7 ms·

Tangential to the article, I have two hypotheses: 1) There is not a shortage of scientists. There's loads of kids going to graduate school to become servants

by nagrom 12y ago

Tangential to the article, I have two hypotheses: 1) There is not a shortage of scientists. There's loads of kids going to graduate school to become servants for mediocre, yet politically-connected scientists. Then, once they have spent the X years and $Y in opportunity costs to get a PhD, they have to figure out a career for themselves. This is a bad, not a good, thing. It reduces early-stage career experimentation and encourages low-quality science. 2) You don't need to be smart to be a scientist; you need to be stubborn. This is similar to the argument that ideas don't matter for entrepreneurship. There are loads of theories and ideas in any given field about the way that things may be. What you need, as a minimum, is the ability to stick the course to figure out a way of testing those theories and ideas and do the (extraordinarily boring) legwork to get it done. I know a lot of scientists (physicists and mathematicians) and all of them are stubborn, but not particularly brilliant. 99% of physics and mathematics are made up of people who will do drudge work for years with very little recognition or reward. Very, very occasionally, one of them hits the jackpot. It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation.

ANTSANTS 12y ago
I agree, but you can apply your second hypothesis to pretty much any pursuit or career. "It's not brilliance that defines a professional artist; it's a willingness to draw constantly for very little compensation." "It's not brilliance that defines a professional athlete; it's a willingness to be bored, exercise a lot, grind out drills, and play many games." "It's not brilliance that defines a professional programmer..." Everything in life boils down to perspiration at some point.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Professional programmers actually receive quite a lot of compensation, though.
  - ps4fanboy 12y ago
    Only the top tier do, takes some low pay grinding to get there
    - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
      By the standards of academia, that is completely untrue. When I graduated with a BSc Computer Science degree in 2011, the median starting salary for CS grads going to industry was $65k. For comparison, that's roughly the starting salary for someone who just got a tenure-track position in academia (source: http://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?SurveyID=24 http://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?SurveyI...). So compare: in one field, you start earning a median $65k at age 22 with only a bachelor's degree, and in the other, you start earning $65k in your mid to late thirties, after a bachelor's, a PhD, and often at least one post-doc. Everything before that is "low-pay grinding", except that the academic definition of "low-pay" ranges from lower-middle class ($25k-$30k for the better-paid grad-students and worse-paid post-docs) to taking on debt (the humanities).
      - wavefunction 12y ago
        >>So compare: in one field, you start earning a median $65k at age 22 A median means that half the CS grads made less than 65k. Tenure track also comes with some eventual benefits you won't receive with a bachelor's in CS. Let's be clear about what we're actually comparing.
        8557056 12y ago
        >> A median means that half the CS grads made less than 65k. This is false. For example, X% could make exactly 65k and only the lower ((100 - X) / 2)% would make less. ...where X \in (0, 100]
        Crito 12y ago
        I doubt many people at all are making exactly $65k. However I also doubt that many CS grads at all are making significantly less than $65k. Those that are making appreciably less than that are almost certainly not working in the field, or they are not working in the US. I wager that the salary distribution of CS grads working in the field in the US is pretty damn tight.
  - ANTSANTS 12y ago
    Hence the ellipsis ;)
  - collyw 12y ago
    Not in many countries.
- nagrom 12y ago
  Hm. I'm not convinced - there are plenty of professional programmers (who make maybe $60k, which is a good salary) working at Java shops who do 8am-5pm and think a monad is an itinerant who lives in the desert. There are loads of professional teachers, professional medics, professional sanitation workers, etc. who just turn up, do the job and go home. Some may and do work long hours for little reward, but a lot don't. There is a culture in academia that you may, sometimes, when you really need to, you may take the weekend off. Or Sunday, at least.
  - ANTSANTS 12y ago
    You're right, I didn't choose my words well. I should have dropped "career" from the statement and just left "pursuit," something you do in a large part for its own sake. And maybe I should say "It's not brilliance that defines a good X," because clearly you can be a subpar artist/programmer/teacher/etc. and get by on some combination of luck, connections, politics, organizational apathy, and so on, but if you really want to be the best damn X you can be, it's going to involve a lot of elbow grease no matter what that X is.
  - yen223 12y ago
    Both of you are right - perspiration is necessary but not sufficient.
  - hyperbovine 12y ago
    A lot of people are in academia precisely because grinding out Java for 9 hours a day, or what have you, sounds like their own personal version of hell. The work can be all-consuming but if you're doing it right, it's fascinating. The intangible value of not being bored is something I see glossed over again and again by outsiders.
