18 ms·

Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

129 points by tacon 8y ago

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
With apologies for the snark, don't they teach the use of paragraphs in academia?
- andyv 8y ago
  It's indicative of how far gone he is.
aluren 8y ago
Regarding "literally everyone does it" (fishing for results, removing negative ones, and so on): it's very true, and much more prevalent than what people think. Even at top-level universities with big shots. Especially at top-level universities with big shots. I know someone, upon entering a lab to do electronic microscopy, who found out that the image data her lab had written multiple papers on very high-impact journals about (we're talking Nature/Science here) could have easily been generated by dead cells instead of living ones, i.e. they had been staring at artifacts for years to draw conclusions on protein content, mechanisms, and so on. Of course, upon learning this, her boss quickly set upon contacting the journals in question to issue an apology and retract the relevant papers, thanked her for noticing the mistake, and everything went back in order. Just kidding, he told her to shut up if she wanted to keep her job. Interesting fact: the majority of the impact factor values of big-name journals (Nature, Science, Cell and co.) comes from a few select high-impact papers. Most of the rest goes relatively uncited. The reason is, most of these papers are not astounding but simply make it through the editorial system because the big shots in charge of the labs know the editors. Not that these papers themselves are devoid of merit (though I know my fair share of Nat/Sci/Cell papers that happen to be 80-100% bunk), but they wouldn't have made it to such highly selective journals otherwise. These journals also happen to have an usually high retraction rate. I have friends working in the aforementioned big-shot labs that are jaded to tte point that they just dismiss most thing coming out of Science. And that's just my area and that of people I know. Things go very awry in medicine or anything related to cancer where the pressure is so high, the field so competitive, the scientific questions so complicated, the experiments so hard to reproduce and the incentives to publish so exacerbated (note that medical journals generally have the highest impact factors). And I can't even begin to imagine what goes on in psychology. Plus, the pay is lousy.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- v_lisivka 8y ago
  Science is not when you publish something. Science is when at least two independent labs can reproduce your published result.
  - aldoushuxley001 8y ago
    Why two and not three or one?
    - skh 8y ago
      If two independent labs can reproduce the result it is extremely unlikely to be the result of false positives. The difference between having two versus three independent verifications is minuscule. A standard has to be set and 2 is a good enough standard.
    - daveguy 8y ago
      The more the better. You'd really need a statistically significant number of labs repeating it to be sure. If the underlying study is scientifically sound then a single repeat is good, two repeats is better. 20 repeats is even better. Good luck getting 1 or 2, unless the study is an important work that introduces a useful new technique or is the basis for additional studies. Also good luck knowing whether 2 labs failed for every 1 published. Science is hard. Reporting needs to be improved and there should be grants available to fund repeat studies.
    - v_lisivka 8y ago
      It's easy to keep secret when you only one who knows truth. It's also easy for two, because you immediately know who to blame if secret is revealed, so you can keep pressure. But situation changes for three, because you cannot know who revealed secret, so it's much easier to crack. Imagine, I will report today that I'm able to determine temperature of the physical vacuum (e.g. using double slit experiment), and then able to drop it, i.e. cool vacuum below absolute zero. Will you trust me? Of course, not. Then when you will trust me?
petermcneeley 8y ago
obligatory "Dont become a Scientist" http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html
zyxzevn 8y ago
I had this same problem when I did projects in different disciplines of the university. As an outsider, with the same skill-set, you can look through some of the wrong ideas of other departments. And it is hard to discuss some of those ideas, as they are often established within the specialization. The reasons why those wrong ideas have become established have more to do with tradition than actual science. And the reason why they were accepted, is because they matched some observations. Afterwards they were coincidence or cherry-picked, but often not recognized as such. And alternative theories were not needed nor supported, due to the internal culture. It is easy to compare it with programming problems. You can claim that your program works when you tested it for certain problems. But if no-one else is allowed to test your code, your program probably still has a lot of bugs. In some cases there is even a fundamental problem. They started with the wrong models in the first place, and/or misinterpreted certain observations. And from there they started growing new models on top of it. It is like programming code that started with the wrong abstractions. Most problems occur from theories that are developed without much practical experience. Sometimes even without any practical experience. A friend of mine is a computer-scientist who has almost no computer experience. I have heard many wrong ideas from him. If I want to talk about the problems, I will probably step on someone's toes. Causing anger and the belief that I am just misinformed or under educated. We like to project these problems onto psychology and such, but I can also find them in hard sciences. Let me pick one in hard physics. There are some theories in physics that model field-lines as real. While in reality, fields are always continuous. There are clearly some mistakes in one (or more) of the underlying theories.
