3 ms·

A big part of the problem is there are too many PhDs chasing too little funding. There's no room for negative results when the competition is that big.

Bartweiss 8y ago
I wish I could find it, but there's a superb piece out there about the inherent dysfunction of lottery-style careers. The basic idea was that there are a handful of careers where success is highly rewarded, but job count and quality don't really respond to the market. In academia, there are however many tenured professorships with whatever salary, set by largely non-market forces. In Hollywood, there are only so many recognizable stars at a time who can guarantee sales, so their salaries don't really decline no matter how many people vie for their spots. And the same in pro spots, music, politics, Harvard admissions, etc. And the result is that without adding new jobs or dropping salaries, the people hiring balance the market somehow. Unpaid internships, selling expensive credentials, would-be singers selling hits to existing stars, massive university donations by parents, vicious hazing on football teams, horrifying abuse by casting agents; people who control these 1,000:1 (or higher) seeker-to-slot fields manage to exploit that eagerness to all kinds of horrible ends. [1] Academia is probably less bad than many of those fields, perhaps because the rewards at the top are less spectacular. But it's not a coincidence that Brian Wansink's big scandal was about pressuring a grad student to find results in null data, or that grad students and postdocs end up working miserable hours to be third author on their own research. I don't have an answer here, really. But I certainly agree that as long as there are endless ranks of people struggling to make their names, people are going to keep finding ways to get dramatic-looking results, data be damned. [1] I suspect this stuff really kicks in at several hundred to one or higher. Harvard doesn't reject this percentage, but note that it applies a time-and-money filter before the applications even arrive.

Bartweiss 8y ago

I wish I could find it, but there's a superb piece out there about the inherent dysfunction of lottery-style careers. The basic idea was that there are a handful of careers where success is highly rewarded, but job count and quality don't really respond to the market. In academia, there are however many tenured professorships with whatever salary, set by largely non-market forces. In Hollywood, there are only so many recognizable stars at a time who can guarantee sales, so their salaries don't really decline no matter how many people vie for their spots. And the same in pro spots, music, politics, Harvard admissions, etc. And the result is that without adding new jobs or dropping salaries, the people hiring balance the market somehow. Unpaid internships, selling expensive credentials, would-be singers selling hits to existing stars, massive university donations by parents, vicious hazing on football teams, horrifying abuse by casting agents; people who control these 1,000:1 (or higher) seeker-to-slot fields manage to exploit that eagerness to all kinds of horrible ends. [1] Academia is probably less bad than many of those fields, perhaps because the rewards at the top are less spectacular. But it's not a coincidence that Brian Wansink's big scandal was about pressuring a grad student to find results in null data, or that grad students and postdocs end up working miserable hours to be third author on their own research. I don't have an answer here, really. But I certainly agree that as long as there are endless ranks of people struggling to make their names, people are going to keep finding ways to get dramatic-looking results, data be damned. [1] I suspect this stuff really kicks in at several hundred to one or higher. Harvard doesn't reject this percentage, but note that it applies a time-and-money filter before the applications even arrive.