6 ms·

Lessons for a Young Scientist

54 points by arkj 5y ago

petermcneeley 5y ago
Real lessons http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html
- xipho 5y ago
  This is well understood, and conscientious professors drill these concepts into prospective students and lab members. Unfortunately there are many who aren't conscientious. I know bitter, would-be scientists ejected from the system, we need more money in Science (the NSF budget is so small relative to military expenditures the biggest tragedy I know). I know scientists who think that people are insane for doing anything that isn't what they are doing. We need more tenure. I love grant writing, but I'm in a privileged position (albeit not tenured). It's a wonderful chance to explore, formulate, and refine ideas as to what might be possible. The harder part is when you have a grant, double your work. But, again, the people you get to meet, places you get to go, and aha moments that come out of Science, the products of those grants, and your team's hard work- are unbeatable, and they are a truly memorable part of my life.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    Speaking from experience, tenure isn't enough. The federal government needs to cutoff the indirect funds money siphon because the problems don't end with tenure. Doing so would be painful but would force universities to be real about their priorities. Increasing available funds without changing the system will just increase the scope of the pyramid scheme without changing anything. You have to do both.
    - xipho 5y ago
      Largely agree, however I would rather have a pyramid scheme in science, than building guns. I.e. the argument "we can do better" isn't special to Science. Indirect funds are a big issue, but not without some use, the technical support at various levels is useful. The admin layers above that, not so much. This style of argument is commonly presented here. In discussion here very, very often, people point out "the system will be abused". Most of my friends in Science are content with where they are at. They work super hard, are super intelligent, are often making the best of smaller institutions, and they wouldn't think twice about scamming the system, abusing it, etc. Maybe the liberal mindset bias is in effect here, I'm absolutely certain there are those abusing the system. I feel like the opinions here, in HN, frequently depend so much on assuming that everyone is out to screw their neighbor, at the first chance they get. It's sad (and contrary to the guidelines at some level- assume the best, work from there).
      - derbOac 5y ago
        I guess I feel as if there shouldn't be a choice between having too many wars and a broken academic system? As the pandemic has shown, these issues can have real-life consequences as well. My experience is that experiences in science can vary tremendously depending on the institution, which in itself is part of the problem. Some institutions and fields are basically as you describe, and people are basically humble, hardworking, and make do sincerely and resourcefully. Many, many institutions, though, are dysfunctional and corrupt. Increasingly indirect funds are the primary goal in evaluating scientists and scientific contributions, period. I could tell many personal anecdotes about this, from my own experience as well as those of others (as tenured faculty), but it is not an exaggeration to say that the primary motive in many departments, at least in the biomedical sciences, is indirect funds from the federal government. This has been acknowledged as such in commentaries by formal heads of federal funding agencies. I can explain how this distorts many things, but I have seen these pyramid schemes persist even in the presence of these discussions, without any acknowledgement by programs or colleges. They simply do not care because to do so would cost them indirects. One thing that's upsetting to me is that the people who are well-situated of course are not harmed. They benefit, and are happy to continue with the status quo because they have thrived under it, and don't have to deal with the consequences in terms of misplaced shame, lost years and salaries, and lost opportunities. It also distorts scientific process, leading to endless discussions of p-values versus Bayesian CIs that don't matter because the problem is hype chasing and monetary incentives. The thing is, it's not even necessarily about the scientists, many of whom may be very well-meaning as you describe. It's at a higher level, in terms of program and hiring strategy, departmental organization, etc. The people doing well may not even be aware of the fact that for every group of theirs that is doing well, getting along, etc. there are many times more people who weren't allowed in the group, who got in with a bad crowd, who were manipulated or taken advantage of, or so forth. I often get this sense that the counterarguments go something like this: "well, science is still making a lot of progress" and "good people are getting along fine" which has this Machiavellian flavor to it. The question isn't whether or not progress is being made, it's how much better could things be if they were different? I'm also not saying funding shouldn't be increased, I'm just saying that there have to be serious structural changes to go along with it as well, otherwise we're going to end up with the same problems at a bigger scale.
  - lumost 5y ago
    On the other side, it's possible that we have too many people expecting careers in science. If you look at top-tier work from the 1700s-1950s it's remarkable how productive and impactful the same set of scientists were. Each scientist would produce a few grad student successors over their entire career - and were presumably deeply invested in their success because of this. Since the 1950s US institutions have been producing many more grad students than there could ever possibly be positions for. This simply increases the competition and favors anti-competitive approaches to science (block alternative theories funding, buddy up with a few others to control what papers get accepted to conferences etc. )
