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'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
- hodgesrm 3y ago> “I do hope that it causes Penn and a bunch of other institutions that fund science this way to reflect a little bit on what the chances are that some scientists who do not get funding, and wind up leaving, end up being like Katalin Karikó,” Scales said. A brilliant woman scientist researching an uncool topic hits the trifecta of resistance to her work. It's wonderful to see her persistence vindicated but it sounds like time for a revolution in how university research is managed. The closing quote of the article is very disappointing.
- wavemode 3y agowoman, uncool topic... is the third factor of the trifecta "scientist"? or "brilliant"?
- rawgabbit 3y agoShe was admonished for speaking in her native Hungarian. In any organization, there are the publicized metrics and rules. And then there are the hidden rules which are nothing more than office politics. Do I expect UPenn to change its behavior? I would not hold my breath. The real question is why we hold Ivy League universities on a pedestal.
- przemub 3y agoAh yeah, the allowed kind of racism. My favourite.
- kaashif 3y agoI don't think requiring everyone speak the same language is racism, necessarily. If it's "speak English to include everyone in work conversation" then it's fine. If it's "don't speak Hungarian on the phone to your parents because fuck you" then no, that's bad. I have worked in environments where teammates speak in their native language (spoken by a small minority of people at the company) and it has an exclusionary effect. Once a team (perhaps unintentionally) begins to favour those with the right native language, and a critical mass of speakers is reached, it can sometimes result in mono lingual, mono cultural teams who find it hard to hire or retain other people. It really depends on the specific criticism and how it was phrased.
- skulk 3y agoThe real question has a real simple answer: Ivy leagues and equivalents are how the ruling class grooms its next generation. We put them on a pedestal because being part of the ruling class comes with benefits.
- hodgesrm 3y ago#3 factor was brilliant. According to other accounts she also speaks her mind very forthrightly. [0] [0] https://www.wsj.com/health/after-shunning-scientist-university-of-pennsylvania-celebrates-her-nobel-prize-96157321 https://www.wsj.com/health/after-shunning-scientist-universi...
- bell-cot 3y ago> ...but it sounds like time for a revolution in how university research is managed. Agreed...but it was probably time for a revolution 50 years ago. Suffice to say that those actively causing the problems are very widely, deeply, and skillfully entrenched. And willing to fight to the (metaphorical) death in defense of the current system. Vs...could you tell me how numerous, skilled, and well-armed your hoped-for revolutionary army might be?
- hodgesrm 3y agoFully agree on your 50 years ago point. The crux of the matter seems to be how grants are awarded. Alzheimers Disease research is a case in point. [0] What do do about it? There should be a "crazy ideas bin" that forces a percentage of funds for big research problems to be directed to investigations of off the wall approaches. We would find out who the good revolutionaries are and could even count them.
- throw_pm23 3y agoA revolution will likely make things even worse. Once you decide on selecting a certain trait, a thousand imposters will pop up immediately, who superficially match all the criteria that you wanted to select for.
- raincom 3y agoThis tells us that too many people chase these jobs. Maybe, time to hire as many as possible using basic income scheme.
- StableAlkyne 3y agoThe people who seek professorships aren't motivated by money, they're motivated by prestige and tenure. If they wanted money, they'd have gone directly into the private sector. But: there just aren't enough professorships to support the amount of PhDs we mint every year. This is causes people to go off and postdoc for years hoping somewhere will accept them. Through a combination of luck and skill, some get a job as a prof and go through the tenure gauntlet. But for most, eventually they have to give up on their dream and do something else - except post-docs are underpaid, so they start off in a worse financial position than they otherwise would. This has a domino effect, because those post-docs compete for jobs with fresh PhDs who never wanted to stay in academia anyway. The effect is compounded by universities increasingly relying on adjuncts as a way to cut costs (adjunct professors are heavily exploited, and they take the abuse because they feel like they need to boost their resume to get a tenured position). So, there are even fewer tenure track positions to go around The only way to fix it is to either reduce the number of PhDs awarded every year (not going to happen) or incentive an increase in the number of professorships at universities.
- raincom 3y agoIn a way, this explains why many international Ph.Ds go back to their home countries these days to join local universities. It is good for these countries.
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- m_a_g 3y agoThis article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.
- andrewstuart2 3y agoSadly it's not just academia either. I've seen brilliant innovative engineers get buried because they don't spend the requisite 75% of their time managing the bureaucracy of large orgs.
- Const-me 3y agoI’m not familiar with science, but I don’t believe things are terribly bad for engineers. Brilliant innovative engineers have a degree of control over their lives. If a person is unhappy about the bureaucracy of the large org they can find another job in a startup. Or they can find a better job in a smaller, better managed organization. Or if they’re feeling lucky, they can even start their own business. If they currently hold a senior position in FAANG working on innovative ways to sell more ads, that step will likely involve a substantial pay cut. Still, IMO brilliant engineers are relatively well-compensated across the whole industry. The work they do normally generates a lot of value for the employer. They should be generally fine financially even without these millions of stock options. And they will be probably happier working on the innovations which do something good, as opposed to inventing models, methods, and apparatuses to advance the ongoing enshittification of the internet.
