survival in a very competitive research environment than by the development of a true understanding of the world." I have found this as well. However it's important to remember that before one can do good work, one has to find funding for the good work. It's a complex problem.

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cinquemb 11y ago
"Of course, this does not mean that I will abandon all of my activities related to the search or dissemination of knowledge. I will still teach my courses in Biology and Artificial Intelligence at the University of the People, I will still publish my book, The Revolutionary Phenotype, which contains an important novel theory on the emergence of life. I will still publish the Season 2 of NEURO.tv, for which we have gathered amazing guests. I will still go talk science and have fun with the Drunken Peasants. In fact, my leave will likely give me more time to concentrate on these important activities. The reality is that throughout the years, my attention has drifted away from research academia, because I found other ways to satisfy my scientific curiosity that seemed more appealing and more genuine to me." "There is a general rejection of these alternative paths to knowledge dissemination in academia, but I have grown out of caring about it. Selling knowledge and prestige are the bread and butter of universities, so we should not be surprised to see the main recipients of the flow of money coming from well-wishing parents and governmental funding agencies dismiss the validity of other, less socially costly paths to knowledge dissemination." Seems like he's found other more effective ways for him and for others learning than to do more of the "good work"[0]. [0] "…produce multiple scientific articles per year, none of which having any significant impact on our understanding of the world, similarly to how a chicken who's head has been cut can still walk, but not toward any sort of goal. This issue reveals itself in a series of noxious conditions that are affecting me and my colleagues: a high number of scientific articles with fraudulent data due to the pressures of the "publish or perish" system makes it impossible to know if a recent discovery is true or not; a large portion of the time of a scientist is spent just writing grants so that they can be submitted to 5-10 agencies in the hope that one of them will accept; and a scientific publication system that has become so corrupted that it is almost impossible to get a scientific article published without talking one-on-one with the editor before submitting the article."
- JesperRavn 11y ago
  It's not fair to twist people's words like that. If the poster meant churning out papers by "good work" then the whole post would not make sense. A much more reasonable interpretation would be "in order to produce good papers, or things that are less rewarded (e.g. books), one needs to play the academic game in the meantime and churn out mediocre/bad papers". The main issue as I see it is not that good papers are not rewarded, but rather that bad/mediocre papers are rewarded far more than they deserve. This means that the incentive to work hard on a breakthrough is diminished.
  - cinquemb 11y ago
    The focus on good papers vs bad papers as the problem seems silly to me in comparison to the multiple ways knowledge can be disseminated and built upon in ways that the author cites that proven for him to be more effective along the dimensions he and his audience values (satisfying intellectual curiosity, helping others learn who aren't involved with/or not interested [possibly because of the very low signal to noise] in the "good/bad papers system", lower social costs, etc…).
nextos 11y ago
People don't even understand how critical this problem is. I was previously working at a very good European medical lab. The environment was so weird most postdocs simply spent 95% of their time playing the ladder-climbing game. Some got incredible promotions, like getting all the way from postdoc -> assistant prof. -> asociate prof. in 3 years after ending their PhD with no decent publications at all. It's not even publishing crap. It's that these places develop into odd little societies that end up resembling Orwell's Animal Farm. Obviously, this very good lab is collapsing. I have moved to Oxbridge now and things are much better. Sad to see so many cancer research Euros wasted.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Its a simple problem; that three-sentence description was a pretty good start. The problem is made harder by the near-extinction of tenure-track positions. Colleges are using adjuct-profressors exclusively now, because they are cheap, plentiful and hungry. The search for knowledge has turned into a mill to train people and get a paycheck.
- adminprof 11y ago
  The misinformation about adjuncts is pretty widespread. Adjuncts have indeed been hired way more at teaching colleges and for-profit colleges. But research universities haven't really changed their hiring tendencies much, if at all. It's just that there are a lot more non-R1 universities now that statistically, a higher % of new instructors are adjuncts. Nearly everyone I know that graduated with a PhD from an R1 universities, and was what I considered reasonably good (they were not complete goof-offs and were serious about their work) got good tenure-track positions 0-2 years after graduating.
  - nkurz 11y ago
    Nearly everyone I know that graduated with a PhD from an R1 universities Would these people perhaps be clustered in a particular field? I'd guess that things are very different depending on the percentage of PhD's in a field who go into academia versus industry. For example, the academic job market for Astronomy is very different than CS, because there are many more non-academic options for CS graduates. I think even an outstanding Astronomy PhD from a top tier university may find it difficult to get a tenure track position in their field. The same would probably be true for CS if all the graduates were to pursue academic positions, but since many go into industry, there is less competition for tenure track positions among those who want to teach.
    - mcguire 11y ago
      Not necessarily a good example. Astronomy has that weird, assassination-based promotion system.
return0 11y ago
They can go work elsewhere. Part of the problem is that academic pipelines are clogged with too many PhDs who are not motivated by scientific curiosity.
- lutorm 11y ago
  I think that is completely false. Why would you go into a career with little prospects for a permanent job that if you get it might pay half of what you could get elsewhere if not for scientific curiosity and the desire to make a difference in students' lives? The problem is, like this article alludes to, that the field does not reward scientific curiosity or even serious scientific advancement.
  - return0 11y ago
    Scientific curiosity in itself is not something that should be rewarded.
  - hugh4 11y ago
    For many students, the answer is "to get a visa to move to a first-world country". If you're a smart first-worlder, there's many careers more lucrative than scientific research, so you'd only go into it because of passion. But if you're a smart third-worlder, a scientific career is often your best shot at emigrating to a rich country, so it becomes rational to do it whether you're passionate or not.
- aflyax 11y ago
  Not pursuing a project that’s too risky, is not using the latest tools, and might not get you published in Cell/Science/Nature is all about scientific curiosity. Please. Such b/s.
aardvarks 11y ago
That's a pretty good 3-sentence summary - reflects my experience as well. To expand a bit...it's not that nearly everyone doesn't start out super excited about their subjects and motivated by advancing human knowledge. It's that shortly post-PhD, you realize that in order to continue doing this work you find exciting and meaningful, you have to get money (for supplies, equipment, office space, not to mention your own salary), and the funding system is inherently kind of broken. It's not just the disappearance of tenure-track jobs. To caricature somewhat: 1. Funding is limited - grant success rates in my field are currently 10% to 15% - and in order to have a chance you need some history of having done interesting work, the more the better. 2. To carry out more of your ideas (to maximize the chances that some of them will turn out to be very interesting, as well as the overall amount and speed of work) you typically need more manpower than just yourself. You may also need equipment and people to operate it. Since you're probably a bit short of money, you hire trainees (students or postdocs), who cost less. Now you are really feeling the funding pressure since their livelihoods, not only your own, depend on your getting enough funds. 3. Eventually those trainees graduate, or become senior. Now they need to apply for their own grants and you need to find new trainees. In other words, the process of science today inherently increases the number of scientists competing for funding, and because each scientist during a single career typically requires many trainees, this number increases exponentially. There is no way the research funding budget can increase that fast over the long term. 4. The constantly increasing funding pressure means more and more people become preoccupied with their own survival above most any other professional concern. In addition to politics and ladder climbing, it hurts the science directly: if some project's not likely to get future funding, you might feel you don't have time for it, even if that's what interests you most about your area. It's a hard problem...my impression is the reforms needed would be so sweeping that I'm not sure anyone has a complete picture of what things to do instead, let alone implement them.
- bshanks 11y ago
  I propose one simple reform. The grant-giving institutions are currently (in the aggregate) spending $X of money per year to pay the salary of various people. Some of these people are employed as tenured professors, some as non-yet-tenured tenure track professors, some as postdocs, some as students. The salary of the postdocs and students (if any) is coming entirely from the $X, the salary of the professors is coming partly from interest on the schools' endowments. The number of postdocs and students is (almost) directly proportional to $X. The proposal: the grant-giving institution instead earmark Z% of $X for endowing new tenured professor chairs at the schools. This reduces the ratio of (postdocs + students) per professor. In the extreme case, if all institutions set Z=100%, there would be only professors and no students or postdocs; the number of professors would be less than the number of professors+postdocs+students is today, but this number would be growing at a substantially faster rate (there will be some critical value of Z, large but <100%, such that the the number of students funded is roughly equal to or slightly greater than the replacement rate of retiring professors). Note that this is not all-or-nothing; you can incrementally convince one grant-giving institution at a time to implement this reform, with Z set at various levels, and see incremental benefits.