lgessler 8y ago
Looks like this poster was in STEM. The situation's even more bleak in the humanities--see for instance this Reddit thread[1]: > The humanities PhD is still a vocational degree to prepare students for a career teaching in academia, and there are no jobs. Do not get a PhD in history. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96yf9h/monday_methods_why_you_should_not_get_a_history/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96yf9h/monda...
- pasabagi 8y ago
  Wow, that's hard to read. I thought people who went into Literature had it bad. It sometimes seems like the education sector is an experiment in how to create a society with almost unlimited power to do things, and almost total ignorance about what's a good idea.
  - anonymous5133 8y ago
    Academia lives in a world where people are willing to spend hundreds of thousands to make themselves more knowledgeable in subjects which might have no economic value in the world. Just look at how much of our undergrad education consists "general education" type courses. While these courses are interesting, most of them are pretty useless. I took Chinese history, Asian american film, music history, art history and so on. All of these courses were pretty much usless to me from an economic stand point. I think we need to create two tiers of higher-education: one where people focus purely on vocational/career skills while another where you can focus on non-vocational subjects. Let students decide what their general education will consist of instead of making it some top-down approach. People don't like authoritarianism.
    - pasabagi 8y ago
      I think the problem is, that leads to a society that's a bit like a sports car being driven by a nine-year-old. STEM and vocational stuff is great for getting to places fast. It's awful for making a society that can talk critically about where it's going. I say talk, and not 'think', because I don't think STEM people are bad at thinking about problems critically. I just think a lot of humanities is about developing a common set of reference points, a common vocabulary, so you can work on social problems together. If you don't have that, you can't really stop malicious actors from drowning out their opposition, who are isolated by the fact they don't share a common conceptual toolset. And if that happens for long enough, you end up with a society that's basically a bunch of amazingly powerful machines operated by Fox News.
libeclipse 8y ago
The cause of the problems in academia is hinted at near the end: > the truth is I understand why they have to do things that way, if they don't get published, they don't get money to continue work that should theoretically be beneficial down the road! Scientists optimizing for what is likely to be published (read: what is likely to earn money), sacrificing elsewhere. Maybe if we payed them enough so that they don't have to do this to survive, then we wouldn't have this issue.
- munin 8y ago
  > Scientists optimizing for what is likely to be published (read: what is likely to earn money), sacrificing elsewhere. Maybe if we payed them enough so that they don't have to do this to survive, then we wouldn't have this issue. How do you do this in a society with scarce resources? With scarcity, you need to have a measure of success, otherwise everyone could just say they were a scientist and get a six figure salary to do nothing. Any metric you choose will be gamed. This worked hundreds of years ago because the only people that could get educated were the wealthy, so we didn't need to worry about supporting scientists with public funds, they supported themselves.
  - tonysdg 8y ago
    > With scarcity, you need to have a measure of success, otherwise everyone could just say they were a scientist and get a six figure salary to do nothing. Any metric you choose will be gamed. As a current grad studrnt, I'm calling BS. We (meaning academics, even the ones gaming the system) _know_ what strong, reproducible, well-designed research projects look like. It doesn't take a genius to develop an experiment, run it, document what happened, and publish _all_ of the results. Hell, you learned the basics in middle school -- pick an independent variable, tweak it, then see what happens to the dependent variables. Now it's obviously not that simple -- isolating just one independent variable is practically impossible much of the time -- but the concept of documenting EVERYTHING that you tried should be obvious. There's absolutely zero impetus to share all of that information, however, especially when you only have 12 pages in a conference paper to write up everything. So instead you go fishing, and you run a boatload of tests, and you see which ones "solve" the problem, and you write up just those tests, ignoring all the failures and the false starts. It pisses me off, to be honest, and it's just one of the many reasons I'm trying to get out of here as soon as I can.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
graycat 8y ago