- rewmie 3y ago> I’m not familiar with science, but I don’t believe things are terribly bad for engineers. Brilliant innovative engineers have a degree of control over their lives. The only fundamental difference is not between science and engineering, but between research&academia and industry, specifically in the number of positions available and the competition there is to fill them. You mentioned startups. Basically that means create your own position. That's way out of reach to any academic position because no one can simply go out and create their own research institutions. Therefore, if you want to make a living or have a career in academia, you have to subject yourself to their rules and processes.
- ilaksh 3y agoSo what are the repercussions for the admins who misjudged or mistreated her? If there aren't sufficient changes then maybe groups should move their funding out of Penn.
- smath 3y agoThis was my immediate thought too. We need perhaps a long lived website that captures misjudgement on the part of people in power and update their scores over a long period of time. A kind of public record, ledger. A kind of wikipedia, but simplified only to record +1s, -1s against their name, and the reason for it.
- caddemon 3y agoIt was largely other biology professors, not admins. It's a bad look no doubt, and there are other issues with modern university admins - but this is a direct consequence of those in the field, not typical bureaucracy crap.
- myth_drannon 3y agoUPenn is in the news again. Something tells me the fish stinks from the head.
- kogus 3y agoYour comment made me curious to look up their leadership page. As of this post, Katalin Karikó is featured very prominently on the president's page, above even the president herself. That's a pretty big mea culpa. https://president.upenn.edu/ https://president.upenn.edu/
- drno123 3y agoIf there wasn’t COVID pandemic, and mRNA vaccines did not become widely used for another decade, ms Kariko would never get the deserved recognition.
- malcolmgreaves 3y ago* Dr. Karikó
- Almondsetat 3y agoare we in the 1700s? being a PhD does not mean I have to use your honorific every time you are mentioned
- Invictus0 3y agofemale version of the napoleon complex
- bitzun 3y agoWhen someone is a PhD, and you know this, and you choose to use ms/mr/mrs instead of dr (or omitting an honorific altogether, the most common, unobjectionable choice), it can easily be interpreted as condescension.
- Beijinger 3y agoDude, PhDs give a fuck about PhDs. At least in the States. I would find it odd to be addresses this way. When I addressed my phd supervisor the first time with professor doctor XYZ, he just said, I am Bill. My name is Bill!
- neuronerdgirl 3y agoAlso like the one time you most typically use the Dr honorific is specifically when you are speaking about the person in reference to their profession.
- Eumenes 3y ago
- gustavus 3y agoJust a reminder Einstien who was the most revolutionary scientist since Newton was unable to secure a teaching position prior to publishing 3 nobel prize worthy papers in 1 year. Why do we think academia has suddenly magically changed?
- bee_rider 3y agoWas he a good teacher?
- staunton 3y agoMaybe that should play a role for getting university "teaching" positions but it doesn't. Neither did it play a role for Einstein.
- ModernMech 3y agoBeing a good teacher absolutely plays a role in teaching positions. Source: I work in such a teaching position and have served on several search committees.
- staunton 3y agoThe question was about getting such a position. Do you know any case where a hiring decision was decided by somebody being thought to be bad at teaching? Or somebody being significantly better at teaching than somebody else? How does a hiring committee evaluate somebody's teaching quality? (Not necessarily the same as teaching experience)
- bee_rider 3y agoMost grad students, particularly ones they are interested in staying in, end up having to do some teaching or have a teaching assistant role at some point. I’m sure it is a + on the resume. Nothing individually is a deal breaker or deal maker, everything is factored in, right?
- bell-cot 3y agoWell...yes. Treating the actual high-value workers like sh*t has been American Academia's SOP for how many years now?
- wrycoder 3y agoI read yesterday that there are now more administrators than students at Harvard, but ‘only’ one third as many teachers as students.
- bell-cot 3y agoYep. And Harvard is anything but alone in that respect.
- vkou 3y agoHarvard is at 19,000 employees for 23,000 students - but I'd be surprised if most of the employees are administrators, as this includes the plumbers, the janitors, the gardeners, the campus cops, the cooks, etc, etc. My, uh, no-name school somehow managed to educate ~37,000 students with a 'mere' 7,200 employees (half of them part-time).
- rtkwe 3y agoDid you school have much of a research arm? That's where you can get a lot of mismatch between the ratios because you have whole cadres of people who don't teach anyone at all or teach a few small classes because their jobs are research focused.
- jjk166 3y agoMy alma mater, which is a research university, last year had 8000 employees for 12000 students (6000 undergrad, 6000 grad), of whom 1200 were faculty and 3000 were staff. Of the staff about 1000 were in administration-related roles (management ~200, business operations~500, office support ~300). There are about 500 dedicated research staff, which includes post-docs, research associates, and non-teaching research faculty. Research staff is the largest single employee category for the staff.
