5 ms·

This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.

by m_a_g 3y ago

andrewstuart2 3y ago
Sadly 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 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. 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.
    - finnh 3y ago
      That was GP's point - that things are much better for engineers than people in academia (and perhaps science).
      - rewmie 3y ago
        I guess my point is that engineering and academia are not independent and mutually exclusive sets.
  - robocat 3y ago
    > brilliant engineers are relatively well-compensated across the whole industry. Perhaps only software in the US. I'm not sure your brilliant mechanical or civil or electronics engineer gets fairly compensated for their value, and even great software engineers can get poorly paid in many countries. That should create an arbitrage opportunity.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    > Brilliant innovative engineers have a degree of control over their lives. Not really. Outside of programming in major hub cities, everyone else is faced with limited opportunities and a lack of a competitive job market. I started in 2000 at an internationally known company with a fixed scale for junior engineers of $50K for a BS and $55K for a MS. That was by no means extravagant for the time, when SV was throwing $100K offers at CS majors to do web dev. Roll $55K forward to today and that's $98K. I look at the job listings for juniors in my field and nobody is offering that. I see listings for experienced senior positions below that level. Programming computers is unusual in that it has extremely low operational overhead. Every other engineering discipline has to expend capital and extra resources to generate the final work product and that puts a limit on how much of the pie the engineers can take. With that said, there is a definite long term salary deflation that has been impacting everyone outside of software development.
throw_pm23 3y ago
But how would you solve this issue though? Once you decide that you will value and promote people who fit the characteristics of Kariko, a thousand impostors immediately pop up who will match all the outward appearances of that you wanted to promote.
- waterheater 3y ago
  You're talking about shifting a culture, and the culture is defined by the people. The current doctoral student mentality will define the future of academia, and most doctoral students are disheartened by the idea of writing grants for their careers. So, any future cultural solution will start with doctoral students. 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, this approach should, in the long run, create a positive outlook for doctoral students, ensure that the average quality of doctoral students is higher, and reduce the amount of doctoral "slave labor" which is heavily exploited to support the grant-seeking paradigm (not exaggerating; I know a doctoral student who was required to be in the lab whenever the PI was, which was often 10 hours a day, sometimes 7 days a week).
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    In some European countries, PhD students are paid a salary equivalent to a middle-class income in that country, and PhD slots are already few. Nevertheless, even there there is the same grant culture that everyone is complaining about here. I don’t see how the three things you propose would fix things.
    - waterheater 3y ago
      If you're taking about sustaining a culture change, the doctoral students must be selected such that they will both seek academic research and avoid grant-seeking behaviors. That's why I think it's a solution, but I suppose it's not THE solution. A few more ideas which come to mind right now include: - Stop treating the grant-seeking people as members of the faculty. If a professor is interested in doing academic research, the department funds a maximum of two doctoral students (something done at IIT Bombay, to my knowledge, though the exact quantity may vary). Hire grant-seeking researchers exclusively in a university-affiliated "research institute", physically and departmentally removed from the faculty. Don't call them professors; call them researchers. - Make faculty prioritize. I know multiple computer science faculty who are tenured professors at a major institution but are actually working full-time for tech companies, yet they weren't on sabbatical. At least one of these professors moved across the country to the Bay Area, was (to my knowledge) relived of their teaching duties, and still tried to advise doctoral students. This practice should not be allowed. Free up the salary for faculty who care about the core mission of the university: education. - Develop an intensive doctoral curriculum tightly focused on performing academic research. To my knowledge, the acquisition of academic research skills is arcane. Certainly the academic advisor should pass these skills to their student, but it seems that too many faculty are wrapped up in grant-seeking behaviors to show them. Doctoral students need to be explicitly taught the necessary skills to be a successful professor, which can only happen when the vast majority of doctoral students are attempting to perform academic research and not grant-seeking research. - Create a researcher pathway in the "research institute." If a student applies for the doctoral program but doesn't wish to perform academic research in their career, offer them a junior researcher position in the research institute with opportunities to advance as a researcher, which is honestly what some students who get their doctoral degree actually want. If one was to award a terminal degree to the researcher, it would not be a PhD. I am an eternal optimist on these topics. I strongly believe that universities can still thrive, but they need to adapt by making hard administrative delineations and creating alternative paths for entrants.
omginternets 3y ago
I'd go out on a limb to say "likely many", especially since this is a rather new phenomenon. This is yet another example of bean-counters being at the helm: in their pursuit for productivity (narrowly defined as "impact factor"), they have undermined the very conditions that favor meaningful discovery. These essentially boil down to: the ability for research faculty to make long-term, risky bets. What the bean-counter class can't seem to understand is that researchers are motivated to make big discoveries, so you can actually trust them to be judicious in their use of resources.
- bluGill 3y ago
  > What the bean-counter class can't seem to understand is that researchers are motivated to make big discoveries, so you can actually trust them to be judicious in their use of resources. What you don't seem to understand is there are some who are not motivated by that. Note that I make no claims as to how many are honest/dishonest. This is a valid thing that "bean counters" often miss.
