11 ms·

Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system (2013)

378 points by ramgorur 10y ago

wazoox 10y ago
Jean-Pierre Sauvage (chemistry Nobel price 2016) said exactly the same thing recently. Working without pressure for 30 years in a state funded facility was central to his achievements.
- Odenwaelder 10y ago
  How can he know whether that's actually true? Everyone is troubled by the current state of science. How can we know whether that's not the standard old man's wish for the good old days?
  - mafribe 10y ago
    This is a really good question. As an old man in science who feels strongly that it was much better in the past (less admin, less evaluation BS, less pressure for funding etc), I do worry sometimes that the past wasn't better, and the undivided attention I could give to research as a PhD/postdoc was simply a tranquil niche my supervisor had carved out for his students (as I do for mine today), but that he faced similar pressures.
  - OJFord 10y ago
    I don't believe that's true of Higgs, since he said it of a period in which he was still 'in the system': > Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department > when they did research assessment exercises". A message > would go around the department saying: "Please give a > list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would > send back a statement: 'None.' " > > By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable > with the new academic culture.
    - greeneggs 10y ago
      He retired in 1996, but judging from his CV it looks like he stopped doing research in the 1960s or 70s. [1] His last research paper was published in 1979, and the paper before that was published in 1966. Perhaps he was an excellent teacher, but it doesn't seem like he needed to be in a research university. [1] http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/peter-higgs http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/peter-higgs
      - OJFord 10y ago
        I read it as yours being exactly the view he disliked; that his lack of published research papers did not correspond to any lack of his doing research.
        greeneggs 10y ago
        I don't know if he was doing research or not. (And I'm not trying to judge him either way, since I know almost nothing about him.) But when he was doing his Nobel-winning work, he was publishing on average about one paper per year. Then he published one paper in 13 years, and then zero papers in 17 years (and never again). He could have been doing research but unsuccessfully. He didn't lose his job. (One might argue that he should have, but I won't.) He just said that he would have a hard time finding a different job. Isn't that obvious? If you are looking for a new job at a research university with zero publications for 17 years, you can hardly expect departments to be dying to hire you. I think most people in that situation are not doing any research. Most researchers with ambitious research projects still manage to publish occasionally, not just for "the system" but for themselves. You want to know that you are making at least a little progress on something. Andrew Wiles, for example, published every year or two throughout his work, with the exception of one four-year gap. [1] No 17-year gap. [1] http://web.math.princeton.edu/WebCV/WilesBIB.pdf http://web.math.princeton.edu/WebCV/WilesBIB.pdf
- dasmoth 10y ago
  Also brings to mind John Sulston (Physiology and Medicine 2002), working for many years in a relatively low-key "staff scientist" job before emerging to lead some of the early genome projects. Quotes from [1]: >>> JG: You never entered the professorial track, but remained a staff scientist at the LMB. Did that suit your temperament? >>> JS: Absolutely. It was a very good fit for me. If there was something that I thought was important and worth doing, I could just focus on that, and the only pressure was from family life. It meant you had time to sort all this out and not feel the pressure that you had to cut corners or guess. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1756915/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1756915/
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Reminds me of the real history of Silicon Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo TL;DW The seeds are based on unrestrained spending of huge amounts of non-existing money by the government during WWII.
  - gnipgnip 10y ago
    I don't think you understand how money works.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Max Perutz, as quoted in his obituary: Impishly, whenever he was asked whether there are simple guidelines along which to organise research so that it will be highly creative, he would say: no politics, no committees, no reports, no referees, no interviews; just gifted, highly motivated people picked by a few men of good judgment. http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/feb/07/guardianobituaries.obituaries http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/feb/07/guardianobituari... Quoted by Geoffrey West, of the Santa Fe Institute. The presentation below describes the SFI's own approach to interdisciplinary research: http://fixyt.com/watch?v=w-8sbSPf4ko http://fixyt.com/watch?v=w-8sbSPf4ko
Odenwaelder 10y ago
He is probably right. The current academic environment is terrible and drives talented young researchers out of basic research. But still, it delivers. The question for me is, does it deliver more, less or the same amount of knowledge than during Higgs's time?
- MichaelBurge 10y ago
  There are more people in the world, so probably more schools, which means more teachers. So, there is probably more research volume.
  - VLM 10y ago