- queuebert 3y agoAcademia does not value quality, but quantity. It selects for scientists who are the best at marketing and networking, not necessarily doing quality science, though they can also be. I have no idea how to fix this, but competition needs to be reduced, probably by more guaranteed funding for positions, not just projects, as grants are. This latest military aid package is 2x the entire NIH budget, so surely there is more money for science out there.
- ska 3y agoIt's not really quality vs quantity. The root problem is that (particularly in R1's) the job of raising money to perform the science has devolved somewhat to the level of individual labs and PI's, which creates an incentive that rewards good fundraisers in a much more predictable way than good researchers. In theory this could be addressed by more rigor in the funding agencies review processes, but they aren't resourced to really handle that. It's like a baby (both in size and impact) version of the problem in US Congress & Senate.
- michaelrpeskin 3y agoBut it's even worse than that. Since universities are funded by the grant overhead (30-40% of the grant goes directly to the university, sometimes higher), there's an incentive for "expensive" research. Why fund a theorist who needs a pencil and paper and maybe a fancy computer when you can fund an expensive lab full of state of the art lasers and optics or any other type of expensive technology. Do you want to come up with a ground breaking theory or do you want to turn the crank and measure some value a little more precise? There is value in both, but the universities really bias towards the latter because it's more expensive and needs more and bigger grants to get done.
- ska 3y agoNot really, at least in my experience. Overhead is fungible, so they get roughly the same cut of everything that comes in (to a first approximation). That means the support the institution will put behind a shoot-for-the-stars research centre grant is way different than what a theorist looking to pay for 5 grad students will get, but the institution is happy to proportionately support that as well. Especially R1's that are trying to play the prestige game aggressively, they'll push for a "world class" faculty page pretty much across the board. But they don't all get the same offices. Institutions' reliance on overhead to fund operations varies wildly as well, which makes the calculus different.
- RecycledEle 3y agoI wish every disagreement was logged in a system so that, decades later, we could know who was right and who was wrong. It would tell us who to listen to and who yo shun. I had hopes that Internet forums would be that record, but the nukers destroyed that.
- shepherdjerred 3y agoThat sounds incredibly dystopian.
- bjornsing 3y agoIf you’re very sure of yourself and typically wrong, then yes. But to me the current situation is quite dystopian.
- kps 3y agoPhysics Nobel winner Peter Higgs (of the boson) said the same ten years ago: “Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough.” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
- RecycledEle 3y agoI wish we had a way to see whether someone was right or wrong in the past so we can judge their decision making abilities. This would help us pick good leaders. If only there were a way to document disagreements publicly so they could be reviewed at a later date. I had hopes that Internet discussion forums would be that, but the nukers destroyed that along with most training materials for LLMs.
- renewiltord 3y agoThis is a good outcome. Ideally, star researchers are expunged from academia where good ideas go to die and they're moved to industry where success depends on their work working.
- anonymousDan 3y agoRolls eyes.
- thelittlenag 3y agoMy wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" research along avenues of inquiry that other folks find worth pursuing. Often times this means building on existing lines of research over pursuing new paths. The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers, collaborate to push existing lines of inquiry, write lots of hopefully approved grants, and grow a lab into what is effectively a "successful small business". Quality is an after thought taken care of by what passes for peer review. The incentives for everyone involved is just a complete and total mess. I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants". Had she been, then she would have found herself hired immediately somewhere because universities are incentivized to play a numbers game and get as many folks in writing grants as possible.
- IshKebab 3y agoDefinitely the case. A Nobel prize comes from one great discovery. An academic career comes from ongoing successful grant applications.
- Kye 3y agoWas it always like this or headed here? I'm curious if flat government funding for research against rising costs creates or amplifies counterproductive incentives.
- godelski 3y agoA little of both. The problem is that evaluation of research work is insanely difficult. A lot of people think it's easy because "the world is objective, it either works or doesn't" but research is cutting edge and you're only chipping away at a much larger picture. It can take decades for a work to reveal itself as truly profound or utter shit. The problem, which I rant about in a longer comment, is that instead of acknowledging the noise we've embraced poor metrics and encouraged the hacking of those metrics. I call this Goodhart's Hell. People forget, metrics are models and all models are wrong. You have to constantly be questioning your metrics and determine how well aligned they are with your goals or else you'll drift (the environment moves, so your metric must move too). I think actually the better way to solve this, which may seem paradoxical, is to actually increase funding. Not in size of single prizes for grants (well... we need that too, but that's another discussion), but in the availability. The reason being that the hacking is partially encouraged by the competition for a very scarce resource. A resource that compounds. Due to this (and some nuances, see other post) we're not actually rewarding those who perform the best work (we may actually be discouraging that) but those who become lucky. A "good work" is simply one with high citation counts, which is heavily weighted on the publicity around that work. Which is why top universities have big media departments, pay news publishers to advertise their works, and why survey papers generate huge counts. The problem is that the system is rather complex and there are no simple or "obvious" solutions. "Good enough" is also not clear because too low order of an approximation can actually take you away from your intended goals, not a small step towards as one might think.