For the OP, sure. Of course. He expected something else? After all that time as a student, he didn't see what he saw as a post-doc? When I was in K-12, I got strong messages that education was generally good and, in particular, good preparation for a good career, e.g., financially secure, enough to be a good family provider and more, and a Ph.D. was the best degree. Okay, around DC, with only a BS in math, I quickly had a good career going in applied math and computing. Often I could have done better if I'd known more about math and physics; so I did a lot of study on/off the job and learned a lot. Then I went for a Ph.D. in applied math and did well with it. But, no way, not a chance, never, not even for a milli, micro, nano, pico second did I ever want to be a college prof. Instead I wanted to return to the career I had before grad school and, then, just do better at THAT career. But my wife's Ph.D. program nearly killed her. So, to try to help her get well, I took a slot as a prof in an MBA program in a B-school near her family farm. She didn't get well; that academic slot was as in the OP: The B-school wasn't much about business. The students were putting in time, money, and effort and learning next to nothing useful for career in business. For me, as in the OP, I was being financially irresponsible. So, I left for business, an AI project at IBM's Watson lab. Publishing? The OP claims that some of the publishing was unethical. Actually, in the papers I wrote as sole author, I didn't encounter that. My papers were fully honest, honorable, ethical, etc. Some co-authored papers were nearly all about hype and PR (public relations, getting known, pretending to have some good, leading edge research); the papers weren't actually wrong or unethical, and hype and PR are more common in business than in those co-authored papers! Looking back, here's what's wrong generally with B-school: It has physics envy, wants to see itself as doing high end, pure research. E.g., too many B-schools are much more interested in the question P versus NP than anything having to do with being successful in business. B-schools are not clinical like medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy. Except for some courses in accounting and maybe business law, B-schools are not vocational training or much help for a business career. More generally in US research university education, the big push is for research that can get research grants, and helping the students do well outside academics is a low priority. Really, at a good research university, the students will be able to learn from the best sources the best theoretical foundations of some field; that foundation might, maybe a long shot but might, help for some work in the field, even in business. Yes, one really good application might be a strong pillar for a whole career. Fine. But day by day those research university foundations are not very good information about how to be successful in business, might be like teaching about the details of photosynthesis and the chemistry and thermodynamics of internal combustion engines as a foundation for running a lawn mowing service! Since the OP is about psychology, my brother tried that. He got his Masters. He concluded that psychology knew a lot about rats that was next to useless for people and otherwise next to nothing useful about people, was good at what was not of interest and not much good at what was of interest. He changed to political science and got his Ph.D. there. He has never used the degree for his career! What happened? At the high end US research universities, ballpark 60% of the university budgets is from the university's 60% or so off the top of research grants to the profs. The research grants are heavily for (A) the STEM fields, e.g., from NSF, and (B) bio-medical science, e.g., from NIH. (A) is mostly for US national security and got started during the Cold War after The Bomb and more in the STEM fields were so important in WWII. As a secondary effect, the research funding AND the DoD funding for systems has helped US progress in information technology, e.g, the early days of Silicon Valley. For (B), that is, bluntly, because Congress has to vote the money and a lot of members of Congress are old enough to care about progress in medicine. As a secondary effect, the technology in US medicine is likely the best in the world. Still, as in the OP, commonly trying to be a college prof is financially irresponsible and possibly objectionable ethically, etc. But, again, there are some really big bucks involved, both to run a university and to get research grants. Some good news, for the taxpayers, about the research grants, especially from NSF and NIH, (A) the grant applications commonly get expert reviews and (B) generally the grants are quite competitive. For the students, learning is MUCH easier now than ever before: We are awash in books, often in PDF and for free, video lectures, e.g., quantum mechanics at MIT, etc. And, especially in practical computing, the US workforce does a LOT of independent study and self teaching, e.g., commonly knows MUCH more about practical computing than research university computer science profs. So, in short, we can leave the research universities to do far out research and for the STEM fields, even for theoretical purposes (e.g., do research with a day job as reviewing patents in Switzerland!), i.e., there's no law going to sleep at night for an hour thinking about how to resolve P versus NP, and especially for practical purposes, be largely self-taught. For how to run a successful lawn mowing service, bath and kitchen renovation service, auto repair and body repair shop, ..., building supply company, fast food restaurant, Web site, software house, etc., people get to learn from their parents, early jobs, what they can read, and especially what they can figure out for themselves. For using some algorithms for the traveling salesman problem to find a route over some ground to minimize mowing time, that might, but I doubt it, be okay for some farms but not for mowing suburban lawns!
stretchwithme 8y ago
Tracking what actually happens in scientific studies and how many don't get published would be a good idea. And a blockchain would be a way to do it. Knowing the whole truth could make science better.
- v_lisivka 8y ago
  Can you explain why it cannot be done with Web2.0 and Object Oriented Programming in ACID Cloud?
  - laurentl 8y ago