  - omginternets 3y ago
    >What you don't seem to understand is there are some who are not motivated by that. Yes, and the classical solution was to deny those people tenure. The system worked pretty well, for a large institutional system, until roughly the early 90's. What we have now is an impossibly high standard that prevents well-motivated researchers from accomplishing the very goals that the institution is meant to serve. Edit: now do me a favor and analyze whether university administrators have a track-record of using funds with prudence.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    This is argument is at the center of much of the administrative bloat. It is the same if we consider the arguments around UBI, free public transport etc. Essentially we have created huge administrative bodies to check that nobody is taking advantage of the system, without any cost benefit analysis. We often now spend similar amounts on checking as we are on running the system itself. Maybe we should just acknowledge that some people will always take advantage of the system, and that's just the cost of "doing business".
spamizbad 3y ago
Academia makes what it measures (papers that get cited). You do not need brilliant minds to do this kind of work: you just need hard-working, highly motivated "midwits" and you can pay them accordingly.
tverbeure 3y ago
It's not just academia. A friend of mine was involved in the development of a ground breaking medicine for a pretty common incurable disease. The results of the first and second round trials were fantastic, giving a significant number of patients a normal quality of life that they hadn't experienced in years. The formula was sold to a big pharma company that completely botched the third round trial. It's not that harmful side effects were discovered, but due to a bad testing methodology, the results were not nearly as good as they were. The big pharma company recognized the issue, but a revised third round trial would delay the introduction by years, at which time the amount of profits to make from the medicine were considered too low due to patent expiration. So they just dropped it altogether. It would be too uneconomical for a new company to kickstart the whole approval process again: as soon as the patents expire, other companies would immediately release their generic variant. End result: millions of potential carriers of the disease won't see the benefit of a medicine that has been shown to work.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  I think you're overgenealising a bit here. There are significant incentives on the pharam company to get it right, but they didnt. In a sense, life happens -- it seems this is an accident. Whereas the issue here is that against any reasonable objective of publicly research, academia has institutionalised a series of dysfunctional incentives. ie., the "Accident" is the norm
- noobermin 3y ago
  Is there any recourse? Like can the research group claw back the IP and give it to another company?
  - ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
    It would be a shame if the formula were to "leak" accidentally, resulting in commercialization taking place in another country with looser IP laws, and saving thousands of people's lives in the process.
    - 3y ago
derbOac 3y ago
A complementary story to the one about Karikó is one about a researcher in Texas who, prior to the pandemic, kept getting his grant proposals for a coronavirus vaccine denied because "no one cares about coronaviruses". I'd link to articles about it but right now searching for anything having to do with Texas, coronavirus, and vaccine, is buried in articles about Texas vaccine politics. But you're right — Karikó's story is textbook, prototypical, and its strength is its greatest weakness, that it's almost abnormally illuminated. We never know about all the other stories out there that aren't lucky enough to be exposed so clearly.
strangattractor 3y ago
I've been in rooms with Academics with egos so big it displaces enough oxygen to make it stifling. No one will challenge their behavior because it may affect their career. IMHO it is the due to the culture of Academia which is often win lose and credit based. This eventually leads to unethical behavior in some cases - falsification of data, theft of ideas and believe it or not sabotage. Any type or advancement is almost strictly based on what you can take credit for doing. There is no Nobel for people that run labs that produce the next 10 Nobel winners other than themselves.
waterheater 3y ago
I suspect myriad. Academic politics is messier than real-world politics. In the Dark Triad personality classification, Machiavellianism should be a job requirement for professors if they are to succeed in such a twisted climate (and, as it turns out, many meet that requirement). Bear in mind that academics are better at generalized problem solving than most people, so their attempts to find viable solutions to complex political problems tend to be either elaborate or manipulative. Good people do exist in academia, but most of them have retired, and the rest put up with it. I have a general belief that, unlike the majority of careers, being a successful academic (and I can't underscore "academic" enough) requires a strong moral compass, historically oriented toward a "Divine Light of Truth" or God, which ever floats your boat. Such is not required in a grant-seeking paradigm.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  I was at a talk at 3Com by an MIT professor that Metcalfe knew. He made the old joke that "academic politics are so vicious because nothing's at stake." The prof said, "that depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing'. " So there you have your reason: anyone whose livelihood depends solely on the good opinion of others is likely to have low moral standards.
  - waterheater 3y ago
    >anyone whose livelihood depends solely on the good opinion of others is likely to have low moral standards Highly insightful.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      cribbed from Skin in the Game (Taleb)
rewmie 3y ago
> This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles. I don't think this problem is exclusive of academia. Anyone in the job market has war stories about ridiculous hiring processes that reject candidates for the most pathetic reasons.
geodel 3y ago
IMO there is nothing to wonder as it is part of everything in life. Brilliant candidates not getting job, brilliant students not getting thru school/college admissions, brilliant players not getting into school/college/professional teams of choice and so on. Having always a suitable opportunity for someone's skillset is impossible.