- johnminter 12y ago
  I tend to agree. I would frame the key traits as persistence and a view for the long term payoff. I did a stint as an Industrial Fellow in an NSF-funded center at U. of Minn. in the early '90s. My sponsor was chair of the Chem. E. dept. They had enough B. S. graduates to have a dept. graduation. They had the department valedictorian speak. She mentioned that along the way she questioned whether it would be worth it - especially on evenings walking home after yet another study session working on a problem set from hell. She would see her friends enjoying themselves in one of the local diners or pubs. But at the end, she realized that she had opportunities they would never have. Here both the persistence and the long term view paid off. That said, we are producing far more Ph. D.s than we can employee. I have had a 30+ year career in industry. I have watched margins tighten and good friends get laid off as more and more is offshored. I doubt that this will end well for the next generation. Not everyone will be a "winner." But those who invest in developing their skills will, on average, do much better than those who do not.
  - NotOscarWilde 12y ago
    > That said, we are producing far more Ph. D.s than we can employee. I think one cause might be that "the enterprise" has very little to offer in terms of ideals. Those jobs that actually change the world and help a lot of people usually are out of your reach if you choose the wrong education (like computer science). Being "the man that uncovers the truth" (a scientist) seems much more appealing than "earn a lot of money being a cog in a machine that competes with other machines". I admit, it's just anecdotal. When I see my friends who work at Microsoft, it doesn't seem like the fact that they're working at such a large, influential company excites them. After all, the "up or out" system either drags them out of the company or to some managerial position where there's even more of the "cog in a process" feeling as you spend most of your time presenting your team's results to your superior and the other way around.
shas3 12y ago
Implicit to your comment is the assumption that "going into science" = "becoming a physical sciences professor." This is unfounded! Only a really small minority of STEM majors (aka 'kids') go into academia! The number of industry opportunities for students (at all levels: undergrad to PhD!) in STEM majors is orders of magnitude larger than students in non STEM majors.
- nagrom 12y ago
  I agree that STEM makes you more employable. But how many of those jobs are in science? There's a lot of engineers, accountants, actuaries, teachers, etc. out there who got a degree in physics, maths or biology.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  I know a lot of people in the biosciences with under-graduate degrees. They also have technologist's diplomas because an under-grad degree in biology is almost completely worthless in the job market. No one should go into most sciences (including physics) if they a) intend to stop at the undergrad level and b) expect it to be of non-trivial value in the job market. Engineering degrees are economically useful at the undergrad level. Science degrees are not, at least not any moreso than English or philosophy degrees. So there is absolutely no need to promote STEM degrees as a career choice. They are a very bad one, outside of engineering (and even there it depends on field and timing).
  - collyw 12y ago
    Yes, I wish someone had explained this to me 20 years ago before I started a degree in biology.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Graduate student here. Would love to talk about this stuff. >There's loads of kids going to graduate school to become servants for mediocre, yet politically-connected scientists. The first part is true, but the mediocre scientists aren't necessarily politically-connected. More often, they're just busy, so consistently busy doing their own research and supervising their own students that one day some new and improved methodology, instrument, or statistical tool leaves them in the dust. This happens because, frankly, nobody pays them to keep their methodology, instruments, and statistical tools up to date, and it's not like anyone will refuse to publish their papers if they don't keep up-to-date. They get grants because they publish papers, and they publish papers because they keep doing experiments and/or proving theorems -- the fact that they could be learning more and quicker by working some other way isn't built into any incentive structure except their personal hopes and dreams (which are the first thing any young scientist learns to repress). There is especially no shortage of scientists in the sense that, simply put, there are not enough permanent jobs for the PhDs and post-docs we already train. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd030909s.gif http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd030909s.gif >Then, once they have spent the X years and $Y in opportunity costs to get a PhD, they have to figure out a career for themselves. This is a bad, not a good, thing. It reduces early-stage career experimentation and encourages low-quality science. This is quite true. I find the advising structure in graduate school strange with respect to its stated purposes. The definitional requirement of a PhD is that it be a large piece of original research (stereotypically, about three papers' worth) that charts the course for the young scientist's early career. The best PhD dissertations open up whole new subfields, and those are the young scientists who get the good jobs. But how do we allocate labor to produce these "brilliant new ideas"? Largely by assigning the graduate student to work on their adviser's existing research program, which they can slowly transform into something at least partially their own depending on their level of supervision. (The worst PhD dissertations are basically just longer MSc dissertations: fully supervised research work done in total peonage with little to no original input by the apprentice graduating to become a real scientist.) >There are loads of theories and ideas in any given field about the way that things may be. What you need, as a minimum, is the ability to stick the course to figure out a way of testing those theories and ideas and do the (extraordinarily boring) legwork to get it done. I know a lot of scientists (physicists and mathematicians) and all of them are stubborn, but not particularly brilliant. 