    To test that theory consider something unrelated like fine arts. Surely a ten million person city has more people with job title "artist" than a million person city, probably ten times as much. For the sake of argument say that when the western world measured populations in many tens of millions we got a legendary level playwright every millenia. Now that world culture has a hundred times the participants, we should have a legendary level playwright appear every decade or so. Just not seeing it. We have good playwrights, sure, but not legendary level every decade. The upper end of mental scales, IQ or whatever, does not seem to follow the usual statistics for QA/QC of machine screw production or whatever simple industrial theory. On a purely numerical basis the world wide English Literature academic community should have maybe ten Shakespeare level professors active right now. If we do have those people, they don't have the job title "English literature professor". So where are they? Part of the problem is "shoulders of giants". Perhaps I personally could have invented the calculus, but Newton beat me to it, so I'll never amount to much there. Under that theory unless we lose information as a culture, eventually academia will become perfectly sterile and actual advance will cease, although we can trust numerical metrics will increase forever into perpetuity as they always do unless confronted with reality, which in the case of that metric, is impossible.
    - jnicholasp 10y ago
      > So where are they? There are two questions here, I think: are there a proportionately greater number of people in the world today with Shakespeare-level talent for language; and do those who exist now have the same chance of being recognized and lionized as Shakespeare did? I don't know how we could answer the first question, but I assume it's roughly correct, just on faith in the statistical likelihood of the normal distribution of IQ/talent holding true. The second question maybe gives us some way to account for why we don't seem to see them, though. For one thing, people with that set of talents have a much wider set of fields to go into, now: in Shakespeare's time, people with literary talent could write poetry, or plays (or, as he did, both), and not much else. Today, both of those are sub-divided into lots of sub-genres, and prose fiction exists (and is also highly sub-divided), and prose non-fiction, and song-writing, and journalism, and writing for tv and movies, etc. We wouldn't expect to see every current Shakespeare working solely as a playwright: we should be looking across all the fields that need literary talent, if we want to accurately count today's Shakespeares. And we need to consider whether a Shakespeare-level talent today has any reasonable chance of getting Shakespeare's level of recognition and admiration. There is so much more content today that any one person's output can't get nearly the attention and focus that the smaller world of Elizabethan England could give to Shakespeare. Achieving 'legendary' status probably depends less on absolute talent level than on how much one stands out from one's competitors - that's much harder to do in a larger, more sophisticated world. You would probably have to be significantly better than Shakespeare today to stand out as much as he did in his time. Going back to the sciences, the situation is a little different because it probably is the case, as you suggested, that the field is finite and there will probably come a time when there is nothing significant for a new Newton to discover, and thereby be recognizable as a Newton-level mind. That's less the case for the arts - the working space there is much larger, possibly infinite. But the increasing sophistication and the growing number of fields to work in is the same in science as in literature, and so is the consequent dilution of attention and recognition. I'm not sure that conditions now allow us to reliably recognize our geniuses.
mpweiher 10y ago
When I was first exposed to the research "environment" during my Diplom studies (undergraduate - graduate, early to mid 90ies), I immediately recognised that if you actually love research and knowledge, academia was the last thing you ever want to get into. No surer way to kill the spark. Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student. Interestingly, that's also the feedback I get, though as "helpful" advice that while what I am doing may be both good and important, it is unlikely to lead to success in academia. With the implication that I should stop doing it and concentrate on something more reasonable. Fortunately, I am not particularly interested in success in modern academia, so I get to do something I consider both good and important. A related issue is that there really is no such thing as a senior researcher. Instead, professors are turned into research managers, responsible for helping their charges' careers, who then also turn into research managers. Actual research appears to be mostly a still not entirely avoidable side-effect. (And this seems similar to the way the only real way to advancement in industry is to switch to management, all dual-track equivalence rhetoric aside).
- HSO 10y ago
  > Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student. Interesting, your experience matches mine very closely! I once quit a doctoral program in disgust but once I had enough money to fund myself, I could go back to become, perhaps similar to you, a "not regular PhD student" and create a more suitable situation for myself. Not only did I become free in my choice of research topic and collaborators/supervisors. More importantly, I was able to reject proposed, "faster" topics that would have led more immediately to bite-sized, publishable results. As a result, I was able to find and work on something I believe could be fundamental in my field. On a sidenote, I just started re-reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I am growing more and more convinced that the right way to do something important in today's academic environment (that's the link to OP) is the sort of half-half position that seems to be our shared experience. If you are too much of an insider, you might end up doing "normal science". If you are too much of an outsider, the risk is high that you are/become just another crank. Half-half seems like a good position. Maybe a few decades ago, it was still possible to hold an academic position and maintain one's independence. Today, a full-fledged, conventional academic career seems hard to square with a free spirit, what with all the dross of admin and the drag of teaching duties.
erikb 10y ago