jordanpg 11y ago

Usually we only hear this from the disgruntled. It is valuable to hear this perspective from someone who perceives themselves as happy and successful. > because I know how they were obtained. This is similar to one of the reasons I left graduate school. I realized that everyone who plays ball and puts in the hours gets a PhD. And I saw incomprehensible postdoc hires. Lots of things didn't even look like significant accomplishments (or even all that hard, and I'm no rockstar).

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rch 11y ago

David Eagleman is a good one, and plays a mean harmonica too.

viach 11y ago

Looks like it's a good time to start automating scientific research...

chubot 11y ago

I feel the same thing in huge companies in which the employees are insulated from market forces. Aren't we supposed to be, like, building stuff that users want? Rather than just trying to get promoted and game the system? IQ and motivation are independent variables... it's a shame when people with high IQs exert tons of effort in small-minded directions, or just toward fighting each other.

zo1 11y ago
>"Aren't we supposed to be, like, building stuff that users want? Rather than just trying to get promoted and game the system?" That's the company's job, not yours. In fact, you are actually already doing it if you twist definitions a bit. The "user" is the company you work for, and you are the product. And you "gaming" the corporate-ladder system is you simply marketing the product (yourself) to your user/client so that they pay you more for it. The beauty of it is that the emergent behavior of those combined two agents yields a net positive for society. Do not be fooled into thinking that only "noble" academia is the way to advance humankind.
- jqm 11y ago
  No. Absolutely no. A net positive is not being realized for humanity when you consider all the factors in this type of behavior. What this is a wasteful process of leaching excessive production into the bank accounts of people pretending to be productively engaged. I have to agree with OP. Far too many big companies are busy trying to figure out how to game the system and cheat the consumers and have become filled with ladder climbers who have long since lost sight of the original mandate assigned to them by the system. This probably won't last very long historically speaking and it might not end well either. It's unbalanced, unjust, corrupt and just plain wrong. Incidentally, the companies job is OP's job. Companies don't exist without people.