99% of physics and mathematics are made up of people who will do drudge work for years with very little recognition or reward. Very, very occasionally, one of them hits the jackpot. It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation. clap clap clap http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6odkq8jNo1qbolbn.gif http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6odkq8jNo1qbolbn.gif Absolutely, completely, entirely, 100% true. The vast majority of professional science is legwork. Theoreticians can spend plenty of time constructing models or proving theorems to feel brilliant, but ultimately, they mostly just do legwork as well. Experimentalists and engineering researchers have to actually do experiments and actually produce artifacts. Mind, many of us find even the drudgery and legwork plenty fascinating to set-up and do, but almost never so much that we'd object to your taking it away somehow. Also mind: some scientists are brilliant. They're just not the mode, or even always the shining stars of the field, since professional scientists are mostly selected (and therefore optimized) for tenacity (being bored and working weekends for very little compensation) and consistency (producing 110% the desired results, from elementary school through grant applications). I would add only one quality: a professional scientist is defined not only by religious devotion to doing loads and loads of legwork for little compensation, but also by an emotional ability to withstand being constantly graded, measured, and stack-ranked against everyone else in your field, in time periods ranging from each semester to every few years. From the beginning of undergrad through tenure and up until you move from doing research to mostly teaching or administrating, you basically never stop having to pass yet another set of exams (each one calibrated to fail some percentage at the bottom, forcing them to find other careers) to continue doing your existing job or to receive a promotion that other skilled professionals would usually get by virtue of experience alone. While I've heard that many decades ago, funding and positions were plentiful, and so the system was not nearly so burdensome as today, now I am always a little amazed that scientific advancement manages to happen at all, since almost everything a scientist does professionally is connected to keeping his job instead of actually getting and sharing research results.
scottlocklin 12y ago
I almost stopped reading the article after the sentence, "A self-esteem expert offers a way out of the conundrum." I should have. This is psychobabble rubbish, written by people who have not done science, and who do not know the life histories of people who have studied science to any degree. The main encouragement I had from my parents was to visit the library. They definitely discouraged me from taking apart the blender and refrigerator when I was in the 3rd grade. They did eventually buy me and my sisters a radio shack computer; there was no special encouragement for me to hack assembler as a kid, but I did, and my sisters used it to play video games. Curiosity comes from within. The blank slate theory is as rubbish as the theory of reincarnation. I share your two hypotheses to the point I consider them ansatzes. Most of my peers have Ph.D.'s in hard sciences or engineering as I do. Most of them wasted their time on their thesis research; it's just a certificate meaning "certifiably smart, persistent, and able to do self guided study." I don't particularly regret getting my underwear drawer liner autograph from the governator. It was a poor financial decision, but I had fun playing with big toys, and it provided enough meaning to my life I avoided ending up a glue sniffer or drunkard. Attempting to convince more people to do this is a fool's errand: we can't even employ the ones we have. I've been lucky in that I have mostly worked on interesting things and been reasonably well paid for it, but doubling or tripling the number of science people in the world is foolish unless you give them something useful to do. My last job hunt, I ended up talking to an awful lot of people who thought a good use of my time would be building data pipelines to some Hadoop atrocity. You don't need a Ph.D. in physics or machine learning to do that. Yet a lot of Ph.D. types are doing this sort of plumbing for a living, because there are not enough jobs doing actual science.
- abc_lisper 12y ago