I can feel him. It is not just in science, but in business as well. People want results, not understand their problems. And they want them yesterday, despite only telling you about it today. In some regards it's just a trick to keep you working hard for them. But still it's neither fun nor actually productive. It's great to work with freelancers though, since from the good ones you can learn how to handle that situation: Don't give users, customers, management enough information to really control you, understand that you are the one providing the results or not, and don't talk about your work but only about that part of the results that they actually care about. This way they don't consider you unproductive or incompetent, but that they need you. They still hate you, but they hate you because they need you. And that you can use to actually solve problems, take the time you need, and thereby provide the results they really need.
- return0 10y ago
  > but in business as well I think business is more ruthless. It won't let you waste too much time in a false belief that your product or science will become successful. That leads to faster iteration.
  - erikb 10y ago
    Maybe yeah. I haven't worked in science yet, so zero experience with that. In any case the feeling may be the same though. If the "super productive" business is faster than the "super productive" science, then the old school business was probably also faster than old school science.
  - pcrh 10y ago
    In the pharmaceutical business at least, huge sums of money are frequently spent on strategies that even graduate students could point out as being unlikely to succeed. The reasoning behind these unproductive decisions is almost always "markets".
    - adrianratnapala 10y ago
      Can you elaborate on how this works? Do you mean there is (in effect) some kind of market for vapourware, so companies work on things that sound good even though they predictably can't work? Who benefits?
dschuetz 10y ago
I ditched my academics career and went into public service. I expected to do actual science, instead I ended up studying bad papers which cost huge piles of money. I feel sorry for the naive and the burnt-out young academics. Potential wasted all the way.
DrNuke 10y ago
A strong will is needed to do research in the dark, you are going to sacrifice a lot and as an outsider you will almost always be looked down, very often rightly so (because you miss the day-to-day peer review that at the very least avoids you methodological or execution mistakes).
leksak 10y ago
This may be a symptom of the hyper-connective world we live in today. You observe this phenomenon elsewhere outside of academia as well. There is an intense pressure to distinguish oneself from the greater body of people occupying the same industry as yourself. Consider that a vibrant Github profile is essentially a prerequisite to be considered as an engaged professional in software engineering these days. It doesn't matter if you have ethical qualms about Github, or spend most of your day doing... your day job. A 22-year old shouldn't have to fret about not having enough public repositories or not having contributed enough to open-source. I'd expect any craftsman to start producing their best work well into their career, and not at the start of it.
- trendia 10y ago
  Ethical qualms about Github? Could you explain? Should I worry about hosting my code there?
  - leksak 10y ago
    Beyond uptime concerns (which Github manages very well) is the fact that it is closed source, and whenever you use a closed system but that provides very good services for free you yourself is the commodity. Beyond that, dozzie's remark is very much on point, the host could become tainted in the same way as for instance SourceForge. Fortunately, the distributed nature of Git means that you are unlikely to "lose" your source-code. But really you have no control over your code, it is their liberty to censor it if they please. The primary issue, as far as I am concerned, is that while I can clone and go elsewhere is that Github is the centralized hub for (FL)OSS today. Everything lives there. If you are not on there, you are de facto invisible. A better alternative, as far as I am considered, would be a distributed net of "self-hosted" Gitlab instances. I am not comfortable with all the bad press that Github has suffered regarding gender equality, but I feel that I am suffering from vendor lock-in due to the success of the platform.
    - hilop 10y ago
      If GitHub censors your code, or even if they don't, you can publish it elsewhere
partycoder 10y ago
The problem is that universities and journals are ranked. Rankings are based, in part, on metrics related to publications and citations and that's the utility function they try to optimize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish
bvv 10y ago
Peter Higgs published about 5 scientific papers after his Nobel-winning work in 1964 until his retirement in 1996, none of which were particularly impressive. I think this is below any reasonable standards, not just below contemporary academic standards. Therefore, barring special circumstances like an exemplary teaching record, in my opinion Edinburgh University would have been right to sack him and replace him with a more productive person. In short: I don't think that Higgs nearly getting sacked is an accurate indication that academia has too much of a 'publish or perish' culture.
- js8 10y ago
  I would go even further. Look at history of art - most artists were just alcoholic bums, such as Verlaine. We would be better off as a society if we made those people more productive than writing poetry, for example, they could be soldiers.
  - augustt 10y ago
    I'm definitely not in the humanities camp, but I don't see how someone who produced work that presumably thousands of people found value in would be less beneficial to society than yet another person to die at war.
  - hilop 10y ago
    If you are being sarcastic, it isn't working. Did Verlaine have a lifetime paid appointment to not create any poetry? While other artists were soldiers because they needed income?
    - js8 10y ago