alexholehouse 11y ago

Posts like this (and there are many of them) scare me. I'm in the latter half of a PhD. I love it. I work insane hours entirely out of my own choice, because it is the most rewarding and enjoyable thing I've ever been a part of. The idea that I've found something that I love, that is challenging, that (I hope) I'm relatively good at, and that has a definite net positive good for us as a species/society, yet I may not be able to pursue this long term because of the immense challenges facing academia as a whole (catalyzed, I would argue, by tragic lack of funding) is really concerning, on both a personal and a societal level.

javert 11y ago
> catalyzed, I would argue, by tragic lack of funding No, you don't get it. There is tons of funding. But academia is a corrupt old-boys network. Those petty, conniving people rise to the top and ultimately control the system. - A grad student (who regrets going to grad school)
- alexholehouse 11y ago
  Does that mean a lack of funding can't catalyze the issue? Edit: Just for transparency (topical!) I did not downvote you, and totally agree that cronyism is a major (and yeah maybe causative) issue, but I also think the decision on how to fund is basically an entirely separate problem which really doesn't have an obviously good solution (in my mind).
  - javert 11y ago
    Make the companies that profit from the research do the research themselves, in house, and pay for it and direct it themselves. That's the only way. You can't set up academia as a soviet-style bureaucracy and expect it to perform any differently from a soviet-style bureaucracy.
    - sanotehu 11y ago
      What, like the pharmaceutical industry? I would argue that much good knowledge is created that way but it, too, has its issues. See much of Ben Goldacre's work. http://www.badscience.net/ http://www.badscience.net/

w1ntermute 11y ago

Another possible (unspoken) reason why Gariépy is resigning is presumably that he's been a postdoc[0] for the last 3-4 years[1]. Unfortunately, the nature of modern biomedical research is such that you need an army of researchers to do the mechanical grunt work at the lab bench that leads to papers. This has led to a glut of postdocs, who are underpaid, overworked, and have little hope of ever obtaining a permanent academic position[2]. And even at top universities, industry positions are quite difficult to get without putting time and effort that you don't have to spare into extensive networking[3]. During his postdoc, Gariépy's had one second-author publication in Nature Neuroscience[4], which probably wasn't enough to get a tenure-track professorship. If, like the first author on that paper, he had gotten an assistant professorship at a prestigious university[5], he probably wouldn't be airing his dirty laundry. Also note that he is a YouTuber[6] and has a book coming out according to his Twitter profile[7], so he's probably trying to leverage any notoriety he gets from ragequitting his postdoc to jumpstart his career in science journalism. 0: http://today.duke.edu/node/132805 http://today.duke.edu/node/132805 1: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanfrancoisgariepy https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanfrancoisgariepy 2: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc-researchers-stirs-quiet-crisis-science/HWxyErx9RNIW17khv0MWTN/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc-re... 3: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/09/02/cambridge-planners-take-kendall-fat-chunkies/k9SuETiCJSVj5UveEUEoLK/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/09/02/cambridge-pl... 4: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v16/n2/abs/nn.3287.html http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v16/n2/abs/nn.3287.html 5: https://medicine.yale.edu/neuroscience/people/steve_chang.profile https://medicine.yale.edu/neuroscience/people/steve_chang.pr... 6: http://neuro.tv/ http://neuro.tv/ 7: https://twitter.com/JFGariepy https://twitter.com/JFGariepy

javert 11y ago
You can say that. But, he's still right.
- protomyth 11y ago
  Not the OP, but of course he's right. On the other hand, there is bit of a different between one of the princes of the kingdom abdicating his title while leaving the kingdom and a common person leaving the kingdom. Grant writing is a very painful form of writing and I have relatives that have made good money by being good at it[1]. I do believe it would be tough to do research and put the time in to be an acceptable grant writer. Something has got to give. 1) for those writing grant to certain government agencies, yeah, there is an old-boys/girls-club and using an "out" word in your grant is a killer (I've drank a lot of beer over the evolution of the word 'empowerment'). One tip my aunt told me is to volunteer to be a grant reader in DC. You see what everyone else is writing, know why things got accepted, and meet the people in charge.