- seanr88 3y agoIn many professions including the business of startups and academia you need to be at least as good at selling something as you are at developing/discovering it.
- rawgabbit 3y agoWhile that may be true today, in the research sciences — there should be some kind of middle ground. Thomas Edison may have been a giant of self promotion. But I would argue Nikola Tesla invented as much or more foundationally important technology we use today. I would argue Tesla like Kariko will never be a wiz at self promotion. But a domain expert should have spotted them early on. I mean isn’t that the job of people who dole out tax payer money for research? UPDATE. I mixed up Edison and Tesla. Tesla was the champion self promoter.
- fsh 3y agoI think you got this backwards. Tesla made a few important inventions early on and then spent the rest of his life showing off big sparks and scamming investors. Edison's labs were far more influential.
- rawgabbit 3y agoSorry I did get it backwards.
- seanr88 3y agobut the people you have to convince are the people who are doling out tax payer money for research. By definition they don't know your fabulous discovery only you know that. So you need to convince someone else that the idea you have is worth investigating and they should give you money to do it. So the people who are best at convincing other people are the people who get the grants and who get to do the research. Even once you have discovered something convincing other people that what you have discovered is worthwhile is not easy, as this article shows. Being a good fundraiser is more important than technical skill in both research/academia and also in startups.
- shrubble 3y agoReminder that: 1) Ken Iverson who invented the APL programming language and went on to win the Turing Award in 1979, had already published 'that one little book' that was considered insufficient for tenure, but which formed the basis for the award. 2) tubes remained the main focus of MIT faculty for quite some years after the transistor was invented. It was Robert Noyce and the people he worked with at Grinnell College who knew more about transistors than MIT : https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyce.html https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyc...
- 5kg 3y ago3) Stephen Cook was denied tenure position at UCB: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Cook https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Cook
- PheonixPharts 3y agoI also find it's worth reflecting that there was a time when things were not so insane. Being unable to work at Cambridge due to a lack of advanced degress, Wittgenstein was famously pushed, at 40, to just submit his Tractatus as a PhD thesis so that he could get his PhD from Cambridge. One of his examiners, G.E. Moore, stated the following on his examiners report: "I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but, even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree." Having spent a good bit of time in academia I cannot imagine an institution that would make a statement so both humble and honest. Wittgenstein today would remain an interesting weirdo that, since never being formerly accredited, would be wildly considered as not worth taking seriously. What terrifies me about today's academic environment is not only the it's own decline in quality, but it's staunch refusal to admit any knowledge created outside its walls as admissible.
- lebean 3y agoYou describe a time when things weren't insane, but describe Wittgenstein being seriously considered for a PhD for a work that brought us language games and asserts "All propositions are of equal value" as an example. I tried to scribble truth tables and manipulate symbols on a chalkboard to work out how this makes sense, but I remembered that there is no such thing as truth or falsehood, so I guess I can't really judge.
- robd003 3y agoReminder that Penn is the 2nd worst school for free speech: https://rankings.thefire.org/rank/school/university-of-pennsylvania https://rankings.thefire.org/rank/school/university-of-penns...
- mightyham 3y agoAs someone who is not in academia, I'm curious how dysfunctional the incentive structures of these institutions really are? Is it more the case that aggrieved professors doing actually good research is just a rare situation bound to happen every once in a while?
- washadjeffmad 3y agoEveryone thinks their research is important, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. Not every chair, board, or panel can fully understand every topic, especially when it's highly specialized, much less predict its impact. So often, people feel like they're being neglected when they're just not visible because they haven't communicated something to an audience they either don't recognize or don't value. They often write grants that don't explain the value of their work in a way that can be presented to people who don't already understand the value of the subject. And if they're already pessimistic about support, they won't ask for support. If they're too focused on their work and not paying attention to the new hires, they won't realize they need to talk to their department about which faculty are using which labs this semester. In general, even when faculty talk to each other, they aren't always listening - at least not beyond anything that might directly be of interest to them. And rarely does anyone ask, "How does all of this work, anyway?" In a way, you're seeing the system working. Despite Karikó being unhappy with Penn State, she was able to perform and carry out research that did not prove critical until a global pandemic, her research was able to be located, accessed, and used, and she was subsequently recognized for it. We can't reward potential. It's unfortunate that she felt unsupported by her department, but she did have personal advocates who helped to advance her, and she certainly wasn't the only researcher at Penn State - was she treated any differently to them? And being blunt, if it were obvious that her research was valuable, wouldn't it have already been done by others, making this story pointless? Is it possible to be recognized for being a hidden gem before you're found?