  I can't agree more. One thing I noticed is that, when dealing with large entities like university education, your apartment, home, job etc., the risk is optimized out of the system, and placed on the individual. Take a close look at the contracts you sign on, next time, if you don't believe me. Now, as some one poorly paid and pursuing science you would be particularly vulnerable to this risk. The bad thing is you have worked yourself into a corner, and there is nothing that you can immediately do, to improve your situation, should you fall into bad times. If you are working for a contractor for a big IT company, you can work long hours for increased pay. You, as a scientist, will not find a similar outlet. Personally, I think the whole thing sucks. It is not that we need more people in science, rather, we need more investment in science; People/Institutions with big money taking big risks. Like Elon Musk.
corysama 12y ago
> You don't need to be smart to be a scientist; you need to be stubborn. Are there any good ways to teach stubbornness to very-non-stubborn kids in a student-teacher relationship? Too often stubbornness is attributed to some quirk in the child's history/family life that leads them down a self-reinforcing path of self-motivated stubbornness. That's not useful for the vast majority of kids who are surrounded by constant, quick distractions and have parents who lack the knowledge/motivation to instill stubbornness into them.
- clebio 12y ago
  Maybe? But do we need to? Is there some inherent reason why we should try to change a student or kid's nature?
  - corysama 12y ago
    Being surrounded by constant, quick distractions is passively, accidentally, incidentally working to change kids' nature with or without you. You can choose to be a teacher and actively participate in the process or you can choose be a bystander and let other influences have their way unchallenged. There are no universal rules when it comes to people. But, what I've observed and what I've had reported to me by those who have studied the issue has pretty consistently shown people who pursue their goals more stubbornly achieving those goals more reliably. And conversely, people who are more easily distracted/dissuaded struggling more and having a more difficult time. If I cared about a kid that seemed easily distracted/dissuaded, I would do what I could to set that kid up to achieve his/her goals more reliably with less struggle and difficulty. (please don't take this into a discussion the value of achievement vs struggle and difficulty)
- nagrom 12y ago
  I think that you missed point 1) ;-)
  - corysama 12y ago
    Even though I disagree with the premise that world doesn't need any more STEM, that doesn't relate to my question. I'm still interested in how to effectively teach stubbornness regardless.
Osmium 12y ago
> This is similar to the argument that ideas don't matter for entrepreneurship. I've long believed doing a PhD is very similar to being an entrepreneur. Discipline and maintaining motivation are by far the hardest things. Little pay and no guarantee of reward. You have an idea and you have to do your best to see it through, but it's tough, utterly exhausting and very isolating. It's a wonder anyone manages it at all really.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  I've done a PhD and been an entrepreneur. The former is much harder, although "success" is almost certain if you're persistent. It is very difficult for people to appreciate how grueling an academic career can be, from grad school on. I put together this list to make the point: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1588 http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1588 (needs to be read to the end to see what I mean.)
yodsanklai 12y ago
> I know a lot of scientists (physicists and mathematicians) and all of them are stubborn, but not particularly brilliant. My experience is that professors in "pure maths" are very bright and showed exceptional reasoning skills from an early age. > It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation. That's quite a generalisation! obviously, not all professional scientists are geniuses and it takes perseverance to get a decent permanent position. But to get a position in a decent institution isn't only a matter of political connections and stubbornness. Look up some coursera classes for instance. The people teaching those classes aren't just there because they're the only ones willing to do some "extraordinarily boring" legwork.
analog31 12y ago
>>>> Very, very occasionally, one of them hits the jackpot. That's the definition of a jackpot.
freyr 12y ago
There's loads of kids going to graduate school to become servants for mediocre, yet politically-connected scientists. Then, once they have spent the X years and $Y in opportunity costs to get a PhD, they have to figure out a career for themselves. This is a bad, not a good, thing. It reduces early-stage career experimentation and encourages low-quality science. Good point. The opportunity cost of getting a PhD can generally be pretty soul crushing if measured in terms of dollars, years, and rungs on the career ladder (although a lot of things can be soul crushing if measured by those metrics). All that effort to do some research that, at the end of the day, probably won't matter to anyone. I don't take that as a huge personal failure, because most research doesn't really change the world. That's the nature of research. It's like the world of startups, where most of the time you fail to make an impact, and occasionally you succeed. But unlike in the start-up world, success isn't measured in $XM IPOs or buyouts. It means getting your foot in the door as a non-tenured professor, so you can work fiendishly at a below-market salary for the next few years trying to secure tenure. Or taking a job at an industrial research lab, and possibly discovering you don't actually enjoy working at industrial research labs. Ah, now I'm too old to work as a programmer at your social media company? Sweet.
emotionalcode 12y ago
What is brilliance, to you, then?