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javert 11y ago

As a grad student, he's right and I'm glad he's saying it. (I'm in CS, though, not biology.)

qCOVET 11y ago

I absolutely agree with everything in this post. When I was a post doctoral fellow, my principal investigator would publish at least one paper a month. She was celebrated in the department. (a) The papers were published in journals like - Journal of Green Donkey Testicles, Journal of differentiation of dying mouse ... Journals that I had never heard of, had no impact and every tiny bit of an experiment that was conducted in the lab, would get published, without a full picture. (b) Much of the data was turned into data by turning everything into being 'statistically significant' . I would do experiments and I would see no freaking difference between control and experimental, yet, through the magic of statistics, she would find the difference. It was lame and depressing. (c) Above is an isolated example. There are countless smart, diligent and hard working professors who continue to push the boundaries of science (ex. my amazing PhD prof, whom I dearly love and admire). Unfortunately, their time is plagued by writing grants after grants, fighting inter-departmental politics, dealing with Chair of the department on regular basis ... basically stuff that distracts them from having the time to relax, think and innovate. (d) Commercialization of innovations in schools and universities are butchered by the IP policies, where by the University would take 1/3, the commercialization office would take 1/3 and the poor researcher is left with the rest. This kills innovation + tech commercialization and the desire of a researcher to be an entrepreneur.

elliptic 11y ago
Regarding d) - how much do you think the researcher, much of whose work was presumably funded by taxpayer dollars, should get?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- eloff 11y ago
  Since the income generated is taxed anyway, Some of the proceeds go back to where they came from. An investment of sorts. The university and commercialization office should probably get cuts more commensurate with their contributions, whatever that may be.
- 11y ago

Al-Khwarizmi 11y ago

The CS field gets a lot of bashing for gravitating a lot around conferences rather than journals. Because, you know, journals are supposed to be the serious venue for the grown-ups. But actually, CS conferences (at least the ones I've published in) have a double-blind review system that feels much fairer than the single-blind in the top journals. Of course it's far from perfect (more often than not the reviewers can guess the affiliation of the authors anyway) but things like almost needing to talk to the editor to publish papers, or the editor using author name as an important acceptance criterion, do not happen AFAIK. In general my experience with reviews has felt much fairer in conferences with double blind system than in the typical journals with editorial boards full of sacred cows. And I don't say that out of spite for rejection, because in fact I've had more rejections in conferences than in journals. A pity that in my country (Spain) the bureaucratic requirements for funding, tenure, etc. are one-size-fits-all and basically conferences count almost nothing and journals are everything, even if in my particular subfield no one cares about journals. So I end up playing a double game: publishing some papers where I know I should to find the right audience, and others where I am forced to to survive.

sanotehu 11y ago
Would you mind explaining the double-blind review in CS conferences? I'm a doctor by trade so am well acquainted with the way peer-review works but I've never heard of conferences being reviewed, either before-the-fact as an acceptance criterion or after-the-fact as a kind of rating.
- Al-Khwarizmi 11y ago
  In the context of peer review (at least in CS), "single-blind" means that the authors don't know who the reviewers are, and "double-blind" means that additionally, the reviewers don't know who the authors are. Conferences with double-blind review require papers to be anonymized, avoiding any mentions of author names or affiliations in the PDF submitted for review, as well as other obvious elements that would reveal the identity of the authors (e.g. "As we showed in a previous paper [4], ...")

alexmuro 11y ago

I work as a researcher in a grant funded lab, I can see where this post is coming from. There is a lot of needless politics in academia, and often the right things are not rewarded. However no matter what set of actions you choose to reward, people will find a way to game that system. The criticism in this post, while at least partly true, is too cynical to make a difference in any way. Sure, there are a lot of poor and useless papers published and terrible labs in the US University research system, but the search for knowledge is moving undeniably forward under this system.

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luckydude 11y ago

Years ago, like 1999 or so, I chaired a Linux conference. The Usenix people wanted me to fold Linux into Usenix and thought (probably mistakenly) that I could bring those people to Usenix. I said sure on condition: all papers are blind reviewed going forward. No authors, nothing that could identify the authors in the papers until they are accepted. Usenix flat out refused. Which sort of backs up what this guy is saying. Sad state of affairs.

stefantalpalaru 11y ago

> The editor later proceeded to explain to us why he was inquiring about the reputation of these scientists: "I'm asking to make sure that I accept articles from reputable people. Because you see, at , we want to do real science, not Richard-Dawkins-type science." I remember discreetly crying for an hour that night at the conference's bar, not because that man was unjustifiably mean to one of the most intelligent scientists in the world, but because I had come to the realization that our system of scientific publication was governed by people who have no idea what knowledge is. It's not just the people governing it. It's the system itself: you are vetted by the only people who understand what you write - the other members of your own little tribe. The editor is not supposed to understand what he publishes, he just asks the opinion of your colleagues, anonymizes slightly the responses (you can still tell who's who by their style) and gives them to you so you can reply. Afterwards the music starts again, you switch chairs and it's your turn to review your peer's article. Is there any wonder why this lead to heaps of useless research and widespread enhanced interrogation of meaningless data? And no, Richard Dawkins is not "one of the most intelligent scientists in the world", he's just somebody you like and you extended your character judgment to every aspect of his work because you took the same shortcut as that editor: he's in your opinion one of the good ones. And your opinion is that of someone using Facebook as a blogging platform ;-)

jessaustin 11y ago
It does seem unlikely that any random group of scientists (or people in general, for that matter) are going to be of one mind with respect to Dawkins.