      The point is it's about time horizon. The parent would decide that in early days of Higgs' career, he wasn't productive enough, and thus he would prevent him making the discovery for which he is famous. Likewise, at the time Verlaine, it would be more productive if he was just sent to war. But from a longer time horizon, nobody really cares about those people in the 1950s having to support Peter Higgs living, or about people not having Verlaine in the army. We care about their results differently now. I wish that timescale is the one thing that people who use the word "productivity" or "efficiency" would understand. There is no universal optimum, it depends on the time horizon you're looking at. And while I am at it, let me make another comment to the article. I think today, we are so obsessed about efficiency of other people working, because there simply aren't enough jobs for everybody (due to automation). Since having a job (in a general sense) is customarily a requirement to being fed, most humans optimize towards not actual productivity, but an appearance of productivity. All these attempts to measure productivity are just a symptom of this problem - we desperately need something with which we can bang people in control of resources over their heads with, so that we could eat. In other words, most jobs are changing from doing actual work into proving to other people in society that you did, ever so diminishing, amount of work. It's a shift in the focus of the competition, and unless we collectively realize that we can just lay back and don't need to actually compete, it won't get any better.
guelo 10y ago
It was cruel and unusual punishment by whoever it was that recommended that a scientist who doesn't watch television should watch that awful scientist insulting sitcom.
transposed 10y ago
"He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn't impressed." ... [choppy panted laughter]
- inlineint 10y ago
  "...to this day he owns neither a TV nor mobile phone, and only acquired his first computer on his 80th birthday." https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-interview-underlying-incompetence https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-... Perhaps he used his computer to watch it.
SubiculumCode 10y ago
The core problem are grant procedures. Universities get a 20%+ cut of grants a professor eecieved. Therefore they wants professors who receive lots of grants. Grant awarders are judged on their ability to choose applicants that create value using those funds. An easy metric is papers produced. And those who publish lots of papers in the past is a good predictor of future production. So these are the applicants that get funded. Another problem is the lack of funds for professor positions relative to the number of trained applicants. With so many qualified academics, departments have to use some metric to base decisions, and publications is more measurable (grant $$$) than scientific value.
- mattkrause 10y ago
  20+% is optimistic. Overhead rates (at R1s in the US) are closer to 50-70%. I've heard tell of places with extremely specialized facilities (like deep-sea research vessels) that charge nearly 100% overhead (i.e., to spend $50,000 on "your" research, you need to bring in at least 100,000).
  - SubiculumCode 10y ago
    Yes. But there is variability per institute and so was trying to be conservative in the lower threshold of the percentage cut. The university cut does make some sense. There are a lot of services on which PI's rely. Administration to handle hiring processes. Building maintenance and plumbing. But per usual, instead of just covering costs, it is viewed as revenue on which to grow the university (and admin pay). Actually, I am not sure whether university cut factors into funding decisions at NIH and the like.
    - mattkrause 10y ago
      Sure, I just wanted to put the actual numbers out there because 20% or so actually seems pretty fair for keeping the lights on, taking out the trash, etc, while 70+% is....a lot. On top of this, a lot of the....infrastructure is still fee-for-service. The university may fund the initial purchase of an MRI scanner (or whatever) out of overhead, but individual labs still pay $400+ an hour to use it. I don't know if the NIH or NSF takes overhead into account, but many of the most successful grantees also have some of the highest overhead so probably not. On the flip side, I've heard someone claim that their department chair strongly encouraged applying for NIH grants, because the NIH-negotatied overhead rate is much higher than other funders (also, allegedly more prestigious, but you'd think $500,000 spends about the same, regardless of where it comes from).
throwwit 10y ago
Eventually, the biggest consequence of a focus on incremental advancements may be that there will be no more 'Einsteins' or Higgses in a role-model sense.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 10y ago
A sign of the higher freq / lower amplitude of todays era ?
robotresearcher 10y ago
We expect senior professors to train students. How do you train students? By getting them to do work and write papers. If they haven't published by graduation time, they can't prove they can get the job done. This is the main reason that senior people produce a lot of papers - they have a lot of students. I've written a bunch of papers - I don't care any more about quantity. But I want each of my graduating students to have a publication or two so they can get a job. So we turn out a bunch of papers every year, and no, not every one is earth-shaking, partly because roughly every second paper is a student's first one and that's what they were capable of at the time. It's easy to miss this kind of dynamic from the outside.
- Tomminn 10y ago
  This is a great point. Although I would wager that the large quantity of mediocre papers your students have produced have not exactly harmed your own career. So, while your personal motives may be beyond repute, there will be many academics who think "This is the main reason senior people have a lot of students- they produce a lot of papers." Which is one of the dynamics that is troublesome. The marginal value of another PhD student to a senior professor is almost always fairly positive. Which means senior professors have an incentive to maximize the number of PhD students. This has two problems: 1) The value of the senior professor's mentorship to each PhD student diminishes (maybe almost linearly) with each PhD student added. 2) If each senior professor hires on average X PhD students per generation, approximately (1/X) of the those PhD students can become senior professors if the rate that academia grows is negligible compared to growing X times as large per generation. (And right now, X must be at least 20.)
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    Don't forget that a prof has to raise the money in ferocious competition to fund every student. Only successful profs can get enough money for a lot of students.
    - hueving 10y ago
      Not if they make the students teach.