by nagrom 12y ago

ANTSANTS 12y ago

I agree, but you can apply your second hypothesis to pretty much any pursuit or career. "It's not brilliance that defines a professional artist; it's a willingness to draw constantly for very little compensation." "It's not brilliance that defines a professional athlete; it's a willingness to be bored, exercise a lot, grind out drills, and play many games." "It's not brilliance that defines a professional programmer..." Everything in life boils down to perspiration at some point.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Professional programmers actually receive quite a lot of compensation, though.
- ps4fanboy 12y ago
  Only the top tier do, takes some low pay grinding to get there
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    By the standards of academia, that is completely untrue. When I graduated with a BSc Computer Science degree in 2011, the median starting salary for CS grads going to industry was $65k. For comparison, that's roughly the starting salary for someone who just got a tenure-track position in academia (source: http://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?SurveyID=24 http://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?SurveyI...). So compare: in one field, you start earning a median $65k at age 22 with only a bachelor's degree, and in the other, you start earning $65k in your mid to late thirties, after a bachelor's, a PhD, and often at least one post-doc. Everything before that is "low-pay grinding", except that the academic definition of "low-pay" ranges from lower-middle class ($25k-$30k for the better-paid grad-students and worse-paid post-docs) to taking on debt (the humanities).
    - wavefunction 12y ago
      >>So compare: in one field, you start earning a median $65k at age 22 A median means that half the CS grads made less than 65k. Tenure track also comes with some eventual benefits you won't receive with a bachelor's in CS. Let's be clear about what we're actually comparing.
      - 8557056 12y ago
        >> A median means that half the CS grads made less than 65k. This is false. For example, X% could make exactly 65k and only the lower ((100 - X) / 2)% would make less. ...where X \in (0, 100]
        Crito 12y ago
        I doubt many people at all are making exactly $65k. However I also doubt that many CS grads at all are making significantly less than $65k. Those that are making appreciably less than that are almost certainly not working in the field, or they are not working in the US. I wager that the salary distribution of CS grads working in the field in the US is pretty damn tight.
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  Hence the ellipsis ;)
- collyw 12y ago
  Not in many countries.
nagrom 12y ago
Hm. I'm not convinced - there are plenty of professional programmers (who make maybe $60k, which is a good salary) working at Java shops who do 8am-5pm and think a monad is an itinerant who lives in the desert. There are loads of professional teachers, professional medics, professional sanitation workers, etc. who just turn up, do the job and go home. Some may and do work long hours for little reward, but a lot don't. There is a culture in academia that you may, sometimes, when you really need to, you may take the weekend off. Or Sunday, at least.
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  You're right, I didn't choose my words well. I should have dropped "career" from the statement and just left "pursuit," something you do in a large part for its own sake. And maybe I should say "It's not brilliance that defines a good X," because clearly you can be a subpar artist/programmer/teacher/etc. and get by on some combination of luck, connections, politics, organizational apathy, and so on, but if you really want to be the best damn X you can be, it's going to involve a lot of elbow grease no matter what that X is.
- yen223 12y ago
  Both of you are right - perspiration is necessary but not sufficient.
- hyperbovine 12y ago
  A lot of people are in academia precisely because grinding out Java for 9 hours a day, or what have you, sounds like their own personal version of hell. The work can be all-consuming but if you're doing it right, it's fascinating. The intangible value of not being bored is something I see glossed over again and again by outsiders.
johnminter 12y ago
I tend to agree. I would frame the key traits as persistence and a view for the long term payoff. I did a stint as an Industrial Fellow in an NSF-funded center at U. of Minn. in the early '90s. My sponsor was chair of the Chem. E. dept. They had enough B. S. graduates to have a dept. graduation. They had the department valedictorian speak. She mentioned that along the way she questioned whether it would be worth it - especially on evenings walking home after yet another study session working on a problem set from hell. She would see her friends enjoying themselves in one of the local diners or pubs. But at the end, she realized that she had opportunities they would never have. Here both the persistence and the long term view paid off. That said, we are producing far more Ph. D.s than we can employee. I have had a 30+ year career in industry. I have watched margins tighten and good friends get laid off as more and more is offshored. I doubt that this will end well for the next generation. Not everyone will be a "winner." But those who invest in developing their skills will, on average, do much better than those who do not.
- NotOscarWilde 12y ago
  > That said, we are producing far more Ph. D.s than we can employee. I think one cause might be that "the enterprise" has very little to offer in terms of ideals. Those jobs that actually change the world and help a lot of people usually are out of your reach if you choose the wrong education (like computer science). Being "the man that uncovers the truth" (a scientist) seems much more appealing than "earn a lot of money being a cog in a machine that competes with other machines". I admit, it's just anecdotal. When I see my friends who work at Microsoft, it doesn't seem like the fact that they're working at such a large, influential company excites them. After all, the "up or out" system either drags them out of the company or to some managerial position where there's even more of the "cog in a process" feeling as you spend most of your time presenting your team's results to your superior and the other way around.