peterwwillis 11y ago

As a lay person, it was pretty ridiculous and slightly horrifying to learn how much time and effort my scientist friends have to put into fulfilling irrelevant academic criteria just to be allowed to work on the research they are incredibly passionate about. In 'Scientific Progress Goes "Boink!"', Calvin and Hobbes build a duplicator machine out of a cardboard box. If they were researchers, they'd first have to go to school for X years, graduate, apply for a position at a research institution that kind-of does research into duplicators, get accepted, and then spend years working research around how cardboard boxes work, spend more time writing grants and trying to publish their cardboard box research, and maybe one day a board will green-light them for actually being able to research how to duplicate something. How can we tell the people with money to stop funding this stupid system?

cma 11y ago
I think any funding system we come up with that gives out funds to uncredentialed children and stuffed animals is probably going to turn out to be a disaster. If systems have to pass that as a litmus test, I think many good systems would fail.
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  Very funny, but we're talking about a situation where they were fully capable of designing and building the device.
  - cma 11y ago
    A system that needs to have no filtering so that kids don't get filtered out is unnecessarily broad. If it hits this one comic book false negative, too bad.
    - Dylan16807 11y ago
      In a world where children are as competent as they think they are, the system should let confident children have a shot (they don't need much funding anyway). More seriously you're taking the analogy a bit too literally. It's about time spent using competency vs. time spent signalling competency. The latter should be nowhere near a majority.

krick 11y ago

I don't really see, what people mean when they "agree" or "disagree" with this article and the likes of it. Aside of expressing his own disappointment the author points out what is wrong with the academic research, that's true. But point out what is wrong, though isn't useless, is a lot easier than suggest (even pretty lousy) better alternative. It's easy to imagine how everyone should be free to explore whatever he wants in his own free time, with his own money, at his own home lab (although even this isn't true, because currently even the most basic stuff needed for research in chemistry or biology is illegal to freely buy and sell, as it can be used to produce drugs or bombs or because of some other "national security" bullshit). But what the author is talking about isn't his own time and money — it's expecting to be provided with all stuff he needs for research and for him to live and prosper. And if someone is about to give you all that, your promise that you'll discover something great eventually isn't really enough for him. Quite understandably so. So ideally he would like to make sure that you, both: won't use all money and lab equipment that's given to you to smoke crack and do nothing; and that you are actually able to discover something great. Which, I guess, even you yourself won't promise, because you don't know. So, in fact, even with all that bureaucracy we cannot have any guarantees. And author wants for the system not only to work, but to work without putting too much pressure on him and his colleagues. How he imagines that? He doesn't explain clearly enough.

rwallace 11y ago
The problem is that excessive competition in a system originally designed to ensure research money was spent well, is now actually causing the money to be spent badly. Asking for concrete suggestions for improvement is perfectly fair. Here are two things that could be done that would help. First, ideally, flood the system with money, fund science the way it should be funded, as though it actually mattered as much as entertainment or killing people. Again, providing ten times as much money would produce more and better science per dollar not just in total. Second, failing that, filter PhD applicants by random lottery; discard a randomly selected 80% or however many it takes, before moving forward as currently.

akhilcacharya 11y ago

I'm assuming that he'll be recruited by Google next.

noelsusman 11y ago

Something like 90% of people working in academia have pretty much the same opinion. This isn't anything that hasn't been said a thousand times over already. The real question is how do we solve it? I've seen tons of people complain about the state of academia (myself included), but I have yet to see a workable solution to the problem.

danieltillett 11y ago
There are quite a few options that have been proposed, the real problem is we are not applying science to solving it. We need to do the studies to find out what maximises quality scientific output and then scale out. The reason this is not done is the people at the top think the current system is working well, for them.

hyperion2010 11y ago

I met and worked with JF for 6 months. I learned an enormous amount working with him. His creativity in experimental design and his approach to answering questions was inspiring. Sadly, the fact that he is leaving academia does not surprise me. People who care more about doing good science than about publishing (those are absolutely NOT the same things) rarely make it in academia. Funding for true basic research has contracted significantly and scientific communities have become incredibly risk averse with regard to who and what they give grants to. The peer review system reviews based on social norms within that field, not on what is actually good science. Finally, training and education are still based on the guild system. People who actually want to advance the state of human knowledge, not just have an academic position, find this environment toxic. Best of luck to JF in his future endeavours. Academia is the true looser here.

sundarurfriend 11y ago

Non-facebook mirror: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=rz261piT http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=rz261piT

svisser 11y ago

Relevant one-page article: "On “Write-Only” Conferences" - http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/IEEE-IS_letter2007.pdf http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/IEEE-IS_letter2007.pdf (conferences in exotic locations for which you only need to submit an article to attend)

mcguire 11y ago
I don't quite get that letter. The IEEE has plenty of write-only conferences that are not in scenic locales; anyone who actually goes doesn't even get a good vacation, so no one actually attends. But it's still a publication.

