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This is getting more and more common in science, as a researcher's reputation and funding is more and more connected to their ability to get media/internet atte
by earthscienceman 5y ago
This is getting more and more common in science, as a researcher's reputation and funding is more and more connected to their ability to get media/internet attention.
- Y_Y 5y agoThis comment made me weep internally. It's soul-crushing how relentless self-promotion is now as necessary good science for a "successful" academic career. (We can define that as getting paid anything at all by a university.) I never really had the intellectual talent or salesmanship for that, my gripe is that academia has this unsettling undercurrent of boasting and bluffing and backstabbing and it makes it just an unpleasant community in which to forge a livelihood. Surely a healthy measure of these things has always existed, but the incentives has become perversely perverse and it really drives away people with a genuine aptitude and interest from areas where they can make genuine discoveries about nature and contribute to the sum of human knowledge. And it drove me away too.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y agoIt always was this way. Source - PhD in physics, 1988.
- earthscienceman 5y agoOh yeah. I'm miserable. I have a 'dream career' but the reality of it is so unsettling. I work in a laboratory where collaboration only happens if it directly benefits someone's career in an "I'm famous" way... not an "I contributed to an important work" way. This is not unique. It's systemic. My job largely revolves around seeming important, not doing good work.
- phkahler 5y ago>> My job largely revolves around seeming important, not doing good work. That happens in companies too. It's really strange. OTOH we also know that any objective measures will be gamed, which I guess is the same thing. Perceptions are more important than reality sometimes.