6 ms·

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

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
  What public money do you think is going toward producing PhDs? PhDs are funded by teaching and research work. They aren't paid to get the PhD.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    The research part is often funded by public grant money. > They aren't paid to get the PhD. PhD students are often paid salaries/stipends derived from (often public) grant money.
    - raziel2701 6y ago
      And the best part is that all this public money results in research papers that lie behind a private paywall. How have we allowed for this fraud to go on and on?
      - mattkrause 6y ago
        That's no longer true. From 2013 onward, the results of all federally-funded research needs to be publicly available. Here's the memo mandating it: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expanding-public-access-results-federally-funded-research https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi... People do generally take this seriously and there are consequences (e.g., can't use publications in NIH grants if they haven't been deposited).
        raziel2701 6y ago
        I have continued to publish and never have I been instructed to make the papers be open access. No one is enforcing that mandate. The research I've been a part of is wholly funded by the taxpayer and papers that I published after the mandate continue to not be freely available.
        reasonabl_human 6y ago
        Perhaps they fall under export control due to being applicable to national defense?
bnralt 6y ago
It seems like this is exactly the kind of thing that a government is useful for. Why not have more publicly funded research institutions that employ them, and put them to work on useful research without having them worry about grant considerations, teaching classes, or the publishing treadmill?
- ghaff 6y ago
  It sounds like you're replacing grant writing with a win the government research funding for life lottery which obviously an improvement. That said, there is some of that in the national labs although they need to worry about program funding like everywhere else. (Though military programs in particular are pretty secure.)
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Which is not obviously an improvement.
- saboot 6y ago
  We do .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_development_centers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_...
  - papa_reton 6y ago
    Unfortunately they are US-only, have small funding and deliver little publicly available results. And sometimes they do nasty stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Engineering_Institute#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Engineering_Institute...
    - saboot 6y ago
      Many of us deliver much of our results publicly all the time. At ORNL any user can come and use our facilities. We've got a neutron beam system which I think exists only in one other place on Earth. In fact, users can use it for free only if they pledge to publish their results publicly.
ghaff 6y ago
Bell Labs was one organization. While it's always a big blurry how much pure research goes on at corporate research labs, I'm not sure there isn't as much research going on today than there ever was given all the money especially in software out there. Hard to measure as I say, but I think it was maybe the 80s going into the 90s that a lot of the old-style corporate research labs were going out of fashion and nothing had really come in to replace them.
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  The Reagan Recession was brutal.
saboot 6y ago
We may not have a Bell Labs, but we have the entire complex of national laboratories which have pivoted from solely developing nuclear weapons towards more basic science. I work in them .. it's really strange how much of the public is unaware of all the work we do, thousands of PhDs are employed through them currently doing basic science funded by tax payers.
- raziel2701 6y ago
  I'm employed in one of them and it is a very bureaucratic, political environment. Our facilities are dilapidated despite the billions in funding, resources are so wastefully spent, there's a lot of siloed equipment, a lot of unused equipment, and it's not unusual to see the lab fund the same project twice but run by different people. I would be so curious for an audit to be done to the lab just to see how misspent the money is. This place I'm in is top-down research. The research ideas that one proposes have to be aligned with certain wishlists and pre-determined directions. It's not a place of innovation, but stagnation. This national lab feels more like a jobs program for phds, but with a sisyphean twist, it lacks vision.
  - saboot 6y ago
    I've worked at a few .. there's one that immediately comes to mind from your description, but some are much better than others at giving freedom to their staff to pursue their own ideas. There is funding like LDRD which is meant to support ideas from the bottom up.
    - reasonabl_human 6y ago
      I’ve previously worked at one before and have since drifted away from basic research. At this point I am gravitating toward it again... in your opinion, what FFRDCs are best at providing that freedom / are less political?
      - saboot 6y ago
        My friend just started a job at LBNL and is loving it. LLNL is considered a great place to work as well. I can't speak to every single lab but I hear good things about working at both of them.
pvaldes 6y ago
> All that training, for nothing All that training, for money that you pay to the university. From the point of view of that companies, the more people failing, the more profitable is their activity, as long as the supply of new people wanting to try it does not dry. There is a reason for the words "inspire", "young" and lately "women" having a prominent place and being repeated again and again in every newspaper or report about scientists.
KirillPanov 6y ago
> We don't have a Bell labs anymore Bell Labs was 100% funded by the rents of a government-enforced monopoly. Ma Bell spent its corporate lifetime fighting to prevent things like the Internet from happening. Bell Labs' job was to patent things like the answering machine so AT&T could prevent them from existing for as long as possible. I, for one, am very very glad that Bell Labs no longer exists.
panic 6y ago
> What do we do with all these smart people? Every community (families, neighbors, fandoms, friends, online chatrooms, religious groups, video game guilds...) has needs. What if smart people helped attend to the needs of the communities they're a part of rather than trying to solve the entire world's problems in a uniform way?

