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Is it counterproductive that we expect researchers to work in universities and become professors? It seems like there should be more outlets for the calling. Ou

Is it counterproductive that we expect researchers to work in universities and become professors? It seems like there should be more outlets for the calling. Our universities are proving to be a bottleneck. I see how there is an often-natural relationship between cultivating knowledge and disseminating it to students. However, we need and have more prospective researchers than universities are willing or able to support.

ampdepolymerase 6y ago
The issue is that there are too many barriers to commercialisation and the current stakeholders have too much power. The profitable fields like medicine strictly limit the number of people accepted (the official explanation is that there aren't enough residencies, the unspoken reason is that the American Medical Association wants to keep salaries up) and FDA drug approval laws err on the side of caution; better to have 10 people die due to disease and lack of access to treatments than to have one person die due to a faulty drug that the FDA let through. This attitude and approach means that the time to market is huge and highly resource intensive. The COVID vaccines were designed in less than a day. It took a year to reach market even under the ridiculously accelerated approval pace.
- earhart 6y ago
  A close friend of mine made a career out of shepherding drugs through the FDA approval process. They’ve stated multiple times that in their professional experience, every single regulation is there because some asshat tried to cut corners so they could profit from snake oil. Additionally, the RNA vaccines were somewhat novel. In the future, maybe (hopefully!) we’ll be able to speed up the process, but for now, do you really want to give the entire population an experimental substance, with no tracking, with our woeful medical system, and see how it turns out, hoping to get lucky? Bearing in mind that the number of people you’d have to vaccinate for herd immunity is much larger than the number of people who’re likely to have a problem from Covid-19? I do grok that bureaucrats are incentivized to follow the precautionary principle, simply because people equate actions to responsibilities for outcomes and don’t tend to weight inaction so heavily. But overall, I’m really glad the FDA was so careful, and because of that care, I’ll happily get the shot once it’s available to low-risk people like myself; I’m very pro-vaccines, but even I wouldn’t have taken it a year ago.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  There's this loop in medical education where people come into it with lofty goals, but are then hit with $240k of tuition (excluding living expenses). They then take out loans on that, and then have to pay them back. So, when people talk about cutting salaries, there are all these new doctors that are going 'wait a minute, by this point I'm $300k (just on postgraduate training) in the hole after 4-years of hellish training, and I have to pay that back.' If we were able to take some of the debt burden out of medical education, you'd have people still lining up out the door to go to med school, they'd probably be willing to take lower salaries, and work in more underserved areas.
- croissants 6y ago
  > the unspoken reason is that the American Medical Association wants to keep salaries up I used to believe this, but the AMA claims that it's actually the US Congress that is keeping the number of residencies low [1]: > The American Medical Association (AMA) adopted policy at its Annual Meeting today to build upon its efforts aimed at modernizing and increasing funding for graduate medical education (GME). The new policy calls for the AMA to continue advocating for legislation that removes the caps on Medicare-funded residency positions, which were imposed by the Balanced Budget Amendment of 1997, to help ensure an adequate physician workforce to meet the nation’s growing needs for health care services. I'm not an expert on this though, so it's possible that this is all PR doublespeak. [1] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-fund-graduate-medical-education-address-physician-shortages https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-fun...
raziel2701 6y ago
That's been a question I have no answer to: What do we do with all these smart people? Currently most just go inside hierarchical workplaces where they have to learn to play office politics and carry out meaningless job functions in exchange for financial security. We don't have a Bell labs anymore, science is getting more expensive and most of the venture capital money goes to software rather than to the more capital-intensive lab equipment plus salaries. We as a society train all these phds that then leave their field of expertise because there's no opportunities. You can try your luck as an underpaid postdoc and hope that you get an amazing article on a high reputation journal and at the same time a faculty position has opened up (because the faculty died) for the particular niche field you are an expert in. That's a lot that's utterly outside of your control. So most just go into finance/consulting/tech and move on. All that training, for nothing.
- cal5k 6y ago
  Maybe we don't need all those PhDs, and we should stop funnelling public money into producing an excess supply of them?
  - odyssey7 6y ago
    We do need the PhDs (or otherwise trained researchers). It’s the universities that don’t.
  - burntoutfire 6y ago
    On of the effects of training too many PhDs is downward pressure on academics' salaries - i.e. the public gets their science results on the cheap.
    - fuzzfactor 6y ago
      The public fails to get much science at all, not because they or the scientists are cheap, just neither one can afford the things that were always expceted to be within reach any more.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
derangedHorse 6y ago
I'd say a better distinction is more important for the students. Teaching is a skill that the accumulation of knowledge doesn't inherently strengthen. Forcing researchers to teach against their will for professorship on the strict basis of knowledge typically causes the students to receive a lower quality education. If we're talking about bottlenecks, I'd say the number of topics that are ruined for potentially great researchers by horrible lecturers is a bigger problem. Sidenote - Writing about this topic reminded me of the lengths Andrew Ng went through to achieve excellence in his role of being a professor in all aspects of the job (in this case what he went through to become a better teacher): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140320175655-176238488-learn-to-speak-or-teach-better-in-30-minutes/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140320175655-176238488-lear...
itronitron 6y ago
I doubt that most researchers work in universities. Every large product company (food, pharma, automotive, gaming) has multiple research groups, and while they tend to be very small relative to the larger company they are probably much bigger than most academic departments.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  Add to this that there is a lot of research that goes into production processes and translation from a basic-sciences setting to a production setting. So, say you have a novel antibody, you have to have a ton of non-academic researchers who have to figure out how to make the thing stable, safe, scalable, deliverable, cost-effective, etc. It's all research, just not university-style research.
  - itronitron 6y ago
    Another reason not to pursue university-style research is that historically a lot of scientific progress and even breakthroughs have occurred on the 'applied' side due to their access to reams of data and interest in process control and incremental refinement.
selimnairb 6y ago
Part of the problem is that research positions tend to be for Ph.D. students and post-docs who cost less than permanent research scientists. This is good in the short term for the individual grant, but has the side effect that to continue research we have to produce more Ph.D.s than there are permanent fair-paying academic positions for.
- mattkrause 6y ago
  Even though students are individually cheaper, I'm not totally convinced that a largely-trainee work force is really the most cost-effective overall[0]. My postdoc lab has gone through 3-4 (and counting) cycles of figuring out how to perform a certain type of experiment, only for the person doing it to move on. Having someone quasi-permanant to keep that knowledge around would not only let the experiments go a lot faster, but it'd save on very expensive, very fragile consumables. [0] Not only are students/postdocs individually cheaper, but there are also lots more sources of funding for them, so it might even be rational for a lab or department, even if it's not actually true for the funder.
analog31 6y ago
I finished my PhD in physics, and went straight into industry. After a bit of job hopping, I now help design scientific equipment. I knew that I was not cut out to be a research superstar. I've had a good career with no regrets, have never had to work obscene hours, and live in a pleasant town.
boublepop 6y ago
We do have more prospectives for researchers. There’s industry which many go into. Most the time it even gives you much better financials, but the trade off is lower freedom in choosing your area of research. To me it’s a fair trade off. If your in a big company with a high salary doing research you have to convince management if you want to start working with some new area of research and have them invest into it. If you are in academia you have to convince some grant issuing institution. Either way if you want to be a researcher it’s not enough that you are talented in doing the research itself. You also have to be able to write down your work in high quality, and communicate your past and current work, as well as future work plans in high enough quality to get someone to invest in you.

