4 ms·
My graduate advisor was like that. Refused to ever put anything in writing. Would verbally order you to do something, entire room would jump in and say "that do
by awritawirj 3y ago
My graduate advisor was like that. Refused to ever put anything in writing. Would verbally order you to do something, entire room would jump in and say "that doesn't make sense, literally doesn't add up", when they would bring it up again I would send them an email stating exactly what was wrong with their idea and why I didn't like it, if they insisted I would send them another email stating "although you have not responded to my previous written correspondence, you have verbally commanded me to do this multiple times so I will go ahead with your idea although here is a list of my objections", and then when the crap idea failed exactly the way everyone in the lab said it would professor would rant that it was your idea and they were always against it and you've wasted everyone's time and resources. Not surprisingly, I left with a MS instead of finishing my PhD. What an asshole. Professor recently got tenure, after multiple students and staff (including me) reported them for fraud, embezzlement, and slander.
- huijzer 3y agoAlthough I'm very positive about my graduate advisor, I do see similarities in my PhD field in general. I'm still trying to figure out what is the goal of academia. It's not about finding the truth.
- SoftTalker 3y agoMoney, as always. Instead of selling a product to willing customers at a profit, you try to sell your research ideas to funding organizations in the hopes that they will give you a grant.
- huijzer 3y agoYes that makes sense, but what is then the goal of government funding in all of this? Is it just politics? Like we want to find out that Facebook corrupts our youth, so we fund research in that direction? Government seems to not care about whether the actual findings are true because both citations and peer review do not measure truth but popularity.
- huijzer 3y agoOne could counter this by saying that truth is valued in the sense that publishing false papers costs you your reputation. However, there is a simple solution for this and that is to make your theories more intricate. If your theories are intricate, you can just say that it was all part of the scientific process and walk away without blame.