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
What public money do you think is going toward producing PhDs? PhDs are funded by teaching and research work. They aren't paid to get the PhD.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  The research part is often funded by public grant money. > They aren't paid to get the PhD. PhD students are often paid salaries/stipends derived from (often public) grant money.
  - raziel2701 6y ago
    And the best part is that all this public money results in research papers that lie behind a private paywall. How have we allowed for this fraud to go on and on?
    - mattkrause 6y ago
      That's no longer true. From 2013 onward, the results of all federally-funded research needs to be publicly available. Here's the memo mandating it: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expanding-public-access-results-federally-funded-research https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi... People do generally take this seriously and there are consequences (e.g., can't use publications in NIH grants if they haven't been deposited).
      - raziel2701 6y ago
        I have continued to publish and never have I been instructed to make the papers be open access. No one is enforcing that mandate. The research I've been a part of is wholly funded by the taxpayer and papers that I published after the mandate continue to not be freely available.
        reasonabl_human 6y ago
        Perhaps they fall under export control due to being applicable to national defense?

bnralt 6y ago

It seems like this is exactly the kind of thing that a government is useful for. Why not have more publicly funded research institutions that employ them, and put them to work on useful research without having them worry about grant considerations, teaching classes, or the publishing treadmill?

ghaff 6y ago
It sounds like you're replacing grant writing with a win the government research funding for life lottery which obviously an improvement. That said, there is some of that in the national labs although they need to worry about program funding like everywhere else. (Though military programs in particular are pretty secure.)
- ghaff 6y ago
  Which is not obviously an improvement.
saboot 6y ago
We do .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_development_centers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_...
- papa_reton 6y ago
  Unfortunately they are US-only, have small funding and deliver little publicly available results. And sometimes they do nasty stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Engineering_Institute#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Engineering_Institute...
  - saboot 6y ago
    Many of us deliver much of our results publicly all the time. At ORNL any user can come and use our facilities. We've got a neutron beam system which I think exists only in one other place on Earth. In fact, users can use it for free only if they pledge to publish their results publicly.

ghaff 6y ago

Bell Labs was one organization. While it's always a big blurry how much pure research goes on at corporate research labs, I'm not sure there isn't as much research going on today than there ever was given all the money especially in software out there. Hard to measure as I say, but I think it was maybe the 80s going into the 90s that a lot of the old-style corporate research labs were going out of fashion and nothing had really come in to replace them.

fuzzfactor 6y ago
The Reagan Recession was brutal.

saboot 6y ago

We may not have a Bell Labs, but we have the entire complex of national laboratories which have pivoted from solely developing nuclear weapons towards more basic science. I work in them .. it's really strange how much of the public is unaware of all the work we do, thousands of PhDs are employed through them currently doing basic science funded by tax payers.

raziel2701 6y ago
I'm employed in one of them and it is a very bureaucratic, political environment. Our facilities are dilapidated despite the billions in funding, resources are so wastefully spent, there's a lot of siloed equipment, a lot of unused equipment, and it's not unusual to see the lab fund the same project twice but run by different people. I would be so curious for an audit to be done to the lab just to see how misspent the money is. This place I'm in is top-down research. The research ideas that one proposes have to be aligned with certain wishlists and pre-determined directions. It's not a place of innovation, but stagnation. This national lab feels more like a jobs program for phds, but with a sisyphean twist, it lacks vision.
- saboot 6y ago
  I've worked at a few .. there's one that immediately comes to mind from your description, but some are much better than others at giving freedom to their staff to pursue their own ideas. There is funding like LDRD which is meant to support ideas from the bottom up.
  - reasonabl_human 6y ago
    I’ve previously worked at one before and have since drifted away from basic research. At this point I am gravitating toward it again... in your opinion, what FFRDCs are best at providing that freedom / are less political?
    - saboot 6y ago
      My friend just started a job at LBNL and is loving it. LLNL is considered a great place to work as well. I can't speak to every single lab but I hear good things about working at both of them.

pvaldes 6y ago

> All that training, for nothing All that training, for money that you pay to the university. From the point of view of that companies, the more people failing, the more profitable is their activity, as long as the supply of new people wanting to try it does not dry. There is a reason for the words "inspire", "young" and lately "women" having a prominent place and being repeated again and again in every newspaper or report about scientists.

KirillPanov 6y ago

> We don't have a Bell labs anymore Bell Labs was 100% funded by the rents of a government-enforced monopoly. Ma Bell spent its corporate lifetime fighting to prevent things like the Internet from happening. Bell Labs' job was to patent things like the answering machine so AT&T could prevent them from existing for as long as possible. I, for one, am very very glad that Bell Labs no longer exists.

panic 6y ago

> What do we do with all these smart people? Every community (families, neighbors, fandoms, friends, online chatrooms, religious groups, video game guilds...) has needs. What if smart people helped attend to the needs of the communities they're a part of rather than trying to solve the entire world's problems in a uniform way?