378 points by ramgorur 10y ago

Jean-Pierre Sauvage (chemistry Nobel price 2016) said exactly the same thing recently. Working without pressure for 30 years in a state funded facility was central to his achievements.

Odenwaelder 10y ago
How can he know whether that's actually true? Everyone is troubled by the current state of science. How can we know whether that's not the standard old man's wish for the good old days?
- mafribe 10y ago
  This is a really good question. As an old man in science who feels strongly that it was much better in the past (less admin, less evaluation BS, less pressure for funding etc), I do worry sometimes that the past wasn't better, and the undivided attention I could give to research as a PhD/postdoc was simply a tranquil niche my supervisor had carved out for his students (as I do for mine today), but that he faced similar pressures.
- OJFord 10y ago
  I don't believe that's true of Higgs, since he said it of a period in which he was still 'in the system': > Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department > when they did research assessment exercises". A message > would go around the department saying: "Please give a > list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would > send back a statement: 'None.' " > > By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable > with the new academic culture.
  - greeneggs 10y ago
    He retired in 1996, but judging from his CV it looks like he stopped doing research in the 1960s or 70s. [1] His last research paper was published in 1979, and the paper before that was published in 1966. Perhaps he was an excellent teacher, but it doesn't seem like he needed to be in a research university. [1] http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/peter-higgs http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/peter-higgs
    - OJFord 10y ago
      I read it as yours being exactly the view he disliked; that his lack of published research papers did not correspond to any lack of his doing research.
      - greeneggs 10y ago
        I don't know if he was doing research or not. (And I'm not trying to judge him either way, since I know almost nothing about him.) But when he was doing his Nobel-winning work, he was publishing on average about one paper per year. Then he published one paper in 13 years, and then zero papers in 17 years (and never again). He could have been doing research but unsuccessfully. He didn't lose his job. (One might argue that he should have, but I won't.) He just said that he would have a hard time finding a different job. Isn't that obvious? If you are looking for a new job at a research university with zero publications for 17 years, you can hardly expect departments to be dying to hire you. I think most people in that situation are not doing any research. Most researchers with ambitious research projects still manage to publish occasionally, not just for "the system" but for themselves. You want to know that you are making at least a little progress on something. Andrew Wiles, for example, published every year or two throughout his work, with the exception of one four-year gap. [1] No 17-year gap. [1] http://web.math.princeton.edu/WebCV/WilesBIB.pdf http://web.math.princeton.edu/WebCV/WilesBIB.pdf
dasmoth 10y ago
Also brings to mind John Sulston (Physiology and Medicine 2002), working for many years in a relatively low-key "staff scientist" job before emerging to lead some of the early genome projects. Quotes from [1]: >>> JG: You never entered the professorial track, but remained a staff scientist at the LMB. Did that suit your temperament? >>> JS: Absolutely. It was a very good fit for me. If there was something that I thought was important and worth doing, I could just focus on that, and the only pressure was from family life. It meant you had time to sort all this out and not feel the pressure that you had to cut corners or guess. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1756915/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1756915/
Noseshine 10y ago
Reminds me of the real history of Silicon Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo TL;DW The seeds are based on unrestrained spending of huge amounts of non-existing money by the government during WWII.
- gnipgnip 10y ago
  I don't think you understand how money works.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Max Perutz, as quoted in his obituary: Impishly, whenever he was asked whether there are simple guidelines along which to organise research so that it will be highly creative, he would say: no politics, no committees, no reports, no referees, no interviews; just gifted, highly motivated people picked by a few men of good judgment. http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/feb/07/guardianobituaries.obituaries http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/feb/07/guardianobituari... Quoted by Geoffrey West, of the Santa Fe Institute. The presentation below describes the SFI's own approach to interdisciplinary research: http://fixyt.com/watch?v=w-8sbSPf4ko http://fixyt.com/watch?v=w-8sbSPf4ko

Odenwaelder 10y ago

He is probably right. The current academic environment is terrible and drives talented young researchers out of basic research. But still, it delivers. The question for me is, does it deliver more, less or the same amount of knowledge than during Higgs's time?