    - petermcneeley 5y ago
      I mean the whole world worked that way back then. Kings trained kings and cobblers trained cobblers. In fact there were many father-son scientists duos. The issue is that there really is less and less work on the bottom (farming etc). There is actually less work in even blue collar due to how things are made (thrown out). So where do people work? Why wouldnt 2022 have like a population of 60% scientists? Would you rather them fill bullshit jobs?
      - lumost 5y ago
        I'm not sure the characterization of science not being full of bullshit jobs is accurate. Many of these jobs are studying fields that finished decades ago, training scientists who will never work in the field, writing endless tiny grant proposals, and trying to publish enough not to get buried. I think we need a more stable funding model for science that doesn't incentivize gaming the system. I'd love it if 60% of the population had stable employement as scientists while robots did everything else for us, but spending 100x on our current science infrastructure would probably mean less output unless we allow greater independence and stability.
        petermcneeley 5y ago
        "I think we need a more stable funding model for science that doesn't incentivize gaming the system." I think there is a scarcity issue here and if that scarcity issue was resolved you would see a blooming of scientific discoveries/applications. As for the fields finishing decades ago. Yes some of them have become quite well defined (Physics) but there still is plenty of room for applied science and engineering in these areas.
- stocknoob 5y ago
  Yep. If you are a technical person who wants to pursue their curiosity, get a tech job, reach financial independence in your early 40s, and build your own tenure instead of jumping through these hoops.
  - unemphysbro 5y ago
    i'm running the counterfactual simulation and i agree :)
- lnwlebjel 5y ago
  > I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs. Ruined, really? Like living on the street ruined? Anyone with a PhD in Physics has opportunities. They might not be able to get a tenure track job in a Physics department, but there are many, many other opportunities, even in academia. For example, several of the best oceanographers I've worked with are Physics PhDs.
  - InefficientRed 5y ago
    >> I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs. > Ruined, really? The "I" in that sentence is doing a lot of work, and Katz is a sort of generally a foolish know-it-all on everything outside of his field. See, e.g., his defense of the Iraq war. Sounds like he knows everything, but the blind spots are astounding (and now, two decades later, finally obvious to even the least informed layman.) I remember reading it and shaking my head at the time -- 'this is what dunning-kruger looks like!'. The piece aged about as well as I would've predicted at the time. From what I've heard about Katz and his advising... style... the selection bias of this "I" is particularly perverse. That said... > Like living on the street ruined? Yes, and this is a MUCH more serious problem than you're giving it credit for. PhD stipends are NOT normal salaries/wages! AFAIK it's literally the only full-time position where the employer does not have to pay FICA taxes. That means no unemployment benefits. That means homelessness if you don't find a job immediately after graduation. Why might you not find a job immediately after completing a physics phd? Perhaps you graduate during a multi-year hiring slow-down caused by a global pandemic or a financial crisis. I.e., you're one of roughly a third of recent cohorts. I've known many people who failed to find a post-doc and ended up homeless for a period of time because they didn't realize that they couldn't even rely on federal unemployment as a stop-gap. One of my wife's former peers slept on our couch for a couple months. I've know many, MANY more people who would've been homeless for a period of time in their late 20s after half a decade of working full-time had it not been for family support. Truly astounding numbers. Perhaps 1/2 to 2/3rds of my wife's graduating cohort fell into that category. I opted out of academia with TT offers in hand because I don't understand how people can run a group staffed by grad students and look themselves in the mirror in the morning.
asdf_snar 5y ago
It's interesting to complement the last point, "Only geniuses (or cranks) head straight for the grandest and most fundamental problems", with two of Hamming's [0] points: > When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. but also > If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. [0] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.pdf
- Fomite 5y ago
  I'd suggest that "grandest and most fundamental" and "important", while correlated, are not the same thing.
  - rsfern 5y ago
    Hamming specifically defines important as both high impact and high tractability in this essay, so I generally think he would have agreed with you
- eli_gottlieb 5y ago
  >And another thing: Only geniuses (or cranks) head straight for the grandest and most fundamental problems. You should multiply the importance of the problem by the probability that you’ll solve it and maximize that product. In my experience, there's actually a neat little trick for doing this: be interdisciplinary. What one discipline considers a grand and fundamental problem may be, from the perspective of another discipline, much more narrowly-defined and tractable. Attempting to accommodate many disciplinary points of view on a problem gives you more independent experimental evidence to draw on, narrowing down the range of possible models or theories you need to investigate in depth.
logitjoy 5y ago
One of the greatest Mathematicians of twentieth century, Bill Thurston, would make gigantic theories out of interesting examples. It motivates me to always work with examples even in pure math. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thurston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thurston