    Well, it’s well-known [citation needed] that to be taken seriously, any vague business idea proposal must exhibit Proof of Buzzword. Just like in the Bitcoin protocol, when a Buzzword has successfully been mined enough times its reward value halves and one must add new, previously unexploited buzzwords to the proposal to maintain its credibility. By this token web2.0, ACID, Cloud et al. have almost no buzzword value left. Even Bitcoin is very 2017. Which is why the only logical solution is nano-engineered quantum genetic algorithms with dark matter entanglement in P-space.
- PAClearner 8y ago
  > And a blockchain would be a way to do it I can't even.
alpineidyll3 8y ago
Quit my professorship about four months ago, and I've Never been happier. Academia works for some people, but is systemically twisted and has become terribly corrupt in most places. There's a life outside people. Not just life but intellectual life. I'm so much happier not contributing to a system I hate.
shawn 8y ago
It's just how it goes in those fields...remove all of the negative results, don't actually report the ridiculous number of fishing expeditions you went on (especially in fMRI research), make it sound like you mostly knew what you were going to find in the first place, make it a nice clean story. This has always bugged me about our implementation of the scientific method. There's no reason it has to be this way; it's just convention.
yosefzeev 8y ago
Money corrupts everything including academics.
account2 8y ago
Can anyone speak to what it's like doing a post doc in CS?
- PAClearner 8y ago
  you should be more specific-what part of CS? all the CS postdocs I know see a) pretty happy b) have a really easy back up of a high paying industry gig that they can pivot to because of currently insanely inflated demand for academics to make deep learning on the blockchain on the cloud on embedded devices doing quantum backprop -these are ML/theory postdocs
  - account2 8y ago
    I am primarily interested in the experience of ML post-docs that forgo going into industry. Can you elaborate a bit more about their experience? Salaries look a bit lower for post docs vs industry work. Some I've seen start in the mid-40k to 70k range. Could be different based on geography.
    - PAClearner 8y ago
      are you already a grad student or are you considering it? in my department [we are an outlier probably] post doc wages are actually pretty comparable to industry i.e. >= 100k. 40k to 70k seems low to me. I would expect the range to be more like 60-100k. I haven't been on the real job market yet-but the key to getting a TT or postdoc position seems to be a) collaborators who want to hire you b) people who have heard you give a talk in person and are familiar with your research.
      - account2 8y ago
        I am considering going into a CS PhD focusing in ML. The mid 40k-70k range was from quick google search I did for CS post docs in ML in lower cost of living areas where the cost of living is much lower than on the West Coast. I am trying to look at career prospects and weigh whether it makes sense to stay in academia or jump to industry (after I complete a PhD). If wages are closer to 60k-100k for post docs, then I may consider staying in academia for some time after completing a PhD depending on whether my career interest shift.
yodsanklai 8y ago
This is a recurring topic on HN. My (European) experience is that academia provides a great work environment. If you have tenure, you're free to work on whatever you want, you have very low pressure (beside the pressure you decide to inflict on yourself), you're basically paid to learn new things and teach them to others. You can easily visit other institutes abroad. You get to meet interesting people. Age discrimination isn't an issue. The salary isn't on par with what you could make working for a company but it's enough. If you're ambitious and talented you can easily earn money on the side (consulting, starting your own company, taking a leave) and you can have the best of both worlds.
- zerr 8y ago
  The problem is getting a tenure position - with all these nepotism, protectionism, elitism of academic world.
  - PAClearner 8y ago
    meh as a baby academic I am not convinced that the nepotism protectionism elitism of academia are markedly higher than the 'real world'
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      The big difference is the workplace variety. You can work at start ups, small businesses, mid-sized companies, or mega-corporate, or even government jobs. It isn't that they don't exist there but that it is easier to escape certain types of it.
- aluren 8y ago
  Yes, I believe we have it easier in Europe. I realize my other post sounds rantish but the reason I'm still in academia, beyond the very valid points you've mentioned, is that I don't believe the nepotism and dishonesty issues are specific to academia. >You get to meet interesting people. I want to stress that part because I don't feel it does the environment justice. You get to meet fantastic and very intelligent people from all countries in the world. During gathering events, meetings, parties, etc. I've been to, it's not rare to see eight different nationalities out of eight people around a dining table. You talk about science at first but very quickly discussions derail into comparisons between such and such country's perspective, differences in culture, jokes about the language, and so on. And it happens every time. Not all environments provide this. Of course, you may argue that this diversity of culture and insights is counterbalanced by the community's homogeneity in many other aspects (e.g. the overwhelming majority of scientists are very liberal, even by European standards), and it's pretty obvious that your view of, say, Iranian or Russian people is going to be skewed if the only ones you've talked to are very educated and liberal 20- or 30-somethings working as expats. Scientists are known for their insularity, and while they're a demographic that's among the most susceptible to date outside their country, they're also very prone to date inside the community. The 'ivory tower' stereotype is not completely wrong.