MichaelBurge 10y ago
There are more people in the world, so probably more schools, which means more teachers. So, there is probably more research volume.
- VLM 10y ago
  To test that theory consider something unrelated like fine arts. Surely a ten million person city has more people with job title "artist" than a million person city, probably ten times as much. For the sake of argument say that when the western world measured populations in many tens of millions we got a legendary level playwright every millenia. Now that world culture has a hundred times the participants, we should have a legendary level playwright appear every decade or so. Just not seeing it. We have good playwrights, sure, but not legendary level every decade. The upper end of mental scales, IQ or whatever, does not seem to follow the usual statistics for QA/QC of machine screw production or whatever simple industrial theory. On a purely numerical basis the world wide English Literature academic community should have maybe ten Shakespeare level professors active right now. If we do have those people, they don't have the job title "English literature professor". So where are they? Part of the problem is "shoulders of giants". Perhaps I personally could have invented the calculus, but Newton beat me to it, so I'll never amount to much there. Under that theory unless we lose information as a culture, eventually academia will become perfectly sterile and actual advance will cease, although we can trust numerical metrics will increase forever into perpetuity as they always do unless confronted with reality, which in the case of that metric, is impossible.
  - jnicholasp 10y ago
    > So where are they? There are two questions here, I think: are there a proportionately greater number of people in the world today with Shakespeare-level talent for language; and do those who exist now have the same chance of being recognized and lionized as Shakespeare did? I don't know how we could answer the first question, but I assume it's roughly correct, just on faith in the statistical likelihood of the normal distribution of IQ/talent holding true. The second question maybe gives us some way to account for why we don't seem to see them, though. For one thing, people with that set of talents have a much wider set of fields to go into, now: in Shakespeare's time, people with literary talent could write poetry, or plays (or, as he did, both), and not much else. Today, both of those are sub-divided into lots of sub-genres, and prose fiction exists (and is also highly sub-divided), and prose non-fiction, and song-writing, and journalism, and writing for tv and movies, etc. We wouldn't expect to see every current Shakespeare working solely as a playwright: we should be looking across all the fields that need literary talent, if we want to accurately count today's Shakespeares. And we need to consider whether a Shakespeare-level talent today has any reasonable chance of getting Shakespeare's level of recognition and admiration. There is so much more content today that any one person's output can't get nearly the attention and focus that the smaller world of Elizabethan England could give to Shakespeare. Achieving 'legendary' status probably depends less on absolute talent level than on how much one stands out from one's competitors - that's much harder to do in a larger, more sophisticated world. You would probably have to be significantly better than Shakespeare today to stand out as much as he did in his time. Going back to the sciences, the situation is a little different because it probably is the case, as you suggested, that the field is finite and there will probably come a time when there is nothing significant for a new Newton to discover, and thereby be recognizable as a Newton-level mind. That's less the case for the arts - the working space there is much larger, possibly infinite. But the increasing sophistication and the growing number of fields to work in is the same in science as in literature, and so is the consequent dilution of attention and recognition. I'm not sure that conditions now allow us to reliably recognize our geniuses.

mpweiher 10y ago

When I was first exposed to the research "environment" during my Diplom studies (undergraduate - graduate, early to mid 90ies), I immediately recognised that if you actually love research and knowledge, academia was the last thing you ever want to get into. No surer way to kill the spark. Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student. Interestingly, that's also the feedback I get, though as "helpful" advice that while what I am doing may be both good and important, it is unlikely to lead to success in academia. With the implication that I should stop doing it and concentrate on something more reasonable. Fortunately, I am not particularly interested in success in modern academia, so I get to do something I consider both good and important. A related issue is that there really is no such thing as a senior researcher. Instead, professors are turned into research managers, responsible for helping their charges' careers, who then also turn into research managers. Actual research appears to be mostly a still not entirely avoidable side-effect. (And this seems similar to the way the only real way to advancement in industry is to switch to management, all dual-track equivalence rhetoric aside).

HSO 10y ago
> Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student. Interesting, your experience matches mine very closely! I once quit a doctoral program in disgust but once I had enough money to fund myself, I could go back to become, perhaps similar to you, a "not regular PhD student" and create a more suitable situation for myself. Not only did I become free in my choice of research topic and collaborators/supervisors. More importantly, I was able to reject proposed, "faster" topics that would have led more immediately to bite-sized, publishable results. As a result, I was able to find and work on something I believe could be fundamental in my field. On a sidenote, I just started re-reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I am growing more and more convinced that the right way to do something important in today's academic environment (that's the link to OP) is the sort of half-half position that seems to be our shared experience. If you are too much of an insider, you might end up doing "normal science". If you are too much of an outsider, the risk is high that you are/become just another crank. Half-half seems like a good position. Maybe a few decades ago, it was still possible to hold an academic position and maintain one's independence. Today, a full-fledged, conventional academic career seems hard to square with a free spirit, what with all the dross of admin and the drag of teaching duties.

erikb 10y ago

I can feel him. It is not just in science, but in business as well. People want results, not understand their problems. And they want them yesterday, despite only telling you about it today. In some regards it's just a trick to keep you working hard for them. But still it's neither fun nor actually productive. It's great to work with freelancers though, since from the good ones you can learn how to handle that situation: Don't give users, customers, management enough information to really control you, understand that you are the one providing the results or not, and don't talk about your work but only about that part of the results that they actually care about. This way they don't consider you unproductive or incompetent, but that they need you. They still hate you, but they hate you because they need you. And that you can use to actually solve problems, take the time you need, and thereby provide the results they really need.