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dang 11y ago
That's deeply unfair in the case of a non-native speaker: almost no one reaches foreign language proficiency at the level you're implicitly demanding, which is basically perfection. I don't know if this author is a native speaker but his name suggests he may not be. On HN, you should err on the side of charitability about this—especially since grammar peeves, though we all have them, are the quintessence of off-topic.

ching_wow_ka 11y ago

I am somewhat ignorant. What significant achievements does Dawkins hold in his field? All I know is that he's known for trying to convince others of his beliefs.

stefantalpalaru 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins#Work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins#Work
- jleyank 11y ago
  Here's his CV: http://www.fontem.com/archivos/usuarios/cv_521.pdf http://www.fontem.com/archivos/usuarios/cv_521.pdf

CSDude 11y ago

I will give an example how the system is broken. I am a masters student, and my advisor assigns me full reviews without even asking, in the fields that I do not even understand anything a little bit, not even in my area. I review them for him. Some dude's approval to a conference is at my hands. I do not feel in any position to review most of the papers I have been given and talking to my advisor does not help. So, I just accept them all if they do not have major style issues, and that's it.

mcguire 11y ago
Do what I did (unintentionally): suggest that they reject a major, name, researcher's paper because it's an unintelligible mess with no real results. I never had to review a paper again. Which is kind of a pity. I liked doing that, including learning enough about the topic to make something like intelligent comments.

fit2rule 11y ago

This article speaks to me of the most destructive force in our human world: the social collective. It seems that the majority of his ills are sourced directly from the dire circumstances of the mass collective operating on itself in a negative way - that there is something broken in the peer-acceptance process; perhaps it is indeed impossible to advance science without disassociation from the collective reality of all scientists, who - psycho-socially - desire to attain a social goal as an imperative before any kind of natural observation or 'progress' otherwise; i.e. the complaints of the author would be best addressed to nobody in particular; it is the fact of the anonymous-crowd-mass which produces the conditions degrading science, today. There are simply too many social machinations in play. The desire for acceptance at a banal level (grant money), the desire for acclaim at a banal level (peer review), the desire to be heard above the din of the masses, at a most banal level (publication requirements) - all of these banal instincts have accrued much caché in the zeitgeist as reasons for doing things. tl;dr sometimes you have to shake the sheets if you want to get a good sail on. No great explorer, adventurer, discoverer, scientist, engineer .. ever .. got that way because they followed the processes of the status quo. The fact that many of us must discover, and learn to stomach: life is not special for a majority of people. That includes scientists. It includes people who think they deserve otherwise. If you want to exceed and excel, propel the species forward: beware the collective. It will eat you.

bobwaycott 11y ago

This echoes closely (for me) what I experienced as a grad student before ultimately abandoning it. In 2005, I was pursuing my then-dream of joining the ranks of academia. I was a history & philosophy grad, and my field was 20th-century intellectual and cultural history (so, you know, a whole lot easier than and not at all like the real sciences). I'd grown somewhat tired of the expected vulture-like hovering about what had been the standard historiographical approaches of the past 30 years. Not because I did not find them valuable, insightful, meaningful, or worth continuing. I absolutely did. I continue to find them incredibly insightful. However, it just wasn't quite what I was looking for. I thought I had something better, something nobody was doing at all at that time in the field. For an entire year, I found myself locked in an endless struggle of presenting my case, arguing my thesis and its philosophical framework and merit, with every member of the department. I couldn't succeed in convincing a single prof to head my committee. Not one. There were long and impassioned debates. They asked a ton of questions, really forced me to dig further into proving the merits and value of the idea, constantly put me on the spot to really flesh out how I was going to support this idea. At first, I thought I was simply failing to make my case. I could accept that. It drove me to work harder to make my case. I slowly began realizing something else was up when, without fail, every prof hit a point of being no longer interested in hearing my arguments. This was signified--every single time--when they suggested they'd be willing to lead my committee if I would choose a topic that matched their research. They offered to take me on as their RA because I had so thoroughly proven my ability to quickly gain depth and breadth of understanding in a given topic. They even granted me a TA position by the end of the year to sweeten the pot (I'd been attending with no financial assistance at that point, paying the bill myself). After this happened with the last remaining prof, I finished the semester out, then emailed them all a thanks-but-no-thanks letter. I left the program. A month later, I received an email from one of the professors. It was a personal heads-up and invitation to attend an upcoming conference the university would be hosting. The keynote speaker just happened to be an expert on a philosopher who featured prominently in inspiring and underpinning my proposed work. The keynote topic was a talk about that philosopher's work, and a musing on how it needed to be included in historiography alongside the analytic categories employed for so long in modern historical scholarship. There was even a light-hearted mention by this prof of how much it sounded exactly like everything I'd been arguing in the department for a year, and how she thought I wouldn't want to miss hearing what an expert had to say on the topic. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ EDIT: couple word choices; formatting.

