3 ms·

There are plenty of published papers which look absolutely foolish (crazy assumptions, bad design, bad analysis, all sorts of things...). Given that every grad

by theamk 3y ago

There are plenty of published papers which look absolutely foolish (crazy assumptions, bad design, bad analysis, all sorts of things...). Given that every grad student is supposed to produce a few publications, there is no shortage of them. What does limit creativity is having science a full-time job, as this does come out with some expectation of results. This is especially true for people pursuing academic carrier - a grad student might spend two years on failing projects and then shrug and leave for industry; but someone shooting for a tenured position better show successes. Unfortunately I don't know how to fix this. If one is does not have to work for some reason, or at least has a high-paying job which leaves plenty of free time, they can do some research.. but that does not scale. And plenty of hard science research requires equipment which is expensive, dangerous, and large.

godelski 3y ago
> What does limit creativity is having science a full-time job, AS THIS DOES COME OUT WITH SOME EXPECTATION OF RESULTS. You're getting to my point. The thing about any research is that it is a lot of failure before success. Which makes progress hard to impossible to measure essentially until success is made. Butt eh expectation of results is my problem. The tyranny of metrics. The fuzzier a goal is, the fuzzier the metric's guidance is. All metrics are guides btw. An academic's quality is extremely difficult to measure and citation, h-index, i10, and others do a shit job. The only way is to be subjective, because honestly only a researcher's peers know if they are doing good work or not, and that's even unreliable. I mean the job is literally to explore unknown areas. I'm not sure why anyone expects constant and big results. If you're constantly finding things you either hit a gold mine or you are staying pretty local and not doing much exploring.

by theamk 3y ago

godelski 3y ago

> What does limit creativity is having science a full-time job, AS THIS DOES COME OUT WITH SOME EXPECTATION OF RESULTS. You're getting to my point. The thing about any research is that it is a lot of failure before success. Which makes progress hard to impossible to measure essentially until success is made. Butt eh expectation of results is my problem. The tyranny of metrics. The fuzzier a goal is, the fuzzier the metric's guidance is. All metrics are guides btw. An academic's quality is extremely difficult to measure and citation, h-index, i10, and others do a shit job. The only way is to be subjective, because honestly only a researcher's peers know if they are doing good work or not, and that's even unreliable. I mean the job is literally to explore unknown areas. I'm not sure why anyone expects constant and big results. If you're constantly finding things you either hit a gold mine or you are staying pretty local and not doing much exploring.