return0 10y ago
> but in business as well I think business is more ruthless. It won't let you waste too much time in a false belief that your product or science will become successful. That leads to faster iteration.
- erikb 10y ago
  Maybe yeah. I haven't worked in science yet, so zero experience with that. In any case the feeling may be the same though. If the "super productive" business is faster than the "super productive" science, then the old school business was probably also faster than old school science.
- pcrh 10y ago
  In the pharmaceutical business at least, huge sums of money are frequently spent on strategies that even graduate students could point out as being unlikely to succeed. The reasoning behind these unproductive decisions is almost always "markets".
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    Can you elaborate on how this works? Do you mean there is (in effect) some kind of market for vapourware, so companies work on things that sound good even though they predictably can't work? Who benefits?

dschuetz 10y ago

I ditched my academics career and went into public service. I expected to do actual science, instead I ended up studying bad papers which cost huge piles of money. I feel sorry for the naive and the burnt-out young academics. Potential wasted all the way.

DrNuke 10y ago

A strong will is needed to do research in the dark, you are going to sacrifice a lot and as an outsider you will almost always be looked down, very often rightly so (because you miss the day-to-day peer review that at the very least avoids you methodological or execution mistakes).

leksak 10y ago

This may be a symptom of the hyper-connective world we live in today. You observe this phenomenon elsewhere outside of academia as well. There is an intense pressure to distinguish oneself from the greater body of people occupying the same industry as yourself. Consider that a vibrant Github profile is essentially a prerequisite to be considered as an engaged professional in software engineering these days. It doesn't matter if you have ethical qualms about Github, or spend most of your day doing... your day job. A 22-year old shouldn't have to fret about not having enough public repositories or not having contributed enough to open-source. I'd expect any craftsman to start producing their best work well into their career, and not at the start of it.

trendia 10y ago
Ethical qualms about Github? Could you explain? Should I worry about hosting my code there?
- leksak 10y ago
  Beyond uptime concerns (which Github manages very well) is the fact that it is closed source, and whenever you use a closed system but that provides very good services for free you yourself is the commodity. Beyond that, dozzie's remark is very much on point, the host could become tainted in the same way as for instance SourceForge. Fortunately, the distributed nature of Git means that you are unlikely to "lose" your source-code. But really you have no control over your code, it is their liberty to censor it if they please. The primary issue, as far as I am concerned, is that while I can clone and go elsewhere is that Github is the centralized hub for (FL)OSS today. Everything lives there. If you are not on there, you are de facto invisible. A better alternative, as far as I am considered, would be a distributed net of "self-hosted" Gitlab instances. I am not comfortable with all the bad press that Github has suffered regarding gender equality, but I feel that I am suffering from vendor lock-in due to the success of the platform.
  - hilop 10y ago
    If GitHub censors your code, or even if they don't, you can publish it elsewhere

partycoder 10y ago

The problem is that universities and journals are ranked. Rankings are based, in part, on metrics related to publications and citations and that's the utility function they try to optimize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish

bvv 10y ago

Peter Higgs published about 5 scientific papers after his Nobel-winning work in 1964 until his retirement in 1996, none of which were particularly impressive. I think this is below any reasonable standards, not just below contemporary academic standards. Therefore, barring special circumstances like an exemplary teaching record, in my opinion Edinburgh University would have been right to sack him and replace him with a more productive person. In short: I don't think that Higgs nearly getting sacked is an accurate indication that academia has too much of a 'publish or perish' culture.

js8 10y ago
I would go even further. Look at history of art - most artists were just alcoholic bums, such as Verlaine. We would be better off as a society if we made those people more productive than writing poetry, for example, they could be soldiers.
- augustt 10y ago
  I'm definitely not in the humanities camp, but I don't see how someone who produced work that presumably thousands of people found value in would be less beneficial to society than yet another person to die at war.
- hilop 10y ago
  If you are being sarcastic, it isn't working. Did Verlaine have a lifetime paid appointment to not create any poetry? While other artists were soldiers because they needed income?
  - js8 10y ago
    The point is it's about time horizon. The parent would decide that in early days of Higgs' career, he wasn't productive enough, and thus he would prevent him making the discovery for which he is famous. Likewise, at the time Verlaine, it would be more productive if he was just sent to war. But from a longer time horizon, nobody really cares about those people in the 1950s having to support Peter Higgs living, or about people not having Verlaine in the army. We care about their results differently now. I wish that timescale is the one thing that people who use the word "productivity" or "efficiency" would understand. There is no universal optimum, it depends on the time horizon you're looking at. And while I am at it, let me make another comment to the article. I think today, we are so obsessed about efficiency of other people working, because there simply aren't enough jobs for everybody (due to automation). Since having a job (in a general sense) is customarily a requirement to being fed, most humans optimize towards not actual productivity, but an appearance of productivity. All these attempts to measure productivity are just a symptom of this problem - we desperately need something with which we can bang people in control of resources over their heads with, so that we could eat. In other words, most jobs are changing from doing actual work into proving to other people in society that you did, ever so diminishing, amount of work. It's a shift in the focus of the competition, and unless we collectively realize that we can just lay back and don't need to actually compete, it won't get any better.