Fomite 5y ago
"There’s no justification for snobbery of pure over applied work." is such an important point. The most gratifying, impactful work I've done in my career has been applied work. The growth bit at the end is the most important one, in my opinion. In graduate school, an ecology professor of mine noted that for a field at steady state, the number of PhD students a R1 institution PI could expect to follow them on that path was 1. For a field doubling in size, it was...2. I've approached my lab trying to be mindful of that.
- leohonexus 5y ago
  > the number of PhD students a R1 institution PI could expect to follow them on that path was 1 Sorry if I sound dumb, but do you mind elaborating on what you meant by R1 institution PI?
  - jsweojtj 5y ago
    PI is Principal Investigator (think professor in charge of a research group) and R1 is the rating (top tier) research university. See a list here, https://www.brandeis.edu/diversity/dei-recruitment-hiring/outreach-institutions/r1-research.html https://www.brandeis.edu/diversity/dei-recruitment-hiring/ou...
  - Fomite 5y ago
    Not dumb at all. Academia loves its jargon.
- InefficientRed 5y ago
  > for a field at steady state 1. What you mean by "steady state" really matters. 1a. There can be fields that are totally stagnant in terms of huge new intellectual advances but where the student population is exploding. 1b. There can be fields that are experiencing precipitous decline in enrollment while the intellectual and commercial field itself is in hyper-growth (CS has experienced 2 of these moments in its short history). 1c. There can be fields that are stagnant in every respect but which, for whatever reason, attract lots of funding relative to the number of occupied seats. "ML + X" for all X was like this a half decade ago or so, even for values of X in stark decline. 2. CS is growing much faster than 2x. Or at least was for the last 5-10 years. 3. Most importantly, in CS, R1 is probably the very worst type of job for a phd-holder looking to do science. You get the pay of a professor, more stress than industry, are dependent on a system that horribly exploits IC labor, and are absoutely beholden to the politics of pretty ineffectual funding agencies. R2 or teaching track CS jobs are super chill, very stable, and often pay not too much worse than R1. Industry positions come with WAY more money and often more prestige/resources.
hamiltonians 5y ago
but its getting too hard to find new discoveries
moralestapia 5y ago
Another important lesson I want to share is that science (as most all other professions) has become corrupt and your career outcome will largely depend on who you know, who knows you, who you strike deals with, etc... disregarding your actual achievements and talent. It would be a mistake for somebody in the current age to think of it as a meritocracy. So, if you're a young scientist, decide if it's worth the squeeze and plan accordingly.
- rodrigosetti 5y ago
  What career is a meritocracy?
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    There are still some instances in the industry where merit works. There's close to zero of that left in academia.
    - glofish 5y ago
      I think it is unfair to say close to zero, just that it is far less than what most people expect of science
      - earthscienceman 5y ago
        Not only that, but I hate to be the bearer of bad news... It has always been that way. Science was the domain of wealthy white men who came from thoroughbred backgrounds. It's more of a meritocracy than ever, in some ways, in that you can pay to attend a university and you can shoehorn your way into the system. I'm a scientist, I grew up in a single parent family with zero academic background. However, this is not the norm, and it's a rough road full of petty bullshit and gatekeeping... choose accordingly. I don't know what it is with HN and this fetishism for the past and its superior ethical and technical state. It's, as a general rule, entirely false. Any time you read "things aren't like they used to be" it should trigger intense skepticism. In fact, things used to be awful. It was just accepted as the norm and poorly documented in their reasons for being awful and now we have forums where the public can easily and openly discuss such issues.
glofish 5y ago
Tragicomically the author quotes: "the great ecologist E.O. Wilson" for guidance on what a good scientist is... Read what Scientific American did to Wilson mere three days after his death: https://razib.substack.com/p/setting-the-record-straight-open https://razib.substack.com/p/setting-the-record-straight-ope... A meritless attack by an untrained hack, with no evidence and proof whatsoever: > seemed to have little to do with Wilson, and everything to do with opportunistically shoehorning particular views about social justice into the practice of hard science. and > ... attacks on science are legion, genuine fear of the social-media mob is rampant in academia and whole careers are “canceled” on a specious basis ... That is a much better lesson for a young scientists of where science is headed.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sersi 5y ago
  Wow, that completely discredits Scientific American... I'm pretty politically aligned with the nurse who wrote that oped but that doesn't change the fact that this oped is a complete hackjob, attacking great scientists with baseless accusation, wilfully misunderstanding the work of Wilson (and Mendel, Darwin, etc...) and completely misunderstanding statistics. The point of science is the search of truth, it's impossible to get closer to the truth of the world if the only answers the researcher accepts are those that matches their political views.
teleforce 5y ago
This book by Richard Hamming is an excellent guide for doing research in science and engineering, regardless if you considered yourself old or young [1]. [1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Doing_Science_and_Engineering https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Doing_Science_and...