- waterheater 3y agoWhat is your definition of "academic research"? Not all research is academic, so take a moment to think about what that means for you. I'll give you what I think it is in the next paragraph. A HN commenter once wisely stated: "Building things [in academia] is fine, but of course it's not academic research - which is defined by the creation of game-changing concepts and philosophical structures, some of which happen to be mathematical." I completely agree. Many universities are majority funded by the US federal government. The proportion of money a university receives from federal student aid and federal research grants is wild, even for a state-run public university. Without those funds, the people currently employed at a university will lose their jobs, so a university will attempt to work with those funding sources as much as possible. How do universities increase incoming federal student aid dollars? Enroll more students. How do universities increase incoming federal research grant dollars? Submit more grants. Though their phrasing is different, these two goals are what drive the modern university administrator. Let's set aside the student enrollment situation and just focus on the grants. Federal research grants come from major federal entities, such as the DHHS, NSF, DoE, DoD, and others. When a professor receives a grant, the university take a sizable cut of the grant. Some here have said that R1 institutions take 70%, and that seems reasonable to me. So, for every grant that a professor receives, the university receives money. As such, universities select for professors who can write grants and get them. Federal grants are often focused on big problems, and these big problems require lots of technical resources, interdisciplinary collaboration, and personnel. These problems aren't unimportant, but they aren't "game-changing" concepts; by applying for a competitive federal grant, everyone is playing the game. One important note about grants is, they typically require regular updates on results and a flow of publications. So, you have a situation where universities tend to select for professors with grant-seeking behavior, and those professors ensure the universities receive grant dollars. If a professor is sitting around playing with ideas which might become game-changing philosophy and mathematics, they probably aren't publishing papers, which means they probably haven't received a grant, which means the university isn't getting grant dollars from that professor. As a result, in the eyes of the university, professors who publish more are better, and professors who publish less are worse. I don't want discredit the professors who do very good work on grant dollars. It's just becoming more apparent that the current organizational structures of the modern research university is breaking down. For example, though I don't personally agree with doctoral students forming unions, I understand why they're doing it: professors try to maximize doctoral student output by paying them a pittance. As I said in other comments, a solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better, and (3) universities explicitly select for doctoral students interested in an academic career. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some. However, it should, in time, naturally fix the problem.
- zamalek 3y agoMy experience in university convinced me that: modern universities are not institutions of learning or discovery, they are businesses and are only concerned about the bottom line. As always, enshittification follows (and arguably happened a long time ago already). That includes amazing short-term decision making at the cost of long-term sustainability.
- FireBeyond 3y agoTangential quote I heard once, "Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached".
- s1artibartfast 3y agoUnpopular opinion, but this was a reasonable outcome from the university. If a researcher makes a great discovery, but can’t get funding to do anything with it, You don’t keep them around not making progress. They got pushed out, found funding, and finally furthered the technology. It is unclear if more scientific progress would have been made if they were kept at penn without funding.
- mjburgess 3y agoYou have summarised the incentives. You've yet to defend them. Presumably the point of research is that it's not commercially viable at this stage; were it, the market would already address this need. Why bother with a university research system which 'lives or dies' just as start ups do? We already have those. It is widely recognised that there needs to be a long (perhaps millenia-long) pipeline of 'unprofitable' research into commerical outlets. Who thought playing around with wires and magents would lead anywhere?
- ModernMech 3y agoUnfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society. Money needs to be made, growth needs to be demonstrated, debts need to be paid, and for that grants need to come in. People recognize that unprofitable research is necessary, but no one wants to fund it. And event when by some miracle it does get funded, people complain loudly and mock it ruthlessly. Sometimes the institution stays strong, sometimes it buckles under the pressure.
- johnp271 3y ago"Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society." There might be unpleasant realities of living in a capitalistic society but they are less unpleasant than living in any other sort of society.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoThe government funds a large amounts of unprofitable research because some of it may prove valuable. much of it does not prove valuable. Unlimited funding for all researchers is not a viable option, so discretion is used. Very smart people put effort in to competing and selecting the most promising options. One could argue that this technology was overlooked initially (although it eventually DID get funded). What nobody suggests is how this technology should have been discerned from the rest without future knowledge.
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- rdiddly 3y agoBeing currently in the middle of belatedly reading The Black Swan, I can't help but see this as a classic case. Penn has a formula that's supposed to predict "success," and it's a linear formula: more papers & funding leads linearly to more success. y = mx + b which is totally how the world works, right? Not if you've read Nassim Taleb or even Paul Graham's essays about mining unfashionable/disreputable/heretical ground for ideas nobody else has thought of or is willing to consider. Just like startups, somebody is going to discover something huge in there. Even if you were willing to say a university isn't a place of ideas for their own sake, and is instead nothing more than a venture capital firm like their bureaucrats seem to be asserting - in short even with the profit/greed motive intact, it still seems like a dumb strategy to model the world as linear and boring.
- 11101010001100 3y agoSorry but no one needs more cargo cult science.