ampdepolymerase 6y ago

The issue is that there are too many barriers to commercialisation and the current stakeholders have too much power. The profitable fields like medicine strictly limit the number of people accepted (the official explanation is that there aren't enough residencies, the unspoken reason is that the American Medical Association wants to keep salaries up) and FDA drug approval laws err on the side of caution; better to have 10 people die due to disease and lack of access to treatments than to have one person die due to a faulty drug that the FDA let through. This attitude and approach means that the time to market is huge and highly resource intensive. The COVID vaccines were designed in less than a day. It took a year to reach market even under the ridiculously accelerated approval pace.

earhart 6y ago
A close friend of mine made a career out of shepherding drugs through the FDA approval process. They’ve stated multiple times that in their professional experience, every single regulation is there because some asshat tried to cut corners so they could profit from snake oil. Additionally, the RNA vaccines were somewhat novel. In the future, maybe (hopefully!) we’ll be able to speed up the process, but for now, do you really want to give the entire population an experimental substance, with no tracking, with our woeful medical system, and see how it turns out, hoping to get lucky? Bearing in mind that the number of people you’d have to vaccinate for herd immunity is much larger than the number of people who’re likely to have a problem from Covid-19? I do grok that bureaucrats are incentivized to follow the precautionary principle, simply because people equate actions to responsibilities for outcomes and don’t tend to weight inaction so heavily. But overall, I’m really glad the FDA was so careful, and because of that care, I’ll happily get the shot once it’s available to low-risk people like myself; I’m very pro-vaccines, but even I wouldn’t have taken it a year ago.
phobosanomaly 6y ago
There's this loop in medical education where people come into it with lofty goals, but are then hit with $240k of tuition (excluding living expenses). They then take out loans on that, and then have to pay them back. So, when people talk about cutting salaries, there are all these new doctors that are going 'wait a minute, by this point I'm $300k (just on postgraduate training) in the hole after 4-years of hellish training, and I have to pay that back.' If we were able to take some of the debt burden out of medical education, you'd have people still lining up out the door to go to med school, they'd probably be willing to take lower salaries, and work in more underserved areas.
croissants 6y ago
> the unspoken reason is that the American Medical Association wants to keep salaries up I used to believe this, but the AMA claims that it's actually the US Congress that is keeping the number of residencies low [1]: > The American Medical Association (AMA) adopted policy at its Annual Meeting today to build upon its efforts aimed at modernizing and increasing funding for graduate medical education (GME). The new policy calls for the AMA to continue advocating for legislation that removes the caps on Medicare-funded residency positions, which were imposed by the Balanced Budget Amendment of 1997, to help ensure an adequate physician workforce to meet the nation’s growing needs for health care services. I'm not an expert on this though, so it's possible that this is all PR doublespeak. [1] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-fund-graduate-medical-education-address-physician-shortages https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-fun...