shas3 12y ago

Implicit to your comment is the assumption that "going into science" = "becoming a physical sciences professor." This is unfounded! Only a really small minority of STEM majors (aka 'kids') go into academia! The number of industry opportunities for students (at all levels: undergrad to PhD!) in STEM majors is orders of magnitude larger than students in non STEM majors.

nagrom 12y ago
I agree that STEM makes you more employable. But how many of those jobs are in science? There's a lot of engineers, accountants, actuaries, teachers, etc. out there who got a degree in physics, maths or biology.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
I know a lot of people in the biosciences with under-graduate degrees. They also have technologist's diplomas because an under-grad degree in biology is almost completely worthless in the job market. No one should go into most sciences (including physics) if they a) intend to stop at the undergrad level and b) expect it to be of non-trivial value in the job market. Engineering degrees are economically useful at the undergrad level. Science degrees are not, at least not any moreso than English or philosophy degrees. So there is absolutely no need to promote STEM degrees as a career choice. They are a very bad one, outside of engineering (and even there it depends on field and timing).
- collyw 12y ago
  Yes, I wish someone had explained this to me 20 years ago before I started a degree in biology.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

Graduate student here. Would love to talk about this stuff. >There's loads of kids going to graduate school to become servants for mediocre, yet politically-connected scientists. The first part is true, but the mediocre scientists aren't necessarily politically-connected. More often, they're just busy, so consistently busy doing their own research and supervising their own students that one day some new and improved methodology, instrument, or statistical tool leaves them in the dust. This happens because, frankly, nobody pays them to keep their methodology, instruments, and statistical tools up to date, and it's not like anyone will refuse to publish their papers if they don't keep up-to-date. They get grants because they publish papers, and they publish papers because they keep doing experiments and/or proving theorems -- the fact that they could be learning more and quicker by working some other way isn't built into any incentive structure except their personal hopes and dreams (which are the first thing any young scientist learns to repress). There is especially no shortage of scientists in the sense that, simply put, there are not enough permanent jobs for the PhDs and post-docs we already train. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd030909s.gif http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd030909s.gif >Then, once they have spent the X years and $Y in opportunity costs to get a PhD, they have to figure out a career for themselves. This is a bad, not a good, thing. It reduces early-stage career experimentation and encourages low-quality science. This is quite true. I find the advising structure in graduate school strange with respect to its stated purposes. The definitional requirement of a PhD is that it be a large piece of original research (stereotypically, about three papers' worth) that charts the course for the young scientist's early career. The best PhD dissertations open up whole new subfields, and those are the young scientists who get the good jobs. But how do we allocate labor to produce these "brilliant new ideas"? Largely by assigning the graduate student to work on their adviser's existing research program, which they can slowly transform into something at least partially their own depending on their level of supervision. (The worst PhD dissertations are basically just longer MSc dissertations: fully supervised research work done in total peonage with little to no original input by the apprentice graduating to become a real scientist.) >There are loads of theories and ideas in any given field about the way that things may be. What you need, as a minimum, is the ability to stick the course to figure out a way of testing those theories and ideas and do the (extraordinarily boring) legwork to get it done. I know a lot of scientists (physicists and mathematicians) and all of them are stubborn, but not particularly brilliant. 