This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.

by m_a_g 3y ago

This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.

andrewstuart2 3y ago

Sadly 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 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. 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.
  - finnh 3y ago
    That was GP's point - that things are much better for engineers than people in academia (and perhaps science).
    - rewmie 3y ago
      I guess my point is that engineering and academia are not independent and mutually exclusive sets.
- robocat 3y ago
  > brilliant engineers are relatively well-compensated across the whole industry. Perhaps only software in the US. I'm not sure your brilliant mechanical or civil or electronics engineer gets fairly compensated for their value, and even great software engineers can get poorly paid in many countries. That should create an arbitrage opportunity.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  > Brilliant innovative engineers have a degree of control over their lives. Not really. Outside of programming in major hub cities, everyone else is faced with limited opportunities and a lack of a competitive job market. I started in 2000 at an internationally known company with a fixed scale for junior engineers of $50K for a BS and $55K for a MS. That was by no means extravagant for the time, when SV was throwing $100K offers at CS majors to do web dev. Roll $55K forward to today and that's $98K. I look at the job listings for juniors in my field and nobody is offering that. I see listings for experienced senior positions below that level. Programming computers is unusual in that it has extremely low operational overhead. Every other engineering discipline has to expend capital and extra resources to generate the final work product and that puts a limit on how much of the pie the engineers can take. With that said, there is a definite long term salary deflation that has been impacting everyone outside of software development.

throw_pm23 3y ago

But how would you solve this issue though? Once you decide that you will value and promote people who fit the characteristics of Kariko, a thousand impostors immediately pop up who will match all the outward appearances of that you wanted to promote.