- rdiddly 3y agoNo one needs more failed startups either, but if your point is that some ideas are bad, yeah no kidding. In fact most of them are. A cargo cult by the way would be another great example of misapprehending the world as a simple deterministic or linear place where the more mock airstrips an isolated tribe builds and the more trappings of European culture they adopt or imitate (e.g. crucifixes), the more material wealth they'll get.
- MrRolleyes 3y ago[dead]
- d--b 3y agoWell the fact is that she remained at Penn for 30+ years, so clearly it couldn't be that horrible. And there she made some groundbreaking discoveries that contributed to the COVID vaccine and she got a Nobel Prize, so she probably did get some people behind her. University politics are terrible, but in this very case, whatever happened, it turned out pretty good for both her and the University.
- ceejayoz 3y ago> Well the fact is that she remained at Penn for 30+ years, so clearly it couldn't be that horrible. People stay married to abusive partners for decades, too.
- godelski 3y agoI knew there was trouble as soon as I saw "Nobel Prize [winner]" and "Adjunct professor" in the same sentence. What's it take to get tenure track these days? But she mentions the rate of publications. Kps noted that Peter Higgs said something similar as well. There's many others too! Turing prize winner Hinton had this to say about ML and I couldn't agree more > One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging people to think about radically new ideas. > Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad. Or from Bengio > In the rush preceding a conference deadline, many papers are produced, but there is not enough time to check things properly and the race to put out more papers (especially as first or equal-first author) is humanly crushing. On the other hand, I am convinced that some of the most important advances have come through a slower process, with the time to think deeply, to step back, and to verify things carefully. Pressure has a negative effect on the quality of the science we generate. I would like us to think about Slow Science (check their manifesto!). > Students sometimes come to me two months before a deadline asking if I have ideas of something which could be achieved in two months. I'm sure you can find one from LeCun too (drop it if you have it) and we have the 3 godfathers of ML. But as someone finishing my PhD, I'm utterly convinced that the whole process is psychotic and anti-scientific. I have written many rants on HN about this so what's another? Here's how I see it, and what I've been coining as Goodhart's Hell because the idea is more abstract that ML publishing or even academic publishing. There's just a huge fucking irony that this happens in ML. It is Goodhart's Hell because everything in our world has become about easy to use metrics and bending over backwards to meet those metrics. There is not just a lack of concern about if the metric aligns with our intended goals, but an active readiness to brush off any concerns. We as a modern world just fucking embraced metric hacking as the actual goal. In ML we see this, as Hinton mentions, with benchmarkism with just trying to get top scores. But you need several (fwiw, I've held a top spot for over a year now on a popular generative dataset but the work remains unpublished because I don't have enough compute to tune other datasets. Reviewers just ask for more but not justify the ask by how another dataset says more). This is an insane world, especially as we've been degrading our statistical principles. The last 5+ years no one uses a validation set for classification but rather tunes their fucking hyperparameters on test set results. Generative models frequently measure metrics against the train set and don't have a test set! A true, honest to god, hold out set essentially doesn't exist (we might call it "zero shot", which is inaccurate, or "OOD"...). ML work has simply become a matter of compute. Like Higgs said, you need to publish fast, but these days top companies are asking for 5+ papers at a top conference for a newly minted PhD. I'm sorry, good work takes time. All this on top of several consistency experiments that demonstrate that reviewers are simply reject first ask questions later. Which why shouldn't they be? No one checks a reject and doing so increases the odds your work gets in since it's a zero sum game. And in honesty, I don't see how conferences and journals are anything but fraud. Not in the sense that works in there are untrue (though a lot are and a lot more are junk. Regardless of field), but in the economic operation. The government and universities (double dipping on that gov money) pay for these to exist. Universities pay researchers to produce work. Researchers send to venues (journals/conferences). Researchers review other works submitted to the venue for no pay (so Uni pays). 80% of work gets rejected, and goes through the process again. And after all that, the only meaningful thing accomplished is that the university has a signal that the work that their researchers did is "good." Because the venue gets copyright ownership over the paper, which the university must now pay for to access (the "official" version, "preprints" are free). I'm sorry, but citation count is a bad metric but far more meaningful than venue publication and it's fucking free. Why don't we just fucking publish to OpenReview? The point of publishing is to communicate our work, nothing more nothing less. OR gives you hosting like arxiv but also comments and threads (and links to github). Do we need anything else? I mean no review can actually determine if a paper is valid or good work. But we forget that the world isn't binary, it's tertiary: True, False, Indeterminate (thanks Godel, Turing, and Young). In reviewing we do not have access to the "True" side, just as we don't have access to that in science in general. We do not know where the "True" direction points, but we know how to move away from the "False" and "Indeterminate" directions. That's why there's that famous substack named that way or Isaac Asimov's famous Relativity of Wrong paper[2]. We're not a religion here... There is at least a few ways I know how to fight back. 1) Actually fucking review a work and do your god damn job. Your job isn't to be a filter, it is to earnestly read the work and to work with the authors to make it the best work it can be. Remember you're on the same side. 2) Simply don't review if you can't do #1. You're almost never required to and academic service isn't worth much, so why do it? 3) Flip the system on its head. Instead of concentrating on reasons to reject a paper (fucking easy shit right there), focus on reasons to accept a paper. Simply ask yourself "is there something __someone__ in the community would find useful here?" If yes, accept. Novelty doesn't exist in a world where we have 20k+ papers a year and produce works every few months. It's okay to move fast, but it's less novel and impactful, it's just closer to open science. Stop concentrating on benchmarks since if it's useful someone is going to tune the shit out of it anyways, benchmarks don't mean shit. These days benchmarks are better at showing overfitting than good results anyways (yes, your test loss can continue to decrease while you overfit). [0] https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-more-like-brains/ https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-... [1] https://yoshuabengio.org/2020/02/26/time-to-rethink-the-publication-process-in-machine-learning/ https://yoshuabengio.org/2020/02/26/time-to-rethink-the-publ... [2] https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
- aborsy 3y agoThe US academic system is focused on money, and operates like a for-profit business. Does EU produce better science, I wonder?
