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I don't see it as a general public problem but I actually do see it as an ongoing scientific training problem. Biology PhD programs these days spend a lot more

I don't see it as a general public problem but I actually do see it as an ongoing scientific training problem. Biology PhD programs these days spend a lot more time teaching prior biology results than they do having students engage with what it means to be a scientist, in the limited time that they teach at all. "Students" are then sorted into a lab where they learn the specific scientific cookbook of the subfield and in some cases never even try to apply it truly on their own before graduating, because they are used as a lab monkey for 4+ years. Collaborative side projects or substantial additional course work are rare, so students are often functionally the same as a lab employee. The lab has minimal external incentive to train the person to become a good scientist, and there isn't much cultural pressure either, so the training focus is instead to become a good [hyperspecific topic] lab member. To graduate a student needs a deep understanding of what was previously shown in their niche, but they really do not need to engage with much at all to do with meta science, and it is wholly possible to graduate without ever demonstrating the ability to ask good scientific questions from the genesis of a project through to it's completion, even in the context of the norms of said niche subfield. Student experiences of course vary widely, and even for those that do the menial slog version of a bio PhD, the attitude surrounding it varies. Some seem to be happy for the guidance when their advisor is like this while others resent the lack of intellectual freedom. Regardless, I find this to be pervasive in the environments I've been able to observe, even at a few of the supposedly top life sciences PhD programs in the US. To think deeply about meta science in any official capacity as part of PhD training requires you to go out of your way. Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum it is possible to receive a "top" PhD and stay in academia for quite a long time through only a combination of hard work and learning the experimental best practices of the field as if it were a trade (and that might be underrating the nuance in the trades honestly, I don't know enough to say). I do think it is a difficult problem to avoid to at least some extent, because open questions in biology increase in complexity quite a lot over time, with a big time and financial commitment required to do a number of projects these days. Without radical changes in labor sources for wet lab work I'm not sure the issue can be sufficiently addressed. I also imagine that even in less expensive/slow fields there is an increasingly unapproachable body of prior knowledge to learn, and people don't want to be trainees forever. So I believe a large philosophical paradigm shift might be needed too. I'd love to see multiple different types of PhDs introduced with different graduation requirements, funding structures, and intended postgrad career paths, while maintaining the core thesis writing experience across the board.

staunton 4y ago
> a large philosophical paradigm shift might be needed too Why? The way to learn a lot of prior knowledge is focused study and good teaching. Philosophy has little to do with it. I agree that it would make sense having more specialized lab workers (which definitely is a trade and should be learned while doing like one) assisting scientists whose education must be broader. Another thing concerning the philosophy is that the current environment and competition for resources at research institutions rather discourages good scientific practice. E.g., it encourages overselling results while never attempting to reproduce them. This is getting better in my opinion, as e.g. in the open science initiative. However, I find it very hard to agrue that teaching more philosophy of science would do much good here. It's a problem of incentives. Another question is whether science would actually progress faster (or in some other way better) if the philosophical ideals were followed more closely. I don't see how the situation in bio labs that you describe would benefit from all PhD students having heared three lectures on philosophy of science. The occasions where the philosophy actually informs decisions in the lab are very rare (though sometimes very important) and there seem to be enough people who know these things well enough for their purposes when this knowledge benefits the lab. When leaving academia, few students will have a chance to apply these concepts and most at least know that scientific methodology is a thing and will learn it if actually needed for what they do. Furthermore, most fields have their own somewhat incompatible folklore methodologies that do not easily generalize to unrelated problems.
- caddemon 4y ago
  No as fields get deeper and deeper there is a point at which it is no longer humanly possible to cover the prior material exhaustively in a vaguely reasonable timeframe. We can keep digging narrower and narrower niches at the expense of basic scientific literacy, or we can realize that at some point the system cannot keep scaling in a one dimensional way. Or I guess we can make people go to school until they're 60. If you think what I'm proposing is three lectures on philosophy of science than either you have zero idea how a PhD program works or you're arguing in bad faith. The fact that someone can graduate from a top 5 biology PhD program without ever demonstrating the ability to come up with a decent research question nor to independently plan a decent study to address a given research question is appalling. The fact the programs actively discourage students from exploring anything intellectual outside of the narrow framework of their chosen lab, even projects that would clearly fit under the program's broader umbrella, is also appalling. The primary point isn't whether students can learn those things on their own later. The primary point is that this is a huge indictment of the culture of graduate training. It is creating a legion of fucking drones as our next set of profs. Many of them are truly not aware that they lack this expertise. Also, a PhD is explicitly designed as training to be in academia. There are a small set of industry jobs that require a PhD, and there are more industry jobs that appreciate a PhD, but really the only reason that PhDs have shifted so much towards industry is because the academic job market is completely fucked. It is only recently that biology professors will entertain the idea that someone should choose to leave academia after a PhD and that is not considered failure. Yet at the same time they do a bad job of preparing others for academic research.

staunton 4y ago

> a large philosophical paradigm shift might be needed too Why? The way to learn a lot of prior knowledge is focused study and good teaching. Philosophy has little to do with it. I agree that it would make sense having more specialized lab workers (which definitely is a trade and should be learned while doing like one) assisting scientists whose education must be broader. Another thing concerning the philosophy is that the current environment and competition for resources at research institutions rather discourages good scientific practice. E.g., it encourages overselling results while never attempting to reproduce them. This is getting better in my opinion, as e.g. in the open science initiative. However, I find it very hard to agrue that teaching more philosophy of science would do much good here. It's a problem of incentives. Another question is whether science would actually progress faster (or in some other way better) if the philosophical ideals were followed more closely. I don't see how the situation in bio labs that you describe would benefit from all PhD students having heared three lectures on philosophy of science. The occasions where the philosophy actually informs decisions in the lab are very rare (though sometimes very important) and there seem to be enough people who know these things well enough for their purposes when this knowledge benefits the lab. When leaving academia, few students will have a chance to apply these concepts and most at least know that scientific methodology is a thing and will learn it if actually needed for what they do. Furthermore, most fields have their own somewhat incompatible folklore methodologies that do not easily generalize to unrelated problems.

caddemon 4y ago
No as fields get deeper and deeper there is a point at which it is no longer humanly possible to cover the prior material exhaustively in a vaguely reasonable timeframe. We can keep digging narrower and narrower niches at the expense of basic scientific literacy, or we can realize that at some point the system cannot keep scaling in a one dimensional way. Or I guess we can make people go to school until they're 60. If you think what I'm proposing is three lectures on philosophy of science than either you have zero idea how a PhD program works or you're arguing in bad faith. The fact that someone can graduate from a top 5 biology PhD program without ever demonstrating the ability to come up with a decent research question nor to independently plan a decent study to address a given research question is appalling. The fact the programs actively discourage students from exploring anything intellectual outside of the narrow framework of their chosen lab, even projects that would clearly fit under the program's broader umbrella, is also appalling. The primary point isn't whether students can learn those things on their own later. The primary point is that this is a huge indictment of the culture of graduate training. It is creating a legion of fucking drones as our next set of profs. Many of them are truly not aware that they lack this expertise. Also, a PhD is explicitly designed as training to be in academia. There are a small set of industry jobs that require a PhD, and there are more industry jobs that appreciate a PhD, but really the only reason that PhDs have shifted so much towards industry is because the academic job market is completely fucked. It is only recently that biology professors will entertain the idea that someone should choose to leave academia after a PhD and that is not considered failure. Yet at the same time they do a bad job of preparing others for academic research.