99% of physics and mathematics are made up of people who will do drudge work for years with very little recognition or reward. Very, very occasionally, one of them hits the jackpot. It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation. clap clap clap http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6odkq8jNo1qbolbn.gif http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6odkq8jNo1qbolbn.gif Absolutely, completely, entirely, 100% true. The vast majority of professional science is legwork. Theoreticians can spend plenty of time constructing models or proving theorems to feel brilliant, but ultimately, they mostly just do legwork as well. Experimentalists and engineering researchers have to actually do experiments and actually produce artifacts. Mind, many of us find even the drudgery and legwork plenty fascinating to set-up and do, but almost never so much that we'd object to your taking it away somehow. Also mind: some scientists are brilliant. They're just not the mode, or even always the shining stars of the field, since professional scientists are mostly selected (and therefore optimized) for tenacity (being bored and working weekends for very little compensation) and consistency (producing 110% the desired results, from elementary school through grant applications). I would add only one quality: a professional scientist is defined not only by religious devotion to doing loads and loads of legwork for little compensation, but also by an emotional ability to withstand being constantly graded, measured, and stack-ranked against everyone else in your field, in time periods ranging from each semester to every few years. From the beginning of undergrad through tenure and up until you move from doing research to mostly teaching or administrating, you basically never stop having to pass yet another set of exams (each one calibrated to fail some percentage at the bottom, forcing them to find other careers) to continue doing your existing job or to receive a promotion that other skilled professionals would usually get by virtue of experience alone. While I've heard that many decades ago, funding and positions were plentiful, and so the system was not nearly so burdensome as today, now I am always a little amazed that scientific advancement manages to happen at all, since almost everything a scientist does professionally is connected to keeping his job instead of actually getting and sharing research results.

scottlocklin 12y ago

I almost stopped reading the article after the sentence, "A self-esteem expert offers a way out of the conundrum." I should have. This is psychobabble rubbish, written by people who have not done science, and who do not know the life histories of people who have studied science to any degree. The main encouragement I had from my parents was to visit the library. They definitely discouraged me from taking apart the blender and refrigerator when I was in the 3rd grade. They did eventually buy me and my sisters a radio shack computer; there was no special encouragement for me to hack assembler as a kid, but I did, and my sisters used it to play video games. Curiosity comes from within. The blank slate theory is as rubbish as the theory of reincarnation. I share your two hypotheses to the point I consider them ansatzes. Most of my peers have Ph.D.'s in hard sciences or engineering as I do. Most of them wasted their time on their thesis research; it's just a certificate meaning "certifiably smart, persistent, and able to do self guided study." I don't particularly regret getting my underwear drawer liner autograph from the governator. It was a poor financial decision, but I had fun playing with big toys, and it provided enough meaning to my life I avoided ending up a glue sniffer or drunkard. Attempting to convince more people to do this is a fool's errand: we can't even employ the ones we have. I've been lucky in that I have mostly worked on interesting things and been reasonably well paid for it, but doubling or tripling the number of science people in the world is foolish unless you give them something useful to do. My last job hunt, I ended up talking to an awful lot of people who thought a good use of my time would be building data pipelines to some Hadoop atrocity. You don't need a Ph.D. in physics or machine learning to do that. Yet a lot of Ph.D. types are doing this sort of plumbing for a living, because there are not enough jobs doing actual science.

abc_lisper 12y ago
I can't agree more. One thing I noticed is that, when dealing with large entities like university education, your apartment, home, job etc., the risk is optimized out of the system, and placed on the individual. Take a close look at the contracts you sign on, next time, if you don't believe me. Now, as some one poorly paid and pursuing science you would be particularly vulnerable to this risk. The bad thing is you have worked yourself into a corner, and there is nothing that you can immediately do, to improve your situation, should you fall into bad times. If you are working for a contractor for a big IT company, you can work long hours for increased pay. You, as a scientist, will not find a similar outlet. Personally, I think the whole thing sucks. It is not that we need more people in science, rather, we need more investment in science; People/Institutions with big money taking big risks. Like Elon Musk.

