6 ms·
"I sometimes find it both funny and frightening that the majority of the world’s academic research is actually being done by people like me, who don’t eve
by jpwagner 11y ago
"I sometimes find it both funny and frightening that the majority
of the world’s academic research is actually being done by people
like me, who don’t even have a PhD degree. Many advisors, whom you
would expect to truly be pushing science forward with their decades
of experience, do surprisingly little and only appear to manage the
PhD students, who slave away on papers that their advisors then put
their names on as a sort of “fee” for having taken the time to read
the document..."
That's a bit like saying: "What's so great about Henry Ford? He didn't _build_ the damn cars."
It appears that the author's definition of "true science" is akin to knowledge-that-needn't-be-effectively-communicated-to-anyone, which, in my estimation, is not science at all.
- wyager 11y ago>It appears that the author's definition of "true science" is akin to knowledge-that-needn't-be-effectively-communicated-to-anyone How did you get that from "Advisors shouldn't treat advisees like shit and then take an unfair amount of credit for their work."?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Fomite 11y agoPerhaps the utter discounting of the things that keep the labs going, the grad students funded, and generally anything other than "I did the grunt work" as not real science. And this speaking as someone who is one of the people doing most of the coding/writing for our projects. Senior faculty enabling me to do my job is a contribution.
- grovulent 11y agoA lot of labs are very much like this... with the actual science work getting done by the post-grads. What the author doesn't realise that while the lab heads might not be doing a lot of science on a day to day basis - most are overloaded with a bunch of other stuff that is forced upon them... endless committee meetings, grant writing, teaching and teaching administration etc...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- tormeh 11y agoCan't all of that, except teaching, be done by a secretary?
- yodsanklai 11y ago> Can't all of that, except teaching, be done by a secretary? Not really, most of these tasks require some expertise. For exemple, committee meetings could be about recruiting colleagues and assessing their work or selecting papers for a journal or a conference. Grant writing requires expertise too...
- marcosdumay 11y agoThat'd require a secretary with a PhD. Looks more like most of it should not be done. But then, I have no idea how to change it. Teaching is probably the easiest one to solve. Some kinds of classes should be attributed to teachers, not researchers (those are very different kinds of expertize).
- timelined 11y agoIt is increasingly common for large labs in the life sciences (25+ members) to hire multiple support staff (with PhDs) to help offset this load. This is in addition to positions like Senior Research Scientists (senior postdocs) who often serve as 50% "project managers" and 50% independent postdocs.
- Fomite 11y agoNo, committee meetings, which can involve things like setting the PhD curriculum, or deciding on faculty recruiting or retention, cannot be done by a secretary. No, grant writing, which is plotting the (often multi-million dollar) course for a lab, proposing science that has not yet been done and documenting those methods well enough and concisely enough for a review panel cannot be done by a secretary.
- 11y ago
- magnifyingglass 11y agoI don't know if many scientists and researchers understand how much harder it becomes to do science when you are surrounded by information chaos. If you have someone tossing the right words at you here and there, and I literally mean like 10 words over 5 years - if those are the right 10 words, then that can mean all the difference between making sense and going crazy. Having a smart teacher point you in some direction that they have a developed intuition for is billions of times more valuable than having what essentially seems like static noise. Which gets to a more important point about slow progress in research. If you go too fast, it's complete chaos. Languages and data doesn't translate well across large populations quickly, information gets entangled with multiple incorrect definitions and multiple ways of interpreting, entire populations can be wiped of their confidence of the integrity of information and data, left with shrugs and feelings of confusion that has zero inertia behind it.