5 ms·

I'm curious why this field hasn't been "privatized" to some degree. Why doesn't division of labor apply? Why not have scientists go off and do their research an

I'm curious why this field hasn't been "privatized" to some degree. Why doesn't division of labor apply? Why not have scientists go off and do their research and rely on a team that is skilled at hoarding grants or publishing works from raw data? I imagine it's probably due to some institutional barriers (e.g. you can't get funding outside of a university context). I imagine the reason is as always - our leaders are two-faced in their support of science. They claim that it's a national issue but fail to make professorship even remotely competitive in the hard sciences. This kind of thing raises the most righteous indignation in me. We have a nation of know-nothing politicians claiming "We need more kids in STEM!" without doing anything to address the quagmire academia has become, largely because of over-competition for resources. For all of this myopia around STEM it's largely a misnomer. No one in industry cares about climate science, geology, theoretical physics, abstract algebra, topology, combinatorics or number theory - at least not in the dollars and cents view. They may care insofar as there's a cash benefit, but not to the degree that they care about building better oil pipelines, faster algorithms and more efficient fabrics. So what we end up with is a world where Nike, Facebook and Exxon Mobil attract the best talent - a world where PhD's are basically forced to quit their jobs in order to go make money for the bourgeois.

hash-set 10y ago
It's because the whole rotten mess that is academia is dying, that's why.
sseagull 10y ago
> Why not have scientists go off and do their research and rely on a team that is skilled at hoarding grants or publishing works from raw data? Partly because science is very specialized. If I work on something new, then it's possible there is very few people in the world that know it or will easily understand it. I couldn't have someone else write a paper or grant proposal based on it - either they wouldn't understand it, or they are a fellow scientist who wouldn't want to do it either. The mistake, in my opinion, is making the number of papers published a metric on which you determine a scientist's worth. Just like most metric-ization of society today, it's a bad idea.
- neuromantik8086 10y ago
  I disagree on your first point- I think that there could be someone else who could write a grant proposal for me, provided that they a) expressed an interest in grant writing over benchwork / data analysis and b) were fluent enough in the field's literature to be able to translate my ideas into bureaucratic prose more elegantly and efficiently than me. Such a hypothetical individual might have some overlap with the "scientific popularizer" roles that we see cropping up with figures like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye, in the sense that they could serve as a conduit between scientists and funding (whereas popularizers serve as links between scientists and the general public). The issue is that this kind of idealized division of labor can't exist in the current climate- there just isn't enough money to distribute a researcher's load across multiple specialists. This results in researchers being expected to juggle advising, grant writing, committee work, publishing, coding, analysis, and teaching, which creates more stress on researchers and poorer quality results. I do agree with you on your second point though- publish or perish is academia's equivalent to rank and yank.
  - neuromantik8086 10y ago
    As an aside, I doubt that psychology would be experiencing nearly the number of issues that it is now with replicability if psychologists were able to delegate their analysis to an in-house statistician for verification. Or maybe it would (assuming that the poor application of statistics is more of a socio-political issue, which might very well be the case).
    - nonbel 10y ago
      >"the poor application of statistics" It is actually statisticians who are at the root of the problem. There is no proper way to apply the statistics most people are taught (NHST). However, everyone tries (and fails) to come up with some way to use the stats because they can't believe they were taught to perform such a waste of time ritual. See here for a decent overview: http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf
- 10y ago

hash-set 10y ago

It's because the whole rotten mess that is academia is dying, that's why.

sseagull 10y ago

> Why not have scientists go off and do their research and rely on a team that is skilled at hoarding grants or publishing works from raw data? Partly because science is very specialized. If I work on something new, then it's possible there is very few people in the world that know it or will easily understand it. I couldn't have someone else write a paper or grant proposal based on it - either they wouldn't understand it, or they are a fellow scientist who wouldn't want to do it either. The mistake, in my opinion, is making the number of papers published a metric on which you determine a scientist's worth. Just like most metric-ization of society today, it's a bad idea.

neuromantik8086 10y ago
I disagree on your first point- I think that there could be someone else who could write a grant proposal for me, provided that they a) expressed an interest in grant writing over benchwork / data analysis and b) were fluent enough in the field's literature to be able to translate my ideas into bureaucratic prose more elegantly and efficiently than me. Such a hypothetical individual might have some overlap with the "scientific popularizer" roles that we see cropping up with figures like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye, in the sense that they could serve as a conduit between scientists and funding (whereas popularizers serve as links between scientists and the general public). The issue is that this kind of idealized division of labor can't exist in the current climate- there just isn't enough money to distribute a researcher's load across multiple specialists. This results in researchers being expected to juggle advising, grant writing, committee work, publishing, coding, analysis, and teaching, which creates more stress on researchers and poorer quality results. I do agree with you on your second point though- publish or perish is academia's equivalent to rank and yank.
- neuromantik8086 10y ago
  As an aside, I doubt that psychology would be experiencing nearly the number of issues that it is now with replicability if psychologists were able to delegate their analysis to an in-house statistician for verification. Or maybe it would (assuming that the poor application of statistics is more of a socio-political issue, which might very well be the case).
  - nonbel 10y ago
    >"the poor application of statistics" It is actually statisticians who are at the root of the problem. There is no proper way to apply the statistics most people are taught (NHST). However, everyone tries (and fails) to come up with some way to use the stats because they can't believe they were taught to perform such a waste of time ritual. See here for a decent overview: http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf
10y ago