- slackfan 3y agoIt's very similar with additional niggles of who holds the purse strings. (the EU in this case)
- ceejayoz 3y agoMy favorite little bit about all this: https://www.glamour.com/story/katalin-kariko-biontech-women-of-year-2021 https://www.glamour.com/story/katalin-kariko-biontech-women-... > In 2013—after enduring multiple professional setbacks, one denied grant after another, and a demotion at the institution to which she’d been devoted for decades—Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., walked out of her lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine for the last time. > That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving vaccines but was then a relative upstart in the field. Instead the woman who had bounced from department to department, with no tenure prospects and never earning over $60,000 a year, said with total confidence: “In the future, this lab will be a museum. Don’t touch it.”
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoCinderella)
- mlsu 3y agoReading the comments here, it seems that even very prestigious universities are full of academic pettiness and dysfunction which deny all of us the output of brilliant people like Katalin Karikó. It leaves me wondering: why do we not create any new universities? Why doesn't a Carnegie of our age create a new university? Brin University? Zuck University? This seems like a no brainer. I think it might seem difficult to attract new talent to an "unestablished" university. But what if you make a simple promise: we will never, ever get in your way, the way that universities do today. We will never pressure you to publish subpar results. We will never nit-pick your purchase of a laptop. Have vision! Pursue things that are promising to you! We trust you, smart person, and we will give you autonomy to do what you think is promising. Based on what is discussed here, it seems like that would be extraordinarily compelling to the most optimistic, least cynical, and probably at least a handful of the most brilliant researchers out there. If the winning move is not to play the game, don't play. I don't know. It just seems like there is a narrow-mindedness at play. A sense that "why try to fix this -- we'll never beat UPenn. Maybe not, but isn't it worth a try, based on how dysfunctional academia is? All it takes is the will.
- lupire 3y agoToday they make companies. Karikó went private to great success.
- waterheater 3y agoLook into the difficulties faced by the University of Austin [1] (not the University of Texas at Austin). This is a project which explicitly seems to be pushing back against the current toxic academic environment, yet a major issue they are encountering seems to be degree accreditation. To get "recognized" these days, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) [2] will need to agree that your school teaches things correctly. Of course, the AAUP is responsible for the current toxic academic environment, so it's a catch-22. Zuck University almost certainly will be fully aligned with the AAUP. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin [2] https://www.aaup.org/ https://www.aaup.org/
- 3y ago
- dbmikus 3y agoTangentially related, but her daughter is Susan Francia, who is an Olympic gold medalist rower. It's wild to me when you see family members at the top of their completely different fields.
- johnp271 3y agoThe research and discoveries that are most deserving of a Nobel Prize are precisely the sort that are unexpected and unpredicted in advance. All this "Monday morning quarterbacking" by everyone who now suggest that this discovery should have been obvious 20+ years ago or that the talent of those who made the discovery should have been obvious is rather silly. Arguably the story of how this researcher was treated and what she still managed to accomplish can serve as inspiration and motivation to persevere to future generations of folks with unconventional ideas or ideas that are disparaged by the 'experts'. Yes, it can also serve as motivation to research institutions to take risks and go out on limbs every now and then as there can be some wheat hidden within the chaff.
- senkora 3y ago> Unless something changes, this isn’t going to go well," Grady told Karikó, according to her memoir. While unpleasant, this is a conversation that is sometimes necessary to have as someone in a position of power communicating to a subordinate. > In 2013, Karikó said she returned to her lab after spending time away to find all of her belongings having been packed, moved, and misplaced at Grady's direction. But this is just petty and cruel.
- very_good_man 3y agoAcademia seems like a wonderful place into which we, as a society, should send unlimited borrowed money.