waterheater 3y ago
You're talking about shifting a culture, and the culture is defined by the people. The current doctoral student mentality will define the future of academia, and most doctoral students are disheartened by the idea of writing grants for their careers. So, any future cultural solution will start with doctoral students. 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, this approach should, in the long run, create a positive outlook for doctoral students, ensure that the average quality of doctoral students is higher, and reduce the amount of doctoral "slave labor" which is heavily exploited to support the grant-seeking paradigm (not exaggerating; I know a doctoral student who was required to be in the lab whenever the PI was, which was often 10 hours a day, sometimes 7 days a week).
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  In some European countries, PhD students are paid a salary equivalent to a middle-class income in that country, and PhD slots are already few. Nevertheless, even there there is the same grant culture that everyone is complaining about here. I don’t see how the three things you propose would fix things.
  - waterheater 3y ago
    If you're taking about sustaining a culture change, the doctoral students must be selected such that they will both seek academic research and avoid grant-seeking behaviors. That's why I think it's a solution, but I suppose it's not THE solution. A few more ideas which come to mind right now include: - Stop treating the grant-seeking people as members of the faculty. If a professor is interested in doing academic research, the department funds a maximum of two doctoral students (something done at IIT Bombay, to my knowledge, though the exact quantity may vary). Hire grant-seeking researchers exclusively in a university-affiliated "research institute", physically and departmentally removed from the faculty. Don't call them professors; call them researchers. - Make faculty prioritize. I know multiple computer science faculty who are tenured professors at a major institution but are actually working full-time for tech companies, yet they weren't on sabbatical. At least one of these professors moved across the country to the Bay Area, was (to my knowledge) relived of their teaching duties, and still tried to advise doctoral students. This practice should not be allowed. Free up the salary for faculty who care about the core mission of the university: education. - Develop an intensive doctoral curriculum tightly focused on performing academic research. To my knowledge, the acquisition of academic research skills is arcane. Certainly the academic advisor should pass these skills to their student, but it seems that too many faculty are wrapped up in grant-seeking behaviors to show them. Doctoral students need to be explicitly taught the necessary skills to be a successful professor, which can only happen when the vast majority of doctoral students are attempting to perform academic research and not grant-seeking research. - Create a researcher pathway in the "research institute." If a student applies for the doctoral program but doesn't wish to perform academic research in their career, offer them a junior researcher position in the research institute with opportunities to advance as a researcher, which is honestly what some students who get their doctoral degree actually want. If one was to award a terminal degree to the researcher, it would not be a PhD. I am an eternal optimist on these topics. I strongly believe that universities can still thrive, but they need to adapt by making hard administrative delineations and creating alternative paths for entrants.

omginternets 3y ago

I'd go out on a limb to say "likely many", especially since this is a rather new phenomenon. This is yet another example of bean-counters being at the helm: in their pursuit for productivity (narrowly defined as "impact factor"), they have undermined the very conditions that favor meaningful discovery. These essentially boil down to: the ability for research faculty to make long-term, risky bets. What the bean-counter class can't seem to understand is that researchers are motivated to make big discoveries, so you can actually trust them to be judicious in their use of resources.

bluGill 3y ago
> What the bean-counter class can't seem to understand is that researchers are motivated to make big discoveries, so you can actually trust them to be judicious in their use of resources. What you don't seem to understand is there are some who are not motivated by that. Note that I make no claims as to how many are honest/dishonest. This is a valid thing that "bean counters" often miss.
- omginternets 3y ago
  >What you don't seem to understand is there are some who are not motivated by that. Yes, and the classical solution was to deny those people tenure. The system worked pretty well, for a large institutional system, until roughly the early 90's. What we have now is an impossibly high standard that prevents well-motivated researchers from accomplishing the very goals that the institution is meant to serve. Edit: now do me a favor and analyze whether university administrators have a track-record of using funds with prudence.
- cycomanic 3y ago
  This is argument is at the center of much of the administrative bloat. It is the same if we consider the arguments around UBI, free public transport etc. Essentially we have created huge administrative bodies to check that nobody is taking advantage of the system, without any cost benefit analysis. We often now spend similar amounts on checking as we are on running the system itself. Maybe we should just acknowledge that some people will always take advantage of the system, and that's just the cost of "doing business".

spamizbad 3y ago

Academia makes what it measures (papers that get cited). You do not need brilliant minds to do this kind of work: you just need hard-working, highly motivated "midwits" and you can pay them accordingly.