54 points by arkj 5y ago

petermcneeley 5y ago

Real lessons http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html

xipho 5y ago
This is well understood, and conscientious professors drill these concepts into prospective students and lab members. Unfortunately there are many who aren't conscientious. I know bitter, would-be scientists ejected from the system, we need more money in Science (the NSF budget is so small relative to military expenditures the biggest tragedy I know). I know scientists who think that people are insane for doing anything that isn't what they are doing. We need more tenure. I love grant writing, but I'm in a privileged position (albeit not tenured). It's a wonderful chance to explore, formulate, and refine ideas as to what might be possible. The harder part is when you have a grant, double your work. But, again, the people you get to meet, places you get to go, and aha moments that come out of Science, the products of those grants, and your team's hard work- are unbeatable, and they are a truly memorable part of my life.
- derbOac 5y ago
  Speaking from experience, tenure isn't enough. The federal government needs to cutoff the indirect funds money siphon because the problems don't end with tenure. Doing so would be painful but would force universities to be real about their priorities. Increasing available funds without changing the system will just increase the scope of the pyramid scheme without changing anything. You have to do both.
  - xipho 5y ago
    Largely agree, however I would rather have a pyramid scheme in science, than building guns. I.e. the argument "we can do better" isn't special to Science. Indirect funds are a big issue, but not without some use, the technical support at various levels is useful. The admin layers above that, not so much. This style of argument is commonly presented here. In discussion here very, very often, people point out "the system will be abused". Most of my friends in Science are content with where they are at. They work super hard, are super intelligent, are often making the best of smaller institutions, and they wouldn't think twice about scamming the system, abusing it, etc. Maybe the liberal mindset bias is in effect here, I'm absolutely certain there are those abusing the system. I feel like the opinions here, in HN, frequently depend so much on assuming that everyone is out to screw their neighbor, at the first chance they get. It's sad (and contrary to the guidelines at some level- assume the best, work from there).
    - derbOac 5y ago
      I guess I feel as if there shouldn't be a choice between having too many wars and a broken academic system? As the pandemic has shown, these issues can have real-life consequences as well. My experience is that experiences in science can vary tremendously depending on the institution, which in itself is part of the problem. Some institutions and fields are basically as you describe, and people are basically humble, hardworking, and make do sincerely and resourcefully. Many, many institutions, though, are dysfunctional and corrupt. Increasingly indirect funds are the primary goal in evaluating scientists and scientific contributions, period. I could tell many personal anecdotes about this, from my own experience as well as those of others (as tenured faculty), but it is not an exaggeration to say that the primary motive in many departments, at least in the biomedical sciences, is indirect funds from the federal government. This has been acknowledged as such in commentaries by formal heads of federal funding agencies. I can explain how this distorts many things, but I have seen these pyramid schemes persist even in the presence of these discussions, without any acknowledgement by programs or colleges. They simply do not care because to do so would cost them indirects. One thing that's upsetting to me is that the people who are well-situated of course are not harmed. They benefit, and are happy to continue with the status quo because they have thrived under it, and don't have to deal with the consequences in terms of misplaced shame, lost years and salaries, and lost opportunities. It also distorts scientific process, leading to endless discussions of p-values versus Bayesian CIs that don't matter because the problem is hype chasing and monetary incentives. The thing is, it's not even necessarily about the scientists, many of whom may be very well-meaning as you describe. It's at a higher level, in terms of program and hiring strategy, departmental organization, etc. The people doing well may not even be aware of the fact that for every group of theirs that is doing well, getting along, etc. there are many times more people who weren't allowed in the group, who got in with a bad crowd, who were manipulated or taken advantage of, or so forth. I often get this sense that the counterarguments go something like this: "well, science is still making a lot of progress" and "good people are getting along fine" which has this Machiavellian flavor to it. The question isn't whether or not progress is being made, it's how much better could things be if they were different? I'm also not saying funding shouldn't be increased, I'm just saying that there have to be serious structural changes to go along with it as well, otherwise we're going to end up with the same problems at a bigger scale.
