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“This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

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Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#51

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

javert wrote: post #17
alexholehouse wrote: post #12

Posts like this (and there are many of them) scare me. I'm in the latter half of a PhD. I love it. I work insane hours entirely out of my own choice, because it is the most rewarding and enjoyable thing I've ever been a part of. The idea that I've found something that I love, that is challenging, that (I hope) I'm relatively good at, and that has a definite net positive good for us as a species/society, yet I may not…

> catalyzed, I would argue, by tragic lack of funding No, you don't get it. There is tons of funding. But academia is a corrupt old-boys network. Those petty, conniving people rise to the top and ultimately control the system. - A grad student (who regrets going to grad school)

From experience as a researcher in a country undergoing severe R&D funding cuts, I can tell you that the ones that are most likely to survive the lack of funding are the "corrupt old boys", who can exploit their contacts and their system-gaming skills to secure the little funding that remains. Promising young scientists that aren't under the wing of one of the old boys are much likely to suffer the raw end of the deal. Basically my perception is that the funding cuts made everything this article describes much more prevalent, not less.

So in my opinion, "catalyzed by tragic lack of funding" (note "catalyzed", not "caused") is a pretty accurate description.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#52

Post by lutorm »

return0 wrote: post #24
plg wrote: post #2

"I found scientists to be more preoccupied by their own survival in a very competitive research environment than by the development of a true understanding of the world." I have found this as well. However it's important to remember that before one can do good work, one has to find funding for the good work. It's a complex problem.

They can go work elsewhere. Part of the problem is that academic pipelines are clogged with too many PhDs who are not motivated by scientific curiosity.

I think that is completely false. Why would you go into a career with little prospects for a permanent job that if you get it might pay half of what you could get elsewhere if not for scientific curiosity and the desire to make a difference in students' lives?

The problem is, like this article alludes to, that the field does not reward scientific curiosity or even serious scientific advancement.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#53

Post by justin66 »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #22

The CS field gets a lot of bashing for gravitating a lot around conferences rather than journals. Because, you know, journals are supposed to be the serious venue for the grown-ups. But actually, CS conferences (at least the ones I've published in) have a double-blind review system that feels much fairer than the single-blind in the top journals. Of course it's far from perfect (more often than not the reviewers can…

> The CS field gets a lot of bashing for gravitating a lot around conferences rather than journals. Because, you know, journals are supposed to be the serious venue for the grown-ups.

I just remember how my university, who had some standard and fairly comprehensive subscriptions to electronic IEEE and ACM journals, didn't get conference proceedings for some damn reason. From the critically-thinking student's point of view, conferences and journals look like two different ways of getting students to part with money with no recourse if the product happens to suck, as academic material so often does.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#54

Post by pcrh »

w1ntermute wrote: post #34
pcrh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Pubmed, it appears that since 2007, he published 6 papers in one lab (likely his Ph.D. lab), including a first author in PNAS, and 4 papers in a second lab since 2013, including the Nat. Neurosci. paper you cite, where he is one of 3 authors. It isn't a terrible publication record. One would have to know the significance of what he did publish in order to judge properly. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=…

> 4 papers in a second lab since 2013 Out of those 4 papers in his postdoc lab, two are reviews[0,1] and one is a peer commentary[2], so only the second-author paper I linked before counts as original research. Similarly, one of his (three) first-author publications from his PhD lab is also a review[3]. He does have two first-author publications from that lab, including one in PNAS[4], but neither of them seem to hav…

There are only 3 authors on the Nat. Neurosci. paper, so he likely spent a large amount of his time working on this project. So it would be a bit unfair to compare his output in that lab to that of the first author of the same paper.

Metrics are fine and all, but rarely tell the full picture. Not that I know what the full picture really looks like in this case...

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#55

Post by JesperRavn »

sanderjd wrote: post #20
w1ntermute wrote: post #15

Another possible (unspoken) reason why Gariépy is resigning is presumably that he's been a postdoc[0] for the last 3-4 years[1]. Unfortunately, the nature of modern biomedical research is such that you need an army of researchers to do the mechanical grunt work at the lab bench that leads to papers. This has led to a glut of postdocs, who are underpaid, overworked, and have little hope of ever obtaining a permanent a…

I downvoted this and I wanted to say why. It reads to me like a (perhaps well-researched) ad-hominem attack. Rather than speaking to the points raised by the post, you attempt to undermine the person who posted it.

I think that it's fair to analyse the author's success or lack thereof, because he relies on this as part of his argument, e.g.

