5 ms·

It's almost as if most research doesn't go anywhere. If I put you in a dark room, and ask you to find a way to light it, how many times will you fail to find t

It's almost as if most research doesn't go anywhere. If I put you in a dark room, and ask you to find a way to light it, how many times will you fail to find the switch? Oh wait, I lied. There's not actually a switch, but there might be a candle in that general direction. Maybe. That's how little we have to go off of. That's how empty any information on your study is. I don't think people really understand how hard this type of work is. Research is a purely exploratory and creative work. Like art, science requires time, patience, and many many failures. You don't just get a bunch of eureka-Einsteins that come out of MIT day one knocking down Theorems and discovering new physical laws. That's just not humanly possible and it's ridiculous if you think it'll ever work that way I am perfectly willing to admit that the vast majority of research and PhD's went nowhere and will continue to go nowhere for a long time. But that doesn't mean they're useless. Research requires exploration. It requires trial and error. It is highly inefficient and does not fit well in a consumerist society like ours, but this is the way that works best for us so far. If you have some better idea, then why don't you go out and do it? How are you going to get a bunch of incredibly intelligent, creative, and independent people funded and provided for in a society that values immediate results over long term achievements? I'm not arguing the academia system is perfect. Any one knows it's screwed up beyond belief. But it's not out of malice. We're not purposely trying to make the world worse, or something ridiculous like that. You have many people who care a lot about the science, who need to eat and sleep and need money to do that. Sometimes the money goes to their heads, sometimes their massive egos get the better of them, but do you seriously think we don't care about science? You'd have to be an idiot to do a PhD for the money or the fame. Why do you think we put 7+ years of our lives into stuff like this? So most PhDs don't actually get tenured positions. What are you actually trying to say? Are you saying there aren't enough tenured positions? Or are you implying that these PhDs don't deserve tenured positions? Do you have any evidence for either of those claims? Because otherwise you're just participating in more armchair speculation.

gaius 9y ago
A PhD is effectively an apprenticeship towards becoming a tenure-track professor. It's not unreasonable to wonder why we are investing so much in training so many people when there is so little demand for that training. The vast majority of PhDs end up in industry doing something barely related, and are no more productive at it than those with only a first degree or even no degree at all.
- JustFinishedBSG 9y ago
  > A PhD is effectively an apprenticeship towards becoming a tenure-track professor. No it's not, plenty of people get PhD with the goal of ending as a researcher in the industry.
  - davidgay 9y ago
    Or, even, shockingly, because they enjoyed doing research, even if they then don't spend the rest of their life doing research in academia or industry.
foldr 9y ago
I didn't read krick as suggesting that malice was involved. He/she was talking about the kind of work that the institutional structure of science tends to favor.
nnfy 9y ago
Perhaps your experience was different from mine. I went to a well known, buy non ivy league school, and grad school for myself and most, not all, of those around me was more about faking it until you made it into industry. Plenty of junk science, including a thesis I decided not to publish, while my advisor wanted the extra points on his resume. Many PHD students are stuck because they got a hard stem degree (like physics) but realized that job pickings were a little slim without further academic development. Or they are foreigners and cannot stay in the U.S. without studying. Passion does not always last forever. Especially when you got off-ivy league schools. Didnt you hear stories in school about graduate students who were simply stuck for a decade because of lack of interest from them and/or their advisor? Not totally farfetched.
- xaa 9y ago
  Yeah...I saw this about an hour ago, and bit my tongue. But it is dismaying that apparently the reverence for science is so high around here that it extends to downvoting criticisms of science as a process and sociological phenomenon to oblivion. Maybe it will help these poor fellows if I say look, I have a PhD, I work in research, and I agree with everything krick says. Yes, papers are unnecessarily jargonistic and borderline illegible. Yes, there are massive problems with the incentive structure in science. We openly say science is "publish or perish"; how can we not expect that to incentivize lower paper quality, irreproducibility, and status signalling in the form of unnecessary jargon? Even if we assume the noblest of intentions for every single scientist, which is...idealistic. spaceseaman is equating (IMO unfairly) criticism of the process of science in its current US manifestation with some kind of disrespect towards its obvious beneficial outcomes and motives. The whole thing IS full of inefficiency, and that's not solely because science is hard. Taxpayers have a right to demand that we don't waste their money and perhaps even to present our findings in a way they can understand with a reasonable application of effort (ideally not paywalled as well).
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    Well, the problem is that people so often go motte-and-bailey on it. Motte: all the valid critiques of how institutional science works, all of which are well-known. Bailey: full Paul Ryanism, cut the NSF and NIH to the fucking bone and tell scientists to go get "real jobs" in industry. Subject academics to yet more administration and reporting requirements that further incentivize bad science and just generally make everyone miserable. We'd all be less tetchy about the motte if it wasn't used as an excuse for the bailey.

