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“This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”
61–70 of 144 posts
Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Scientific curiosity in itself is not something that should be rewarded.
Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”
#63The 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.
CS conference papers go through the same process as a journal would in your field, but typically with only 1-2 revision cycles. The acceptance rates are much lower than journal because there are fewer retries, so people generally submit ready-to-publish work to conferences. Many researchers don't publish in journals at all, or just do it as a token activity.
Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”
#64"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.
Its a simple problem; that three-sentence description was a pretty good start. The problem is made harder by the near-extinction of tenure-track positions. Colleges are using adjuct-profressors exclusively now, because they are cheap, plentiful and hungry. The search for knowledge has turned into a mill to train people and get a paycheck.
The misinformation about adjuncts is pretty widespread. Adjuncts have indeed been hired way more at teaching colleges and for-profit colleges. But research universities haven't really changed their hiring tendencies much, if at all. It's just that there are a lot more non-R1 universities now that statistically, a higher % of new instructors are adjuncts.
Nearly everyone I know that graduated with a PhD from an R1 universities, and was what I considered reasonably good (they were not complete goof-offs and were serious about their work) got good tenure-track positions 0-2 years after graduating.
Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”
#65Relevant one-page article: "On “Write-Only” Conferences" - http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/IEEE-IS_letter2007.pdf
(conferences in exotic locations for which you only need to submit an article to attend)
Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”
#66[deleted]
Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”
#67I absolutely agree with everything in this post. When I was a post doctoral fellow, my principal investigator would publish at least one paper a month. She was celebrated in the department. (a) The papers were published in journals like - Journal of Green Donkey Testicles, Journal of differentiation of dying mouse ... Journals that I had never heard of, had no impact and every tiny bit of an experiment that was condu…
Regarding d) - how much do you think the researcher, much of whose work was presumably funded by taxpayer dollars, should get?
I believe University of Waterloo is one of the few that does full ownership of work by Prof (I could be wrong) .. and year after year, they beat the biggest Universities in Canada for being ranked as the #1 in entrepreneurship, tech commercialization and innovation. I think its the subsequent economic impact that counts, rather than sequestering innovation for the sake of a few bucks in 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 ownership model.
https://uwaterloo.ca/research/waterloo-commercialization-off...
Many of the big giants of tech world have set up offices all around uWaterloo and enjoy a symbiotic relationship w/ the research faculty.
Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”
#68I absolutely agree with everything in this post. When I was a post doctoral fellow, my principal investigator would publish at least one paper a month. She was celebrated in the department. (a) The papers were published in journals like - Journal of Green Donkey Testicles, Journal of differentiation of dying mouse ... Journals that I had never heard of, had no impact and every tiny bit of an experiment that was condu…
Regarding d) - how much do you think the researcher, much of whose work was presumably funded by taxpayer dollars, should get?
I think the point goes towards the idea that the rewards should be related to the risk.
Commercializing IP - which is not a product yet - is non-trivial, could take years to productize, and then longer to penetrate (or create) a market. In short, it's a long, painful, and often expensive process that often fails anyway. If there was a way to provide a license agreement that was more favorable to product/market validation, that could change the economics.
Unfortunately, I've only participated in licensing once, so I don't have an alternative model to suggest.
Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”
#69[deleted]
That's deeply unfair in the case of a non-native speaker: almost no one reaches foreign language proficiency at the level you're implicitly demanding, which is basically perfection.
I don't know if this author is a native speaker but his name suggests he may not be. On HN, you should err on the side of charitability about this—especially since grammar peeves, though we all have them, are the quintessence of off-topic.
Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”
#70"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.
That's a pretty good 3-sentence summary - reflects my experience as well.
To expand a bit...it's not that nearly everyone doesn't start out super excited about their subjects and motivated by advancing human knowledge. It's that shortly post-PhD, you realize that in order to continue doing this work you find exciting and meaningful, you have to get money (for supplies, equipment, office space, not to mention your own salary), and the funding system is inherently kind of broken. It's not just the disappearance of tenure-track jobs. To caricature somewhat:
1. Funding is limited - grant success rates in my field are currently 10% to 15% - and in order to have a chance you need some history of having done interesting work, the more the better.
2. To carry out more of your ideas (to maximize the chances that some of them will turn out to be very interesting, as well as the overall amount and speed of work) you typically need more manpower than just yourself. You may also need equipment and people to operate it. Since you're probably a bit short of money, you hire trainees (students or postdocs), who cost less. Now you are really feeling the funding pressure since their livelihoods, not only your own, depend on your getting enough funds.
3. Eventually those trainees graduate, or become senior. Now they need to apply for their own grants and you need to find new trainees. In other words, the process of science today inherently increases the number of scientists competing for funding, and because each scientist during a single career typically requires many trainees, this number increases exponentially. There is no way the research funding budget can increase that fast over the long term.
4. The constantly increasing funding pressure means more and more people become preoccupied with their own survival above most any other professional concern. In addition to politics and ladder climbing, it hurts the science directly: if some project's not likely to get future funding, you might feel you don't have time for it, even if that's what interests you most about your area.
It's a hard problem...my impression is the reforms needed would be so sweeping that I'm not sure anyone has a complete picture of what things to do instead, let alone implement them.