- dakial1 3y agoThe thing is, any human group, company, academia, etc...are influenced by politics, and those who do it well get the attention and the resources. It doesn't matter if they are technically brilliant or not. There is no place where you don't need good communication and selling skills. That's a fact of life and it seem impossible to remove this from any of these institutions. Kariko seems to be that very hardworking intelligent person that really needs an eloquent and self-marketer sidekick to thrive. She is a Steve Wozniak in need for a Steve Jobs.
- contemporary343 3y agoSome of this is universal, but much of her story is particular to how US med schools operate: their research faculty tend to be largely soft money in nature, so grant money is even more necessary than in other 'hard money' jobs in non-med school fields. Such a system is destined to fail when geniuses like Kariko pursue risky new territory for which large grants are hard to secure.
- contemporary343 3y agoSome of this is universal, but much of her story is particular to how US med schools operate: their research faculty tend to be largely soft money in nature, so grant money is even more necessary than in other 'hard money' jobs in non-med school fields. Such a system is destined to fail when geniuses like Kariko pursue risky new territory for which large grants are hard to secure. The really distasteful thing here is Penn as an institution. They have reaped the benefits of her work in terms of mRNA patent royalties (a very large number I believe), and of course reputationally. Yet, they treated her truly terribly and have never - and it seems like will never - acknowledge it. For example, Sean Grady, mentioned here as the one that essentially cleared out her lab in 2013 without telling her is the chair of neurosurgery at Penn Medicine. Will he apologize? I doubt it.
- zaptheimpaler 3y agoHer book Breaking Through [1] also goes into more detail about this. Basically academia is now ruled by the same rotten economic lenses as the rest of the economy. Everything is about profits, labs are evaluated in "grant $/sqft." and people are evaluated on a "resume" or dumb metrics like papers published. It's really hopeless how this economic virus infects every little corner of our world and turns it to shit. This isn't just one story, there are countless other researchers and even life-saving drugs that are not developed purely because of this mindset. For a brief moment in time during the COVID pandemic we saw that it is possible to have a better system but it's been forgotten just as quickly. [1] https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/breaking-through-34 https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/breaking-through-34
- caddemon 3y agoAt least profits have some rough relationship with reality in most industries. In academia it is the worst of both worlds. You need to be a start up hype man type (or something adjacent anyway) to get the grants, but you only need to deliver a paper at the end - not an actually functional product or organization. So we do not see the same upside that a market driven approach might have for eventually finding a stable state, only the downside of being ruthlessly metric driven.
- ubermonkey 3y agoI really love how bad Penn looks on this now. It's hilarious.
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]
- DrNosferatu 3y agoWhat about the psychology angle? I get the feeling Katalin Karikó got a lot of that flak because she made some narcissists look bad (directly or indirectly, by comparison). - Your views on this?
- inputError 3y ago[dead]
- warbaker 3y agoThe real problem here is that funding for sciences is way too low. Grant agencies cannot always get it right. The more funding they have, the more they can give to researchers that they aren't 100% sure about.
- getpost 3y agoI enjoyed this 2-Aug-2023 podcast interview covering some of this stuff: https://josephnoelwalker.com/147-katalin-kariko/ https://josephnoelwalker.com/147-katalin-kariko/
- j7ake 3y agoUPenn made the right decision for itself. If Kariko was the real deal, UPenn would still get credit for Nobel. If Kariko was a dud, they let go of a liability early. There is absolutely no incentive for UPenn to keep a professor who isn’t bringing in money.
- GabeIsko 3y agoA pretty obvious consequence of the American war on funding scientific research.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoIn 2013, Karikó said she returned to her lab after spending time away to find all of her belongings having been packed, moved, and misplaced at Grady's direction. As a woman who wonders how we solve this, I feel like the piece doesn't cast light on actionable means to make real progress. It implicitly seems to assume a thing the world calls sexism but offers no real solutions. Presumably, Grady was a big factor here. Why was he such a problem? There's no real explanation for his behavior and we are unlikely to ever learn anything meaningful about what drove his decisions. It airs dirty laundry, which is perhaps an essential first step in being able to analyze the problem space: First, we have to overcome the taboo against speaking of such things. But then the initial attempts to speak of it tend to fall within some Overton Window of acceptable assumptions and this seems to do little or nothing to give women a viable path forward.
- thimkerbell 3y agoPenn sold the patent to an outside company? Maybe it should be standard in such cases (if it isn't already) to give the researchers the right of first refusal.
- lacker 3y agoEveryone picks on Penn, but really the whole academic community made this mistake. Her research was public; any other university could have offered her a job as well. Nobody realized how important her research was at the time.
- lkjl4t34 3y ago[dead]
- anigbrowl 3y agoIt'd be worth taking publicly available citation network data and developing a metric based on long term (say 25y) significance vs short term. Anyone who understands how to 'play the game' can make an impact over a 5-10y period, but people who actually change the game will stand out, as would their collaborators to a lesser extent. I'm glad to see this article calling out the people who threw stumbling blocks in her way. They deserve any career damage they get.