My friends have also pointed out that I should not be "discouraged" by the difficulties faced as a scientist, that I should continue to "fight." Again, they are wrong; discouragements due to failures have never kept me down. I have never been afraid of failures and of retrying, and retrying again; my scientific successes are what discouraged me, because I know how they were obtained

I will still publish my book, The Revolutionary Phenotype, which contains an important novel theory on the emergence of life

The author's argument rests on both his success in academia in spite of its unfairness, but even more importantly, it relies on his claims to have found more fruitful pursuits outside academia. I don't think anyone really considers how personally fulfilling these pursuits to be to be an important issue, but rather whether he is actually correct that these pursuits are more valuable to society than academia.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#56

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

sanotehu wrote: post #48
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #22

The CS field gets a lot of bashing for gravitating a lot around conferences rather than journals. Because, you know, journals are supposed to be the serious venue for the grown-ups. But actually, CS conferences (at least the ones I've published in) have a double-blind review system that feels much fairer than the single-blind in the top journals. Of course it's far from perfect (more often than not the reviewers can…

Would you mind explaining the double-blind review in CS conferences? I'm a doctor by trade so am well acquainted with the way peer-review works but I've never heard of conferences being reviewed, either before-the-fact as an acceptance criterion or after-the-fact as a kind of rating.

In the context of peer review (at least in CS), "single-blind" means that the authors don't know who the reviewers are, and "double-blind" means that additionally, the reviewers don't know who the authors are.

Conferences with double-blind review require papers to be anonymized, avoiding any mentions of author names or affiliations in the PDF submitted for review, as well as other obvious elements that would reveal the identity of the authors (e.g. "As we showed in a previous paper [4], ...")

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#57

Post by rwallace »

krick wrote: post #38

I don't really see, what people mean when they "agree" or "disagree" with this article and the likes of it. Aside of expressing his own disappointment the author points out what is wrong with the academic research, that's true. But point out what is wrong, though isn't useless, is a lot easier than suggest (even pretty lousy) better alternative. It's easy to imagine how everyone should be free to explore whatever he…

The problem is that excessive competition in a system originally designed to ensure research money was spent well, is now actually causing the money to be spent badly. Asking for concrete suggestions for improvement is perfectly fair. Here are two things that could be done that would help.

First, ideally, flood the system with money, fund science the way it should be funded, as though it actually mattered as much as entertainment or killing people. Again, providing ten times as much money would produce more and better science per dollar not just in total.

Second, failing that, filter PhD applicants by random lottery; discard a randomly selected 80% or however many it takes, before moving forward as currently.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#58

Post by simonster »

alexholehouse wrote: post #12

Posts like this (and there are many of them) scare me. I'm in the latter half of a PhD. I love it. I work insane hours entirely out of my own choice, because it is the most rewarding and enjoyable thing I've ever been a part of. The idea that I've found something that I love, that is challenging, that (I hope) I'm relatively good at, and that has a definite net positive good for us as a species/society, yet I may not…

It depends a lot on who you're working for. You might think that every professor with interesting publications at a high-ranking institution is smart, interested in their work, and invested in the success of their students. Or at least, this is what I thought when I was an undergraduate, when I did some research with some really great people. Since then, I've realized that some people of these professors are not particularly interested in science, but have big egos and are particularly skilled at promoting themselves. They're at top institutions and they are thus able to attract lots of money and smart, hard-working students, but their intellectual contribution to their lab's work is relatively small and the environment they produce within their labs (and institutions) is pretty toxic.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#59

Post by Dylan16807 »

cma wrote: post #45
peterwwillis wrote: post #37

As a lay person, it was pretty ridiculous and slightly horrifying to learn how much time and effort my scientist friends have to put into fulfilling irrelevant academic criteria just to be allowed to work on the research they are incredibly passionate about. In 'Scientific Progress Goes "Boink!"', Calvin and Hobbes build a duplicator machine out of a cardboard box. If they were researchers, they'd first have to go to…

I think any funding system we come up with that gives out funds to uncredentialed children and stuffed animals is probably going to turn out to be a disaster. If systems have to pass that as a litmus test, I think many good systems would fail.

Very funny, but we're talking about a situation where they were fully capable of designing and building the device.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#60

Post by hyperion2010 »

I met and worked with JF for 6 months. I learned an enormous amount working with him. His creativity in experimental design and his approach to answering questions was inspiring. Sadly, the fact that he is leaving academia does not surprise me. People who care more about doing good science than about publishing (those are absolutely NOT the same things) rarely make it in academia. Funding for true basic research has contracted significantly and scientific communities have become incredibly risk averse with regard to who and what they give grants to. The peer review system reviews based on social norms within that field, not on what is actually good science. Finally, training and education are still based on the guild system. People who actually want to advance the state of human knowledge, not just have an academic position, find this environment toxic.

Best of luck to JF in his future endeavours. Academia is the true looser here.

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