129 points by tacon 8y ago

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago

With apologies for the snark, don't they teach the use of paragraphs in academia?

andyv 8y ago
It's indicative of how far gone he is.

aluren 8y ago

Regarding "literally everyone does it" (fishing for results, removing negative ones, and so on): it's very true, and much more prevalent than what people think. Even at top-level universities with big shots. Especially at top-level universities with big shots. I know someone, upon entering a lab to do electronic microscopy, who found out that the image data her lab had written multiple papers on very high-impact journals about (we're talking Nature/Science here) could have easily been generated by dead cells instead of living ones, i.e. they had been staring at artifacts for years to draw conclusions on protein content, mechanisms, and so on. Of course, upon learning this, her boss quickly set upon contacting the journals in question to issue an apology and retract the relevant papers, thanked her for noticing the mistake, and everything went back in order. Just kidding, he told her to shut up if she wanted to keep her job. Interesting fact: the majority of the impact factor values of big-name journals (Nature, Science, Cell and co.) comes from a few select high-impact papers. Most of the rest goes relatively uncited. The reason is, most of these papers are not astounding but simply make it through the editorial system because the big shots in charge of the labs know the editors. Not that these papers themselves are devoid of merit (though I know my fair share of Nat/Sci/Cell papers that happen to be 80-100% bunk), but they wouldn't have made it to such highly selective journals otherwise. These journals also happen to have an usually high retraction rate. I have friends working in the aforementioned big-shot labs that are jaded to tte point that they just dismiss most thing coming out of Science. And that's just my area and that of people I know. Things go very awry in medicine or anything related to cancer where the pressure is so high, the field so competitive, the scientific questions so complicated, the experiments so hard to reproduce and the incentives to publish so exacerbated (note that medical journals generally have the highest impact factors). And I can't even begin to imagine what goes on in psychology. Plus, the pay is lousy.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
v_lisivka 8y ago
Science is not when you publish something. Science is when at least two independent labs can reproduce your published result.
- aldoushuxley001 8y ago
  Why two and not three or one?
  - skh 8y ago
    If two independent labs can reproduce the result it is extremely unlikely to be the result of false positives. The difference between having two versus three independent verifications is minuscule. A standard has to be set and 2 is a good enough standard.
  - daveguy 8y ago
    The more the better. You'd really need a statistically significant number of labs repeating it to be sure. If the underlying study is scientifically sound then a single repeat is good, two repeats is better. 20 repeats is even better. Good luck getting 1 or 2, unless the study is an important work that introduces a useful new technique or is the basis for additional studies. Also good luck knowing whether 2 labs failed for every 1 published. Science is hard. Reporting needs to be improved and there should be grants available to fund repeat studies.
  - v_lisivka 8y ago
    It's easy to keep secret when you only one who knows truth. It's also easy for two, because you immediately know who to blame if secret is revealed, so you can keep pressure. But situation changes for three, because you cannot know who revealed secret, so it's much easier to crack. Imagine, I will report today that I'm able to determine temperature of the physical vacuum (e.g. using double slit experiment), and then able to drop it, i.e. cool vacuum below absolute zero. Will you trust me? Of course, not. Then when you will trust me?

petermcneeley 8y ago

obligatory "Dont become a Scientist" http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html

zyxzevn 8y ago

I had this same problem when I did projects in different disciplines of the university. As an outsider, with the same skill-set, you can look through some of the wrong ideas of other departments. And it is hard to discuss some of those ideas, as they are often established within the specialization. The reasons why those wrong ideas have become established have more to do with tradition than actual science. And the reason why they were accepted, is because they matched some observations. Afterwards they were coincidence or cherry-picked, but often not recognized as such. And alternative theories were not needed nor supported, due to the internal culture. It is easy to compare it with programming problems. You can claim that your program works when you tested it for certain problems. But if no-one else is allowed to test your code, your program probably still has a lot of bugs. In some cases there is even a fundamental problem. They started with the wrong models in the first place, and/or misinterpreted certain observations. And from there they started growing new models on top of it. It is like programming code that started with the wrong abstractions. Most problems occur from theories that are developed without much practical experience. Sometimes even without any practical experience. A friend of mine is a computer-scientist who has almost no computer experience. I have heard many wrong ideas from him. If I want to talk about the problems, I will probably step on someone's toes. Causing anger and the belief that I am just misinformed or under educated. We like to project these problems onto psychology and such, but I can also find them in hard sciences. Let me pick one in hard physics. There are some theories in physics that model field-lines as real. While in reality, fields are always continuous. There are clearly some mistakes in one (or more) of the underlying theories.