guelo 10y ago

It was cruel and unusual punishment by whoever it was that recommended that a scientist who doesn't watch television should watch that awful scientist insulting sitcom.

transposed 10y ago

"He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn't impressed." ... [choppy panted laughter]

inlineint 10y ago
"...to this day he owns neither a TV nor mobile phone, and only acquired his first computer on his 80th birthday." https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-interview-underlying-incompetence https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-... Perhaps he used his computer to watch it.

SubiculumCode 10y ago

The core problem are grant procedures. Universities get a 20%+ cut of grants a professor eecieved. Therefore they wants professors who receive lots of grants. Grant awarders are judged on their ability to choose applicants that create value using those funds. An easy metric is papers produced. And those who publish lots of papers in the past is a good predictor of future production. So these are the applicants that get funded. Another problem is the lack of funds for professor positions relative to the number of trained applicants. With so many qualified academics, departments have to use some metric to base decisions, and publications is more measurable (grant $$$) than scientific value.

mattkrause 10y ago
20+% is optimistic. Overhead rates (at R1s in the US) are closer to 50-70%. I've heard tell of places with extremely specialized facilities (like deep-sea research vessels) that charge nearly 100% overhead (i.e., to spend $50,000 on "your" research, you need to bring in at least 100,000).
- SubiculumCode 10y ago
  Yes. But there is variability per institute and so was trying to be conservative in the lower threshold of the percentage cut. The university cut does make some sense. There are a lot of services on which PI's rely. Administration to handle hiring processes. Building maintenance and plumbing. But per usual, instead of just covering costs, it is viewed as revenue on which to grow the university (and admin pay). Actually, I am not sure whether university cut factors into funding decisions at NIH and the like.
  - mattkrause 10y ago
    Sure, I just wanted to put the actual numbers out there because 20% or so actually seems pretty fair for keeping the lights on, taking out the trash, etc, while 70+% is....a lot. On top of this, a lot of the....infrastructure is still fee-for-service. The university may fund the initial purchase of an MRI scanner (or whatever) out of overhead, but individual labs still pay $400+ an hour to use it. I don't know if the NIH or NSF takes overhead into account, but many of the most successful grantees also have some of the highest overhead so probably not. On the flip side, I've heard someone claim that their department chair strongly encouraged applying for NIH grants, because the NIH-negotatied overhead rate is much higher than other funders (also, allegedly more prestigious, but you'd think $500,000 spends about the same, regardless of where it comes from).

throwwit 10y ago

Eventually, the biggest consequence of a focus on incremental advancements may be that there will be no more 'Einsteins' or Higgses in a role-model sense.

deleted 10y ago

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agumonkey 10y ago

A sign of the higher freq / lower amplitude of todays era ?

robotresearcher 10y ago

We expect senior professors to train students. How do you train students? By getting them to do work and write papers. If they haven't published by graduation time, they can't prove they can get the job done. This is the main reason that senior people produce a lot of papers - they have a lot of students. I've written a bunch of papers - I don't care any more about quantity. But I want each of my graduating students to have a publication or two so they can get a job. So we turn out a bunch of papers every year, and no, not every one is earth-shaking, partly because roughly every second paper is a student's first one and that's what they were capable of at the time. It's easy to miss this kind of dynamic from the outside.

Tomminn 10y ago
This is a great point. Although I would wager that the large quantity of mediocre papers your students have produced have not exactly harmed your own career. So, while your personal motives may be beyond repute, there will be many academics who think "This is the main reason senior people have a lot of students- they produce a lot of papers." Which is one of the dynamics that is troublesome. The marginal value of another PhD student to a senior professor is almost always fairly positive. Which means senior professors have an incentive to maximize the number of PhD students. This has two problems: 1) The value of the senior professor's mentorship to each PhD student diminishes (maybe almost linearly) with each PhD student added. 2) If each senior professor hires on average X PhD students per generation, approximately (1/X) of the those PhD students can become senior professors if the rate that academia grows is negligible compared to growing X times as large per generation. (And right now, X must be at least 20.)
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  Don't forget that a prof has to raise the money in ferocious competition to fund every student. Only successful profs can get enough money for a lot of students.
  - hueving 10y ago
    Not if they make the students teach.