gaius 9y ago

A PhD is effectively an apprenticeship towards becoming a tenure-track professor. It's not unreasonable to wonder why we are investing so much in training so many people when there is so little demand for that training. The vast majority of PhDs end up in industry doing something barely related, and are no more productive at it than those with only a first degree or even no degree at all.

JustFinishedBSG 9y ago
> A PhD is effectively an apprenticeship towards becoming a tenure-track professor. No it's not, plenty of people get PhD with the goal of ending as a researcher in the industry.
- davidgay 9y ago
  Or, even, shockingly, because they enjoyed doing research, even if they then don't spend the rest of their life doing research in academia or industry.

foldr 9y ago

I didn't read krick as suggesting that malice was involved. He/she was talking about the kind of work that the institutional structure of science tends to favor.

nnfy 9y ago

Perhaps your experience was different from mine. I went to a well known, buy non ivy league school, and grad school for myself and most, not all, of those around me was more about faking it until you made it into industry. Plenty of junk science, including a thesis I decided not to publish, while my advisor wanted the extra points on his resume. Many PHD students are stuck because they got a hard stem degree (like physics) but realized that job pickings were a little slim without further academic development. Or they are foreigners and cannot stay in the U.S. without studying. Passion does not always last forever. Especially when you got off-ivy league schools. Didnt you hear stories in school about graduate students who were simply stuck for a decade because of lack of interest from them and/or their advisor? Not totally farfetched.

xaa 9y ago
Yeah...I saw this about an hour ago, and bit my tongue. But it is dismaying that apparently the reverence for science is so high around here that it extends to downvoting criticisms of science as a process and sociological phenomenon to oblivion. Maybe it will help these poor fellows if I say look, I have a PhD, I work in research, and I agree with everything krick says. Yes, papers are unnecessarily jargonistic and borderline illegible. Yes, there are massive problems with the incentive structure in science. We openly say science is "publish or perish"; how can we not expect that to incentivize lower paper quality, irreproducibility, and status signalling in the form of unnecessary jargon? Even if we assume the noblest of intentions for every single scientist, which is...idealistic. spaceseaman is equating (IMO unfairly) criticism of the process of science in its current US manifestation with some kind of disrespect towards its obvious beneficial outcomes and motives. The whole thing IS full of inefficiency, and that's not solely because science is hard. Taxpayers have a right to demand that we don't waste their money and perhaps even to present our findings in a way they can understand with a reasonable application of effort (ideally not paywalled as well).
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  Well, the problem is that people so often go motte-and-bailey on it. Motte: all the valid critiques of how institutional science works, all of which are well-known. Bailey: full Paul Ryanism, cut the NSF and NIH to the fucking bone and tell scientists to go get "real jobs" in industry. Subject academics to yet more administration and reporting requirements that further incentivize bad science and just generally make everyone miserable. We'd all be less tetchy about the motte if it wasn't used as an excuse for the bailey.