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DrNuke 11y ago

That's why in 2015 clusters like YC, if they achieve criticality, self-awareness and overall sustainability, have the chance to outgrow both unis and corps for meaningful and productive innovation.

mcguire 11y ago
On a small scale. There's no way that model will support decades-long, large collaboration work.

hosh 11y ago

The headless-chicken researchers sounds replaceable by AI. If survival is the main goal, then it is a short-sighted strategy.

bane 11y ago

I keep hearing about how miserable things are in academia and have come to perhaps a surprising conclusion: research and education need to be broken up. I know that there's arguments that the two should stay entangled, and that new research feeds quickly into education blah blah blah. But I personally think that the world is far better off with large, dedicated, quasi-commercial R&D labs and institutions like Xerox-Parc, Bell Labs, Howard Hughes Medical, Battelle, Microsoft Research etc. and that those research labs operate off of a "licensed innovation" model. It feels like these places are struggling (I might be wrong), but I'd argue for a vast expansion of this system on par with the university system, but without either being burdened by the needs of either one. Offer competitive industry pay and work on demand for commercial and public interest. A kind of kernel of this already exists, either big National Labs that try to spin out mature research paths into companies (giving the researches a shot at making it big as CEO or CTO of these new companies) or as dedicated commercial R&D firms that get hired to produce product ideas for commercialization. But I think it should be institutionalized in the same way universities are rather than running as independent as they do now. And then universities should get out of the research game altogether. I don't have real concrete ideas on how this should be done, but it would provide a better career track for smart people.

jleyank 11y ago
This might be useful for postdocs, but remember that the PhD degree is a research degree. Therefore, academia has to have some kind of research available for people to do. Assuming that the typical PhD in Chemistry anyway takes 4-6 years based on topic and level of support. The first two years are coursework and other prep work for entering the actual research process. Semester #5 is the prelim, which is the entry exam. The next 2-3 semesters are the golden time when other interests fall away, work progresses and the material that justifies the PhD gets done. After that comes writing up and doing whatever odds and ends the boss wants done or wants done to expand/round-out the dissertation or whatever. It's possible that lab-based PhD's take longer because the reactions have to work and yield the desired product. Also, a lot will depend on how often the student's in the lab (reactions have to be worked up, machine time has to be found, etc). Run 2x vs 1x daily has a direct impact on time-in-process. Fortunately, the non-lab PhD's can work pretty much anywhere as modern laptops are either sufficient or work well as front-ends to compute resources. The end result of this is 3-7 papers, which will be "stapled together" to make the dissertation. The work has to be "novel", and some people are lucky/good enough to produce something that's a win. Note that some of the best ideas in the field (possibly any field) come from 2-4th year grad students who don't know or care they're wrong... Oh, they might produce some code throughout this process, or some groups maintain a code base that pretty much every student contributes to (such as QM groups). Coming out of this process, the newly-minted PhD is now capable of doing an academic postdoc to either round out their training or start the path towards an academic position. Or, they can do an industrial postdoc or go directly into pharma or biotech (or the various support companies doing chemistry, software or whatever supporting these two areas). Think of the PhD as a union card, certifying the holder as being (vaguely?) capable of independent, organized work. Lab PhD's typically post-doc with the "other half" of their discipline: come out as a synthetic PhD, go work for a natural product group, etc. Once in pharma, they face a 3-6 year period where they're to learn various aspects of the medicinal chemistry process. They start as pairs of hands and end up, hopefully, as somebody who can run with at least part of a drug design or development project. Academia, for the most part, lacks the money or interest for this part of the training process - it's applied research with an eye towards the big return, and IP issues prevent publishing until projects die or go into the market. I suspect physics PhD's might have similar timelines, possibly delayed if they have to build their apparatus (or wait for time at CERN). I've heard that UK PhD's get through quicker, and it's possible European PhD's get through a little slower than North American due to a better funding environment? I've no understand of the schedule for things like Biology or Medical-related PhD's as that's totally outside my experience (personal and professional). Might be slower as the mice/cells/whatever can up and die on them. To close this spiel, while research labs have always provided a place for PhD's to go work (and still do), there's always problems due to security, funding, etc. If there was more money available, we'd end up with a better crop of postdocs and probably young professors with better home lives but that doesn't seem to be the trend of things right now. Given all the uncertainty over funding, finding a position, avoiding layoff/outsoucing/offshoring, ... I can see why people aren't interested in going this route. Those that do either have a "cause" they wish to follow/fulfill or they're really interested in the subject matter and want to take it farther than one can do with courses. If people want the $$, they'll do far better managing or funding people like I've described than being one.

vonklaus 11y ago

This is something thar is echoed all the time and it does not seem to be something limited or confined to academia, whoch makes it all the more unfortunate.

kaonashi 11y ago

Seems like the inevitable result of forcing scientists to be competitive in an activity which is inherently cooperative.