- lumost 5y ago
  On the other side, it's possible that we have too many people expecting careers in science. If you look at top-tier work from the 1700s-1950s it's remarkable how productive and impactful the same set of scientists were. Each scientist would produce a few grad student successors over their entire career - and were presumably deeply invested in their success because of this. Since the 1950s US institutions have been producing many more grad students than there could ever possibly be positions for. This simply increases the competition and favors anti-competitive approaches to science (block alternative theories funding, buddy up with a few others to control what papers get accepted to conferences etc. )
  - petermcneeley 5y ago
    I mean the whole world worked that way back then. Kings trained kings and cobblers trained cobblers. In fact there were many father-son scientists duos. The issue is that there really is less and less work on the bottom (farming etc). There is actually less work in even blue collar due to how things are made (thrown out). So where do people work? Why wouldnt 2022 have like a population of 60% scientists? Would you rather them fill bullshit jobs?
    - lumost 5y ago
      I'm not sure the characterization of science not being full of bullshit jobs is accurate. Many of these jobs are studying fields that finished decades ago, training scientists who will never work in the field, writing endless tiny grant proposals, and trying to publish enough not to get buried. I think we need a more stable funding model for science that doesn't incentivize gaming the system. I'd love it if 60% of the population had stable employement as scientists while robots did everything else for us, but spending 100x on our current science infrastructure would probably mean less output unless we allow greater independence and stability.
      - petermcneeley 5y ago
        "I think we need a more stable funding model for science that doesn't incentivize gaming the system." I think there is a scarcity issue here and if that scarcity issue was resolved you would see a blooming of scientific discoveries/applications. As for the fields finishing decades ago. Yes some of them have become quite well defined (Physics) but there still is plenty of room for applied science and engineering in these areas.
stocknoob 5y ago
Yep. If you are a technical person who wants to pursue their curiosity, get a tech job, reach financial independence in your early 40s, and build your own tenure instead of jumping through these hoops.
- unemphysbro 5y ago
  i'm running the counterfactual simulation and i agree :)
lnwlebjel 5y ago
> I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs. Ruined, really? Like living on the street ruined? Anyone with a PhD in Physics has opportunities. They might not be able to get a tenure track job in a Physics department, but there are many, many other opportunities, even in academia. For example, several of the best oceanographers I've worked with are Physics PhDs.
- InefficientRed 5y ago
  >> I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs. > Ruined, really? The "I" in that sentence is doing a lot of work, and Katz is a sort of generally a foolish know-it-all on everything outside of his field. See, e.g., his defense of the Iraq war. Sounds like he knows everything, but the blind spots are astounding (and now, two decades later, finally obvious to even the least informed layman.) I remember reading it and shaking my head at the time -- 'this is what dunning-kruger looks like!'. The piece aged about as well as I would've predicted at the time. From what I've heard about Katz and his advising... style... the selection bias of this "I" is particularly perverse. That said... > Like living on the street ruined? Yes, and this is a MUCH more serious problem than you're giving it credit for. PhD stipends are NOT normal salaries/wages! AFAIK it's literally the only full-time position where the employer does not have to pay FICA taxes. That means no unemployment benefits. That means homelessness if you don't find a job immediately after graduation. Why might you not find a job immediately after completing a physics phd? Perhaps you graduate during a multi-year hiring slow-down caused by a global pandemic or a financial crisis. I.e., you're one of roughly a third of recent cohorts. I've known many people who failed to find a post-doc and ended up homeless for a period of time because they didn't realize that they couldn't even rely on federal unemployment as a stop-gap. One of my wife's former peers slept on our couch for a couple months. I've know many, MANY more people who would've been homeless for a period of time in their late 20s after half a decade of working full-time had it not been for family support. Truly astounding numbers. Perhaps 1/2 to 2/3rds of my wife's graduating cohort fell into that category. I opted out of academia with TT offers in hand because I don't understand how people can run a group staffed by grad students and look themselves in the mirror in the morning.