lgessler 8y ago

Looks like this poster was in STEM. The situation's even more bleak in the humanities--see for instance this Reddit thread[1]: > The humanities PhD is still a vocational degree to prepare students for a career teaching in academia, and there are no jobs. Do not get a PhD in history. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96yf9h/monday_methods_why_you_should_not_get_a_history/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96yf9h/monda...

pasabagi 8y ago
Wow, that's hard to read. I thought people who went into Literature had it bad. It sometimes seems like the education sector is an experiment in how to create a society with almost unlimited power to do things, and almost total ignorance about what's a good idea.
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  Academia lives in a world where people are willing to spend hundreds of thousands to make themselves more knowledgeable in subjects which might have no economic value in the world. Just look at how much of our undergrad education consists "general education" type courses. While these courses are interesting, most of them are pretty useless. I took Chinese history, Asian american film, music history, art history and so on. All of these courses were pretty much usless to me from an economic stand point. I think we need to create two tiers of higher-education: one where people focus purely on vocational/career skills while another where you can focus on non-vocational subjects. Let students decide what their general education will consist of instead of making it some top-down approach. People don't like authoritarianism.
  - pasabagi 8y ago
    I think the problem is, that leads to a society that's a bit like a sports car being driven by a nine-year-old. STEM and vocational stuff is great for getting to places fast. It's awful for making a society that can talk critically about where it's going. I say talk, and not 'think', because I don't think STEM people are bad at thinking about problems critically. I just think a lot of humanities is about developing a common set of reference points, a common vocabulary, so you can work on social problems together. If you don't have that, you can't really stop malicious actors from drowning out their opposition, who are isolated by the fact they don't share a common conceptual toolset. And if that happens for long enough, you end up with a society that's basically a bunch of amazingly powerful machines operated by Fox News.

libeclipse 8y ago

The cause of the problems in academia is hinted at near the end: > the truth is I understand why they have to do things that way, if they don't get published, they don't get money to continue work that should theoretically be beneficial down the road! Scientists optimizing for what is likely to be published (read: what is likely to earn money), sacrificing elsewhere. Maybe if we payed them enough so that they don't have to do this to survive, then we wouldn't have this issue.

munin 8y ago
> Scientists optimizing for what is likely to be published (read: what is likely to earn money), sacrificing elsewhere. Maybe if we payed them enough so that they don't have to do this to survive, then we wouldn't have this issue. How do you do this in a society with scarce resources? With scarcity, you need to have a measure of success, otherwise everyone could just say they were a scientist and get a six figure salary to do nothing. Any metric you choose will be gamed. This worked hundreds of years ago because the only people that could get educated were the wealthy, so we didn't need to worry about supporting scientists with public funds, they supported themselves.
- tonysdg 8y ago
  > With scarcity, you need to have a measure of success, otherwise everyone could just say they were a scientist and get a six figure salary to do nothing. Any metric you choose will be gamed. As a current grad studrnt, I'm calling BS. We (meaning academics, even the ones gaming the system) _know_ what strong, reproducible, well-designed research projects look like. It doesn't take a genius to develop an experiment, run it, document what happened, and publish _all_ of the results. Hell, you learned the basics in middle school -- pick an independent variable, tweak it, then see what happens to the dependent variables. Now it's obviously not that simple -- isolating just one independent variable is practically impossible much of the time -- but the concept of documenting EVERYTHING that you tried should be obvious. There's absolutely zero impetus to share all of that information, however, especially when you only have 12 pages in a conference paper to write up everything. So instead you go fishing, and you run a boatload of tests, and you see which ones "solve" the problem, and you write up just those tests, ignoring all the failures and the false starts. It pisses me off, to be honest, and it's just one of the many reasons I'm trying to get out of here as soon as I can.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