tverbeure 3y ago

It's not just academia. A friend of mine was involved in the development of a ground breaking medicine for a pretty common incurable disease. The results of the first and second round trials were fantastic, giving a significant number of patients a normal quality of life that they hadn't experienced in years. The formula was sold to a big pharma company that completely botched the third round trial. It's not that harmful side effects were discovered, but due to a bad testing methodology, the results were not nearly as good as they were. The big pharma company recognized the issue, but a revised third round trial would delay the introduction by years, at which time the amount of profits to make from the medicine were considered too low due to patent expiration. So they just dropped it altogether. It would be too uneconomical for a new company to kickstart the whole approval process again: as soon as the patents expire, other companies would immediately release their generic variant. End result: millions of potential carriers of the disease won't see the benefit of a medicine that has been shown to work.

mjburgess 3y ago
I think you're overgenealising a bit here. There are significant incentives on the pharam company to get it right, but they didnt. In a sense, life happens -- it seems this is an accident. Whereas the issue here is that against any reasonable objective of publicly research, academia has institutionalised a series of dysfunctional incentives. ie., the "Accident" is the norm
noobermin 3y ago
Is there any recourse? Like can the research group claw back the IP and give it to another company?
- ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
  It would be a shame if the formula were to "leak" accidentally, resulting in commercialization taking place in another country with looser IP laws, and saving thousands of people's lives in the process.
  - 3y ago

derbOac 3y ago

A complementary story to the one about Karikó is one about a researcher in Texas who, prior to the pandemic, kept getting his grant proposals for a coronavirus vaccine denied because "no one cares about coronaviruses". I'd link to articles about it but right now searching for anything having to do with Texas, coronavirus, and vaccine, is buried in articles about Texas vaccine politics. But you're right — Karikó's story is textbook, prototypical, and its strength is its greatest weakness, that it's almost abnormally illuminated. We never know about all the other stories out there that aren't lucky enough to be exposed so clearly.

strangattractor 3y ago

I've been in rooms with Academics with egos so big it displaces enough oxygen to make it stifling. No one will challenge their behavior because it may affect their career. IMHO it is the due to the culture of Academia which is often win lose and credit based. This eventually leads to unethical behavior in some cases - falsification of data, theft of ideas and believe it or not sabotage. Any type or advancement is almost strictly based on what you can take credit for doing. There is no Nobel for people that run labs that produce the next 10 Nobel winners other than themselves.

waterheater 3y ago

I suspect myriad. Academic politics is messier than real-world politics. In the Dark Triad personality classification, Machiavellianism should be a job requirement for professors if they are to succeed in such a twisted climate (and, as it turns out, many meet that requirement). Bear in mind that academics are better at generalized problem solving than most people, so their attempts to find viable solutions to complex political problems tend to be either elaborate or manipulative. Good people do exist in academia, but most of them have retired, and the rest put up with it. I have a general belief that, unlike the majority of careers, being a successful academic (and I can't underscore "academic" enough) requires a strong moral compass, historically oriented toward a "Divine Light of Truth" or God, which ever floats your boat. Such is not required in a grant-seeking paradigm.

AlbertCory 3y ago
I was at a talk at 3Com by an MIT professor that Metcalfe knew. He made the old joke that "academic politics are so vicious because nothing's at stake." The prof said, "that depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing'. " So there you have your reason: anyone whose livelihood depends solely on the good opinion of others is likely to have low moral standards.
- waterheater 3y ago
  >anyone whose livelihood depends solely on the good opinion of others is likely to have low moral standards Highly insightful.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    cribbed from Skin in the Game (Taleb)

rewmie 3y ago

> This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles. I don't think this problem is exclusive of academia. Anyone in the job market has war stories about ridiculous hiring processes that reject candidates for the most pathetic reasons.

geodel 3y ago

IMO there is nothing to wonder as it is part of everything in life. Brilliant candidates not getting job, brilliant students not getting thru school/college admissions, brilliant players not getting into school/college/professional teams of choice and so on. Having always a suitable opportunity for someone's skillset is impossible.