asdf_snar 5y ago

It's interesting to complement the last point, "Only geniuses (or cranks) head straight for the grandest and most fundamental problems", with two of Hamming's [0] points: > When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. but also > If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. [0] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.pdf

Fomite 5y ago
I'd suggest that "grandest and most fundamental" and "important", while correlated, are not the same thing.
- rsfern 5y ago
  Hamming specifically defines important as both high impact and high tractability in this essay, so I generally think he would have agreed with you
eli_gottlieb 5y ago
>And another thing: Only geniuses (or cranks) head straight for the grandest and most fundamental problems. You should multiply the importance of the problem by the probability that you’ll solve it and maximize that product. In my experience, there's actually a neat little trick for doing this: be interdisciplinary. What one discipline considers a grand and fundamental problem may be, from the perspective of another discipline, much more narrowly-defined and tractable. Attempting to accommodate many disciplinary points of view on a problem gives you more independent experimental evidence to draw on, narrowing down the range of possible models or theories you need to investigate in depth.

logitjoy 5y ago

One of the greatest Mathematicians of twentieth century, Bill Thurston, would make gigantic theories out of interesting examples. It motivates me to always work with examples even in pure math. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thurston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thurston

Fomite 5y ago

"There’s no justification for snobbery of pure over applied work." is such an important point. The most gratifying, impactful work I've done in my career has been applied work. The growth bit at the end is the most important one, in my opinion. In graduate school, an ecology professor of mine noted that for a field at steady state, the number of PhD students a R1 institution PI could expect to follow them on that path was 1. For a field doubling in size, it was...2. I've approached my lab trying to be mindful of that.