graycat 8y ago

For the OP, sure. Of course. He expected something else? After all that time as a student, he didn't see what he saw as a post-doc? When I was in K-12, I got strong messages that education was generally good and, in particular, good preparation for a good career, e.g., financially secure, enough to be a good family provider and more, and a Ph.D. was the best degree. Okay, around DC, with only a BS in math, I quickly had a good career going in applied math and computing. Often I could have done better if I'd known more about math and physics; so I did a lot of study on/off the job and learned a lot. Then I went for a Ph.D. in applied math and did well with it. But, no way, not a chance, never, not even for a milli, micro, nano, pico second did I ever want to be a college prof. Instead I wanted to return to the career I had before grad school and, then, just do better at THAT career. But my wife's Ph.D. program nearly killed her. So, to try to help her get well, I took a slot as a prof in an MBA program in a B-school near her family farm. She didn't get well; that academic slot was as in the OP: The B-school wasn't much about business. The students were putting in time, money, and effort and learning next to nothing useful for career in business. For me, as in the OP, I was being financially irresponsible. So, I left for business, an AI project at IBM's Watson lab. Publishing? The OP claims that some of the publishing was unethical. Actually, in the papers I wrote as sole author, I didn't encounter that. My papers were fully honest, honorable, ethical, etc. Some co-authored papers were nearly all about hype and PR (public relations, getting known, pretending to have some good, leading edge research); the papers weren't actually wrong or unethical, and hype and PR are more common in business than in those co-authored papers! Looking back, here's what's wrong generally with B-school: It has physics envy, wants to see itself as doing high end, pure research. E.g., too many B-schools are much more interested in the question P versus NP than anything having to do with being successful in business. B-schools are not clinical like medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy. Except for some courses in accounting and maybe business law, B-schools are not vocational training or much help for a business career. More generally in US research university education, the big push is for research that can get research grants, and helping the students do well outside academics is a low priority. Really, at a good research university, the students will be able to learn from the best sources the best theoretical foundations of some field; that foundation might, maybe a long shot but might, help for some work in the field, even in business. Yes, one really good application might be a strong pillar for a whole career. Fine. But day by day those research university foundations are not very good information about how to be successful in business, might be like teaching about the details of photosynthesis and the chemistry and thermodynamics of internal combustion engines as a foundation for running a lawn mowing service! Since the OP is about psychology, my brother tried that. He got his Masters. He concluded that psychology knew a lot about rats that was next to useless for people and otherwise next to nothing useful about people, was good at what was not of interest and not much good at what was of interest. He changed to political science and got his Ph.D. there. He has never used the degree for his career! What happened? At the high end US research universities, ballpark 60% of the university budgets is from the university's 60% or so off the top of research grants to the profs. The research grants are heavily for (A) the STEM fields, e.g., from NSF, and (B) bio-medical science, e.g., from NIH. (A) is mostly for US national security and got started during the Cold War after The Bomb and more in the STEM fields were so important in WWII. As a secondary effect, the research funding AND the DoD funding for systems has helped US progress in information technology, e.g, the early days of Silicon Valley. For (B), that is, bluntly, because Congress has to vote the money and a lot of members of Congress are old enough to care about progress in medicine. As a secondary effect, the technology in US medicine is likely the best in the world. Still, as in the OP, commonly trying to be a college prof is financially irresponsible and possibly objectionable ethically, etc. But, again, there are some really big bucks involved, both to run a university and to get research grants. Some good news, for the taxpayers, about the research grants, especially from NSF and NIH, (A) the grant applications commonly get expert reviews and (B) generally the grants are quite competitive. For the students, learning is MUCH easier now than ever before: We are awash in books, often in PDF and for free, video lectures, e.g., quantum mechanics at MIT, etc. And, especially in practical computing, the US workforce does a LOT of independent study and self teaching, e.g., commonly knows MUCH more about practical computing than research university computer science profs. So, in short, we can leave the research universities to do far out research and for the STEM fields, even for theoretical purposes (e.g., do research with a day job as reviewing patents in Switzerland!), i.e., there's no law going to sleep at night for an hour thinking about how to resolve P versus NP, and especially for practical purposes, be largely self-taught. For how to run a successful lawn mowing service, bath and kitchen renovation service, auto repair and body repair shop, ..., building supply company, fast food restaurant, Web site, software house, etc., people get to learn from their parents, early jobs, what they can read, and especially what they can figure out for themselves. For using some algorithms for the traveling salesman problem to find a route over some ground to minimize mowing time, that might, but I doubt it, be okay for some farms but not for mowing suburban lawns!

stretchwithme 8y ago

Tracking what actually happens in scientific studies and how many don't get published would be a good idea. And a blockchain would be a way to do it. Knowing the whole truth could make science better.

v_lisivka 8y ago
Can you explain why it cannot be done with Web2.0 and Object Oriented Programming in ACID Cloud?
- laurentl 8y ago
  Well, it’s well-known [citation needed] that to be taken seriously, any vague business idea proposal must exhibit Proof of Buzzword. Just like in the Bitcoin protocol, when a Buzzword has successfully been mined enough times its reward value halves and one must add new, previously unexploited buzzwords to the proposal to maintain its credibility. By this token web2.0, ACID, Cloud et al. have almost no buzzword value left. Even Bitcoin is very 2017. Which is why the only logical solution is nano-engineered quantum genetic algorithms with dark matter entanglement in P-space.
PAClearner 8y ago
> And a blockchain would be a way to do it I can't even.