JesperRavn 11y ago

As someone who completed a PhD and knows many people who went on to academic positions, there tend to be three stages for people who come to accept the status quo. 1. A desire to make big breakthroughs in the field. 2. A frustration with the slow progress being made in the field, the apparent inability of the field to produce big breakthroughs, and the proliferation of papers whose net contribution to knowledge is small or zero. 3. An acceptance that the stagnation in the field is (1) partly an artifact of it being hard to recognize progress when it is happening and (2) a consequence of the fundamental nature of the discipline, e.g. all the simple elegant theories have been explored already. It's not that there are not problems in academia, but most academics (at least in my field) don't consider these to be a major barrier to progress. I was particularly wary of the claim: I will still publish my book, The Revolutionary Phenotype, which contains an important novel theory on the emergence of life. Surely a novel theory on the emergence of life would be of great interest in the field? At worst I imagine you would have to dress it up in some mathematical model. EDIT: I found a chapter from a previous version of the book in progress here: http://themoralsignal.com/TheMoralSignal%20-%20Chapter%201.pdf http://themoralsignal.com/TheMoralSignal%20-%20Chapter%201.p... readers can judge for themselves, but it didn't strike me as work that academia would be foolish for ignoring.

tete 11y ago

I hear that a lot. It kind of made me certain that I don't want to go for a PhD. I also frequently hear that it was a great time and that people should do it (very shortly summed up) "if they love science". But to be honest, there is a lot of people who are researchers and scientists without ever getting any kind of degree. Okay, not a lot as in the majority, but enough to be aware that it is valid to write papers, etc. and be accepted in research communities. I am not saying it is easy and it probably is way, way more unlikely, but then this sounds a lot like "if you really love science". I also agree that the utility part will probably be harder, so it may depend a lot on what you study. Those are all my assumptions, based on the things I heard. They are not really statements. I really want to hear what others think about that and especially where I am awfully wrong.

timtas 11y ago

Science is in trouble. Before long we'll owe an apology to medieval astrologers and barbers. What’s wrong with Science (http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21591549-and-nature-and-cell-nobel-prize-winner-attacks-elite-journals-whats-wrong http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2159154...) How science goes wrong (http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-re...) I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss Here's How. (http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800 http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-hel...) How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/feb/26/how-computer-generated-fake-papers-flooding-academia http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/feb/26/...) Bad Science – Study on Gay Marriage Was Fake, Gets Retracted (http://www.zmescience.com/science/bad-science-michael-lacour-26052015/ http://www.zmescience.com/science/bad-science-michael-lacour...) Some Online Journals Will Publish Fake Science, For A Fee (http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/10/03/228859954/some-online-journals-will-publish-fake-science-for-a-fee http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/10/03/22885995...) The Mind of a Con Man (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-...) Why Biomedical Research Has A Reproducibility Problem (http://footnote1.com/why-biomedical-research-has-a-reproducibility-problem/ http://footnote1.com/why-biomedical-research-has-a-reproduci...) I could go on but...you know...Google.

xjlin0 11y ago

Cannot agree with him more, on every words from this post. Using just the publication score as the measurement on the scientific research is actually killing the entire field.

freshhawk 11y ago

This is a sentiment I've heard from a lot of my friends in academia. I hope the author isn't also similar to those friends of mine in another way: assuming that the marketing job that private industry has done when comparing themselves to academia is true. That things are more rational and productive outside academia. That they won't just enter another game played by chickens with no heads that has slightly different rules. That they won't spend most of their time doing useless bullshit that the system demands they produce even though it does nothing to further the goals they are supposed to be advancing. I liked the piece, so I do hope the author ends up preferring the different kind of pointless make-work the alternatives provide him.

aflyax 11y ago

Every single Ph.D. on my data science team has pretty much said the same thing (independently). The way I put it: Academic science is a branch of the entertainment industry in a socialist sub-economy.

pfooti 11y ago

FWIW, I have a PhD and spent five years as an assistant professor. I then went on to take a different job as a lecturer for a few years before leaving academia completely. The general complaint JF raised rings true. In my field (learning sciences), there was a TON of jank publications. The majority of the published work still is stuff that exists solely to increment the author's publication count. The term "least publishable unit" was used unironically. The focus is flawed. There is still a lot of good work being done in the system, but that work is really only 10% of the work that is done. I had to choose between artificially inflating my pub count and not making tenure. In the end, I decided to walk away - I personally don't have the kind of perseverance necessary for that. Of course, I now make significantly more money and am actually appreciated by my colleagues (rather than viewed as competition), and still get to contribute real work in the field in a private sector nonprofit instead. And I get to program too (in LS at least it was all publications, the software you created didnt count for anything.)

mangamadaiyan 11y ago

I almost did a Ph.D. Luckily, my prof and I didn't get along too well, and I escaped with just a Master's degree. To this day, my prof doesn't list me in his page (all other students before and after me are listed, and the lone publication I have with him is listed too).

akulbe 11y ago

My biggest concern with this is that it devalues education even further. Many potential/current/former students are questioning the value of higher education. If you cannot trust the researchers, then how can anything be trusted? If it's just one big good-old-boy system, what's the point?