raziel2701 6y ago

That's been a question I have no answer to: What do we do with all these smart people? Currently most just go inside hierarchical workplaces where they have to learn to play office politics and carry out meaningless job functions in exchange for financial security. We don't have a Bell labs anymore, science is getting more expensive and most of the venture capital money goes to software rather than to the more capital-intensive lab equipment plus salaries. We as a society train all these phds that then leave their field of expertise because there's no opportunities. You can try your luck as an underpaid postdoc and hope that you get an amazing article on a high reputation journal and at the same time a faculty position has opened up (because the faculty died) for the particular niche field you are an expert in. That's a lot that's utterly outside of your control. So most just go into finance/consulting/tech and move on. All that training, for nothing.

cal5k 6y ago
Maybe we don't need all those PhDs, and we should stop funnelling public money into producing an excess supply of them?
- odyssey7 6y ago
  We do need the PhDs (or otherwise trained researchers). It’s the universities that don’t.
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  On of the effects of training too many PhDs is downward pressure on academics' salaries - i.e. the public gets their science results on the cheap.
  - fuzzfactor 6y ago
    The public fails to get much science at all, not because they or the scientists are cheap, just neither one can afford the things that were always expceted to be within reach any more.
- alisonkisk 6y ago

derangedHorse 6y ago

I'd say a better distinction is more important for the students. Teaching is a skill that the accumulation of knowledge doesn't inherently strengthen. Forcing researchers to teach against their will for professorship on the strict basis of knowledge typically causes the students to receive a lower quality education. If we're talking about bottlenecks, I'd say the number of topics that are ruined for potentially great researchers by horrible lecturers is a bigger problem. Sidenote - Writing about this topic reminded me of the lengths Andrew Ng went through to achieve excellence in his role of being a professor in all aspects of the job (in this case what he went through to become a better teacher): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140320175655-176238488-learn-to-speak-or-teach-better-in-30-minutes/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140320175655-176238488-lear...

itronitron 6y ago

I doubt that most researchers work in universities. Every large product company (food, pharma, automotive, gaming) has multiple research groups, and while they tend to be very small relative to the larger company they are probably much bigger than most academic departments.

phobosanomaly 6y ago
Add to this that there is a lot of research that goes into production processes and translation from a basic-sciences setting to a production setting. So, say you have a novel antibody, you have to have a ton of non-academic researchers who have to figure out how to make the thing stable, safe, scalable, deliverable, cost-effective, etc. It's all research, just not university-style research.
- itronitron 6y ago
  Another reason not to pursue university-style research is that historically a lot of scientific progress and even breakthroughs have occurred on the 'applied' side due to their access to reams of data and interest in process control and incremental refinement.

selimnairb 6y ago

Part of the problem is that research positions tend to be for Ph.D. students and post-docs who cost less than permanent research scientists. This is good in the short term for the individual grant, but has the side effect that to continue research we have to produce more Ph.D.s than there are permanent fair-paying academic positions for.

mattkrause 6y ago
Even though students are individually cheaper, I'm not totally convinced that a largely-trainee work force is really the most cost-effective overall[0]. My postdoc lab has gone through 3-4 (and counting) cycles of figuring out how to perform a certain type of experiment, only for the person doing it to move on. Having someone quasi-permanant to keep that knowledge around would not only let the experiments go a lot faster, but it'd save on very expensive, very fragile consumables. [0] Not only are students/postdocs individually cheaper, but there are also lots more sources of funding for them, so it might even be rational for a lab or department, even if it's not actually true for the funder.

analog31 6y ago

I finished my PhD in physics, and went straight into industry. After a bit of job hopping, I now help design scientific equipment. I knew that I was not cut out to be a research superstar. I've had a good career with no regrets, have never had to work obscene hours, and live in a pleasant town.

boublepop 6y ago

We do have more prospectives for researchers. There’s industry which many go into. Most the time it even gives you much better financials, but the trade off is lower freedom in choosing your area of research. To me it’s a fair trade off. If your in a big company with a high salary doing research you have to convince management if you want to start working with some new area of research and have them invest into it. If you are in academia you have to convince some grant issuing institution. Either way if you want to be a researcher it’s not enough that you are talented in doing the research itself. You also have to be able to write down your work in high quality, and communicate your past and current work, as well as future work plans in high enough quality to get someone to invest in you.