alpineidyll3 8y ago

Quit my professorship about four months ago, and I've Never been happier. Academia works for some people, but is systemically twisted and has become terribly corrupt in most places. There's a life outside people. Not just life but intellectual life. I'm so much happier not contributing to a system I hate.

shawn 8y ago

It's just how it goes in those fields...remove all of the negative results, don't actually report the ridiculous number of fishing expeditions you went on (especially in fMRI research), make it sound like you mostly knew what you were going to find in the first place, make it a nice clean story. This has always bugged me about our implementation of the scientific method. There's no reason it has to be this way; it's just convention.

yosefzeev 8y ago

Money corrupts everything including academics.

account2 8y ago

Can anyone speak to what it's like doing a post doc in CS?

PAClearner 8y ago
you should be more specific-what part of CS? all the CS postdocs I know see a) pretty happy b) have a really easy back up of a high paying industry gig that they can pivot to because of currently insanely inflated demand for academics to make deep learning on the blockchain on the cloud on embedded devices doing quantum backprop -these are ML/theory postdocs
- account2 8y ago
  I am primarily interested in the experience of ML post-docs that forgo going into industry. Can you elaborate a bit more about their experience? Salaries look a bit lower for post docs vs industry work. Some I've seen start in the mid-40k to 70k range. Could be different based on geography.
  - PAClearner 8y ago
    are you already a grad student or are you considering it? in my department [we are an outlier probably] post doc wages are actually pretty comparable to industry i.e. >= 100k. 40k to 70k seems low to me. I would expect the range to be more like 60-100k. I haven't been on the real job market yet-but the key to getting a TT or postdoc position seems to be a) collaborators who want to hire you b) people who have heard you give a talk in person and are familiar with your research.
    - account2 8y ago
      I am considering going into a CS PhD focusing in ML. The mid 40k-70k range was from quick google search I did for CS post docs in ML in lower cost of living areas where the cost of living is much lower than on the West Coast. I am trying to look at career prospects and weigh whether it makes sense to stay in academia or jump to industry (after I complete a PhD). If wages are closer to 60k-100k for post docs, then I may consider staying in academia for some time after completing a PhD depending on whether my career interest shift.

yodsanklai 8y ago

This is a recurring topic on HN. My (European) experience is that academia provides a great work environment. If you have tenure, you're free to work on whatever you want, you have very low pressure (beside the pressure you decide to inflict on yourself), you're basically paid to learn new things and teach them to others. You can easily visit other institutes abroad. You get to meet interesting people. Age discrimination isn't an issue. The salary isn't on par with what you could make working for a company but it's enough. If you're ambitious and talented you can easily earn money on the side (consulting, starting your own company, taking a leave) and you can have the best of both worlds.

zerr 8y ago
The problem is getting a tenure position - with all these nepotism, protectionism, elitism of academic world.
- PAClearner 8y ago
  meh as a baby academic I am not convinced that the nepotism protectionism elitism of academia are markedly higher than the 'real world'
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    The big difference is the workplace variety. You can work at start ups, small businesses, mid-sized companies, or mega-corporate, or even government jobs. It isn't that they don't exist there but that it is easier to escape certain types of it.
aluren 8y ago
Yes, I believe we have it easier in Europe. I realize my other post sounds rantish but the reason I'm still in academia, beyond the very valid points you've mentioned, is that I don't believe the nepotism and dishonesty issues are specific to academia. >You get to meet interesting people. I want to stress that part because I don't feel it does the environment justice. You get to meet fantastic and very intelligent people from all countries in the world. During gathering events, meetings, parties, etc. I've been to, it's not rare to see eight different nationalities out of eight people around a dining table. You talk about science at first but very quickly discussions derail into comparisons between such and such country's perspective, differences in culture, jokes about the language, and so on. And it happens every time. Not all environments provide this. Of course, you may argue that this diversity of culture and insights is counterbalanced by the community's homogeneity in many other aspects (e.g. the overwhelming majority of scientists are very liberal, even by European standards), and it's pretty obvious that your view of, say, Iranian or Russian people is going to be skewed if the only ones you've talked to are very educated and liberal 20- or 30-somethings working as expats. Scientists are known for their insularity, and while they're a demographic that's among the most susceptible to date outside their country, they're also very prone to date inside the community. The 'ivory tower' stereotype is not completely wrong.