corysama 12y ago

> You don't need to be smart to be a scientist; you need to be stubborn. Are there any good ways to teach stubbornness to very-non-stubborn kids in a student-teacher relationship? Too often stubbornness is attributed to some quirk in the child's history/family life that leads them down a self-reinforcing path of self-motivated stubbornness. That's not useful for the vast majority of kids who are surrounded by constant, quick distractions and have parents who lack the knowledge/motivation to instill stubbornness into them.

clebio 12y ago
Maybe? But do we need to? Is there some inherent reason why we should try to change a student or kid's nature?
- corysama 12y ago
  Being surrounded by constant, quick distractions is passively, accidentally, incidentally working to change kids' nature with or without you. You can choose to be a teacher and actively participate in the process or you can choose be a bystander and let other influences have their way unchallenged. There are no universal rules when it comes to people. But, what I've observed and what I've had reported to me by those who have studied the issue has pretty consistently shown people who pursue their goals more stubbornly achieving those goals more reliably. And conversely, people who are more easily distracted/dissuaded struggling more and having a more difficult time. If I cared about a kid that seemed easily distracted/dissuaded, I would do what I could to set that kid up to achieve his/her goals more reliably with less struggle and difficulty. (please don't take this into a discussion the value of achievement vs struggle and difficulty)
nagrom 12y ago
I think that you missed point 1) ;-)
- corysama 12y ago
  Even though I disagree with the premise that world doesn't need any more STEM, that doesn't relate to my question. I'm still interested in how to effectively teach stubbornness regardless.

Osmium 12y ago

> This is similar to the argument that ideas don't matter for entrepreneurship. I've long believed doing a PhD is very similar to being an entrepreneur. Discipline and maintaining motivation are by far the hardest things. Little pay and no guarantee of reward. You have an idea and you have to do your best to see it through, but it's tough, utterly exhausting and very isolating. It's a wonder anyone manages it at all really.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
I've done a PhD and been an entrepreneur. The former is much harder, although "success" is almost certain if you're persistent. It is very difficult for people to appreciate how grueling an academic career can be, from grad school on. I put together this list to make the point: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1588 http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1588 (needs to be read to the end to see what I mean.)

yodsanklai 12y ago

> I know a lot of scientists (physicists and mathematicians) and all of them are stubborn, but not particularly brilliant. My experience is that professors in "pure maths" are very bright and showed exceptional reasoning skills from an early age. > It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation. That's quite a generalisation! obviously, not all professional scientists are geniuses and it takes perseverance to get a decent permanent position. But to get a position in a decent institution isn't only a matter of political connections and stubbornness. Look up some coursera classes for instance. The people teaching those classes aren't just there because they're the only ones willing to do some "extraordinarily boring" legwork.

analog31 12y ago

>>>> Very, very occasionally, one of them hits the jackpot. That's the definition of a jackpot.

freyr 12y ago

There's loads of kids going to graduate school to become servants for mediocre, yet politically-connected scientists. Then, once they have spent the X years and $Y in opportunity costs to get a PhD, they have to figure out a career for themselves. This is a bad, not a good, thing. It reduces early-stage career experimentation and encourages low-quality science. Good point. The opportunity cost of getting a PhD can generally be pretty soul crushing if measured in terms of dollars, years, and rungs on the career ladder (although a lot of things can be soul crushing if measured by those metrics). All that effort to do some research that, at the end of the day, probably won't matter to anyone. I don't take that as a huge personal failure, because most research doesn't really change the world. That's the nature of research. It's like the world of startups, where most of the time you fail to make an impact, and occasionally you succeed. But unlike in the start-up world, success isn't measured in $XM IPOs or buyouts. It means getting your foot in the door as a non-tenured professor, so you can work fiendishly at a below-market salary for the next few years trying to secure tenure. Or taking a job at an industrial research lab, and possibly discovering you don't actually enjoy working at industrial research labs. Ah, now I'm too old to work as a programmer at your social media company? Sweet.

emotionalcode 12y ago

What is brilliance, to you, then?