leohonexus 5y ago
> the number of PhD students a R1 institution PI could expect to follow them on that path was 1 Sorry if I sound dumb, but do you mind elaborating on what you meant by R1 institution PI?
- jsweojtj 5y ago
  PI is Principal Investigator (think professor in charge of a research group) and R1 is the rating (top tier) research university. See a list here, https://www.brandeis.edu/diversity/dei-recruitment-hiring/outreach-institutions/r1-research.html https://www.brandeis.edu/diversity/dei-recruitment-hiring/ou...
- Fomite 5y ago
  Not dumb at all. Academia loves its jargon.
InefficientRed 5y ago
> for a field at steady state 1. What you mean by "steady state" really matters. 1a. There can be fields that are totally stagnant in terms of huge new intellectual advances but where the student population is exploding. 1b. There can be fields that are experiencing precipitous decline in enrollment while the intellectual and commercial field itself is in hyper-growth (CS has experienced 2 of these moments in its short history). 1c. There can be fields that are stagnant in every respect but which, for whatever reason, attract lots of funding relative to the number of occupied seats. "ML + X" for all X was like this a half decade ago or so, even for values of X in stark decline. 2. CS is growing much faster than 2x. Or at least was for the last 5-10 years. 3. Most importantly, in CS, R1 is probably the very worst type of job for a phd-holder looking to do science. You get the pay of a professor, more stress than industry, are dependent on a system that horribly exploits IC labor, and are absoutely beholden to the politics of pretty ineffectual funding agencies. R2 or teaching track CS jobs are super chill, very stable, and often pay not too much worse than R1. Industry positions come with WAY more money and often more prestige/resources.

hamiltonians 5y ago

but its getting too hard to find new discoveries

moralestapia 5y ago

Another important lesson I want to share is that science (as most all other professions) has become corrupt and your career outcome will largely depend on who you know, who knows you, who you strike deals with, etc... disregarding your actual achievements and talent. It would be a mistake for somebody in the current age to think of it as a meritocracy. So, if you're a young scientist, decide if it's worth the squeeze and plan accordingly.

rodrigosetti 5y ago
What career is a meritocracy?
- moralestapia 5y ago
  There are still some instances in the industry where merit works. There's close to zero of that left in academia.
  - glofish 5y ago
    I think it is unfair to say close to zero, just that it is far less than what most people expect of science
    - earthscienceman 5y ago
      Not only that, but I hate to be the bearer of bad news... It has always been that way. Science was the domain of wealthy white men who came from thoroughbred backgrounds. It's more of a meritocracy than ever, in some ways, in that you can pay to attend a university and you can shoehorn your way into the system. I'm a scientist, I grew up in a single parent family with zero academic background. However, this is not the norm, and it's a rough road full of petty bullshit and gatekeeping... choose accordingly. I don't know what it is with HN and this fetishism for the past and its superior ethical and technical state. It's, as a general rule, entirely false. Any time you read "things aren't like they used to be" it should trigger intense skepticism. In fact, things used to be awful. It was just accepted as the norm and poorly documented in their reasons for being awful and now we have forums where the public can easily and openly discuss such issues.

glofish 5y ago

Tragicomically the author quotes: "the great ecologist E.O. Wilson" for guidance on what a good scientist is... Read what Scientific American did to Wilson mere three days after his death: https://razib.substack.com/p/setting-the-record-straight-open https://razib.substack.com/p/setting-the-record-straight-ope... A meritless attack by an untrained hack, with no evidence and proof whatsoever: > seemed to have little to do with Wilson, and everything to do with opportunistically shoehorning particular views about social justice into the practice of hard science. and > ... attacks on science are legion, genuine fear of the social-media mob is rampant in academia and whole careers are “canceled” on a specious basis ... That is a much better lesson for a young scientists of where science is headed.

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sersi 5y ago
Wow, that completely discredits Scientific American... I'm pretty politically aligned with the nurse who wrote that oped but that doesn't change the fact that this oped is a complete hackjob, attacking great scientists with baseless accusation, wilfully misunderstanding the work of Wilson (and Mendel, Darwin, etc...) and completely misunderstanding statistics. The point of science is the search of truth, it's impossible to get closer to the truth of the world if the only answers the researcher accepts are those that matches their political views.

teleforce 5y ago

This book by Richard Hamming is an excellent guide for doing research in science and engineering, regardless if you considered yourself old or young [1]. [1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Doing_Science_and_Engineering https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Doing_Science_and...